How to Deal with Life's Challenges | Eckhart Tolle Teachings

Life does not cease from challenging you and that doesn't change. Even if you awaken spiritually, you will get other challenges, different kinds of challenges. The only difference is as you awaken spiritually, the way in which you respond to the challenges changes. And that is all important. How you confront the challenges of life, how you react to or respond to the challenges of life, determines how you experience your life. How you experience your life ultimately is not determined by what happens to you, because most people think that that's the case. But how you experience your life, or what you call your life is ultimately not determined by what happens to you. It is determined by how you respond to what happens to you. And how you respond to what happens to you determines what happens in the so called future, how you respond. Now. Some people, whenever they are challenged by life, they behave as if there was something very wrong with their life. That things are not supposed to go wrong or be challenging. This is not supposed to happen. And this works on both a small scale and large scale. And you might have met people and perhaps you were one of those people in the past, people who are continuously complaining about things. They're continuously not in alignment, continuously out of alignment with whatever is going on around them. Situations and people and places and events. Either something is there that shouldn't be there, something is happening right now that should not be happening, or something is not happening that should be happening, or I should be somewhere else, but I'm here and that's a huge problem. I'm trying very hard to get there, but I'm here now. This sounds a little weird when I say it like this, but the sad fact is that many people, people live like that for most of their life. They are not, they are not aligned with their. What they are doing right now. Yes, they are doing it, but they are not fully in the doing because they'd rather be somewhere else. They would rather be already at the end of this particular activity. And when you very much in that mindset, that means your life is stressful. Continuously stressful means there's a mental projection of where you need to be or should be. But you're here. So you engage in this activity. But there's a. You have mental, you have certain thoughts that tell you either you already want to be at the end of what you're doing, or although you are doing this, you really should also be doing. Oh would be doing that and that and that, but you're doing this. A dreadful way to live. Normal, by the way. It's called normal. And you See it when you watch the movies. Everybody's like that in the movie, so it must be normal. They're all like. And people love to see the dysfunctional way in which people lived reflected on TV and in the movies. They reflected their own dysfunction and the charges of confirmation that okay, I'm actually okay, because everybody's unhappy. Everybody is living in this way, in this contin state of almost continuous dissatisfaction. Except for brief moments, sometimes to do with having a good meal or sex. Could do it for a while, it doesn't last very long. Or you get what you wanted. You get what you wanted. The thing that you said, oh, that's going to make me happy. And then you get it. And for a moment you feel ah. And you feel this happiness arising. And why do you. You think you feel this happiness because you got what you wanted. But if you look more deeply, you will realize that you do not really feel happy because you got what you wanted. You feel happy because for very short time period, the mind structure that was always unhappy with the isness of things, something is missing here. I need that. I need to get rid of that. I need to get that mind structure subsides. And for a moment you don't want anything except what is here, here, now, and that suddenly you feel more alive. You feel ah. And now then perhaps you begin to understand why. The Buddha talked about the greatest obstacle to spiritual awakening being continuous. Well, he called it, and in the translations it's called desire. But a better translation of what the Buddha was talking about is a more vital term is wanting. The continuous wanting. Wanting this, wanting that wanting, the neediness, the wanting. And that is the mind structure that operates in humans that prevents them from experiencing the deeper dimension of reality, which we could call the timeless dimension. The timeless dimension of consciousness. Remember, we talked about time a few minutes ago. We talked about time and yes, a few minutes ago. And we talked about the express train that you can't get off. We talked about the fire that is consuming you. That is time. That is true. But the good news is that there is in every human a deeper dimension of consciousness. In many humans, it's only a potential, a latent potential, like a seed. In others, the seed has already begun to sprout. There is the possibility in humans of accessing and living from the deeper dimension of consciousness. And accessing that deeper dimension of consciousness is what we could call spiritual awakening, where you realize that in addition to being a person, a personality or a person who lives in this world of time, of past and future, in addition to being this. This person. There is more to you than there is more. There are other dimensions to who you are. Or more specifically, there is a deeper dimension to who you are than the merely historical person. And that's why we are here tonight, because I want this not just to be a conceptual talk, although of course, we're using words. But the aim is for you to experience at first, and even if it's only a glimpse, or to deepen, for many of you it will be just deepening. Because you already are sensing what it is that I'm talking about. You say, I think I know what he's talking about. You're already sensing within yourself what it is that I'm talking about when I speak of a deeper dimension of who you are, a deeper sense of identity of who you are.