Eckhart Tolle explains how awareness and compassion toward yourself stop the cycle of self-criticism. He connects self-forgiveness to empathy, showing how unconscious behavior keeps you trapped until you recognize it.
The capacity for compassion is something that is part of the evolution of the human being. Humans. Even nowadays in this present time, there are still millions of humans who are so trapped in their egoic sense of self that they are incapable of sensing, feeling the reality of another human being. The word that we need to use here is empathy, which is closely related with compassion. There are still many, many humans on the planet who are so trapped in their egoic sense of self that they are incapable of empathy. And then there are many others in whom empathy is present to a greater or lesser degree. And without empathy, of course, there can be no compassion. Now, this is particularly important when we talk about compassion with reference to other human beings or other life forms. For a moment, let's talk though, about compassion towards yourself and what that means, particularly as awareness begins to awaken in you, you become aware of your own patterns. You begin to become aware of your own behavior. Not necessarily in the moment that it happens, but in many cases, those people who are beginning to awaken, the awareness is beginning to arise. Those humans become aware, for example, after they have engaged in unconscious speech, unconscious behavior, reactive behavior, and suddenly they become aware, oh, that's what I did. I got completely taken over by anger. I got completely taken over by my overreaction. I said things to that person that I didn't really mean, that they just came out of my mouth. Or even I could even go to physical violence. How could I have done that? And many humans who are awakening are experiencing these times when they begin to judge themselves as not good enough. So that is something to be aware of when you, as you begin to awaken, you become an observer of yourself to a greater or lesser degree. Rather than just being totally identified with whatever comes into your head and whatever words come out of your mouth and whatever action you're engaged in, you're so identified that there's not the slightest space of awareness. Now, there's no point in talking about compassion towards yourself to people who are so unconscious. So we talk about compassion. Drawing implies that there's some awareness in you. You're aware of yourself, you're aware of your behavior, and you experience different levels of awareness at different times in your life, from day to day. And then you become aware that there are times when you are unconscious. And usually then you wake up, so to speak, out of it, and say, oh, got taken over by my pain body again. And for many people, that can become a source of suffering because they judge themselves as not good enough. And they even have a hostile begin to have a Hostile relationship towards the more unconscious aspects of who they are, your imperfections. So compassion towards yourself is to still realize there are areas in your life where you're still unconscious. And that's how it is. And you forgive yourself. Again, forgiveness is related also with all these things are closely related. Empathy, compassion, forgiveness. You forgive yourself for your moments of unconsciousness. Or if you've done bad things in the past. And this is often people have asked me that question in the past, when you were not as aware or completely unaware, you did certain things that you now regret. You recognize them as very unconscious. And what do you do with that? The compassionate way is to see that at that time you could not have acted differently. Because your actions reflected your degree of unconsciousness, consciousness, unconsciousness. And that recognition is compassion. You forgive yourself instead of making an identity out of your own past unconsciousness for yourself and say, I am this kind of a person, which is again, a mental construct. Instead of making identity for yourself out of past unconsciousness, you recognized your behavior at that time as unconscious. So you manifested the collective, ultimately, the collective unconsciousness that is in the human psyche, the collective psyche of humanity. And so when you don't make it into an identity, then you realize that it is not who you essentially are. And so you become compassionate towards yourself. But it also applies to the present, at the present time, not making impossible demands of perfection. And then you fall short. There are certain things, certain areas in your life that will never be perfect on the level of form. You cannot be a perfect human being. On the level of form. There are always certain things that you are good at, other things you are not good at. That's fine, no matter how conscious you are. So you don't demand perfection of yourself, not on this level of form. The realization is there is a deep. At the deepest level of who you are, there is perfection already. You are already perfect, complete whole. At the deepest level, yes, the outer level, there will always be certain imperfections. And so you have compassion with yourself as far as your imperfections are concerned. Which does not mean that you actually indulge in behavior that is harmful to yourself or others and say, oh, that's okay, I am compassionate towards myself. So I continue to get drunk three times a week and beat up my wife. And I'm just compassionate towards myself. This is not what I'm talking about. You cannot become compassionate with inflicting suffering on others as you recognize it now. If it happened in the past, that is different. So there are some forms of behavior that need to be rectified through awareness, through presence.
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