How to Stop Worrying About Things That Never Happen | Eckhart Tolle

Life is hard. Life is not easy for any life form, from the smallest to humans, and is probably hardest for humans because they have their mind. So you are continuously challenged by external events, and you are continuously challenged by your own mind. The first thing you tackle is your own mind, so that all the problems that you think you have, you make sure that there's some real challenges there and not some pseudo problems generated by the mind, by the incessant, useless overthinking of the mind. So that you wake up in the middle of the night and worry about things that are not happening but might happen as an example. So these are not real problems, they are pseudo problems. But it's still a huge challenge because you are being challenged by the unconsciousness of your own mind. And that is to be tackled primarily. Once you look through that, then you are no longer in the grip of, at the mercy of your own mind and its conditioning. So awareness arises, presence arises. Then less and less do you get challenged by your own mind, which creates pseudo problems, including overreactions to events, thereby amplifying the events and transforming an external event into suffering. I often give example of when you have to wait for something, you get irritated and you get angry. That's called suffering. It's a might, a form of suffering, not realizing it's not created by the event, it's created by my mind. The moment you don't interpret the event as bad, it is as it is, you're not suffering. You might still be uncomfortable, but that's not suffering. It's not misery. You're just uncomfortable. Maybe your back hurts, you're standing there, or whatever you're doing. No suffering. The suffering is a psychological level. So go to any situation, see how much of your suffering, unhappiness, misery, whatever you want to call it, does it arise from a true situation or is it the mind creating it for you your entire life? If you see your life as causing you suffering, get out of your life situation right now and realize your life. How do I do that? I have so many problems. So many problems. Where are they, I ask? Well, they're everywhere. I mean, I've got to do when I get home, what's waiting for me. All the stuff is waiting for me. I don't know how I'm going to pay my rent, what's going to happen there? My relationship is not going well. They're probably going to fire me soon at work, or they fired me already. All those things I have to deal with when I get home and the things that happened last month. That awful thing that happened then, that still, that's my life. So those are my problems. Okay, where are they now? Right now I can't see any. So I wrote that in a book somewhere. It's an important question. Do you have a problem now? And in order to give a correct answer, you have to become aware of the present moment. And you have to become aware that you are aware. And you become aware that in this moment. If you just take this moment, you don't actually have a problem. You might be in prison. Is that a problem? You're sitting there breathing walls around you may not be pleasant. It's what is. You sense the energy in your body, and you can sense yourself as the consciousness. And you go, there's the deep I. There's no problem ever in the deep I. The problem is when the deep I gets obscured by useless mind stuff. So whenever you enter the present moment, and you should do that frequently so that your consciousness is not absorbed completely by your problematic life situation. Step out of your life situation, which exists in the head, into life. So there's your life situation, past and future, and there's your life, which is now. But it's not your life. We just use those words. It's not your life because you don't have one. Because if you had a life, there would be two of you. You and life. But you are nothing without life. You are life, and life is consciousness. So it's a great realization. When you talk about my life, you're really talking about my life situation. But you don't have a life. And there's no such thing as pure life. There's only life. And you're an expression of the one life, an expression of that one life. You are life. You don't have a life. It's very misleading to think that you have a life because you create this duality inside yourself and you become sorry for yourself. It's a strange duality. I feel sorry for myself. I am a victim of my life. Weird. So there's two of you. There's the life and then there's the victim. There's the me and there's the I. I had that thing that night when I went through this spontaneous awakening. I can't live with myself any longer. And then I looked at the I can't live with myself. Who is that self and who am I? Two people must be here, the self and I. That's so weird. And the similar thing is when you say I hate myself. And even when you say I love myself, although I Love myself is infinitely better than hating yourself. But when you love yourself, you're still in a certain duality. There's an image of who you are, and you love that image. It's much better than hating yourself. So that could be an intermediate step. If you're not happy with yourself, learn to love yourself and accept yourself. That's wonderful. Put the sticker on your bathroom mirror to remind you that you love yourself. That's great. And then at some point you go beyond that also. And then all you need is to be yourself. And then you no longer have a conceptual identity that you love, because then you have a duality there. I love myself. It's like the Narcissus myth in ancient Greece. The myth of the young man called Narcissus, who at that time there were no mirrors. But one day he walked past a pool of water and he looked into the. That's the myth of Narcissus. He looked into the pool of water and he saw his own reflection in the pool of water. And he. He happened to be very good looking. And suddenly he realized that he was very good looking. And he said, wow, look at that. That's me. That was the earliest selfie. Now we don't need the pool of water anymore. It's always in your pocket. So according to the ancient myth of Narcissus, he fell in love with himself. Now that would be a good thing, according to some people. I really love myself. But it was more of an egoic thing. And what the myth really points to, by the way, his life deteriorated after that. But we don't need to go there. He got punished by the gods or whatever. So yes, of course he did. Because what this myth shows is the arising of the human ego, of as you split yourself in two. And there's me, the self, and there's I. So that duality is created. The mental image of me that you have a relationship with, so you have a relationship with yourself, which is very strange because you are not two and you love your dog. Because the dog doesn't do that. The dog does not have a relationship with him or herself. And the cat doesn't either. That's interesting. The dog doesn't love or hate himself. He just is, what about my life or self esteem? I need to do something about my self esteem. I'm not happy with the way I look. No dog says that. Of course. The dog is below thought. That's why the dog leads a relatively unproblematic life. And you have to rise above thought to become free of that. And then you just. In the present moment, you are yourself. And you no longer have a relationship with yourself. You don't hate yourself. You don't love yourself. You are consciousness. There isn't a self separate from consciousness. There's still some mind activity. Of course you need the mind. But you don't derive your sense of self from the mind activity anymore. So that there's no self in it. The thinking is no longer invested with the sense of self. It's just thinking.