If You're Feeling Stuck, Please Watch This | Eckhart Tolle

For many people, certain relationships are a huge form of suffering because people are difficult, people are obnoxious, people are unconscious, and in most cases they don't know what they do. In other words, they are unconscious. So you're surrounded by people who are— will one way or another make your life difficult. This is why Jean-Paul Sartre said, 'Hell is other people.' Oh my God! No, this is how the ego, the unconscious you, experiences people. Sometimes people seem to make you very happy. It's called falling in love, for example. Ah! And you can, in a restaurant sometimes, you can watch couples. You can tell how long they've been together. When they've just fallen in love, there's the And then 5 years later— and often the person that makes you happy, a year later, 2 years later, the very same person. Becomes the source of your unhappiness. If there are any divorce lawyers here, you can probably write books about it. Situations also— people believing that it is possible to find ultimate satisfaction in this world in one way or another, through moving somewhere else, I don't like it here, I want to be somewhere else. Of course, maybe somewhere else is very nice, maybe the weather is better somewhere else, but there will be other things that are not as good, perhaps. Because wherever you go, there you are with yourself. Wherever you go, you find yourself. You can move to Hawaii, ah, beach, palm trees, drink. I've made it, I've made it. A few weeks pass, still not being challenged, wonderful, so beautiful, wonderful, wonderful, and then it gets a bit boring. You're always confined to this little island, and why is the weather not as good as I thought? Quite often it's cloudy and it rains quite a bit, as the rain is That was— what's the— and the place where I live is— before you know it, it's not making you happy anymore. Or any possession that you have. Ah, it's mine, my car, Tesla. It shows you how conscious you are. Until something else happens, and then they start scratching your car. Dukkha, suffering. So suffering is the central image of Christianity. There's the crucifixion, and there is the rebirth and the ascension. The teaching that was made explicit by the Buddha is contained in images, in deep, with deep meaning, very deep meaning, archetypal images. So in that sense, even if you're not a Christian, you may be able to recognize that there is a certain deep wisdom embodied in that. Jesus is the archetype of all humans, as I see it, the archetypal human, and it shows suffering and the end of suffering. The Buddha talked about it, and there it's just shown to you. And so suffering means Life is getting difficult, and then there's a demand on whatever level for more— an influx of more consciousness on what— in whatever vibrational frequency. If you want to make your body stronger, you need to make your body suffer. Really? What do you mean? You need to exercise. And at first, it's not pleasant for the body. The body would rather sit on a sofa and watch Netflix. But it's not going any stronger, it gets weaker, because there's no demand for an influx of energy, which is consciousness at that particular frequency that we call physical energy. But if you make your life difficult for your body, you start weightlifting, for example, and it's not at first very hard. The body is complaining. If the body could speak, it would say, "Don't do that to me. I want to relax." "No, you have to do it." And then you start jogging. "Stop, I can't do it." But don't overdo it. And after a while, so there's a gap, there's a demand for an influx of energy, and then suddenly the body gets stronger and the influx comes, and suddenly what before was difficult and hard becomes deeply enjoyable. That means there's been an influx of— and then the body gets stronger. That's just on a physical level. So it operates on all levels, and the highest level, consciousness— an influx of consciousness is needed for you to transcend suffering. But the influx of consciousness will not come unless you suffer. So that's almost a little paradox. So if you look back for a moment, you can perhaps have gratitude for all the things in your life that didn't go the way they were supposed to go from the point of view of the egoic self. And yet all the things of your life particularly those things that didn't go well, they brought you here. The things that went well didn't bring you here. The big lottery win, if you had one, didn't bring you here. Making money on the stock market didn't bring you here, or getting whatever, probably even having a wonderful, healthy body and being particularly good-looking, unless you— something else has happened, because it keeps you on the surface of life. There's no need to go any deeper. So your suffering drives you deeper, but it does it through causing suffering until you recognize suffering is not necessary.