Inner Expansion Meditation: 15 Minute Special Teaching with Eckhart Tolle

The universe wants to create. It wants expansion. But why is it that so often it seems to put obstacles in the path of expansion? Things go wrong, difficult situations, difficult people, loss, confusion. Why do some people experience life as one damn thing after another? Why does all these things? Why doesn't life leave me alone? Why does expansion seem to be blocked so often? If the universe wants expansion, which it does, not only wants to expand externally, it also expands internally. So with every obstacle, potentially there's a deepening within. So it goes in two directions. So if somebody is a child, grows up with a handicap or very difficult life situation, doesn't have to be a child, or any human being encounters a huge obstacle, either they overcome the obstacle on the external level, or they transcend that obstacle on an inner level. So this is a universal thing. I just to give one example, let's say a child is weak, gets bullied at school, very unhappy because of that. Then the child could suddenly generate so much energy that he or she would take up martial arts, go to a teacher, just as it's shown in those movies, and then eventually he or she can defeat the bully. Generated energy that would not have been generated if the bully had not been there. So it becomes stronger on that. That's expansion in a way. Or the child is just too weak. It doesn't generate expansion on that level. It can never defeat the bully. But the energy goes within, develops other abilities, perhaps the ability to be creative, to think, to create. And 20 years later, the child that was the bully works in some menial job, and the child that was bullied is a great creator. There's expansion too, or becomes a spiritual teacher. So the universe wants to expand, but it also wants you to experience obstacles to expansion which are part of the expansion. It goes in two directions. So welcome all the obstacles in your life, the obstacles to whatever. And collectively, if you listen to the news continuously, things go wrong dreadfully on the planet. It happens to be the case that the news focuses on all the things that go wrong. It never doesn't focus on the things that don't go wrong. So it's of course a distorted version of what life is like. But undoubtedly things do go wrong. Humanity is being challenged through, sometimes through factors that seem to have nothing to do with it, just things just come at you, and other factors created by humanity's unconscious mind, dysfunctional egoic thinking. And so it's only through experience, in the effects of that unconsciousness. Collectively, if you look at humanity as a whole for a moment, as one single expression of consciousness, Divided into billions of little entities. One huge ray of consciousness divided into buildings of smaller rays. Consciousness. One of them is you. So humanity is evolving. The one consciousness expressing itself as the human being is undergoing a process, evolution. It's like bathing. And gradually it's becoming more conscious. Seems to take a long time. But every human being reaches a point where they. Where the consciousness accelerates. And that's when you become weary. You consciously embark on the spiritual path as you are doing. That means you no longer your primary teacher is no longer suffering. It may still come in, but it's no longer your primary teacher. You grow. You awaken voluntarily without being pushed into it through suffering. But you have been, otherwise you wouldn't be. You've had your suffering. There may be a bit more, but not like before. And for many of you, suffering is coming to an end. It doesn't mean that you don't face problems anymore, but you don't transform them into suffering anymore. The I am practice I am. There's no doubt about that. Everything else could be an illusion. And one way of looking at it is to say, well, it is a kind of illusion, because nothing lasts for long. Everything here is impermanent. Be aware in your daily life of the gap between two thoughts so that your mind doesn't drag you along in an incessant stream of involuntary and compulsive thinking. Invite these gaps into your life. So look. By looking at something without interpreting it, by listening to something without interpreting it, by taking conscious breaths, occasionally observe the air flowing into the body, out of the body thought, you become aware of the underlying presence. And only then do you become a true human being. So humans are still undergoing an evolutionary process. They're not finished. They're not even fully human yet most of them, you're fully human. When you. When you are both, when you are conscious not only of your humanness, but also of your beingness. When the two come together, you are a human being. Before you are only a human, unaware of being, only a personality. A human being lives in two worlds that manifested as and the unmanifested. And that would mean you would. When humans, more, more and more humans begin to live like that, of course the world would look very different. The world that we so be not only human, but be the being. So you become a true human being.