Navigating Life's Challenges with Spiritual Awareness | Eckhart Tolle

Oh, by the way, when you awaken spiritually, it doesn't mean this is the end of challenges. They don't stop. The only difference is, and it's a big difference, you no longer unconsciously transform the challenges of life into unhappiness. The entire psychological self that you think you are, that your identity that is derived from whatever it is that your mind identifies with your past. What happened to you in your past, what you did, what people did to you, what you achieved, your successes, your failures, your sufferings, victories and defeats from your past. They gradually a story forms in the mind. And a story is certain thoughts. They come together as a bundle. And so after, as you grow up and you become an adult and you grow, this becomes more developed, this mental image of who you are and that becomes who you sense yourself to be as a person. That becomes your personality. And that is the foundation for most people's sense of identity. That is all they know, and that is the unawakened state of consciousness. So you are confined to this ultimately mind made sense of self that consists of a storyline, a narrative that you think about and you call it my life, me and my life. And that exists in time. This is where the time dimension becomes very important. Because me and my life is me, the person that I am now, which is conditioned by my past, all the things from the past that make up the person that I am now. And then future becomes important for this me and my life. Because you can look to the future as a destination, a source of possible greater fulfillment. Because strange thing is the sense of self that is, that arises from the past, that is, that consists of a bundle of recurring thought forms plus emotional formations, mentally emotional entity, that entity that you call me and my life a lot of the time, spends its time worrying about me and my life and considers itself problematic. Or you carry you as that entity, you as that person. Everybody here carries a life situation with him or herself. You carry a life situation with you. And everybody here has certain, a certain set of problems in their life situation which, whether they are related to your relationships, whether they're related to your health situation, whether they're related to your financial situation, your work situation, any of these areas. It's rare that you are free of perceiving yourself as being kind of almost burdened by problems and that many people have a view of themselves, of their identity as a problem to be solved unconsciously. They don't say, they don't say I am a problem to be solved, but there's an underlying current of unspoken Thought that says, there's something that is not quite right here. And then you look at others, especially on Facebook, and you see they don't have those problems. So what's wrong with me? What's wrong? And even if you walk in the street, they seem to be okay. And you could perceive, why am I always have all got that stuff going on? And then, of course, you begin to pretend, too. You don't know that the others are pretending, but you are pretending. And then you start taking the selfies for your Facebook posts. So this mental image that people have, we now have the technology isn't that great to amplify this mental image and send it out into the world and we can polish it up so that it looks great out there, but the greater it looks on your Facebook taste, the worse you feel inside. So the interesting fact is then that everybody carries the burden of their life situation. And whether it's a heavy burden for you at this time or whether it's a relatively light burden for you at this time as you sit here may vary from person to person, but there is not a single person, unless there's a baby here somewhere. There's not a single person who does not carry this burden of their life situation, whether it's heavy or light at the moment. And it could change if it's heavy today, it might not be heavy anymore tomorrow, but then it'll be heavy again another time. So that's an interesting fact, and that is part of a person's sense of identity is what I call the life situation. What is me and my story? And there's always. And that's a strange fact. There's always something missing. There's always a sense, an underlying sense of, I am not enough. I haven't arrived yet. There's a search, ultimately for greater fulfillment, a search for yourself, ultimately for a better version of yourself. Now, there's nothing wrong with engaging in activities that help you learn a new skill or acquire new knowledge. And so you gradually, you become a better version of yourself. You become, let's say, you acquire better education, whatever it is, a skill, dance, whatever, that's. That's fine. But whatever it is you acquire, on one level, you can improve yourself, no doubt. But on a deeper level, that sense of dissatisfaction will resurface again and again. And no matter what you achieve or attain for a little while, sometimes it happens that a person is totally thinking, now I'm fully myself. I have arrived. This happens. It could happen when you win the lottery. And there's been many things written about lottery winners. Many of them became more unhappy after winning the lottery. They were just. There's a moment of elation and then there was greater unhappiness. So there's that sense of the underlying sense of not enough, not enough yet, I'm not enough. And you never actually arrive. And then you reach retirement age and you suddenly realize that you've always been waiting to start living. And that's a pity. Without knowing it, you've always been lived for the next moment or some other future moment and thought, I'm going to get there one day, I'm going to make it. Whatever. It's a weird expression. Make it. Really make yourself. I suppose that one day I'm going to make it. And ultimately, several times you think you made it. But then you realize your life situation again sabotages you. That's what it does. You might have noticed. You do your best, you do your best. Your best intentions, and you should. But no matter how good your intention, how well focused you are, and how much positive thinking you do, which is which are all great things. I'm not saying don't do them, do them. But even there, you do not escape this fact that challenges come one after another. And challenges sometimes come in the form of some form of chaos. It's good to strive for order. But no matter how good you are in bringing about order in your life, and it's a great thing, you will periodically encounter the eruption of disorder in your life. Whether it's an illness or some kind of loss or some huge drama in your relationship, or toxic, you might have noticed, by the way, a great source of challenge in your life, one of the greatest. Apart from the fact that as you grow older, the body is being consumed, a great source of challenge in your life is human beings. So if you look your life situation, you realize, what is that suffering and happiness? Where does that come from? It's other people. And sometimes the very people that make you happy for a few years, suddenly the very same people make you unhappy. The person you fall in love with today, five years from now, you hate each other at the divorce court. The worst person you ever met. So everybody carries a life situation, and there's a certain heaviness to a life situation. And if you're totally trapped in your life situation, you think about it, you talk about it compulsively. Either you think about it in your head or you talk about to others. The more you are trapped in it, the more unsatisfying your life is. That is really the temporal dimension, because you as the person, you as the personality, you that has a life situation, you. That is the story of me, me and my story that exists in time. And the wonderful thing is there is a way out. There is a dimension of consciousness where you are not trapped on that level. So one could almost say that you can get off that speeding train, but not as a physic, not with your physical body. But there is a possibility of transcending a sense of identity that is exclusively derived from mental emotional patterns in you, because that's what the person or the personality is. Now, most humans don't even know that, but the ancient teachers pointed to it using different signposts. Buddha said, life is suffering. What did I just talk about? I just didn't use those terms. Buddha said, life is suffering, but he also said, I teach suffering. He said, and the end of suffering. Which means when he said, I teach suffering, he meant, I show you how suffering arises. And when he said, and the end of suffering, what he meant was, I show you how suffering can end. Lovely statement. I teach suffering and the end of suffering. So the Buddha talks about the possibility of the end of suffering. Jesus talks about the necessity of on the possibility of what is called salvation. And in other spiritual traditions, other terms are used, liberation, awakening. So they all pointed to it using different signposts, different terminology. And yet very few humans realized what they were talking about. So even like Christians, most Christians don't know what salvation is. They might think an emotional high is salvation or a certain belief. You say, I believe this, which is a story in your head that you don't question thought, in other words, thought forms. There's a story in your head and say, this is how it is. I don't. You don't question, I believe in this narrative. And then they say, this narrative will save you if you believe in it. I would suggest to you that what Jesus was pointing to was much deeper than that. But there was a beautiful truth hiding there. I say hiding because very rarely do you actually hear the depths of the teaching explained to you in churches. So it is possible there is a possibility of transcendence. You can internally transcend the limitations of the person. Which doesn't mean you are no longer a person. You continue to be a person. You also continue to have a life situation, and you continue to be challenged by life. The difference is, oh, by the way, when you awaken spiritually, it doesn't mean this is the end of challenges, really. Oh, they keep coming. They don't stop. The only difference is, and it's A big difference. You no longer unconsciously transform the challenges of life into unhappiness. You no longer transform the challenges of life into an unhappy me, an unhappy sense of self, a dissatisfied person with an in the background. Always a sense of dissatisfaction, discontent, irritation. Not enough. But sometimes, of course, you smile. How are you? Great. I'm just great. Haven't you seen my Facebook page? This is the food I'm eating now. Now, as the Buddha said, I show you suffering. I teach suffering. I show you how suffering arises. Now, how does it ultimately arise? How does the unhappiness, let's use that kind of generic term, unhappiness, which could be all kinds of things. Unhappiness starts with a slight irritation when you're waiting in line and the mind is not moving and you have a slight irritation and you're beginning to be unhappy and then it builds up into something more. Perhaps. Or unhappiness is when you arrive home and your house has gone up in flames a little bit more. Unhappiness. Or unhappiness is when suddenly your spouse leaves you and you go bankrupt and you lose your job and you don't know what going to happen next month, where you're going to live. Another form of unhappiness. Many forms of unhappiness can arise, but when you look at the. You need a little bit of awareness just to detect. And this is already kind of the beginning of a spiritual awakening. When you develop the ability to know what's going on in your mind. And when you develop, and this is awareness slowly arising, when you develop the ability to know what your mind is doing, what thoughts are going through your head, then you may detect where does the unhappiness come from? Does it come. And you can then divide it into two types of unhappiness. One is completely unrelated to an actual event out there. It's entirely produced by dysfunctional thinking. A typical example of that would be worry. You wake up in the middle of the night and you start to worry. Worry means you have create scenarios in your thoughts about things going wrong. You create scenarios about things which you might lose, things you might not get. But you need something may happen to you and you play it out in your mind. You worry about problems that you say you have. But while you worry, there's no worry, is never given a solution to anything. It's just pointless going around in your mind and you don't even know it. Many people are addicted. There's no awareness there. They are addicted to worrying. Their sense, their personality To a large part is a worrying personality. Take the worrying away and a huge chunk of their personality is suddenly gone. Of course they don't want that. They want to hang on to that. I need to worry. I mean, if I don't worry, I'm not taking responsibility for Malema. Everybody worries, don't they? When I look at movies, they worry. Everybody worries. You have to worry. Okay, let me worry a bit more now. Worry is a very good example of dysfunctional thinking. And it produces an emotion. It's not just in the mind. You have certain types of thinking. The body reacts, responds to the thinking, and creates an emotion that reflects the type of thinking, the energetic frequency of that thinking, the story that you create in your mind. The body can't tell the difference between an actual real event out there and something that only your mind is creating. So when your mind is creating critical situation, your body believes that you are in a critical situation or that you're lying in bed at three in the morning and it's very nice and warm and soft, but you're in a critical situation in your mind, and the body believes this is bad. And then you experience the emotion that you would experience if you were really in a critical situation. And then that becomes. And the emotion fuels even more that type of thinking. So you're trapped in a vicious circle. And so there are human beings who are burdened with these personalities that continuously produce totally superfluous, unnecessary unhappiness. All unhappiness is ultimately superfluous. But in this particular case, this type of unhappiness has nothing to do at all with any situation that's actually happening. It's created by dysfunctional thinking. Dysfunctional thinking here means every thought that comes into your head absorbs your consciousness totally. And when I say identify, this is the key. When you identify with thought, there's a sense of me, a self, in every thought. There's no space between you, who you ultimately are, beyond thought. There's no. You're totally unaware of who you are beyond thought because you're so totally identified with that voice in the head that never stops talking. It goes on and on. Oh, why don't you shut up? Shut up. But that's the voice too. That's just another aspect of the voice. Why can't I shut up, Shut up, shut up. Well, that's the voice also, so that doesn't work. And some people are so unconscious. When I say you have a voice in the head that never stops talking, say, what are you talking about? What voice? This hundred Voice. What is that one? Oh, so from anybody who is not. Who is totally identified with mind, is spiritually trapped in that particular dimension. So you have unhappiness arising simply as a product of your mind, even without an external challenge. And then you have other types of unhappiness arising because there is an external challenge in your life. There is a difficult relationship situation, there is a difficult work situation, a difficult financial situation, a difficult health situation. So you might think, well, I am fully justified in being unhappy because let me tell you about what's going on in my life. And then you will tell me that, yes, you have a right to be unhappy. And so, yes, but if you look more closely at those things, and again, it requires a certain degree of awareness when you seemingly become unhappy. And I'm using. Again, just reminding you, I'm using this as a generic term. It could be anything from slight irritation to extreme anger or extreme sadness or anything in between, or even an undercurrent of. An undercurrent of unhappiness, which many, many people, almost everybody has unless they have awakened. There's an undercurrent of dissatisfaction, of unease. And it comes in every situation, whether they know it or not. There's an undercurrent there that's also. It's emotional. These are emotions that have been created by years and years of dysfunctional thinking. And that undercurrent is there. So something in your life situation is challenging. We can look at one small example how unhappiness arises. Let's say just something seemingly insignificant. But life is full of seemingly little things, and they accumulate. So if you become irritated with one little thing after another little thing after another little thing that eventually grows and becomes part of your personality, and you become an irritated person. And the irritated person is actually, without knowing it, looking for more irritation, just waiting, just the slightest thing to go wrong. And then you make a phone call to your bank. Please wait. We appreciate your call, but we are in the Philippines and we can't answer immediately. Well, they don't say that you have to wait, please. Okay, there you are. And five minutes pass. We value your call very much, but there's nobody yet ready. Okay. And then the mind starts saying things, if it hasn't started already. This is dreadful. How can they do that? I'm going to change banks. But they're all the same, aren't they? But they. Why can't they. Why do I always. Can't I get a human being to talk to? What is the. What's wrong with them? I hate this whole civilization anyway. What am I? All kinds of things. And you become unhappy. If you weren't unhappy already, because you were probably a little bit unhappy already. And then it grows, and then you're dealing with the next thing. Or if you're lucky, you get a lovely Filipino person, that is, hi, how are you? Oh, but you have to be open. If you're not open, you don't even know that there's a nazar point. Finally, there's a human being there, but you don't even know that anymore. I've been waiting for 25 minutes on this thing, and then the next thing comes up in your life, and you're already bringing that into that situation. And there goes an irritated person, an angry person. And then you have to go to the airport and you wait in line. It is not moving. Why can't they? Why don't they? They're completely incompetent. Now if. Now if you look, how does the unhappiness arise? And again, needs a little bit of awareness so that you are aware of what your mind is doing. If you're totally identified with your mind, you don't even know what's going on. You are the thoughts. Every thought has a self in it, a sense of self in it. There's an awareness you can suddenly see, oh, where is the unhappiness arising? Is it because I'm sitting or standing here waiting for this or that? Or is it because I am telling myself something about sitting here waiting and about standing here? Does that. Where is the unhappiness coming from? Could it be that the narrative that I have created around this particular situation, rather than the situation, is causing the unhappiness? It's possible, but you have to figure it. Try it out now. How? Because you've got plenty of time because they're not answering the phone. So you investigate. It's a spiritual investigation while you're waiting. How would I experience this situation if I did not add these thoughts to it? If I didn't add the unnecessary, possibly unnecessary burden of thought to it? How would I experience this moment without the addition of a narrative? Okay, let's find out. I got plenty of time. And so there you are, holding the receiver. Okay, well, I would experience this moment as I'm breathing and I feel myself breathing. And I'm looking out of the window and I'm looking around the room. And as I'm breathing, I can feel the energy in my body. There's an energy that the body is alive, and I can feel that it is alive. I've got nothing else to do right now. I can feel the body is alive. There's an aliveness that pervades every cell of the body. And suddenly you now realize what this is without the addition of thought, without the addition of thought that says this should not be happening, this. Because ultimately that's what it's saying, this should not be happening. Or it might say this should not be happening to me. Or it says, why is this always happening to me? Those are, that's the type of thought. And then you experience, okay, that's a relatively small situation, but you are looking into the origin of unhappiness. So you can become free in little situations of the mental, emotional reactive patterns that before you were completely identified with, so identified that they became you, that they became part of your personality, part of the person. And so that's an amazing thing. And then you can, after a while, these are all little challenges in life. And then occasionally a bigger challenge comes. And again in a big challenge challenge comes you lose your job, you go to a doctor and there's a health challenge, relationship comes to an end, or relationship is very difficult and toxic, something collapses around you. And again you can there. It's a similar. Yes, you realize there is a challenge here and you realize that it may be necessary to take some action. But in the meantime you can experiment and see this requires, by the way, more developed, more intense presence when a bigger challenge comes into your life. But you've practiced already with little things, telephone calls and lineup in the supermarket and airport and countless other things. So you've already been successfully practicing with that, just getting ready for the next big challenge to come into your life. And it will come. And there it comes. And then you have already developed the muscle presence power in you has already grown through the ability to relinquish dysfunctional thinking and being able to be with the situation as it is right now, without the addition of this burden of superfluous suffering, creating thought. And let's show you have developed that already. And then the big challenge comes and there you are. Let's say you lose your job and one day you go to the office and the boss says the famous expression, they don't usually say you are fired, that somewhere else in New York somewhere they'll say you're fired. But usually they are much more kind, say, I'm afraid we'll have to let you go. As if you had been longing to go for a long time. And perhaps you have, you just didn't know it we'll have to let you go. Really? Oh, thank you so much. Finally they're letting me go. We'll have to let you go. But usually it's not people, usually reactors. And there comes a slightly bigger challenge because who knows how you're going to pay the mortgage next month? Who knows? Then there we go. And if you, if presence has grown in you, you can then walk out of the office building with a. Carrying the box of your belongings from your office and then you put it in your car, and then you sit in your car. And again you question, if I didn't add any thought to this, how would I experience this moment? It is as it is and right at this moment, it's actually fine. It's actually, this moment is actually better than it would be if I were still stuck in the office. This moment, certainly now the mind says, yeah, but you've got the future to think about. And of course, yes, you may have to take action, but the question is how? What is the quality of your consciousness in the present moment? Because that determines what kind of action you take. Is the basis for your action a sense of fear or anger or panic? I need to find another job. And then if you go, if you get another interview, you're so, so tense that they don't want you say, no, we can't have a nervous person like that. But so you differentiate between taking action and even perhaps focusing your mind on what, what is it that I can do? What steps can I take? What are the possibilities? I usually, when I do something like that, I get a piece. I'm a paper and pen person. I write it down on a piece of paper and then see the possibilities. And then you return into this present moment. You develop the ability to always have your conscious attention anchored in the present moment rather than in your thinking mind. So this is the. You're becoming aligned with the present moment. And it requires, I must admit, some situations require more intense presence than others. If it's a bigger thing, more intense presence, you go to the doctor's office and the doctor says, okay, you have about 12 months, and then maybe not beyond. That's a big challenge. It's a huge challenge because it means, by the way, he may be wrong, but it means time has been taken away, virtually been taken away from you. It's like some deity, malevolent deity, or maybe a good deity, that suddenly says you have no more time because you had been looking for some self fulfillment through time. Unless you're 95 years old, but maybe even then you've been looking for self fulfillment, for some kind of completion of who you are, of the story. You want. You want the happy ending of the story of me? Of course it never comes, but don't tell anybody. It never. The happy ending of the story of me never comes. And then somebody takes away time from you. And that could be the most dreadful shock to you as a person. Because then you mentally go somewhere that doesn't exist anymore. No more vacation, no more this, no more that. And so some people have become terribly, terribly, dreadfully unhappy in that situation. Which would only be normal, I suppose one would say normal. But others have become intensely present through having no more time. And they went, I've met some and some. The body began to deteriorate more and more, more quickly. And they were like luminous lights. They were just sitting there looking at me. And I remember a lady years ago who came to see me when I was still seeing people. She had developed this illness, only had a few more months. And she was just. Every time she came, she was more luminous. You know, just sit there, and we were just present together. There was nobody left. There was no person left. There was only a space of conscious presence. So the person had been burned up completely by this. That was amazing. How. There's another thing I read a couple of years ago. There was a musician in England, apparently quite famous, but I had never heard of him, which doesn't mean anything. So there was. Was a pop musician. And he went to the doctor. I don't know if he's still alive now or not. He went to the doctor and he says he told him. The doctor told him something like that. And this is a very rare case, he said in an interview. He walked out of the doctor's office in a state of enormous elation. He was just. And suddenly he said he was able to enjoy every moment intensely. And he said, why didn't I do this before? And what happened to him? So some people are forced into awakening by a situation. Now, any big challenge in your life potentially is that it is a way of our life forces you into awakening. And there are some people who have never come into touch with any spiritual teaching. And it happened to them. Others encounter intense suffering. And they suffer and suffer. And then they come into contact with the spiritual teaching that points to the possibility of transcendence. And suddenly the very same suffering situation suddenly becomes the open.