This is a YouTube video titled "No Story, No Problem | Eckhart Tolle on Eliminating Your Own Suffering" featuring a monologue by Eckhart Tolle. The content is a spiritual teaching session where Eckhart Tolle discusses the nature of the ego, how it creates suffering through stories and mental narratives, and the importance of presence and awareness to transcend egoic patterns. The talk explores themes of ego irritation, unconscious behavior, and the lightness that comes from releasing egoic stories.
But this is frustrating to the ego, because when there's no longer any story where you oppose the other, where you make yourself feel superior to the other, then there's no food for the ego anymore. Hopefully you had a light meal, otherwise all your consciousness will be drawn into the stomach. I'm beginning to receive your questions. Thank you very much. We will this evening have our first session dealing with questions. If possible, write as legibly as you can. Otherwise I'll get really irritated and my mind will say, do they expect me to read this, to be able to read this? Why can't they write more lentibly? Isn't it common sense that they should write lentibly? Why do people tell you things like that? That would be a normal ego reaction to something that in itself is perfectly okay, because you can either read it or you can't. But the ego adds a story to it. And behind the story is always an attempt to be more right than the other person. There's always an attempt to have in some kind of superiority. It's unconscious, of course. Ego is always unconscious. And this is alternatively what? Actually, I don't get irritated, as you might have guessed. If there's a paper that's not legible, I look at it, okay, I will put this aside and give it more attention later. In the meantime, I'll read the legible ones and then if there's time later, I'll give it more attention. There's no problem without a story. And there's no, you are not wrong and I'm not right. This is just what is. It's just a tiny example of the difference between aligning yourself to the simple isness of the present moment and imposing a story on it in the service of the self that wants to inflate itself. Indignation, irritation. They should. Why do they? Don't they know better? I said, are they all stories in the service of a false sense of self? And so the in presence, all this, what I sometimes call unnecessary baggage that people manufacture mentally and emotionally, all that unnecessary baggage that really is, this heaviness to it that they carry around, it doesn't arise anymore. And there's the simple this is what is. I can either do this or I can do that. I can deal with it now, I can put it aside, no story. But this is frustrating to the ego, because when there's no longer any story where you oppose the other, where you make yourself feel superior to the other, then there's no food for the ego anymore. But there's an incredible lightness and the lightness of being comes and the heaviness goes out of situations that really, that's what the ego is, a heavy me. And even when it attempts to make itself superior, what it doesn't recognize is that all these are really forms of suffering. The ego doesn't even recognize suffering as suffering. It doesn't realize that when you get angry or irritated about somebody else's behavior and bring up a big story about it, you are actually in a state of suffering. If you were able to have attention in your body, you would notice that your body is suffering. Because those things affect the smooth, harmonious working of the energy field that goes through the body. So an angry thought has an effect on the body. Small irritation already had an effect, and the body doesn't really like it. But the ego, the egoic self, is not in touch with the body. And it mistakes suffering for something good. Anger can really get into this. So you can look at your own life and see where you are manufacturing unnecessary stories, both in small situations and in bigger life situations. And in situations to do with relatives, family members, partners, ex partners. A wonderful source of egoic stories can talk about your ex husband or wife for hours, either to somebody else if they are ready to listen, or in your own mind. Or you had a confrontation or an exchange with somebody yesterday. And you can go on, continue that in your mind, and say so many hurtful things to the other person that unfortunately you couldn't think of in the situation. But you can relive it now, and it's almost as good as the real thing. So in that fantasy world of the mind, you can be right again and again. And the other person can be wrong again and again. How wonderful these things are. Not all this is what we call unconscious. So. So people don't know what they are doing for them. That is their reality. Now can we understand why Jesus said, forgive them, for they know not what they do, they are unconscious. It's an automatic process of ego inflation, of ego reinforcement. It's conditioned, learned. It's part of the structure of the mind.
