Overcoming Challenges from Within | Eckhart Tolle on The Inside Track To Freedom (Part 3)

Only part of the challenges of life come from seemingly outside of you, through other people and events and things that happen. And a very great part of challenges actually come from your own mind. And that is, I would suggest, the greater part of challenges in your life are not through external events, although, yes, they also happen. But the greater part of challenges is the unobserved mind. What your mind is doing and saying about your life, the narrative in your mind and the dysfunction of your mind, the misinterpretations of life, of everything in your mind. When you, as we mentioned earlier, when you look at life through the conditioning of your mind, the veil of conditioning, the narrative, and you cannot separate what is from your interpretation of what is. And then that is. And suddenly you realize, okay, this is the challenge and you're not complaining anymore, you're just looking at it and facing it. And you become more alert through every challenge that arises, even the little ones. Like, your flight is cancelled. You arrive at the airport, it's a little challenge, or you stumble and you fall and you break something, it's a little bit bigger challenge, but the mechanism behind the reactivity is the same. So first you can start with little things, little things that go wrong. Flight is cancelled, it's cancelled. Nobody's telling you what's happening. And there are 50 people angry all around you. So you're either drawn into that or you just, okay, because you see it as, oh, it's a sign for me to be alert. It's an opportunity for intensified presence. And then you become actually intelligent for the first time. You access, one could say, higher intelligence. And then if a certain action is possible in that moment, you take action and it'll be right. It's not reactive, it's action but not reaction. And if no action is possible, you're simply in a state of complete surrender and you feel great, just. And maybe you sit there for two hours and still nothing has happened. And then perhaps you go and go to a hotel or you sleep on this chair. And it no longer creates a problem in the conventional sense of the word. It no longer creates an unhappy entity that is you. It creates more alertness. And I have had accounts of people who were given a very serious prognosis when they went to see their doctor. And usually the case is that the doctor tells you something that might imply that there is not much time left for you. That's a terrible thing when you believe that your life is not complete yet, that there's so much more that you wanted to do that you could do, but you may not be able to do it. So usually the first reaction would be very great suffering. But in some people that also has created. I've had quite a few accounts of people who suddenly became intensely alert and present. They refused to leave the present moment because they realized, either through coming into contact with this or some other similar teaching, or intuitively, without having any guidance, they realized if I leave the present moment, I become unhappy. If I go just a few months into the future where I may not be here anymore, or the body or me or whatever, I become unhappy. So they go just totally present and suddenly feel a sense of not only great alertness, but almost elation. Fonda There was an account a few years ago of, unfortunately I've forgotten his name. A British musician, relatively well known, but not world famous. And he was given, he was only believe in his 30s or early 40s. He was given this diagnosis that he would only have another year to live. But this was an unusual case. He reported he taught it in an interview. He walked out of the doctor's office and without going through the stage of suffering first, he immediately experienced, without having read any spiritual book, he immediately realized this arising of very intense alive, sense of aliveness. And he lived completely in the present moment. Suddenly started living completely in the present moment. And then he said in the interview he thought, why didn't I do this before? Why did I wait for this? And he felt not. You can't call this, it's not happiness what he felt, it's not happiness. That's a superficial thing, something deeper than happiness. He felt life itself, the joy of life that is deeper than happiness or unhappiness, perhaps even to call it joy is not quite right. That intensified sense of aliveness and what is that? What is that intensified sense of aliveness? And what happened? Why did he or anybody to something like that happens, why do they suddenly feel that? And they didn't have it before? Because time was removed from them. There was no more time, no future. And without future, the ego cannot survive the sense of self, the egoic sense of self needs future and it needs past. It's built, it's built, it's up through the past. And it needs future for its fulfillment. And of course, ultimate destruction. But the ego doesn't want to talk about that. So the ego got destroyed through that very quickly. And so it has happened to people who have lost everything, who were involved in huge natural disasters or man made disasters. Not to every, doesn't happen to everybody. Some people remain stuck in terrible suffering. But these it's always an opportunity for true spiritual awakening. But you have come here now because you no longer need. You've done the stage of suffering. So suffering plays. It still may still be important because it will intensify your presence when it comes. But you don't need suffering as such because you are voluntarily inviting the state of presence into your life. It begins to manifest through you. And then the challenges that happen also do not remain, are not the same that they were when you were unconscious and continuously reacted angrily or despondently in a very unhappy way where you actually, through the dysfunctional reaction, what you do, you amplify every challenge that happens in your life. When you cannot face it for what it simply is, when you build up a huge narrative around it, you amplify it. Let's go back to a very simple thing. Your flight is canceled at the airport, and you get taken over by reactive mode. You walk up to the counter, you start shouting at the employee, how dreadful this, Alan. It's your. You should be. You should make sure that your clients are you. And you build each other. So what before was a relatively small thing. Through your reactivity, you amplify it. And what often happens then the other person amplifies it back, and you get huge drama. And then they call the police and you're dragged away. One often reads about people, especially these days in planes, perhaps because the seats are so narrow. So many people get very unconscious on planes, and they start making a scene and shouting, and the plane has to land somewhere and they have to be taken off the plane. And this is a typical example of how something that was a little challenge. You had to sit in this very confined space for two, three hours, okay? And you had to sit there. But their level of consciousness, perhaps through excessive intake of alcohol, became even lower than it would be normally. And then the little challenge becomes amplified so much that they end up in prison. And this is just one example of how in human interaction, how humans, they amplify the challenges, and then they get amplified back, and then sometimes even more humans participate in it. And then you get violence and warfare. And it's just the same thing. It happens in one individual. It starts and then it spreads. And so the way in which you deal with challenges and changes, no longer reactive. And when you no longer amplify the challenge, what tends to happen? And this is almost like a little miracle, it dissipates much more quickly and becomes transformed into something else. When you no longer fight it, then very often very quickly, something else happens. Some helpful circumstance that suddenly you say, oh, that's great. It.