Eckhart Tolle explains how presence transforms life's challenges. External problems like health and money matter less than internal ones created by ego and an unobserved mind. Freedom comes from how you respond to events, not the events themselves. Accepting the present moment without labeling and witnessing emotions rather than identifying with them loosens the grip of the ego.
Apply the presence to every arising challenge in your life. And challenge the greater part of challenges. Well, a large part of challenges comes through other people. You might have noticed people can cause lots of challenges because they are so, just so difficult to deal with. It could come through your health situation, the body, and it could come through your work situation, but it's related to your financial situation. Those are the challenges that have certain external causes. So you have, on the one hand, challenges that arise just through your mind, the unobserved mind, and then others, actual challenges in your external life. But the question is, what is the state of consciousness with which you meet the arising challenges in your life? And ultimately your entire life is not determined by what happens to you, but by how you respond to what happens. That is, your freedom, is how you respond to any event that happens to you. And your response determines further events. The important thing is that you gradually begin to realize the sound is making a strange sound. You gradually begin to realize that what until recently you called my life is ultimately something relatively insubstantial. It's a story in your mind. And then that becomes less of a burden. The entire narrative of me, of me and my life is then gradually, and that is part of the integration is gradually no longer perceived as a burden. And you no longer derive your sense of who you are from the story of your life, the narrative. So who you are is the presence now, and that's timeless and it's unconditioned. And all that remains then is memories. Of course you remember your past, but you have now a total, completely different relationship with your past. And ultimately, what is that when we talk of your past? Thoughts in your head is your past. And what's your future? Thoughts in your head is the future. So both past and future are experienced and cannot be experienced in any other way as thoughts in your mind. The rest is just the immediate experience of this moment. And even whenever you label whatever you experience in this moment mentally, by judging it this way or that, that's also the past that is coloring the way in which you are experiencing this moment. So you have a certain relationship to whatever is arising in this moment. And you call it this or call it that, but it doesn't. There's another way of experiencing this moment, and that is accepting it as it is, without the compulsive need to label it. And that's an amazing liberation. And then you are living as the deep I more and more. And you no longer get the sense that something incredibly that you are this huge ball of problems that needs to be solved. A bit like the Gordian knot. That's in Greek. I believe in ancient Greek mythology there was this. I don't think it was even mythology. I think it's an actual historical fact. There was the Gordian knot, K N O T. There was this huge thing, a rope that was tied into a huge knot. I don't know how big it was. And the challenge was to disentangle this Gordian knot. And nobody could do it. Oh, my God. And they said, whoever can disentangle it will conquer the world. That's the story. And then a young man came, his name was Alexander, I think. And he looked at it and he drew his sword and cut through it. And so he became Alexander the Great, who conquered the known world at the time. And so the guardian knot. I'm using this story as an analogy for the egoic self, means you have tied yourself into a guardian knot. Me and my problems. And then you attempt to disentangle one thing after another. But while you solve one problem here, another one pops up there. And then you go there. And then, okay, I've dealt with this. Now that work problem is solved, for the finances are working again. That's great. And then suddenly your spouse goes off with someone else, or suddenly you have a pain here to go. Life never leaves you alone for very long. But the main thing is that this entity that the Buddha calls the self, you cannot. It doesn't take time to transcend it, because you would have to. To some extent. Psychoanalysis tries to solve the problem of you. And although there is something to be said for occasionally looking at certain things in your past, but your main area, your main focus, needs to remain the present moment, except ways when you might suddenly discover why it is that every time somebody makes you wait, you become extremely upset and angry, far beyond what would be warranted by this particular situation. And suddenly you may remember as you become more conscious of your emotions, that perhaps when you were a child, who knows, your dad abandoned you and the family when you're very young, and this sense of abandonment comes over you even when you're waiting for somebody and somebody arrives late, you overreact totally because there's a heavy pain body associated with the idea of abandonment. And this has been unconscious. And suddenly, as you bring more presence, you become more aware of that emotion that arises instead of being it. You are the awareness that sees the arising of the emotion. And then it sometimes happens that when you clearly see the arising of an emotion, you may suddenly also remember where it started. You may or you may not. It could be helpful if you remember where it started. It's not an absolute necessity because it could have started in another lifetime.
