Peace in Adversity | Eckhart Tolle Foundation

The suffering deepens you. It provides— it forces you to become aware of that part of you that is the cause of suffering that operates in you. The real inner peace— and this sounds almost paradoxical— The real inner peace comes not because of something, but in spite of something. When things get difficult, things go wrong, so to speak, adversity happens, suffering arises, things collapse externally, loss, There's a chance— at first of all, it looks like this is something that prevents you from finding peace. So those situations that seem undesirable, that's probably what every one of you found when you first arrived here. How can I be at peace here, free of unhappiness? That's another way of putting it. Can you be free of unhappiness in a situation that would normally be seen as challenging and is challenging? So a superficial kind of peace comes when everything is going fine in your life. Everything is going fine in your relationships, you have a nice job, you're healthy, then you've got enough money. Oh, I feel I'm fine. Or you can go to a resort and spa and be pampered and then even meditate, and you meditate and you feel you're becoming enlightened because you're becoming so peaceful in this wonderful environment. You're being looked after, the most delicious foods, maybe you're on Bali or Hawaii in this fantastic resort, and then you feel, I'm becoming enlightened, I'm so peaceful. But it doesn't last. Then you go back into your normal life and very soon it collapses because it's like a flower that grows in a protective environment, greenhouse. It sprouts very quickly and it grows very quickly, but it has no resistance against adversity. It cannot tolerate adversity. So if you take this flower or this plant outside, it will quickly wither and collapse. So the true peace comes when you're being challenged. When you're being challenged, you need to generate inner resources. The inner resources don't come when the challenge isn't there. So what we call challenge, we could also call difficulty or obstacle, whatever it may be, big and small. Without challenges, humanity, human consciousness would not Not evolve at all. If I had not been challenged, I wouldn't be sitting here. If I had not gone through periods of deep unhappiness and depression, I would not be here. If I had had a happy childhood, which I didn't— so my childhood was— I know some of you have had, I'm sure, a worse childhood than I did, but it was not a happy one. No. There was continuous conflict. My parents, and then they broke up, and then my mother had zero money, couldn't survive. It was quite difficult. And so my life got completely disrupted at an early stage. I left school at 14 and a half. I just couldn't go to school anymore. And so everybody thought his life has come to an end. He's not going to graduate. He's not going to finish high school, and so on. And so, and then And then my life developed in very strange, unusual ways. And I later realized if I had had a more pleasant upbringing with parents who were not— they meant well, but they couldn't help it. They were run by their ego. So they didn't have much choice. When a person is run by their egoic conditioning, they act out their conditioning. They got conditioned in their childhood, and then they act out their conditioning. So for a while I blamed my parents, but then I realized as I went through later spiritual awakening, I couldn't blame them. Then they couldn't help it because there was not enough awareness in them to counteract the negative conditioning that they were brought up with. So then when I realized that, I was able to forgive them because I realized there was actually eventually really nothing to forgive. They couldn't help it. Spiritually speaking, unconscious. When I use the term unconscious, I don't use it in a conventional sense. In a conventional sense, unconscious means you're out completely, that you're unconscious. But spiritually speaking, when you're unconscious, you're completely identified with the mental-emotional conditioning that you grew up with. You're completely— it has you in its grip. grasp and, and there's no awareness in the background. The awareness is asleep. The consciousness is asleep. Basically you can say you are asleep. You are then spiritually speaking, you're unconscious. What is running your life is the conditioning that you inherited. And this conditioning, mental, emotional conditioning that becomes The person, the personality, and you have not realized the deeper essence of who or what you are. And that is there in every human, but in many humans it's dormant. It's only a potential dormant. It's kind of asleep. It's like a seed that hasn't sprouted yet that lies in every human being, the seed of awakening, of— Of awakening. a greater consciousness, of realizing who or what you are in your essence. I call it your essence identity. That the spiritual awakening is a discovery of your essence identity that is deeper— you could also say higher, but I usually put it deeper— deeper than the person or the personality. So the personality, of course, That there's always on that level, you even as you awaken, the personality is still there, but you're not totally controlled by that conditioning anymore. Gradually something else arises that begins for many people when they become aware of what their mind is doing. They become aware of an emotion that arises. rather than completely being the emotion, being taken over by the emotion. And there may be some of you that something happened at some point in your life when an emotion took you over completely and then the emotion acted through you, the awareness was asleep, and then you did something, this conditioned entity did something, that later you realized that was awful. How could I have done that? But what is that I? When you say I, are you actually referring to this conditioned entity, this conditioned person? It is not the deep, the deeper I or the more real I that was dormant in you. And that's an amazing realization. that there is such a thing as this deeper I. And I know that many of you here, even though you may not use that terminology that I'm using here, I know that many of you are already awakening to that deeper dimension within you. And why are you awakening? Because you are experiencing a huge challenge in your life, a huge challenge that provides the pressure. There is more awakening here, I'm sure of that, than let's say Beverly Hills Resort and Spa. There's more, and I'm absolutely— because I've seen places like that. I don't know if that exists, it's a fictitious name I'm giving. The Beverly Hills Resort and Spa, There's not a lot of spiritual— there could be some because some of those people may also be good. They may be wealthy and have freedom, but they may be challenged by something else. Health challenge or relationship challenge. I mean, Beverly Hills is full of unhappy people too, so, but that's another story. I talked about my childhood, and of course, later on, gratitude arose for what went wrong in my childhood. I reached a point where I realized if my life had not gone wrong in conventional terms, if my life had not gone wrong at that early stage of my life, My life, yes, it would have unfolded in a more easier way, perhaps. I would have graduated, would have found perhaps a nice job, well, make a good living, maybe have a family. Yeah. But I would not have been able to do, to contribute to the world what I'm able to contribute now. I would be just an ordinary person. He's doing okay. And I would be sitting there having a beer and watching Netflix. And— I mean, by now I would already be retired for 10 years because I reached retirement age 10 years ago. So I would be sitting there, maybe I would be at that golf club somewhere playing golf. Okay, there's nothing wrong with golf, it can take you into the present moment too, but— That was not my purpose. You reach a point where you become grateful for the suffering that has taken you here, because the suffering deepens you. It provides— it forces you to become aware of that part of you that is the cause of suffering that operates in you. And that is, I call it sometimes the surface I, because everybody says I, but usually when they say I, they refer to this conditioned entity, the sum total of their conditioning is the person. So this I that people refer to when they say I, it's the person, this conditioned person. And this can be a painful identity for people if this conditioned person went wrong somewhere, seriously wrong, or did something seriously wrong. It can be this identity with a conditioned— I. I, the surface I, can turn into a painful identity so that you carry with you a sense of self or an identity that you feel is— there's a heaviness in there and you carry this past. I don't know from talking to one or two people here and the other day in a man's prison— oh, by the way, you're lucky to be a woman to be here. Oh my God. If I ever get convicted, which I will access my feminine side and I will identify as a woman. You can't do that these days. Yes. And I will come here. So we have the surface I, this entity, and then your identity can become— many, many people in this world carry a fairly painful sense of identity, not just You may have experienced that, but the world is full of people who carry the burden of their sense of self. And then when you hear them speak, they say, well, I never imagined my life would go like that. When I was 20, I imagined something different. At some point, something went really wrong. They carry the burden of what they call my unsatisfying life. Relationships collapsed, and then I did that, and then people did that to me. And then they complain continuously in their minds, out aloud, or in their minds about what life did to them. They carry a burden, a burden of the self. This is the fault, ultimately, a false self. The self is a spiritual term that is used in Buddhism, But even Jesus talked about the self when he said, interesting statement by Jesus, deny thyself. That's an interesting— what does he mean, deny thyself? If the self is real, it doesn't make sense to deny it. So when he says deny thyself, the implication is That that self is not ultimately real. And that's exactly what the Buddha said also. The Buddha said you are trapped in an illusory sense of identity which is called the self. And that self is a superficial self. Yes, it's there. You can't get rid of it completely as long as you're here. In a physical body, but the question is, have you discovered within yourself something deeper and more real than this self, the superficial self? The whole teaching of the Buddha could be encapsulated in one quote, something that he's supposed to have said to describe his teaching. He said, I teach suffering and the end of suffering. That said the Buddha literally. I believe that's a genuine quote. You never— there are many scriptures and sometimes you say, did he really say that? Probably not. But here I feel he really said that. I teach suffering and the end of suffering, which means I show you how suffering arises and I show you how suffering can end. And the The Buddha shows your suffering arises. It suffering arises by complete identification with this the self, the false self, the conditioned entity, the person, the personality. How do you then? How do you transcend that? How is it? How do you awaken to the deeper identity, which I call the deep I? These terms. didn't come to me when I was writing the books. They came later when I was talking. I gave a talk one day and suddenly I heard myself say, the surface I and the deep I. I said, oh, that's interesting. A lot of things that are in my books came originally from sessions I had with people, counseling sessions, and I found myself saying things that I didn't know that I knew them. Yeah. So they came from that deeper place, and I said, wow. And often I said, I said that, that's so interesting. Where did that come from? It didn't come from the self, it came from the deep I, and that's a wonderful realization. So that the most important thing in a person's life, no matter what happens, in the more superficial dimension of life, the most important event in your life is the awakening, your awakening to this deep I, even if it first comes at a glimpse at first, little glimpses at first. Glimpses come, for example, when you give attention to the present moment, just what you're doing in the present moment, and take attention away from the past. Instead of dwelling on mentally on things in the past, you take attention into the present moment.