Simple Recipe for Overcoming Suffering | Eckhart Tolle's Life Practices

And every human suffers. Every life form suffers because life is hard and challenging and precarious for every life form. From the moment life comes into being. Life is challenging and precarious for humans, for animals, for plants. Every life form encounters obstacles in its attempt to to grow and expand. And it continuously encounters obstacles to its expansion. Every human in one form or another. If you come into this world very quickly, you'll find obstacles, seeming obstacles to your expansion and growth and well being and flowering. I think you can all, if you think about your so called life, how many obstacles life seems to have put in your path towards happiness. And some people perceive life as life continuously is sabotaging my attempts to find happiness. Why is that? And then they have these strange theories that God is against me or whatever the theory is. But it does seem like, and this is related to the Buddhist term dukkha or suffering. Wherever you go, you will find life is sometimes helpful and then obstacles again. And this is perceived, as some people believe, if you only practice positive thinking continuously, you will no longer encounter obstacles. But that unfortunately is not positive. Thinking is a great thing, can be extremely helpful and bring about certain shifts in you, but it does not free you from experiencing the obstacles that life will put in your path and the challenges that come. So those obstacles, whether they come in the form of loss or illness or relationship problems, many of them arise from their own mind. Because your mind creates an enormous amount of problems that are quite unnecessary, but the mind doesn't know that. So the mind creates an enormous amount of conflict that is unnecessary in your life. That's one kind of obstacle is your own mind. Then and again, you need to experience the consequences of the obstacles that your own mind creates. The conflicts and the unnecessary problems that your own mind, because you identified with the mind creates. You need to experience the suffering that you create for yourself out of that unconsciousness of unconsciousness means completely identifying with the mind, the egoic mind, which in many cases transforms challenges which could be solved easily into much bigger problems. So you have the. Your mind created obstacles that you ultimately create yourself because you're not conscious enough. And then you counter suffering. This is one level of suffering. And this is you need to experience the suffering that comes through unconscious use of the mind in order to awaken. It's only through the suffering that eventually you go, I can't take anymore. As happened to me when I was in bed one night and said, I can't live with myself anymore. And then somehow I realized this myself, that I couldn't live with anymore. Was an illusion, an illusory entity and very unhappy mind. Created entity. But before I realized that, I had to go through this suffering for years and years. So the suffering worked. It fulfilled its purpose. And then you have another level of suffering or obstacles. Obstacles come to you seemingly from the outside, that suddenly you have an accident, an illness that's a kind of outside. It's. Something seems to happen to you that you have not contributed to. Something happens, somebody close to you dies as an accident, many things can happen. But you see, I haven't created that. Of course, in New Age it's very normal to say when things go wrong in your life, the typical New Age person will say, how did you create that? You slipped on a banana skin and broke your leg. Why did you create that? How did you create that? It's an interesting question. I don't want to go into this. Whether even those obstacles or challenges that come to you, not seemingly not from your own mind, but from the outside, did you still create that or not? Let's leave that aside. I don't want to convince anybody one way or another. I have a much more simple recipe here which goes like this. Instead of telling people, you better look at your life and see why you created that or how you created that. I say accept each moment as if you had created it. Accept each moment as if you had wanted it or caused it, wanted it to happen. I can't remember my own writings. It's always not good to go into memory. Don't quote, just present moment. So. But if you live whatever happens, you accept this moment as if you had chosen. That's the one I wrote. Accept. Accept each moment as if you had chosen it. That's a good recipe for working. Because if it already is the case, you might as well accept whatever is as if you had chosen it, because you already here. So I'm not telling people you chose it. Maybe you did, maybe you didn't. Doesn't matter. Still accept it as if you had chosen it. That shifts things. Your whole attitude to it shifts and it dissolves more quickly than whatever the obstacle is. But let's go back to the suffering first. The suffering that arises from your own mind creates conflict and all those things that create suffering. And then at some point you awaken. And then what remains is the suffering that comes with having a body, for example, because eventually the body gets older. No matter how much you go to the gym every day, no matter how fantastic your nutrition is, no matter how many pills for longer life you take, which is all fine and good. But of course, every form eventually dissolves. And the time comes when the body can be perceived as a burden. Almost the older you get, the more likely it is to happen. And so of course you might then say old age isn't so bad. If you consider the alternative, which is you die younger. And then you don't have to experience the body getting fragile and old. But if you get old, the body can become problematic, a source of suffering potentially. But those challenges, if approached correctly, don't have to turn into suffering. Accept each moment as if you had chosen it. If you can go with the isness of things, there's no complaining entity that says something about being a victim and complaining how dreadful things are now. I wish my mother had learned that lesson when she suffered in that way. Because she had always identified very much with her body. Good looking, always nicely dressed, going out and liked to be looked at. Very normal thing for many people. And then the body got older and older, and then hip problems and other fractures and this, and got worse and worse. And the unhappiness grew, grow not so much of limited movement, but the identity. So much was in the body, that tremendous suffering. I tried to free her. And occasionally there were moments when she could disidentify from body. But very, very brief. And that is the destiny of many humans. But the suffering is really that every life form encounters the obstacles that every life form encounters. Whether they come at a younger age, older age, middle age, in whatever form. These things are absolutely necessary. Without which there would be no human evolution whatsoever. And no life form would ever evolve if the life form did not encounter obstacles. So that which looks like an obstacle is actually always potentially an opening. Potentially that seems to stop your progress in life. Always potentially can make you more conscious. So you can use every obstacle that arises in your life. If you can especially work especially quickly if you accept each moment as if you had chosen it. And when it looks this moment is an obstacle, you go with it instead of complaining or running away from it. And then accept and then act if action is possible, or don't act if no action is possible.

You identify with thinking. And the identification with thinking becomes ego. And there are many people in this world who are stuck with hostile life. Denying continuously critical and attacking entities that they carry in their head. And they believe that is who they are. To become free of ego means becoming free of thought. Identification with thought.

That's the end of the ego. Sam.