Eckhart TolleNYT Bestselling author of the Power of Now

Suffering Is the Doorway. This Is How You Walk Through.

22 Jul 2026 · 1 min

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In this brief teaching, Eckhart Tolle explains that suffering can serve as a catalyst for spiritual transcendence, but it is not necessary to wait for a prolonged "dark night of the soul" to achieve awakening. He argues that personal identity is a mental story; when this story is challenged, it can cause intense suffering because the story is not the true self. By recognizing that thoughts are objects of awareness—not the self itself—and deliberately directing attention to the awareness of thoughts, one can begin the process of awakening immediately. This shift in attention dissolves the need for a painful, prolonged crisis and offers a direct path to liberation.

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Any suffering that you encounter is a potential for transcending. If you don't encounter enough suffering, then you probably won't transcend at all. But the important thing is your entire sense of identity is a mental creation, a narrative, and in some way, when the narrative gets challenged, it can lead to extreme suffering. But what's being challenged is ultimately not real. It is not who essentially you are. And so you can either wait for the Dark Night of the Soul to happen and hopefully awaken you out of the narrative of who or what you are, or more easily, you can start now by directing your attention away from stories that your mind is telling you. In other words, realizing that you are not your thoughts. Your thoughts are there, But you are not your thoughts, you are aware of your thoughts. So by simply directing attention there now, you're beginning to awaken. You don't really need the dark night of the soul anymore. That's the secret, that's the liberation.