The Teacher Called Suffering | Eckhart Tolle Teachings

I've mentioned a few times the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus, the young man who, according to this tale, mythological tale, he looked into a pool of water and saw his own reflection. And according to the story, fell in love with himself, or rather the reflection of himself. And I see this as a way of explaining what happened to the human mind that created a reflection of itself in the mind and began to identify with the reflection. So at that point, humans began, well, when the myth of Narcissus was created by we don't know who. By then, probably that process had already started a long time before that. So falling in love with a mental reflection of yourself, or I would slightly reinterpret that, not so much falling in love, because it's not always necessarily love. The relationship that you have with yourself can be a very problematic one. And sometimes it's self hatred. So rather than calling it love, I would say he became obsessed with himself. He became obsessed with that image that he saw. But what the myth is pointing to is that it's something that happened in the human psyche collectively. And suddenly humans started. Every human being started to have a relationship with himself or her. It's a strange thing. And then increasingly the mind, the thinking mind, the unobserved mind contributed more to that. So the image, not just not a visual image, gradually got replaced more and more by a conceptual image in one's mind of who one is, and then gradually deriving one's sense of self from that conceptual image of oneself. The other day I looked up, I'd forgotten what happened to this man Narcissus in the mythological tale. I looked it up the other day and it seems that he eventually committed suicide. This is significant too, because here too, there is a deep truth embedded in that, and that is that the human ego seems to have a self destruct mechanism built into it. In other words, it is the main cause of human suffering, because it is the egoic unconsciousness, especially on a collective level, that creates the largest percentage of human suffering. If you look back 20th century, most of the dreadful suffering was not through natural disasters or even through illness that happened to individual human beings or accidents that happened to individual human beings. But man made suffering suffering through violent conflict. And so the ego creates suffering for yourself, both on a personal level and on a collective level. The ego being the unobserved mind, in the absence of awareness, in the absence of presence, it creates suffering. It doesn't want to create suffering. It wants you to be more fully yourself. It wants you to be better than others. If you can't be better in victory, you can be better in your misery than others, more miserable than others, and through the suffering it creates. The suffering is also the factor that, that as you may remember yesterday I described as a spiritual teacher. Everybody has a spiritual teacher and for most people it's their suffering. It's a strange fact that eventually the suffering that is to a large extent not hundred percent self created. That huge amount of suffering that looks, if you look at it objectively, say why this seems so absurd and unnecessary, both what humans do themselves on a personal level and collectively, it is so unnecessary. If you look at the madness of the First World War that then got extended into the Second World War for almost for nothing they started killing each other. The ego, the collective ego needed to triumph. So the suffering, a large amount of which is self ego created, eventually awakens you. And then the awakening is the end of the ego. So there is a self destruct mechanism built into the ego, which is a good thing. One of the most important things on your spiritual path is awareness of those patterns that we call egoic that still operate in you. And you only really recognize them in situations. When you relate to people, when you encounter problematic situations, difficult people, obstacles on your path, it's then that's why these things are so helpful. You could easily remove yourself to a little cabin for a year and you might find either you will go insane because your own mind will drive you insane, or you might, if you're a good meditator, you might be able to achieve a measure of inner peace through daily meditation in your cabin. And there's nothing wrong to occasionally withdraw. But if you do that as a way into the spiritual dimension, then you may find that the depth of your presence that arises in the protective environment of the cabin or even the ashram, it may not be very deep. And then when you come out of your cabin and go back into being with people and encountering situations, you may find that you quickly lose it. As the story I told before that was told by a monk, a Buddhist monk, Western born Buddhist monk in Thailand. He went very deep eventually. But when he was a young monk, he meditated in a little hut up the mountain, half an hour from the main, from the monastery, and was there in isolation for I believe, six months or longer. And one person would bring him food once a day. And nothing disturbed him except the bees and the mosquitoes and the heat. So he had to surrender to these things, which after a while he was able to do. And then he became more and more Peaceful. At some point, the bees. For some reason, there were lots of bees there. And sometimes his body would be covered with bees. And he made peace with the bees and said, it's okay, giving them loving kindness. Meta. And he didn't get. They didn't sting him. It's amazing. And then after a few months, he had to go come back into the monastery, and then he had to go to the city, Bangkok, to renew his visa after achieving what he thought was sublime states of inner peace in the cabin. So he overcame the obstacle of the bees. He overcame because he surrendered the obstacle of the mosquito, the obstacle of the extreme heat, the obstacle of relatively little food, all that he surrendered to and so became very, very peaceful and thought, this is enlightenment. I made it. And so he had to go to Bangkok to renew his visa, and there was a lineup. And although he was a Buddhist monk, for some reason he was highly respected in Thailand, but he still had to line up. And after one hour in this lineup, he got to the man and said, no, this is the wrong lineup. You have to go there. And then he could feel he was beginning to lose his inner peace. And then he went to the second lineup and waited there. And finally, after half an hour, got to the next man, said, okay, well, there's something missing here. There are two stamps on this form. You should have gone over there first before you line up here. And at that point, he lost his peace completely. And he found himself banging on the table. I have been standing here for two hours lining up, and you are telling me now I have to go there. And at that moment, he observed himself again, said, oh, so he wasn't totally lost. He just lost it briefly. But the deep piece didn't come back for a long time after that. This mind made sense of self is also much more focused on the negative than the positive. To be free, you awaken to who you are beyond your history and your life situation. It.