Understanding That Life Has Its Challenges, with Eckhart Tolle

So, as you know, here we are mainly concerned with entering the realm of being, of presence. There hasn't been a lot for you to do, just little doings. Walking from here to the there, eating your food, some talking, some thinking, which is a doing. But mostly this has been and still is about connecting with being. The dimension of stillness beyond thinking, out of which all thinking arises. Now, when you leave here, many of you, if not most of you, are going back into more doing again. So your challenge will be not to lose the rootedness in that deeper dimension while you are engaged in whatever you do. And the world will do all it can to challenge you, to pull you out of that rootedness. And it will tell you, not in so many words, but it will, in the form of events and people and happenings and things not working and so on, will tell you this is all important. Give me your fullest attention. This really matters. It may matter, but as I put it, although things matter relatively, they may be relatively important. Whether or not you miss your plane, whether or not you find that great job or you lose that great job, or whatever happens, it's all relatively important. But only one thing is of absolute importance, and that is your connectedness with being. So that that dimension is with you as you in your daily life. That's the challenge. A few things will be helpful in this. One is letting go of the unconscious assumption that there should be no problems and difficulties. And if they are, that they are undesirable obstacles that really shouldn't be there in the form of events or people or situations. But if you look back on your life, and I look back on my life, it's always been challenging. There are brief moments when it's not challenging, and that's great. But you know very well that life won't leave you alone. It'll challenge you one way or another. If you look at the world situation, it's the same. There's all kinds of challenges in the news. First there were the Communists, there was a Cold War. And then there are suddenly other huge challenges arising. And it goes on and on. So in the words of the first sentence in the book called the Road Less Traveled, which I never read because the first few sentences were so good, I didn't need to read the rest of it. And the first sentence is, now, this might go against certain New Age beliefs. And it might at first sound negative, because the first sentence is, life is difficult. That doesn't sound very inspiring. And then the next sentence, although I don't remember it literally says, and if you know that you're completely okay with the fact that life is difficult, then it's no longer difficult. So that's all I read, because that says it all already. How does that work? How is life when you know that life is difficult, it's no longer difficult. You try to work that out. Well, here's the explanation. It's really only difficult if you think that it shouldn't be difficult, because then you're in continuous resistance to things and people and events. But once you accept it's an essential part of life, of being difficult, then whenever the next difficulty arises, you say, oh, there's life again, being difficult. In other words, what does that do? It creates an acceptance of what is. If you carry around the assumption in your head, it shouldn't be difficult. There should be no difficult people and obstacles and problems and things should not get cancelled and plans should not be interrupted and nobody should fall ill, and then people shouldn't die. Certainly that's a travesty. These things should not be. They're all dreadful. There's an underlying assumption things should go smoothly. And of course, sometimes they do go smoothly. But the irony or the paradox is that once you recognize the fact that life is difficult, that life is not meant to make you happy. It's not meant to make you unhappy, but it makes you unhappy if you have a wrong attitude towards life. Happiness comes with accepting the fact that challenges are an essential part of the evolutionary process for all life forms. So challenges for you, even if you don't call them challenges, challenges is a nice term because something positive is already implied within it. If you call it problems or bad stuff happening, then it doesn't sound so good. Challenges are here to awaken you. And even if your awakening continues, life continues to give you challenges. And then the awakening accelerates and deepens and at whatever stage you're at, you won't be free as long as you're here. Of challenges. So if you recognize that you no longer need to be in a hostile, confrontational relationship with life A. I don't. Sorry about the term. You're not pissed off all the time with another thing happening. I'm so pissed off with life just can't go on and people just can't take anymore just then there's a kind of accepting, not necessarily welcoming, but sometimes welcoming every situation that arises that is so if you welcome it. There's a book, Byron, Katie, called Loving. What is that means you are in an accepting relationship with whatever arises. Of course, it all arises in the present moment. Anything Else that arises is in your mind. So you need to differentiate between challenges, problems, difficulties that are actual in the form of people, events or situations, and challenges, problems and difficulties that are fictitious, that are purely created by your mind creating pseudo problems. For example, when you worry in the middle of the night, huge problems. Are those the real challenges of life? No, these are fictitious problems created in your mind, dwelling on things, things that happened but should not have happened. Those are not the real challenges of life. Those are the challenges of your mind. The mind created problems. So you need to very clearly differentiate in your life between actual difficulties, challenges or problems. There is a person who is shouting at you. That's an actual. Or there is the thing you just missed your flight and you can't get on the next one or the next one. Or financial challenges, relationship challenges, family situations, work situations, actual things that happen that need to deal with. But then there's a huge amount of suffering that is generated not by the actual challenges of life, but by the fictitious problems that the mind creates. Sometimes around the actual challenges of life and sometimes out of no, out of thin air, things that could go wrong. So on the one hand, you have your mind creating a lot of useful, useless suffering through unconscious thinking. And then you have the actual situations in your life so you don't have to endure your mind. When it says life is difficult, that shouldn't really include your mind, because that's something you can do something about immediately. You don't have to live with a dysfunctional mind. Millions still do. That is something that can be transcended. And this is, of course, what we are doing here. What you are doing as part of the awakening is a huge amount of life is difficult. A huge percentage of that difficulty is created by the mind that we can deal with. That can change. That does not have to be. When you do that, then the next part is actual situations will still occur. Once you know that, then you can come to a more surrendered approach to life and actually, almost or actually welcome the difficult people in your life, the difficult situations in your life, loss and so on, without demanding, unconsciously, not in so many words perhaps, that demanding this should not be happening. And there's something dreadfully wrong when things go wrong in your life. And that makes life really difficult. This is what the man means at the beginning of the book, the author, when he says life is difficult. But when you know that life is difficult and you fully come to terms with the fact that life is difficult, it's not difficult anymore. Because the greatest difficulty is the mental resistance to things that arise and the underlying assumption that they should not. So once you have then a surrendered relationship with the present moment, because everything arises in the present moment, then it's not really that difficult anymore. And you can, even in the midst of turmoil, still be connected with the realm of being within yourself. So there's always a core of stillness, if only in the background. And no matter what happens, that core of stillness is there. If we want to call it stillness, it's also, as we saw and as you know, it's also the source of satisfaction where true satisfaction or a true sense of well being that goes beyond physical well being, a true sense of well being comes from. It's the transcendent dimension. So life will challenge you with its difficulties. Small and big. Small happen probably every day in some form. So you don't get upset anymore when things don't go according to plan. You don't get upset and complain or irritated or angry when people don't behave the way they should behave. And that makes it so much easier when you no longer demand that these things should not be the way they are. Nobody should. They shouldn't cancel flights, Weather shouldn't be such a way. They can't fly anymore. The body shouldn't get old. Nobody should have catch an illness. Now a lot of illnesses are produced or you are much more prone to have an illness. If your mind is very dysfunctional because it lowers the physical resistance, it affects the body. What the mind does obviously affects the body. Even mainstream medicine is beginning to recognize your mental emotional state affects your physical state. So if your mental emotional state is very dysfunctional, your body's resistance to illness decreases. The likelihood increases that you catch something. There are other causes of illness. So nobody can be totally free and say, I'm never going to be ill. The body is a physical vehicle with a certain lifespan. And as it approaches the later stages of its lifespan, is just like an old car, things start to go wrong with it. It's another form. And the older your car gets, the more things need to be replaced and the time comes when it's just not working anymore.