Eckhart Tolle explains how the ego manufactures drama from ordinary problems, feeding on conflict to reinforce itself as right. Many people brace for the next crisis because anger and reactivity become core parts of their identity. Drama is not necessary; it's a conditioned pattern you can observe and step out of.
Drama happens when fools encounter difficulties. What does that mean? It means the way in which you react to the situation, the so-called difficulty, amplifies the situation and transforms it into drama. Ah! And then you can't stop thinking and talking about it, and you become more and more emotional. And you cannot separate the situation from your reaction to the situation. They become one. You don't know that your reaction is what makes it really bad. It's a challenge externally, yes. But does it need to become drama? And some people live in such a state that they're almost— because they've lived like that all their lives, they're almost waiting for the next thing to go wrong. And it usually does. There's something that becomes part of the ego that is, it thrives on the drama. To the ego, the false self, drama is good. It wouldn't explicitly say that, but it does everything to have more of it. It loves it because it gets much stronger in drama. Drama implies in most cases that you are right, the others are wrong. You are fighting the world in the form of other people. Now, without that, does it mean— what is your life minus the drama? What is left of your life minus the drama, says the ego. And then they ask, are we still in a relationship? We haven't been fighting for 3 months. Do we even have a relationship? You say, "Something wrong here. Am I really alive? I haven't been in emotional pain in a long time." Now, of course, it could be that you have deadened yourself to emotional pain. You don't want to feel it anymore. That's a totally different matter. You're not free. And sooner or later it will emerge again. And even here, how do you experience this situation? How do you experience this moment? How do you experience the totality of this retreat, which in terms of time lasts for a number of days? I don't know how many, maybe 5, 6. It lasts a number of days. How do you experience the totality of this situation? And a lot of that depends on the state of consciousness in which you meet the situation, the retreat. And that's an important fact to remember, to be aware of. So although you're now in an unusual environment, you have left your familiar home environment and you're now in an unusual— for many of you, a different country— and the retreat situation itself, it's all very unusual. So you've left all the familiarity behind. And here's something totally new. However, the question is, how much of yourself is still there? How much of the baggage, the inner baggage you've carried with you, the baggage which is the conditioning, the mental-emotional conditioning that determined your life experience up to this point? As the old saying goes, wherever you go, there you are. And so, and then, so you're here, yes, in a totally unfamiliar environment, but then the conditioned self, how much of it is still here and determines the way in which you experience this new situation? So if there are certain very deep conditioned patterns in your mental-emotional field, then you will experience this situation in a very similar way to which you experience your life in your familiar environment. Simple example: if you get angry easily when you're faced with certain situations, even minor situations, then it's safe to predict that you will encounter situations during this retreat that make you angry. And your ego, which is the sum total of the conditioning that you don't recognize, the unobserved mind, if it is the case, your ego, in this case, I've just taken anger as an example, in which which case the anger has become an important part of your egoic identity. And since it is an important part of your egoic identity, it's actually waiting for the next thing to make you angry, because that's its food. In certain extreme cases, you can see it in people when you look into their eyes, those who are very, very heavily conditioned by an angry an underlying angry mental-emotional energy field, you look into their eyes, there is— what is looking through their eyes is not really the human being, because the human being, the being behind the human in other words, is asleep. It's the unconscious state. So what you're seeing there is the conditioned human entity, because as you I don't know if you— the way I interpret human being is the human is the conditioned you, the person, the personality, the conditioned entity. The being is the transcendent you. This is where we are going into during this retreat. But the human of you is then— part of its identity, the egoic identity, is the anger. And so when you look into the person's eyes who carries this pattern to a heightened degree, then you can see that what is looking back at you is a raw emotion, or somebody who's very suspicious of other people. And this emotional entity that has taken possession of this person is just waiting for the next trigger, and it is hoping unconsciously that you will provide the next trigger. And if you detect that in another person, it's unlikely that a person who is so unconscious is actually here part of our group, very, very unlikely, because you, you're probably your angry ego would not have even allowed you or even consider the possibility of going to a spiritual retreat. I mean, totally absurd. However, hypothetically speaking, if you encountered such a person here, You have to stay really conscious and not react emotionally to anything this person says or does. So you have to— it's great practice.
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