Eckhart Tolle teaches that life’s difficulties are not failures but tests that reveal whether one has an inner foundation of presence/being. He explicates Jesus’ parable of the house built on sand versus rock as a metaphor for being rooted in a deep inner dimension ("kingdom of heaven"/spaciousness). Tolle contrasts surface emotions (grief, sadness) with an underlying peace available when one is awake; he invokes the Buddha on suffering and mentions Stoic reaction to death as illustrative contrasts.
Chapters
The world is here to challenge you. Oh, you didn't know that? You thought it would here to make you happy. It's not working, is it? There's one of my favorite parables in the gospels that Jesus tells is the parable of a man who is building a house, and he builds a house without digging a foundation. He builds a house on the sand, and then the house is finished. And then suddenly the floods come and the storms come, and the house is swept away in the floods and the storms. And then there's another man who builds a house. First he digs deep. This is what the parable says. He digs deep until he reaches the rock. And when he reaches the rock, he has a deep foundation for the house. Then he builds the house. Then the floods come, and the storms come, and the rains come, and the house is not swept away. It stands because it has a deep foundation. Obviously, in this parable, the house is you. And Jesus adds, if you practice. This is my paraphrasing, which is probably more correct than what you read. If you practice my teaching, which is this spiritual teaching, then you will be like this man. If you live this. If you live this teaching, which is the awake, then you are like this man who builds a house, and he digs this until it reaches the foundation, and then builds the house. So that means the foundation, obviously, is within yourself to find the dimension of being. And then life comes at you and throws all kinds of challenges in many, many forms. That's what life does, what the world does to you. The world is here to challenge you. Oh, you didn't know that? You thought it would be here to make you happy? It's not working, is it? Can't work. The world isn't here to make you happy. It is actually here to challenge. It's part of the evolution. It's here to challenge you. So the challenges come. Here comes one, and then that goes away. And then you, okay for a little while, and suddenly from behind, oh, my God. And if you are not rooted in the dimension of being, which Jesus calls the kingdom of heaven, which in my paraphrase or translation is the dimension of spaciousness. Kingdom is dimension, dimension of heaven, vast spaciousness, which is inner space. If you are not rooted, then life is sorrow, Life is suffering, as the Buddha said. Life Buddha said, whatever situation you go into, whatever you do, sooner or later, and usually sooner. I'm paraphrasing the Buddha again. Well, the Buddha this time, you will find suffering. Wherever you go, you'll find suffering unless you awaken. I Teach suffering, he said, and the end of suffering. So the beauty Jesus parable about digging deep until he reaches the foundation is just a beautiful picture of what. What is needed in the inner dimension. So when you are connected with, rooted in the presence, the being that is, one could say, underneath the person, then the challenges that life throws at you do no longer create unhappiness or despair. You are not. The world loses its ability to make you unhappy. In the conditions of the world, you transcend, so to speak, you transcend. Now. It doesn't mean you cut yourself. You're not cut off from everything. That's not means that. On the level of the person, you are still affected a little bit, of course, by the varying conditions. You experience something not good, you lose something valuable, and you say, oh, that's a pity. Somebody close to you dies and you feel tears coming. So you experience that sadness that is there when a loved one dies. Or you experience the sadness. If you look at the suffering of the world, you may suddenly find yourself becoming sad or your parent dies, or a child dies. Even more difficult to go with a child that you have dies. That's not supposed to happen. And you feel you. You weep. But underneath that deep down there is a peace. There is sadness on the surface, and underneath there remains a realm of peace. And important when somebody dies. Sometimes people are so devastated, it goes on not for several months, it goes on for years. They relive a bad situation again and again and again through the mind thinking about it and so on. But to be affected emotionally by certain situations is. Is will still happen, most likely. But you're never again. You're not totally devastated. You remain in touch with a dimension of depth. And in that dimension, you know, if that dimension could speak, it would say, all is well, there is no death. Death is a phenomenon that happens in this dimension here. This is a dreamlike dimension, and this is where all these things happen. But the dimension doesn't speak. It's just. If it could speak, it would probably say that. So this is the digging to reach the rock, the rock, the foundation. This is what it's all about. And so we are not at the mercy anymore. Yes, you're not. There was a. I believe I quoted him in a book. There was a philosopher in ancient Greece. He was a Stoic philosopher. Stoicism is a very interesting spiritual philosophy if understood and practiced correctly. There was a philosopher in ancient Greece and then somebody came to him and told him, your son has died. This is a different reaction from. Kim mentioned another story about the other day about an Indian, I believe, a guru who was weeping because his son has died. That's fine. He was weeping, but I'm sure there was still. He was still connected to the being. But this philosopher, the Greek philosopher, when he was told, your son has just died, he's supposed to have said, I knew he was not immortal, And he is supposed to have been a stoic philosopher. Now, we don't know what his inner state actually was at the time. Was he completely cut off from his emotions? Was he just. Or had he gone so deep that the entire world around him appeared to him as a dreamlike scenario? Perhaps he'd gone so deep into being that he had lost interest in this dimension completely. Who knows? Or was he cut off? Had he cut himself off and mistaken that for spiritual realization? We don't know. Perhaps a better answer would have been, maybe that's what he actually said. It got misinterpreted. A better answer would have been, I know he is immortal. And that would have been probably closer to the truth. Sa.
