The Resilient Mind - Dealing With Suffering - Eckhart Tolle

Episode Date: August 2, 2023

Eckhart Tolle, a renowned spiritual teacher, is celebrated globally for his inspiring vision. His bestselling books, including "The Power of Now" and "A New Earth," translated into 52 languages, have introduced millions to the joy of living in the present.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to Dealing with Suffering with Eckhart Tolly. Get access to the Mental Mastery Program and other exclusive episodes by becoming a subscriber. Enjoy. And every human suffers, every life form suffers, because life is hard and challenging and precarious for every life form. From the moment life comes into being, life is challenging and precarious for humans, for animals, for plants.

Every life form encounters obstacles in its attempt to grow and expand. And it continuously encounters obstacles to its expansion. Every human, in one form or another, if you come into this world, Very quickly you'll find obstacles, seeming obstacles to your expansion and growth and well-being and flowering.

I think you can all, if you think about your so-called life, how many obstacles life seems to have put in your path towards happiness. And some people perceive life as life continuously is sabotaging, my attempts to find happiness. Why is that? And then they have these strange theories

that God is against me, whatever the theory is. But it does seem like, and this is related to the Buddhist term, duke or suffering, wherever you go, you will find life is sometimes helpful and then obstacles again. And all,

And this is perceived as some people believe if you only practice positive thinking continuously, you will no longer encounter obstacles. But that unfortunately is not the case. Positive thinking is a great thing, can be extremely helpful and bring about certain shifts in you, but it does not free you from experiencing the obstacles that life will put on your path.

And the challenges that come. So those obstacles, whether they come in the form of loss or illness or relationship problems, many of them arise from their own mind because your mind creates an enormous amount of problems that are quite unnecessary, but the mind doesn't know that. So the mind creates an enormous amount of conflict that is unnecessary in your life.

That's one kind of obstacle is your own mind. then, and again, you need to experience the consequences of the obstacles that your own mind creates, the conflicts and the unnecessary problems that your own mind, because you identified with the mind, creates, you need to experience the suffering that you create for yourself

out of that unconsciousness, of unconscious means completely identifying with the mind, the egoic mind, which in many cases transforms challenges, which could be solved easily into much bigger problems. So you have your mind created obstacles that you ultimately create yourself because you're not conscious enough

and then you encounter suffering. This is one level of suffering. And this is, you're, you're, You need to experience the suffering that comes through unconscious use of the mind in order to awaken. It's only through the suffering that eventually you go, I can't take anymore. It happened to me when I was in bed one night and said, I can't live with myself anymore. And then somehow I realized this myself that I couldn't live with anymore was an illusion,

an illusory entity and very unhappy mind-created entity. but before I realized that I had to go through this suffering for years and years. So the suffering worked. It fulfilled its purpose. And then you have another level of suffering, or obstacles. Obstacles come to you seemingly from the outside that suddenly you have an accident,

an illness that's a kind of outside. It's something seems to happen to you that you have not contributed to. Something happens, somebody close to you, dies as an accident. Many things can happen, but you see, I haven't created that, of course. In new age it's very normal to say,

when things go wrong in your life, the typical new age person will say, how did you create that? You slipped on a banana, and broke your leg, why did you create that? How did you create that? It's an interesting question. I don't want to go into this whether even those obstacles

or challenges that come to you, not seemingly, not from your own mind, but from the outside. Did you still create that or not? Let's leave that aside. I don't want to convince anybody one way or another. I have a much more simple recipe here, which goes like this, instead of telling people, you better look at your life and see why you created that

or how you created that. I say, accept each moment as if you had created it. Accept each moment as if you had wanted it. wanted it or caused it, wanted it to happen. I can't remember my own writings. It's always not good to go into memory, don't quote, just present moment. But if you live, whatever happens,

you accept this moment as if you had chosen, that's the one I wrote. Accept each moment as if you had chosen it. That's a good recipe for working because if it already is the case, you might as well accept whatever is as if you had chosen it because it's already here. So I'm not telling people you chose it.

Maybe you did, maybe you didn't, it doesn't matter. Still accept it as if you had chosen it. That shifts things, that your whole attitude to it shifts and it dissolves more quickly then, whatever the obstacle is. But let's go back to the suffering. First, the suffering that derives from your own mind creates conflict and all those things that create suffering,

and then at some point you awaken. And then what remains is the suffering that comes with having a body, for example, because eventually the body gets older, no matter how much you go to the gym, every day, every day, no matter how fantastic your nutrition is, no matter how many pills for longer life you take, which is all fine and good, but of course every form eventually dissolves,

and the time comes when the body can be perceived as a burden almost. The older you get, the more likely it is to happen. And so, of course, you might then say old age isn't so bad if you consider the alternative, which is you die younger and then you don't have to experience the body getting fragile and old, but if you get old, the body can become problematic, a source of suffering, potentially,

but those challenges, if approached correctly, don't have to turn into suffering. Except each moment as if you had chosen it. If you can go with the isseness of things, there's no complaining entity that says something about being a victim and complaining how dreadful things are now. I wish my mother had learned that lesson

when she suffered in that way because she had always identified identified very much with her body, good looking, always nicely dressed going out, and liked to be looked at, a very normal thing for many people. And then the body got older and older, and then hip problems and other fractures and this, and got worse and worse, and the unhappiness grew and grew,

Not so much of limited movement, but the identity, so much was in the body, that those tremor suffering, I tried to free her. And occasionally there were moments when she could disidentify from body, but very, very brief. And that is the destiny of many humans. But the suffering is really that every,

every life form encounters, the obstacles that every life form encounters, whether they come at a younger age, older age, middle age, in whatever form, these things are absolutely necessary without which there would be no human evolution whatsoever and no life form would ever evolve if the life form did not encounter obstacles.

So that which looks like an obstacle, is actually always potentially an opening. Potentially, that the change to stop your progress in life, always potentially can make you more conscious. So you can use every obstacle that arises in your life. If you can, especially, works especially quickly if you accept each moment as if you had chosen it, And when it looks, this moment is an obstacle,

you go with it instead of complaining or running away from it and then accept, and then act if action is possible. Or don't act if no action is possible. Be grateful for whatever your experience of this moment is. And if you cannot be grateful, at least allow it to be, because it already is. You might as well.

Now if you did this little thing, it sounds very little and it is very little, allowing your experience of this moment to be the way it is, just this little thing would remove, well, it's hard to put it in percentage terms. Let's say 95% of the suffering from your life. I don't know about the rest of the 5% we'll get to that sometime.

That would already remove a gigantic chunk of unhappiness in whatever form. Unhappiness is the most generic term one could use. The Buddha called it suffering. And so for the next six months, then that obviously is one of the practices, not to internally resist. your experience of this moment. Now, of course, many times, possibly you'll forget that. And that's fine.

The moment you realize that you forgot it, it's there again. And then you can accept the experience of this moment as the unhappiness that is arising in you because you forgot to accept your experience of this moment. And so you feel this unhappiness. this unhappiness arising in you and you say, where does that come from? I forgot to accept my experience of this moment.

And then you accept the unhappiness. And the weird thing with unhappiness is, when you completely accept the unhappiness, it cannot survive very long. It doesn't like, it cannot actually coexist with acceptance. So the weird thing then arises that, You say something like, okay, I'm unhappy, it's okay, I don't mind being unhappy. And then the unhappiness goes, what's going on?

That's not supposed to happen. The unhappiness cannot survive for very long with the acceptance, even the acceptance of unhappiness, not indulging in unhappiness, but the acceptance, not the acceptance of unhappiness. It presupposes that there's an awareness there that knows that you are unhappy, Now that might sound like something very natural, but it isn't because the most unhappy people, and there are still millions, and of course they have reasons

for being unhappy, yes. And it's not necessarily the people who you'd think would have the most powerful reasons for being unhappy, it's often those who you would think, well, there are many millions you have it worse than that. you have it worse than they, but these are more unhappy than those, it's often the case. So the unhappiness is something that when it's recognized as unhappiness and accepted, something happens to it, it begins to dissolve.

But the really unhappy people are so identified with the unhappiness, which is a combination of certain recurring. thoughts in your head a certain narrative that is not pleasant, whether it is about my life, whether the narrative says my life or dreadful thing in my life. Why did it all go so wrong, so wrong, wrong, and now I say it's nothing I can do. I'm trying this, I'm, or whether the narrative is about somebody else. You know what he did, what she said and did, and what you, and the narrative maybe about something

that hasn't happened yet and it goes on and on or something that happened in the distant past or not so distant past. So there's a narrative and then there are reflection of the narrative. The narrative is thoughts, certain types of thoughts, certain thoughts that have a certain frequency. And then that awakens the emotional frequency because the body thinks the narrative in

your mind is reality, that is the reality that you're experiencing. So the body reacts with an emotion. Simple example at night, you can't sleep because you're extremely worried about what's going to happen to you. you or somebody close to you, or even the world. It all sounds very critical. There's a crisis in your head. Not outside your head, there's a pillow,

and there's a blanket or even something big and sluffy and soft, down, duvet. And there's no unhappiness there. And if you look around the bedroom, also where's the unhappiness? The plant is okay, it's not unhappy. No, it's all happening in here. And then the body says that is the critical reality

that you inhabit. You are, there is a crisis in your life. The body doesn't know the difference in being what's actually happening and what's happening in your head. What's happening in your head is taken to be the absolute reality. and then you experience the emotion that goes with that kind of narrative.

And so there's no awareness. And when you're trapped in that, you don't even really know that you're unhappy because you are the unhappiness. The unhappiness has become your identity. So when you become the unhappiness, you don't even know that you are, or suff, let's use the Buddhist term, suffering. When you are in this deep suffering,

you don't even know your suffering because the suffering is a gigantic, big, huge chunk part of your sense of self. You are a suffering entity. And as all therapists know that once the patient or the client, whatever they call the people that come to them according to their school, they reach a point where there's a possibility of going beyond the deep sea

patterns, unconscious patterns. And then there's a huge resistance very often, because the person is afraid of losing a very important piece of their identity, and sometimes it's the most important part of their identity. They have lived with an unhappy sense of self for years and perhaps even decades. They don't want to let go.

And again, they don't know that consciously. They never say, I do not want to let go. If they could say that, that means there's already some awareness. So lack of awareness, lack of presence, that is the unawakened state, that still, unfortunately, millions of humans are trapped in that. But the moment you know, you recognize your inner state, that means there is an awareness, which is there is another dimension of consciousness that has emerged. in you, through you.

A deeper dimension of consciousness that is not the conditioned thinking. So we can call it awareness, or can call it presence, you can call it the unconditioned consciousness. And then the beginning of freedom, the possibility of freedom arises. And it's from there that you recognize

your inner states as they arise. From there that you recognize your unhappiness, you can feel the unhappiness. But the moment you become aware of suffering or unhappiness in you, you're no longer feeding it with your thoughts. As long as you're not aware, you're feeding it as a vicious circle. You're feeding it with your thoughts, with your narrative, and you're trapped in the vicious circle.

Your narrative creates more unhappiness, your unhappiness creates more thought. and you're trapped in that. So for the next six months and hopefully beyond, because it's a much more pleasant way to live, you make it your practice to be aware of your inner states. And meaning, no matter what situation arises in your life, whether it's little things, big things,

difficult situations, difficult people, challenges, problems, because the next six months are not going to be free of challenges and problems. So whatever it is, realize that the primary factor in any situation is your inner state, because that determines how you respond. So no matter what it is, your primary responsibility is to be aware of what goes on inside you. And that means whatever arises in your life is actually to be used in your practice, so that you do not become dependent on what's going on externally in your life. So your

inner state gradually is no longer determined, perhaps still little bit, yes, but not completely determined by out events, people, situations, and so on. Inner freedom arises, that's awakening. So there's a disidentification from the movement of thought and the fluctuating emotions. Yes, there's a stepping back. You're not repressing anything, you're allowing it,

But you can only allow it because there's an awareness. And that awareness is you ultimately. That is what I sometimes call the deep eye, as opposed to the surface eye. The certain, I meaning not this eye, but that eye is interesting too. It's an analogy for consciousness, the eye of awareness. But now I'm talking about the pronoun, I first,

There's the surface eye, which is the conditioned person, the entity that you are for a while, and there is the deep eye which is the consciousness. My usual analogy, which probably you've heard me say, mention a few times, the ocean, the surface of the ocean, the wave or the ripple is the surface eye, and the ocean, the depth of the ocean, is the deep eye. And an awakening human is a ripple on the surface of the ocean that until

recently had been completely identified with its ripple existence on the horizontal dimension of the surface of the ocean, looking at every other ripple as another other, another, another, another ripple, not me, it's another, and always you have to be very careful with the others. And the ego actually likes the others to be as other as possible. And then the little ripple begins to realize that it is the, there's a depth, the moment it stops thinking about its ripple existence, and that there's a thinking subsides and something else remains. something else that is very deep, has no form, is just a presence, if we can't even call it anything,

a presence. Thank you for tuning into this episode. If you're enjoying the content, you can access exclusive material by becoming a subscriber. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.