The Teacher Called Suffering | Eckhart Tolle Teachings

i've mentioned a few times [Music] the 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 in 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 if 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 is something that happened in the human psyche collectively and suddenly humans started every human being started to have a relationship with himself or herself it's a strange thing and then the increasingly the mind the thinking mind the unobserved mind contributed more to that so the image which is not just not a visual image gradually got replaced more and more more by a conceptual image in one's mind of who one is and then gradually deriving one sense of self from that conceptual image of oneself the other day i looked up i'd forgotten what happened to them to this manner this was in the mythological tales i looked it up the other day and it seems that he eventually committed suicide this is significant too because there's here too there's 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 it is the main cause of human suffering because it is the egoic unconsciousness especially on a collective level that creates a large 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 happen 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 as you may remember the other 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 it 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 is 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 the 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 they 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 withdrawing but if you do that as your as a way into the spiritual dimension then you may find that your the depth of your presence that arises in the protective environment of the cabin or even the ashram or 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 me 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 not 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 [Music] and then he became more peaceful at some point the beast for some reason there were lots of bees there and his 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 so this is enlightenment i made it and so we 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 would have whoever 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 and said okay well there's something missing here the two stamps on this form you should have gone over there first before you line up here and at that point he lost his piece completely and he found himself banging on onto the table right i have been standing here for two hours lining up and you are telling me now i have to go there and in that moment he observed himself again said oh so he wasn't totally lost he just lost it briefly but the dp's 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 [Music] situation you

Channel: Eckhart Tolle

Views: 161,173

Rating: 4.9204245 out of 5

Keywords: ECKHART TOLLE, eckhart tolle meditation, suffering, eckhart tolle suffering, eckhart tolle youtube, eckhart tolle 2021, power of now, spiritual awakening, eckhart tolle the power of now, eckhart tolle presence, eckhart tolle anxiety, eckhart tolle ego

Id: uq5PokNFSgs

Length: 12min 54sec (774 seconds)

Published: Thu May 20 2021