Eckhart Tolle Quotes About Suffering
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True freedom and the end of suffering is living in such a way as if you had completely chosen whatever you feel or experience at this moment. This inner alignment with Now is the end of suffering. Is suffering really necessary? Yes and no. If you had not suffered as you have, there would be no depth to you as a human being, no humility, no compassion. You would not be reading this now. Suffering cracks open the shell of ego, and then comes a point when it has served its purpose. Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary.
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Teaching a practice can also be a hindrance if it becomes one's identity. To be a spiritual teacher is a temporary function. I'm a spiritual teacher when somebody comes to me and some teaching happens, but the moment they leave I'm no longer a spiritual teacher. If I carry the identity of spiritual teacher, it will cause suffering.
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The more suffering you create, the more suffering comes to you.
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Any action that arises out of stress is of low quality, and it contributes to human suffering. You are making yourself and others suffer.
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Stress is a form of suffering. Look at your body and see what stress does to the body and its functions - what it does to the heart, the circulation, the immune system, the digestive function, the liver.
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If you are not in the state of either acceptance, enjoyment, or enthusiasm, look closely and you will find that you are creating suffering for yourself and others.
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Humanity as a whole has already gone through unimaginable suffering, mostly self-inflicted, the culmination of which was the 20th century with its unspeakable horrors. This collective suffering has brought upon a readiness in many human beings for the evolutionary leap that is spiritual awakening.
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The purpose of the world is for youto be lost in it, ultimately. The purpose of the world is for you to suffer, to create the suffering that seems to be what is needed for the awakening to happen.
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For most people, spiritual awakening is a gradual process. Rarely does it happen all at once. When it does, though, it is usually brought about by intense suffering.
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Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could spare them from all suffering? No, it wouldn't. They would not evolve as human beings and would remain shallow, identified with the external form of things. Suffering drives you deeper. The paradox is that suffering is caused by identification with form and erodes identification with form. A lot of it is caused by the ego, although eventually suffering destroys the ego-but not until you suffer consciously.
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Suffering begins when you mentally label a situation as bad. That causes an emotional contraction. When you let it be, without naming it, enormous power is available to you. The contraction cuts you off from that power, the power of life itself.
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The whole essence of Zen consists in walking along the razor's edge of Now - to be so utterly, so completely present that no problem, no suffering, nothing that is not who you are in your essence, can survive in you. In the Now, in the absence of time, all your problems dissolve. Suffering needs time; it cannot survive in the Now.
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Suffering needs time. It cannot survive in the now.
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It may look as if the situation is creating the suffering, but ultimately this is not so - your resistance is.
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In either case, ugly or beautiful, people derive a significant part of their identity, be it negative or positive, from their body. To be more precise, they derive their identity from the I-thought that they erroneously attach to the mental image or concept of their body. Equating the physical sense-perceived body that is destined to grow old, wither and die with 'I' always leads to suffering sooner or later.
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... inherited collective mind-patterns ... have kept humans in bondage to suffering for eons.
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The mental suffering you create is always some form of non-acceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgement. The intensity of the suffering depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment.
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My main life interest and purpose is to bring spiritual awakening into this world, to be a vehicle for the flowering of consciousness, to help people to live more consciously with less unnecessary suffering and self-generated unhappiness.
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Once the awakening happens, with it comes the realization that suffering is unnecessary now. You have reached the end of suffering because you have transcended the world. It is the place that is free of suffering. This seems to be everybody's path. Perhaps it is not everybody's path in this lifetime, but it seems to be a universal path. Even without a spiritual teaching or a spiritual teacher, I believe that everybody would get there eventually. But that could take time.
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The ego says, ‘I shouldn’t have to suffer,’ and that thought makes you suffer so much more. It is a distortion of the truth, which is always paradoxical. The truth is that you need to say yes to suffering before you can transcend it.
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Accepting means you allow yourself to feel whatever it is you are feeling at that moment. It is part of the isness of the Now. You can't argue with what is. Well, you can, but if you do, you suffer.
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Everything is as it is at any moment. There's no way of arguing, because you are arguing with reality - the isness of this moment. You can argue with it, but that's suffering.
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Some people awaken spiritually without ever coming into contact with any meditation technique or any spiritual teaching. They may awaken simply because they can't stand the suffering anymore.
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Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of 'I know.' Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas.
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Germany is a nation that created an enormous amount of suffering on the planet. The German people also themselves have suffered, because it always goes together.
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Once the pain-body has taken you over, you want more pain. You become a victim or a perpetrator. You want to inflict pain, or you want to suffer pain, or both. There isn't really much difference between the two. You are not conscious of this, of course, and will vehemently claim that you do not want pain. But look closely and you will find that your thinking and behavior are designed to keep the pain going, for yourself and others. If you were truly conscious of it, the pattern would dissolve, for to want more pain is insanity, and nobody is consciously insane.
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When you are suffering, when you are unhappy, stay totally with what is Now. Unhappiness or problems cannot survive in the Now.
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The whole movement of happiness, unhappiness, happiness, unhappiness, could be called unhappiness. You're suffering because your state of mind is in flux, moving back and forth. The ego's happiness is really a form of suffering, because it cannot live without unhappiness.
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Thinking is compulsive: you can't stop, or so it seems. It is also addictive: you don't even want to stop, at least not until the suffering generated by the continuous mental noise becomes unbearable.
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When you see around you the human form suffering or dissolving, you have empathy on the human level. You share the suffering because it has to do with the fleetingness of form. But if that is the only level that operates in you, you haven't gone beyond suffering.
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