Challenges Push Us Into Presence

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1:00Challenges push us into presence. In this podcast, Eckhart answers questions on how to deal with death for ourselves and those we love. He says, it's critical that we break the taboo so we can overcome our fear. Eckhart proposes that would we are faced with the possibility of a very limited future? The ultimate question is not whether or not we will survive, but instead allow the situation to push us toward higher consciousness. She says it's possible to transcend our fear to reach a state of deeper presence. Hello, thank you for taking my question. I am an oncology nurse. I've also just recently had two friends diagnosed with cancer and this week I had a friend who passed away from ALS that she lived with for 14 years. So I feel a lot with disease and end of life, but I've never understood people who use

2:07their faith. They feel that in order to be cured, they must have a strong faith and if their disease isn't cured or they die, it's because they did not believe strong enough. I was always puzzled by that attitude because I felt like if you have a strong faith in God, why are you so afraid to go and meet him? And even as a young child, I never liked the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. It just always puzzled me and I remember you saying at one time, Eckhart, like when you were talking about spiritual healing, eventually everybody is going to die. So it just bothered me by Jesus didn't let Lazarus die. And I just find that sometimes people are so afraid of dying that they cannot enjoy living. But on the other hand, I'm not suggesting that we all forego any kind of treatments and

3:12run off and commit suicide. But I just how do we balance how much treatment we should go with and to decide if we're presented with a situation? How do we decide, should I go for treatment, try treatment? How far do you go? You try a certain treatment if it stops working. I'm often stuck on how to talk with people. I'm pretty good about talking people about end of life and options. But if someone is presented with a choice, I don't always know how to present it if my thoughts would be to go with end of life, hospice care. And it's not something that they wish. I'd want to sound callous, but I also want to be supportive of them. And how much, and it's a term I hate, if I fight with cancer or a fight against whatever disease they have.

4:13But how much fight are we supposed to give to stay in this world? Yes, thank you. Good question. Yes, it's interesting what you said about Lazarus. He was raised from the dead and a few years later he died undoubtedly. One less, of course, the entire story is symbolic of something else, which of course is another matter. But again, the most important thing for our civilization, perhaps, or one of the most important things is to become more familiar with death because death is such a taboo still in our society, mostly. It's rarely talked about. You can recommend, of course, if you mentioned somebody falling ill and the various things you mentioned, one is to have faith that you will be cured.

5:19Sometimes it works. Some people do become cured of cancer. They cure themselves through faith or whatever it is, presence. In other cases, they don't. I would say that when you are faced with a potentially fatal illness, when you know that there is a condition in your body that might kill you, ultimately, because everybody has a condition in your body that will kill you, it's called time, so that's a virus that nobody escapes in the physical level. So if you know, you become aware of mortality, that's already, that can be a dreadful thing, impending mortality or the possibility of mortality approaching before you're really old, that's

6:21can be very frightening for many people. And if you're religious, if you religious beliefs, then you might think if I have enough faith or I pray enough, I will get cured and sometimes you may get cured and at other times you will not. So my advice, if for anybody and perhaps you can pass it on in some way, when you're coming into contact with people who are in that situation, when you are faced with the possibility of imminent death or death or a very limited future, if the doctor tells you you only have one year or maybe two, that initially can be a dreadful thing, but within the context of this teaching, which is the any true spiritual teaching, the ultimate thing is not whether or not you survive and you die a few years later rather than in the years time, the ultimate

7:26thing is that you use that situation or that condition to force you into a, one could say, higher state of consciousness or deeper state of consciousness. When you have little or no future, you think I may not have any more future or very little. Rathies is up to something big. The famous flat's brand has reimagined their iconic point shoe to be better than ever. To celebrate its 10th anniversary, Rathies made the point even more beautiful and comfortable than before. Every closet needs a little black flat and Rathies makes the best one of all. Discover the point at Rathies.com and learn why this timeless shoe is so special. That's r-o-t-h-y-s dot com. Think of a toilet as just an everyday object. Your entire perspective shifts the moment you experience a collar smart toilet. Design changes everything, transforming a basic routine into something extraordinary.

8:30If stand out aesthetics and intuitive controls, these are functional works of art, stunning design that never sacrifices performance. Enjoy customizable features for elevated comfort and convenience. It's more than a fixture. It's a cleaner routine and a more refined space. Experience the difference of collar smart toilets. Find more at collar dot com. At first it's a dreadful thing because the usual, an egoic entity looks to the future for fulfillment. The first worst thing we can do to a human being is to remove future. If there's very little future or there's a possibility that there may not be a lot of future, then at first it will bring out a lot of fear, of course, and despair. But if you have already become familiar with the practice of presence, the practice of

9:34awareness, then it may become easier and you can allow the situation. The expression I use is to force you into intense presence so that you don't look to the future anymore. And you don't look to the past anymore because you know the moment you look to the future, you begin to suffer and you begin to have fear. So if you allow the situation to push you into intense, present moment awareness, and I've known several people who were able to do that and I'm sure there are many others who I don't know who are also able to do that. Allow the situation to force you into intense presence. And sometimes it can happen, usually it happens after you suffer for a period of time and then you just can't stand the suffering anymore. And then you become intensely present and that's the end of the suffering. But that presence can also be very healing.

10:35In some cases intense presence which pervades the entire body, intense presence pervades every cell of the body is extremely healing. And that state of presence you're not fighting an illness. That's very important. Many people have the idea that you need to fight this illness. I don't believe that is the most effective way of dealing with an illness to have the inner attitude that you're fighting an enemy. I'm going to kill you, they say to that thing that wants to kill them. So instead of fighting an illness, first step would be acceptance of the present moment. This is what is. And then an intensification of the presence in the present moment. I have had some accounts of healings that have happened to people who were suffering from potentially fatal illnesses. In many cases healing happened not because they were fighting an illness,

11:38but because they surrendered not to the idea of illness, but to whatever they are experiencing at this present moment. So when I talk about surrender, which means acceptance, you don't accept, or I have to accept that I'm going to die in a year. No, that's not real acceptance. Or I have to accept that I'm a cancer sufferer that's not acceptance. That's a narrative in your mind. Acceptance is always refers to this moment. What are you experiencing at this moment? Maybe you're not experiencing anything, in particular, just accept or they experience some disability or you experience some dysfunction or even pain, acceptance of this moment, and then intensification of presence. In some cases healing happens, but whether or not healing happens is a secondary matter. If you use the illness to force you into intense presence,

12:40then you die before you die in a good sense. There's a flowering of consciousness that takes place through you that would not have happened without the illness. I've personally known several people who have experienced that, and some died a year later, six months later, it no longer mattered, because there was an intensification of consciousness, and there was already a light shining through them. The personality of the ego dissolved completely in that intense presence. In some cases it can even happen, I remember reading an account a few years ago. In England there was a famous musician, I don't remember the name, and he at this account it was published in the Times in London, I think. He was diagnosed with potentially fatal cancer. He went to the doctor and the doctor said, well, you don't have that much longer. It's already spread throughout the body.

13:44He was interviewed and then he said he walked out of the doctor's office, and he had had no spiritual, any kind of spiritual preparation before. This is very rare. He walked out of the office and he suddenly became intensely conscious, intensely aware of everything. He was looking at the sky, he was looking at the trees, and everything was amazing in its intensity of aliveness. He said, why didn't I live like that before? What is this? This is very rare for most people suffering comes first, and then they surrender. But with this person, there was an immediate shift into intense presence. He had never been present before. He said how wonderful this life is every moment, every second. Not even a need to cling to anything, not even need how much longer I'm going to experience this. Even those questions disappeared.

14:47There's a great opportunity when something like that happens for an intensification and acceleration, one could almost say, of spiritual awakening. So if that happens to you or anybody I'm talking to, or anybody you know, potentially it can be an intensification and acceleration of awakening if you use it in that way. How to advise somebody who's never had any contact with this, any kind of spiritual teaching before is difficult. And you cannot advise somebody whether or not to go on with treatment or not because you cannot take that responsibility for them. If they are very afraid of deaths, then whatever their decision is, it will probably be I will suffer even for another six months of life. I'll rather suffer than to die six months earlier. Because they are so afraid of deaths, they have not gone beyond identification with the body,

15:52with the psychological entity, the me. So anybody who is here with us, of course, is much better prepared to deal with a situation like that, when it if it arises. At some point, of course, death will come to everybody. We don't know when it will come. But at some point, death will no longer be tomorrow. It will be today. And therefore it's so important to die to the surface, I call it the surface itself, the ego itself. It's based on the past, the personality and find and we come back here to the vertical dimension of presence. Find that before death comes. Then you are prepared for death. And not only are you prepared for death,

16:53if you see it approaching, your presence will only intensify. And that is how anything that's normally regarded as negative, any kind of disaster, it doesn't have to be an illness, can also have that function. Let's say you lose everything, you lose your marriage, you lose your job, you lose your home, all at once, it does happen, it does happen to people. And again, when disaster strikes, there's always another side to it, there's potentially there's an opening into the transcendent dimension and the deepening can happen. And it happens most likely when you're experiencing some kind of challenge, whatever form,

17:54loss, death, big upheavals, then that drives the evolution of consciousness, the suffering that's created by that leads to the transcendence, potentially to the transcendence of suffering. And that drives the evolution of consciousness. All the challenges of life and there are many fold, all the challenges of life that you will, every human experiences inevitably, they are the driving force behind the evolution of consciousness and that includes death. So all this is a, what we are engaged in here is to do with finding death before death finds us and then realize that there is no death and it's no longer just a belief, it's nothing wrong with a belief, but quite often a belief is not quite enough, it doesn't free you from the deep fear of death in many cases. There's actually a realization of the deep eye that is beyond the physical

18:56you and beyond the psychological you. And that's in fact to bring it to the most simple times, when you stop thinking for a moment and awareness remains, I mentioned it before in our session at the beginning, there's a cessation of thinking, which means the entire personality subsides the person because when you're not thinking about yourself or anything, you're not the person. Thinking subsides, there's a moment of spacious awareness. And again, as I said, we want that's a little death. Then thinking resumes and I call that you reincarnate into the entity again. And then you step out of thinking and there's pure awareness, you die again. And the more you die in that way, the more deeply you realize that death is not something that needs to be feared. So die daily, I don't know who there was one saint, I think he said that, die daily, die

20:01as much as you can by inviting the cessation of the otherwise incessant stream of thinking. And there's this spacious awareness, you're dead. When you are dead, there's something that's left that intensely alive. So I hope that makes sense. Thank you. Thank you. Eckerd, our next question is a written question. If quote, consciousness is gradually arising, unquote, that implies time. So how can there be no need for time to awaken? Right. It sounds like a paradox and it is. So how do we explain that? Let's find an analogy. Let's say there's a you have a lamp, a table lamp with a lamp shade.

21:12So there's a light bulb and there's the lamp shade. And the lamp shade, let's say the lamp shade is very dense. So it lets let's throw very little light from the source of light. But gradually, for various reasons, the shade, the light shade, loses some of its density and more light begins to shine through gradually. So the light represents the light is timeless. But as the this is we're talking about the light of consciousness here in this analogy, the light is comes from the light of consciousness emanates from the transcendent dimension. The consciousness does not have a location in space or time. So there's an emanation of consciousness in the same way that emanates from a

22:19lamp or the sun. And the light that emanates the consciousness that emanates into this dimension, but that we call the universe, not just this planet, the entire universe in all galaxies. There's a gradual intensification of the light that reaches this dimension. The light itself is timeless. So consciousness doesn't grow as such. It's only in this dimension, it can manifest more fully and measure that through the temporal time here. On this planet, the planet most likely started with just mineral. There was nothing. And then at some point there was the first plant life. And then gradually other life forms came over millions and millions of years with many setbacks, many setbacks, not a continuous progression. And after each setback, there was again an

23:24intensification, a renewal of life.

24:24Thank you. So gradually, there's more consciousness, the life forms become more complex here on this planet. And therefore, everywhere else. And you can in humans too, humans evolve gradually with many setbacks. Yes, often, regressive periods happen not only to an individual, but also the collective of humanity can experience regression in this. It's not a continuous ascent to higher consciousness, but there is a movement, an evolutionary movement here. And that takes time. So it takes time for this dimension that is timeless to manifest itself in this world. And so I sometimes on a personal level, on a human level, I sometimes say, you need time before you fully realize that

25:25you don't need time to be yourself. Sometimes it requires time. You need to, in other words, you practice meditation, you have spiritual practices. Every meditation kind of takes time. You say, okay, I'm going to meditate for 15 minutes now or half an hour. And you might even sometimes open your eyes and see how much longer do I have to meditate now. Any practice takes time, any spiritual practice takes time inevitably. And that is the greatest obstacle also. If you do practice meditation, meditation can be quite helpful, but if you want to achieve something through your meditation, become a better meditator, or you want to achieve some kind of state, hoping to achieve a state of enlightenment through meditation, you're already creating time. And that becomes the greatest

26:29obstacle because you're still moving in the realm of becoming instead of being. For most people who do spiritual practice, they are on the level of becoming. I want to reach this level. There's a future they want to reach. And paradoxically, that prevents them from finding the vertical dimension, the being dimension. If through your meditation you want to become an enlightened human, then that idea that you want to become an enlightened human is the greatest obstacle to your to the realization of who you are as an enlightened being. Enlightened means to know who you are on the deepest level. Now, the Buddha has a good example of Buddha's life. He practiced the most hard-use and austere spiritual practices for many years when the Buddha was a young man, because he wanted to become enlightened. And it didn't work. He almost staffed himself to death

27:35as part of his spiritual practice. That's the story goes, and I believe it's true that was transmitted from 2005, when it years ago. And at some point the Buddha says, I've had enough. I'm not talking, this is my paraphrase. I've had enough. He said, I've done with becoming. I'm done with this. And he said, under three. And he already had disciples at that point. And the disciples left him. They said, he's lost it. He's no longer practicing. So all these disciples went away and then he was left alone under three. He was no longer trying to get anywhere. And he sat under the tree. And he sat under the tree. And that's where his realization happened. He had left the realm of becoming. And he found the dimension of being.

28:35Now the question is, one could ask, as sometimes people have asked, would he have found this being dimension if he had not gone through the attempt at becoming for a certain, for a certain long time? Would he still, no, no, we can answer that question. Perhaps, yes, perhaps no. Was it necessary for him to do all these practices, to come to the point of realization that spiritual awakening is not something that can be found in time in the future? We don't know. Some people might say, well, why didn't he start with that and sat under it? Just instead of going through all this, why don't you just sit under three? Well, this is not how it happened. Perhaps he needed to go through this. Perhaps he needed time in order to realize that he did not need time.

29:39And that is the paradox. He can't remove the fact that there is a paradox here, because we are operating on the level of becoming. And the language itself is becoming on that level of time. But we are pointing to something that's beyond that. And therefore, paradox arises. So that's really a sea. You cannot remove the paradox, but perhaps the story may help you. And you may need time, a bit more time before you realize that you don't need it. And perhaps the time has come now. You realize that you cannot awaken in the future. You can only awaken by going deeply into the present. This is really what is meant by that. Perhaps one more question. Hi, Kurt. I'm so grateful for the opportunity to talk to you today. I just want to say that you're teaching, found me at an important time in my life.

30:45And I'm so grateful for everything you did and for everything you're doing right now. So my question is today, and it's interesting with everything you said, because I'm from a place of achieving a lot and something happened to me. And I realized that it's not that important for me to achieve big thing in my life. Instead of just being present to realize what I want to do with my life, with my time, with my husband and with my kid and everything. So I feel that all the foundation of what I did before just doesn't matter anymore. But my family and my colleagues and everybody tried to achieve so many things in their lives. And they work.

31:45So my question is, I suffered from depression and burnout. And I feel that everybody around me are in that kind of state and a lot of anxiety. So I'm wondering, right now, are we cluttering too much of our mind with so many information to become something that I don't want to say that doesn't really matter. But how can someone arrive at something in their lives that they want to do without cluttering their mind with so many things that you become burnout and depressed and anxiety are always in your day? Right. Thank you. Thank you. So the most important thing is to be as much as possible rooted in the vertical dimension of life.

32:46So that you're as present as possible. And sometimes as people realize beginning to realize this dimension, sometimes they lose interest completely in achieving things in the outer world. Some of this may be happening to you also. And that is almost a natural thing that happens to many people. Some people temporarily even lose the ability to do things because they so become so so deeply immersed in being that they can't be bothered with achieving or becoming. I had a little bit or not a little required a bit of that when I first went through a shift in consciousness. For quite some time, I lost interest in future, my so-called future. In fact, I never really regained that much interest in my future. But I lost interest in planning and

33:52doing for a while. For many people, after a while, they realize that they still live in this dimension. And to lead a balanced life, it is best not to completely ignore the demands that perhaps that this dimension places upon you, the dimension of becoming and doing the doing dimension. You can regain your ability to do, but in a different way from before. Because before, when you do things without having this deep connectedness with being, then doing is all the history alive. And you seek some kind of fulfillment. So, the do-it-you-always, like the famous thing, the carrot, the dangling carrot in front of the donkey, the donkey is running towards the carrot, but he doesn't know that he can never reach the carrot. And so humans are sometimes obsessively

34:56consumed by doing, wanting to achieve some kind of success, which ultimately never satisfies for very long, and then the next thing comes. So, there's a seriousness behind the way in which people are engaged in doing when this happens. They're very serious about it. And stress, it creates a lot of stress arises, which is bad for you, it's bad for the body, it's bad for your consciousness. Stress means you want to be there, but you are here. Basically, so the gap between there and here, or now and then, creates stress. For example, you may be, you're in this particular location, maybe you're sitting in your car or whatever, but you need to be from other location, and you'd rather be there, but you can't get there quite yet,

35:57till this mentally you create stress. There's a pull between here and there. I am here, but I want to be there. It works on the dimension of time. This is now, but I want to be there, then when I finish this, I need to finish this task, because I want to get to the end of this thing that I'm doing now, in order to arrive at the end of this doing, and you're projecting yourself, you mentally, you're more there than here. You're not completely present in what you do, because you want it to be all the way through. There's a next thing to do after that, and the next thing after that, you never arrive, really, because when you achieve this, there's a next thing that you striving towards. This is not a healthy or constructive way of doing, and you're creating a lot of unhappiness for yourself, and even others around you, so people who are living that way,

36:59and many of these people do, they make themselves unhappy, and they make others unhappy, they raise around them. Some people are bosses of big companies, and everybody is under continuous stress. They're all ultimately one could almost say insane, and miraculously, the company still survives, but everybody is unhappy. So when you're not motivated by this, how does the doing arise when you are rooted in being? First of all, what do you do might change? You may see that there are the things that you've been doing before, are not really something that you truly enjoy. You might find something else that you enjoy. The level of enjoyment comes into the doing. The needy, the outcome, lessons diminish, to need a particular outcome to your doing, becomes secondary. Yes, I want to achieve this or get

38:06there, but you have the ability to actually be completely present in what you do, which means you even enjoy what you do in the moment. The doing of the moment becomes more important in the place that you want to get to in the future. That is a sign that you become more conscious in your doing. It also does not mean that there cannot be intense energy to what you do, because you might have some wonderful project that you want to create, achieve, and there's this great enjoyment in the doing. You have to be very careful that the old egoic way of doing could reassert itself. You can detect it, for example, when an obstacle comes in, because whenever you want to do something, you're likely to encounter occasionally obstacles to where you want to get to. In the form of other humans or in the form of situations that you encounter,

39:12you get as a delay, or people don't do what they're supposed to do, or you fail at something, an obstacle arises, and how you respond to an obstacle can give you good feedback of whether they're still egoic mindset behind the doing. When an obstacle arises when your present is immediately accepted, oh, and so you look at the obstacle and then instead of focusing on what's wrong or complaining about this human being or the idea, instead of that you immediately focus on the net, what's possible now? So you can have walk around this obstacle or can have transformed into something good. There's never a complaining, there's never, there's not a resistance, there's an immediately alignment with the present moment. So you're not stressed with

40:13an obstacle appears, you don't get negative when an obstacle you immediately look at, oh, and you know that obstacles are bound to appear in whatever work you do, you will have and found challenges in obstacles, and they're no longer, there are something negative that means you're present in what you do. So the obstacle is transformed often into something helpful, and it's not suddenly it's no longer an obstacle. The most important thing then is what you want to achieve, yes, you know what you want to achieve, but it's secondary because there's enjoyment in the doing, and if you achieve it, it's fine, you're great, you've achieved it, it doesn't produce an unrealistic high in you. Wow, I have achieved it because a few days later

41:15you may experience a corresponding low because it hasn't satisfied you for long enough, whatever it may be. Another thing that is there's a playfulness that comes a little bit of a playful attitude when you're engaged in doing, the seriousness goes out of it when you're present with what you do, and that's very important because when you look at the world, people that are kind of deadly serious, wherever you look, whether it's in business or commerce or politics or wherever you look, and then goes out there is a certain detachment because you don't need the excellence to function a particular way to make you happy. You don't need the outcome to make you happy. You don't need to have no challenges in order to be happy. That's so a playfulness, it is the world of you play in the

42:17world of form. Yes, there can be an intensity of doing, but not the seriousness, and then if somebody comes, you immediately will be angry with them, this is so important, this is so important, and you realize nothing is that important. There are many things that are, they might be relatively important, but not absolutely important. So, less attachment or no attachment to outcome, the result of the action, enjoyment of what you're doing, when obstacles arise, there's no negativity that they produce, the obstacle is immediately accepted, and then the enjoyment, enjoyment in the doing, and the playfulness, the lack of that seriousness of that change. So, you may find that

43:19able to do things, but the energy behind you doing has shifted. So, life is much more enjoyable, and there may be a period when you do very little, you just be, or you do just routine things, because there may be periods when you don't need to achieve anything, and there are some humans who, I call them frequency holders, humans who have no particular big project, goal that they want to achieve, they're happy with the little things in the present, and that's fine if they can sustain presence, for example, you, let's say, your gardener, and you can sustain presence without losing presence, if you have routine activities, if you're not challenged, and you have routine activities, the danger is that you lose presence, because when life goes too smoothly, let's say, your gardener, you just want a peaceful life as a gardener, it's fine,

44:24let's say you have 10 years of no challenges, you have a regular small but regular income, and a very peaceful life as a gardener, it might be work for you, there's a danger though, without any challenge, that gradually, your degree of presence would diminish, because we need the challenges. Challenge is coming to kinds, challenges that you create for yourself, they're good too, if you have a project, let's say you want to write a book or a song or whatever, that's a challenge you create for yourself, and that's good, then their challenges is, you haven't created that come seemingly from the outside, and suddenly something appears represents a big challenge in your life, so there's a self-created challenges, and they're good, and their challenges from outside, both of them are very helpful. Thank you so much. Thank you.

45:25All right, well, we have come to the end of our session, and let's just enter a moment of just stillness or beingness, just where? Thank you. I'm Oprah Winfrey, and you've been listening to Eckhart Toley, Essential Teachings, the podcast, you can follow these essential teachings on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you haven't yet, go to Spotify and follow this podcast. Join us next week for more enlightened teachings from Eckhart Toley. Thank you for listening. Frustrated with spending hours on AI outputs that don't feel like your brand, active intelligence 2.8 from active campaign keeps you from sounding like everyone else.

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