A: That kind of question has been asked and talked about by many philosophers and it has remained a kind of stumbling block in the Christian religion. So let’s see what the intuitive answer is. In this sense-perceived universe, if you want to use anything here to compare God to, the most appropriate thing in this sense-perceived universe would be the sun.

The sun is the source of seemingly inexhaustible energy, and the giver of life. The very heat in your body comes from the sun indirectly. The sun of course is not eternal, but compared to the human life span it can be considered virtually eternal, it’s so much vaster. And it gives freely of itself, millions and millions of years of pouring out energy.

Now let’s say the sun is in a process of becoming conscious of itself, because my intuition is the Universe, or rather that which underlies the Universe, or the One behind the many, is in the process of becoming conscious of itself in the dimension of time. The One also exists in the timeless dimension, where there is no past and future.

So God, to use that word for a while, in the timeless, God is already complete and perfect. But it seems that in the realm of time, God is becoming conscious through all these life forms. Now if that were the sun, then in the process of becoming conscious, the sun continuously emits zillions of photons, light particles. Let’s say the individual photon is part of the process of becoming conscious for the sun.

Now in that process, the individual photon would undergo a change of consciousness arising. Temporarily, the individual photon, as it becomes together with the sun, as consciousness arises it mis-perceives itself as a separate entity. It no longer realizes its oneness with the sun. There’s a continuum, it never really loses connection with the sun. So temporarily, as part of the process of becoming conscious, it believes itself to be separate. It’s a temporary thing.

While it believes itself to be separate, it creates all kinds of illusions that reflect the basis illusion of separateness. That’s basically where we are at, where humanity is at. The human being is the photon, the sun particle, so to speak. The consciousness within is the consciousness of God, there’s only one consciousness. And that consciousness, in the process of the whole becoming conscious, mis-perceives itself temporarily. And that creates the illusion of separateness in the individual human.

That creates the illusion of the identification with form, which is the illusion of separateness. That’s seeing oneself as a separate entity. The stronger that illusion is, the more that gets reflected in its actions outside, which then become deluded. And that’s called evil.

Ultimately in evil, nothing is destroyed. The essence of all life forms is eternal. But on its own level, it’s not pleasant. From the point of view of the larger whole, it’s only a brief dream episode that takes place as the One is becoming conscious. So that is the answer to “Did God create evil?”

So the teachings that say that evil ultimately is not real, of course that is correct. But it’s a question of levels. If you look at it from one level, it has a certain reality. The fact that it ultimately is not real doesn’t mean that on this temporary level it appears very real. But it must be recognized as deluded.

Evil can be defined as complete identification with form — that is the illusion. The more an entity is identified with form, the more seemingly evil the entity creates, and the more suffering is created.

What’s the answer? The answer, of course, is why we’re here. We are the arising of the answer. The answer is not just the answer, it’s the end of the illusion of separateness and the end of so-called evil.

~ Eckhart Tolle www.eckhartteachings.com

Take a quick moment to evaluate your life on the basis of these descriptions:

• Do you feel consumed by the demands of your job or schoolwork (or both)?
• Does it seem at the end of each day that you have been running a race of time, frantically trying to do everything on some mental list of required accomplishments?
• Do you suffer from stress of any kind on a regular basis?
• Do you feel that you and your life are stagnant, the opposite of frantic running, wallowing instead in inaction, boredom, despair, negativity or depression?
• Or, if you’ve said no to all the above, do you feel that your life lacks a sense of meaning and purpose, that you don’t know how to find it?

If any of these descriptions apply to you, then consciously or unconsciously, something is blocking your connection to meaning and purpose. That something is most likely you. It may be that you’re still living in survival mode (which may be true if any of the first four descriptions applied to you).

If this is the case, then it’s very important that you take a good look at your priorities in life. Spend several days pondering this question throughout the day: “What am I making most important in my day right now?” You may be very surprised by what you find. Be honest with yourself and write down what you learn. Notice also how you feel about these ‘most important’ things you fill your days with.

How satisfying and fulfilling are they? How many unnecessary activities are unsatisfying to you? Take special note of those. They are the activities you can drop altogether. As you do, you will free up time and inner space from which you can begin to contact and develop your sense of purpose.

Your true purpose already exists, that’s the good news. You don’t have to create it and it’s not a matter of choosing it. Purpose is something you discover within yourself in the space of stillness. This is the only way you can find it, in your own stillness, not in a book or a workshop or in the analysis of your dreams. You must go within and be with yourself in stillness and there you will discover the purpose that has been waiting for you all along.

There’s no substitute in life for finding your true purpose. No amount of money, no degree of power, no activity will give you the satisfaction that a life of purpose provides you.

It’s important to know that your life has an inner purpose and an outer purpose. Your inner purpose is primary. It concerns Being. Your outer purpose is secondary and it concerns doing. Your inner purpose cannot be found on the outer level of life. It isn’t related to what you do but what you are. Your inner purpose, simply stated, is to awaken. This is the primary purpose of every person in the world.

Many people are very concerned with discovering their life’s purpose. They are normally referring to their outer purpose. Outer purpose can change over time and is unique for every person. Inner purpose can shed light on your outer purpose. Inner and outer purpose, ultimately, are intertwined and aligned. The more you are connected you are to your inner purpose, the more your outer purpose will come into focus.

Living in alignment with your inner purpose is the basis for fulfilling your outer purpose in the world and doing so successfully. Without this alignment, you will most likely struggle in your attempts to express your outer purpose. Without alignment to your inner purpose, there’s less joy in all of the activities in life.

Take time each day to reflect on your inner purpose of awakening. Do this by paying attention to your state of consciousness. Give yourself a daily discipline of practicing presence.

~ Eckhart Tolle EckhartTeachings.com

So you are the flame, and you feel your way into the very source — down the wick into where the oil is, inside yourself. That’s the place, the source, so if anything is new, creative, then it has a fragrance of the source.

Somehow, humans, even humans who are still very much identified with their mind, many of them are touched by when they see or hear or whatever — come into contact with — something that came out of that deeper level, whether it’s a work of art, or a piece of music, or it could just be somebody talking. And the words come from that deeper level.

It could just be somebody who has a good sense of humor — even that is already a form of creativity. Spontaneous humor is to suddenly see something that one wouldn’t normally see — a connection between two seemingly unconnected things, and suddenly you connect them and everybody laughs.

Some people have that. Some people have one small area in which they can be creative, and that can be enough to provide you with fulfillment and an income, for the rest of your life — and to contribute that gift to others.

Great stand up comedians, for example, have that gift. Of course, not everything they say is spontaneous, but when they prepare their stuff, they have to be creative. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to be a standup comedian, but it’s difficult. Many people try. It’s hard to be funny. But some have it, and it’s amazing — those few that have that gift. And there too, the sense of humor is spontaneously something arises, and there it comes. It’s being in touch with that.

It’s wonderful to be able to be in touch with that, and feel the power that flows from there, out into this world. Now for that, of course you need some kind of vehicle, because the power needs to flow into some kind of form. You can touch that place also, within, but it may not flow into creativity, because you haven’t developed a vehicle for it.

The very same power that gives rise to creativity can also manifest itself in different ways that we would not call creativity. It could be a healing power that comes into effect the moment you enter into relationships with others. Healing in a wider sense, not just physical healing.

You will not suddenly become a great musician if you have never touched an instrument, just because you touch that place within yourself. It’s not going to manifest as a great scientific discovery in my case, because the vehicle is not prepared for that. My mind is not prepared for that. It doesn’t even work that way.

So for me to expect to come up with the Unified Field Theory that Einstein didn’t come up with — he tried after the theory of relativity, he tried for the rest of his life to come up with that — I am not going to come up with that. It’s very unlikely. The vehicle has not been prepared. I am not going to be a great pianist, because I don’t know how to play the piano. So no matter how deeply I go within, it’s not going to flow into that. You need to prepare the vehicle for creativity.

More important than that is the place — to be able to go within to that place of vibrantly alive stillness, where creativity arises. And you can go in there, and if there’s no vehicle, it will not express itself in any form of creativity, not any conventional form of creativity. But it may actually express itself in different ways.

I just mentioned one, which is an outflow in human interactions — an outflow of … very hard to put a word to it, but you can sense it, when you meet a person who is present in the interaction. It’s a different energy frequency that operates. And that is healing. It’s so formless that it does not require a previously prepared vehicle. You can just be. And you emanate Being.

~ Eckhart Tolle www.eckharttolle.com/

There are many indicators of this misalignment. One is when your experience of unhappiness is disproportionate to your situation or circumstances. It is an overreaction to the situation or circumstance. This is one of the easiest ways to recognize your lack of presence, even though everyone around you will have seen it before you did.

You don’t know you’re not being present because you’ve become identified with the reactivity, which blinds you to your lack of Presence, your misalignment with the Now. Your friends and family can easily see your identification when insignificant things or events cause you intense unhappiness.

Psychology tells us that these overreactions are, of course, the stimulation of old wounded feelings that are brought back to life, amplifying the structures of the ego. Remember that the pain body and ego are closely related. Because of the triggering, you hugely distort the importance of the particular event that is bringing on the intense unhappiness.

When you’re not present, you’re continuously looking at the current situation with the eyes of your emotional past. What you’re currently experiencing is not part of the situation that upsets you. Unfortunately, reactions, overreactions and all negative emotions are what the pain body receives its nourishment from.

When this is going on, you’re not perceiving reality accurately. Instead, you’re seeing the world through a heavily distorted story that traps your access to objective reality and makes you miserable.

So the next time you believe your life is “going in the wrong direction”, do a little inquiry to find out if your unhappiness is a movie or dream conspiracy of your pain body and ego to trap you in your own private hell.

The Present Moment is always waiting to bring you back to the truth.

~ by Eckhart Tolle. www.tolleteachings.com/

A lot of us feel more alive when we are traveling to places we are not familiar with or to countries and cultures we do not know because during those times our ordinary thinking is diminished and our perception is heightened by all the new experiences that are flooding our being. In other words, you become more present.

Have you ever been on a trip or voyage to an exciting new place and a friend or family member is still talking about issues and problems from back home? That’s the voice in the head being predominate even though there are all kinds of opportunities to see and experience new things. Their body may be traveling through time and space, but they are still in the same place in their head as they were back home.

This unfortunately, is the every day reality of most humans. Once something is perceived, it gets named, labeled, judged, categorized as “good” or “bad” and then lumped in along with everything else in the “known” world. In fact, if you wake up to this process you will find that you are perpetually unconsciously naming everything. And this endless naming empowers and establishes the ego as your predominate point of view.

If that naming ceases, even for a moment, then the limitless inner space of the Present Moment opens up and the ego is no longer your central point of reference.

Try this simple exercise:

Select an object that does not remind you of anything from the past (either positive or negative). While remaining relaxed and alert give your complete attention to every detail of this item. If any stray thoughts come up, let them go. We are trying to pay attention to perceiving and ignore the thinking. See if you can take in the experience without the voice in your head judging, assessing, valuing, or devaluing.

Now listen to any sounds and do the same non-judging practice again not making a distinction between positive or negative. As you make progress looking and listening in this way you may notice first subtly and then more substantially a sense of calm. This stillness may be perceived first in the background but then it will progress into the foreground until your entire field of consciousness is suffused with the peace of the Present Moment.

~ Eckhart Tolle www.tolleteachings.com

ET: The natural way of being after death of a loved one is suffering at first, then there is a deepening. In that deepening, you go to a place where there is no death. And the fact that you felt that means you went deep enough, to the place where there is no death.

Conditioned as your mind is by society, the contemporary world that you live in, which knows nothing about that dimension — your mind then tells you that there is something wrong with this. Your mind says “I shouldn’t be feeling peace, that isn’t what one feels in a situation like this.”

But that’s just a thought conditioned by the culture that you live in. So instead we can recognize when this happens, when that thought comes — recognize it as a conditioned thought that isn’t true.

It doesn’t mean that the waves of sadness won’t come back from time to time. But in between the waves of sadness, you sense there is peace. As you sense that peace, you sense the essence of your children as well — the timeless essence. So death is a very sacred thing — not just a dreadful thing. When you react to the loss of form, that’s dreadful.

When you go deep enough to the formless, the dreadful is no longer dreadful, it’s sacred. Then you will experience the two levels, when somebody dies who is close to you. Yes it’s dreadful on the level of form. It’s sacred on the deeper level.

Death can enable you to find that dimension in yourself. You’re helping countless other humans if you find that dimension in yourself — the sacred dimension of life. Death can help you find the sacred dimension of life — where life is indestructible.

Surrender can open that door for you. Complete acceptance of it. So honor that sacred dimension and realize that what your mind is saying, that it isn’t right, is just a form of conditioning — it isn’t the truth. It is supremely right.

This is always the window into the formless. As you accept it, surrender. Because the form is gone, your mind becomes still when you surrender to death. It’s not through explanations that you accept death. You can have explanations, mental explanations that say, well, he or she will move on or reincarnate, or go to some place of rest.

That can be comforting, but you can go to a deeper place than that, where you don’t need explanations — a state of immediate realization of the sacredness of death, because what opens up when the form dissolves is life beyond form. That is the only thing that is sacred. That is the sacred dimension.

You can get tiny glimpses of that when you lose something, and you completely accept that it’s gone. This is a tiny glimpse of death and it can give you a tiny realization — maybe even more than tiny, if you’re ready.

~ Eckhart Tolle www.tolleteachings.com

If there is unhappiness in you, the first step is to realize that is how you feel. The next step is to inquire into it and understand what the action step is. The action step might be changing a situation out in the physical world. Or the action step might be changing something in your inner psychological landscape. A good thing to remember is that the main cause of unhappiness is never a specific situation but the thoughts about and behind that situation.

As you inquire, stay with the facts. Opinions and identifications with the negative situation like “I am ruined” is an opinion that is more a story that a recounting of the facts. If you can face the facts of your situation, you will feel empowered.

If you’re running away from something — whether it is an addiction, not having enough money, an unhappy marriage or relationship, or a painful part of your past — you’re in denial and not operating in objective reality where solutions could appear at any time in the present moment.

Also remember that what you think creates the emotions that you feel. As you tease out the relationship between your thoughts and your emotions, you will find that the truth of your unhappiness is resolved by being the awareness behind your thoughts and emotions.

Seeking happiness will never make you happy, as seeking is really the opposite of the contentment of happiness. And though happiness is elusive, freedom from unhappiness is achievable by facing what is rather than believing the stories your ego has fabricated about it.

As you pierce this veil with your awareness, you will discover your natural state of well-being and inner peace.

~ Eckhart Tolle www.tolleteachings.com

Strictly speaking, you don’t choose to think; Thinking happens to you. The statement “I think” implies volition. It implies that you have willfully chosen to think what you think (or that you think in the first place). For most people, this is not yet the case. “I think” is just as false a statement as “I digest” or “I circulate my blood.” Digestion happens, circulation happens, thinking happens.

The voice in the head has a life of its own. Most people are at the mercy of that voice; they are possessed by their thinking and its repetitive, unconscious content. This circular, repetitive, incessant thinking is conditioned by the past, and it keeps you trapped in the past. It is as though you continue to relive the past over and over again. Do you ever wonder why the same problems challenge you throughout your life? Your unconscious mind is re-creating them, but you don’t even know it.

The Eastern term for this repetitive cycle is karma. You continually bring to your life experiences that correspond to your thinking. What you reap, you will sow. What you think, you will attract. If the contents of your thoughts are locked in past events, you are destined to repeat them. This is karma. And it goes both ways.

We have heard of good karma and bad karma. Bad karma is the experiences we have that are attracted to us by our mind’s obsession with all the bad things that have happened to us. Bad karma not only produces experiences that are undesirable, it is also a life lived in the past, not the present.

Good karma, on the other hand, comes from living in the present moment. When we liberate our mind from thoughts of the past and negative rumination, we are free to engage our mind in original, creative thought. We are free to be spontaneous and fun-loving. We are free to live our life now with a sense of curiosity, discovery and adventure. Far from being trapped in a cycle of negativity, we live a life of freshness, proactivity and healthy self-expression.

If you have been living life in the past, caught in the cycle of bad karma, you can get free of it.

Just in the way that thinking happens to you, bad karma happens to you. It is an involuntary predicament. It is a condition that you do not consciously choose.

The solution is to begin choosing what you want for yourself. Instead of being a victim of your own thinking, be an active, engaged choice maker.

• Choose to be more present.
• Choose to be more aware of what thoughts are circulating in your mind.
• Choose to engage your mind in original, creative thinking.
• Choose to make your mind an interesting, adventurous place.
• Choose to make good karma by using your mind for positive and productive thinking.

~ Eckhart Tolle www.tolleteachings.com

These pain bodies are hungry ghosts. They are always in a state of blaming, wanting revenge, feeling outraged and betrayed. The ego’s need for enemies is always magnified in people like this.

Because of this heightened reactivity, something that really is relatively insignificant gets magnified into a life and death situation that pulls other people into their drama. Some people get themselves involved in extended, exhausting court battles with organizations or corporations like the couple in England who sued McDonald’s over a period of 17 years.

Others are consumed with hatred toward an ex-partner or family member. Because they are not aware of the pain they are constantly carrying inside, this dense pain body is superimposed onto ordinary situations. This sets up a scenario where the person cannot tell the difference between what is happening in their reality and their reaction to it.

The resolution of this pain and suffering therefore must be outside of themselves, so split-off are these people from their dense pain-bodies. This usually brings about actions that recreate the pain body in real life real world events.

This is what seems to have happened to the Norwegian mass-murderer who appeared to everyone as an ordinary citizen, yet, for years an incredible internal hatred was brewing inside -— a pain body so dense that even to this day, there is no remorse for acting out on innocent victims.

As shocking as these extremely dense pain bodies are, they are an exaggerated symptom of the human pain body as a whole — a warning to all of us that the pain body in each of us must be recognized and resolved through understanding, compassion, and the present moment.

~ Eckhart Tolle www.tolleteachings.com

“A victim identity is the belief that the past is more powerful than the present, which is the opposite of the truth. It is the belief that other people and what they did to you are responsible for who you are now, for your emotional pain or your inability to be your true self.” ~ ET