Eckhart Tolle – Part 2: Evolutionary Perspective on The Power of Now, leading to A New Earth
Living Dialogues
Duncan Campbell
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Episode 46 - Eckhart Tolle – Part 2: Evolutionary Perspective on The Power of Now, leading to A New Earth

One of the signature trademark expressions of Living Dialogues is:  “Global Talk Unites Us.”  These two dialogues between myself and Eckhart can also serve as an illuminating and deepening complement to the unprecedented interactive live webcast inaugurated and conducted by Oprah and Eckhart for 10 weeks from the beginning of March to the beginning of May 2008, with over 11 million people coming together each week online “to the same place – with the same purpose – to create a new earth”.  (See www.oprah.com to participate live during that timeframe or listen anytime to those archived programs.)

In commenting on Eckhart Tolle’s contributions to our ongoing planetary dialogue addressing the big questions Who Are We?  Where Do We Come From? Why Are We Here? And Where Are We Going? in the “great big classroom community around the world that we are participating in in this live webcast”, Oprah described The Power of Now and A New Earth as “not, let me repeat, not, a new religion or a new doctrine, but really an invitation for you to connect to your authentic self, and to connect to your spirit, to your soul, to our inner being, to your consciousness, whichever word you want to use.”

Here is an excerpt from this Dialogue Program 46, in which Eckhart and I explore further the personal and collective “pain body” and how consciousness plays “hide and seek” in form until we come to the realization that we are not the form in which awareness is embodied, but in our essence we are the awareness itself.  This realization arises from an appreciation of the historical evolution of our species and of our own life’s unqiue progression.  This awakening moves us from depression or even despair in the face of suffering and feeling separate and isolated to an appreciation of these feelings as a necessary initiation into a mature sense of conscious unity: that “out of the many we are one”, even as we come to accept and celebrate our unique being and the diversity of all other persons and manifestations in nature and in the cosmos.

In the face of the declaration “Humanity is faced with a stark choice:  Evolve or Die”, we have a choice, and together we can create a New Earth:

Duncan Campbell: I'm thinking of it, also from the evolutionary perspective, we started this particular Dialogue talking about Joseph Campbell’s perception that the way of the Sharman that began 40,000 years ago was perhaps the first example in the development of the human species where the collective mind began to move away from its embededness and unity and in nature and the individual experience of the path of suffering and separation began to be seen as a vehicle of transformation.

In here, I'm thinking, that when we talk about pain and suffering, it's not as if we made a mistake or there was anything wrong with the development of this egoic separation. It has been a part of this vast evolution of consciousness coming to know itself, moving into self-awareness and this painful birthing process of losing the unconscious embedded sense of unity in order to create a sense of separate--almost like an adolescent moving away from the matrix or from childhood.

Now, the species itself being challenged to either move beyond the space of separation and move into a deep maturity and co-creative bringing together of all of these experiences or as one person put it, “Committing teenage suicide.”

Eckhart Tolle: Yes.

Duncan Campbell: It's very similar at the species level to teenage suicide where the sense of isolation or not being understood, not crossing the threshold into another layer or adulthood or maturity seems so intimidating that one actually commits suicide.

Eckhart Tolle: Yes. So there's no absolute guarantee which way it will go, but the fact that we are sitting here, talking about this, the listeners are sitting somewhere else listening to this should help us to see that actually it's arising at this moment. It's not that let's hope that the new consciousness is going to rise on the planet before the old consciousness, so to speak, has destroyed it completely. The new is already arising at this very moment and so I am quite optimistic more than perhaps once before about the humanity’s possibility of surviving and go beyond this particular evolutionary stage into liberation.

Liberation, has until now, been an isolated phenomenon. Liberation from egoic mind. Liberation from thought has been an isolated phenomenon. Only a few individuals here and there became free because it was never a necessity on the planet. I call them the first flowerings of human consciousness, those few individuals the Buddha and some others that perhaps we haven’t heard of. In those, the flowering happened and those were the first flowers, the early flowers.

I was told by somebody who studied the evolution of the evolution of the planet that before any flowers appeared on the planet, the planet was already covered in plant life for millions of years. Plants were everywhere but not a single flower had opened yet. So one good site to use this analogy that the flower represents a new evolutionary level in the life of plants.

There must have been a day on the life on this planet when the sun rose one morning and suddenly, the first flower opened. Maybe it didn’t survive for very long. Perhaps, a few thousand years later, two flowers opened and a few more and suddenly, a point was reached when flowers opened all over the planet.

I believe humanity has reached that point now where enlightenment, liberation, whatever you want to call it, is not a luxury anymore. It's happening now on a larger scale because if it doesn’t happen, the species will not survive humanity. Often, transitions, evolutionary leaps, evolutionary transformation happens only through necessity when there's no other choice but to evolve.

You can see this in your own personal life. You can't stand it anymore. Life becomes so dysfunctional with this self-created pain that now, you have to evolve or die. That is the point that we have reached now, that humanity has reached now. Another hundred years of the old egoic consciousness that has created the history of the 20th century which is mad, the planet will not be able to survive another 100 years of that madness.”

And be sure to listen to next week’s Living Dialogue Program 47 with myself and Richard Tarnas: Initiating a New World View Through Dialogue, when we go into further rich exploration of the above subjects.  These themes are the thread running throughout the vision and practice embodied in all Living Dialogues.  All other programs in this series will be of interest on these themes, but particular ones you might wish to click onto listed on the right hand column next to the programs with Eckhart Tolle are those with Byron Katie and Stephen Mitchell, Gangaji, Joseph Chilton Pearce, Rupert Sheldrake, Steve McIntosh, and Stanislav Grof.

SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR FREE TO LIVING DIALOGUES AND IN THE COMING WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM.  TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, BYRON KATIE AND STEPHEN MITCHELL, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, LYNNE MCTAGGART AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

To order a full transcript of this program you can contact me at my website: www.livingdialogues.com or at [email protected]. Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program. All the best, Duncan

Transcript

Transcript

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[musical interlude]

Duncan Campbell: From time immemorial, beginning with indigenous councils and ancient wisdom traditions through the work of Western visionaries such as Plato, Galileo, and quantum physicist David Bohm, mutually participatory dialogue has been seen as the key to evolving and transforming consciousness, evoking a flow of meaning—a dia (flow) of logos (meaning)--beyond what any one individual can bring through alone. So join us now as together with you, the active deep listener, we evoke and engage in “Living Dialogues”.

Welcome once again to “Living Dialogues”.  I'm your host, Duncan Campbell, and with me for this Dialogue, I'm again truly delighted to have Eckhart Tolle, author of “The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment”.

Eckhart Tolle has been a very widely acclaimed spiritual master and teacher for the last number of years since he had an awakening at the age of 29 after graduating from the University of London and being a research scholar and supervisor at Cambridge University, and then suffering a long period of intense psychic pain. He has emerged as someone with the message that many have called as clear as that of Olive the great Mystics [sp].

So Eckhart Tolle, it's a real pleasure and delight to be with you here on “Living Dialogues.”

Eckhart Tolle: Thank you.

Duncan Campbell: In a prior Dialogue, we talked about the notion of what you have called “pain body” and the way in which the pain that we experience and the suffering and sometimes even the blackest despair particularly can be a path to liberation. We talked about how the Buddha described the first Noble Truth as the path of suffering and the third Noble Truth, the goal was the secession.

Yet, there is this paradox sitting there that our conditioned mind sometimes associates the secession of suffering with the attainment of some kind of [xx]state in which unhappiness or pain or illness does not. If it does, it's a mark of our spiritual underdevelopment and we need to somehow do more. We find ourselves then caught once again in the trap of feeling unfulfilled and having to get to some future state which somehow seems ever elusive.

So in this discussion, I'd like to actually set the context that Joseph Campbell, for instance, in his wonderful life work described the way of suffering of the shaman that began about 40,000 years ago as perhaps the first example in human species of moving beyond what he called “The Three Egoistic Drives” of pleasure, power, and the loss of the collective moral order into a fourth principle unmotivated by ego. One that is universal, transcending of all local religions, cults and philosophies, and conflicting with none. He called that the earliest example we know of a lifetime devoted to the fourth end, that is, the pursuit of self-transformation, that is the true meaning of spirituality.

Oftentimes, when we think about self-transformation, we can get caught in that subtle spiritual materialism of perfecting ourselves at some point in the future. Once again, we find ourselves back in the soup [sp] as it were. So perhaps with that background, we can distinguish the true way of suffering and the sense that suffering can be ended from the notion that we can attain a kind of permanent happiness that is pain-free and free of illness or trauma.

Eckhart Tolle: Yes. The desire to add something could be wanting-to-achieve state that is free of this or that or the state of enlightenment. That is more suffering because you know the gap between the state here and know the desired state and in that, more suffering arises. So this suffering, one could say that two levels to suffering: one is this suffering that you create now and you create suffering now by living out of alignment with now. By bringing in a no to what is and refusal to embrace and accept this moment as it is. That refusal to embrace and to accept the suchness of this moment, really is the road of suffering.

Once you've seen that, then you see the futility, evilly insanity of not living in alignment with what is because this moment is life. Life happens nowhere else but now and your whole life unfolds in this now. The now is your whole life. The form changes, there are not really moments in your life or in a day or in an hour, there is only the one now, that space of now. The form that this now takes, the forms that appear and disappear in the field of now--of course, they change continuously, that’s the flax [sp]. But that doesn’t mean there are different nows because there's only one now and this the flax [sp] of forms in the no.
 
So we realize how vital it is to bring our attention away from being trapped in--thoughts trapped us that they're continuously striving towards some future attainment of future goal or adding more of this through having more future. Step out of that into the aliveness and the fullness of this moment, so the road of suffering then recognizing it as the refusal to say yes to what is.

So we can already eliminate suffering by not bringing the no in or detecting the habitual now, because it's a deeply ingrained pattern in every human being, detecting it as soon as possible. That’s whole egos and then the no are creating suffering. OK, and then, very often, the no suddenly collapses and just the yes instead and the same situation is no longer producing suffering. If it's accepted deeply, there may even be peace.

People have reported peace in the face of the greatest disasters, totally unacceptable situations. Prison camp waiting for execution and suddenly, that the yes was so deep there was not a trace of resistance left to what is and that is the surrender to life. Then enormous power comes in to your life because you're aligned with life itself and the very intelligence that is life of which the human mind is only a tiny aspect. So that’s an enormous recognition to see the road of pain as the no to what is.

But, humans have lived in that no for a million years and that no has brought about an enormous amount of collective human pain that every human being carries inside. So there are two levels to human suffering: one is the suffering that you create now by not accepting this now. Then, even if you continuously accept this now because you've seen the futility of non-acceptance, you would still experience the pain from the past, the collective human pain and the pain from your own personal past that lives in you as the pain body.

So that is two levels, then you can often ask yourself when pain arises, emotional suffering pain, am I creating this now or is that the pain body? The pain body is there, and as I pointed out in our earlier talk, it periodically needs to feed on the thoughts and on the reactions of other people to take in more pain. So as the pain body arises, which is the residue of old emotional pain from humanities past, you bring that yes also to that because there's this called a primordial spiritual practice is to bring the yes into what is, externally and internally.

If what is is the arising of pain body of anger, of fear, of heaviness, of turbulence which you can almost sense it as a semi-physical thing almost when you would look at it directly. Then, you bring the acceptance to that, that is it is as it is. So it's no longer turning into a mental story, it's not personalized as me and my dreadfully unhappy story, it simply is an energy field of heaviness, of turbulence, of tightness. That is, “What can I do? It's there.” So you bring an it's there because humanity has lived in the no for half a million years or whatever.

This continuous living in such a state of nonalignment has brought about so much human pain. So what we do then is we bring the yes into the no. So that is how gradually the intensity of the accumulated pain from the past diminishes. In fact, while it's there, it's actually welcomed because the bringing the yes into this moment means to welcome this moment no matter what form it takes. So if this moment happens to be emotional pain, you bring the yes into that.

That brings about transformation not because you want the transformation, the yes is enough. Bringing the yes into the pain body and suddenly you sense what is there, so to speak, around the pain body a field of space, of spaciousness. It's still there, the pain is still there but there's something vaster than the pain, suddenly, and that comes with the surrender to the pain.

For many people, the pain body has been their main spiritual teacher. Certainly, my pain body, my pain was my main spiritual teacher. We would not be sitting here, I would not be saying these words if it hadn’t been for my pain body that drove me out of my mind. So we welcome the pain, not in the sense that we get the egoic sense of self is actually addicted. It identifies with the pain body so there's an addiction to pain.

It's not in that sense that we welcome pain, it's not in the sense that the pain body says, “Please, give me more of it, more pain” because the more is the ego such. When the ego is aligned with the pain body, the ego wants more pain. It wants to enhance longer, its painful identity of me. [laughs] So you can often see people who are trapped in a miserable self-image, want more of it, they will deny what doesn’t fit into that. So it's not that we want more pain but simply accept the isness. That is what brings about a transformation. So the pain body becomes your teacher.

Duncan Campbell: We could even, at this point, Eckhart, talk about the [xx] syndrome of the constant sense of complete which becomes your home. I'm reminded at this point of a phrase from the course, The Miracles, which is sometimes referred to, that each moment can be welcomed either as a grievance or as a miracle. Welcoming the moment of now as a grievance means there's something insufficient about it. There's some kind of complaint, it's not quite right. It could be better or it could be improved on rather than simply the embrace, the unfettered complete surrender and affirmation of this moment no matter what it is and what form it takes.

As I'm saying that, I'm also calling to mind the great poem of Rumi, called “The Guest House” which I'll just read briefly here because it really came very powerfully to my consciousness as you were speaking. And here's Rumi: “This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival, a joy, a depression, a meanness. Some momentary awareness becomes and comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all. Even if there are crowd of sorrows who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame, the malice. Meet them at the door laughing and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.”

So as one of the great teachers said, “If you can be full of gratitude for whatever life brings you, in that very moment, you are enlightened.” And you had a beautiful way of putting it before that you great and affirm everything including your pain without labeling. You go beyond the good or bad and accept everything as profoundly mystically good. So hard for us to do in our conditioning of either or.

Eckhart Tolle: Yes. The non-acceptance strengthens the egoic entity. So it works so miraculously because when you no longer react because the egoic entity lives in and through reactivity. A form arises in the now, it reacts to the form, usually it doesn’t want it, I'd want something different, I'd want some more.

Duncan Campbell: It resists what is.

Eckhart Tolle: It resists what is. So the non-resistance to a form that arises and that form could be an external event, a person, or an inner form as emotion or perhaps pain. That non-resistance to an arising form takes you beyond form identity in yourself. It takes you beyond the mental form of me. The resistance to an arising form strengthens your own egoic form identity. This is why the egoic form identity, the me and story, lives in [xx] resistance.

When the resistance is relinquished, the reactivity to arising forms is not there anymore. It means suddenly, who you are beyond form, beyond the psychologically form of me arises in a very subtle way. It can never be grasped. You can't say, “Oh, here, I have it. Now, I'm going to add it to the content of my mind.” It cannot be grasped. It is so subtle and yet it is vast and powerful.

Who you are arises, at first you might not even notice it. In a very gentle and subtle way, a fields arise and that is the essence of who you are beyond form and it arises because you did not resist whatever form, you did not resist or react to an arising form in the now. Therefore, the form of me is no longer strengthened.

Duncan Campbell: Because the resistance is always based on some conception of how things should be. It also has that secret heart, a kind of striving, going against the grain, not being in aligned with what is thinking that the heroic behavior is to actually consciously select the good and [xx] the evil and keep moving forward into a future in which there will be only good and evil will be vanished rather than accepting in the now that there are some fundamental goodness that underlies everything that isn’t.

This is the great mystical paradox that we see at the end of the Book of Job as translated by Stephen Mitchell where at the end, Job says in response to God, the Voice of the whirlwind, he says, “Until now, I have only seen You with my eyes. Now, I have heard You with my ears. Therefore, I am quiet, comforted that I am dust.” This is after the Voice of the whirlwind has spoken and shown the vast multiplicity of manifestation in its horror as well as in its apparent brightness. At this point, Job accepts all of it.

But this is not a quietistic acceptance, this is a surrender rather than the submission. Perhaps we can talk about that hugely important distinction here because even as we speak, I can feel my own mind structure grappling with the either orness of how can one accept and affirm all that is without, in some way, being passively questistic.

Eckhart Tolle: There's enormous power that comes from that acceptance and it must not be confused with what we might call “resignation.”

Duncan Campbell: Yes.

Eckhart Tolle: Or, it's not to be confused either with an attitude of, “I just don’t care anymore. I just don’t care anymore.”

Duncan Campbell: “Why bother?”

Eckhart Tolle: “Why bother?” If you look deeply, you'll find although the words “I just don’t care anymore”, you still are very much bothered and there isn’t underlying complaint. There's deep underlying negativity when the words come, “I just don’t care anymore.” So all that is not what surrender is. Surrender is an enormously powerful energy field that comes with the yes in which there lies incredible strength. When role has collapsed as you live in [xx] surrender because the role that people play are because they're not aligned with the power of life that is now. They're trying to be something or be someone.

Everything in nature can teach you to live without roles. The tree doesn’t play roles. The animal doesn’t play a role. It has integrity. So that integrity which is enormous strength, comes with that alignment with what is and all roles become unnecessary. Then, you're true strength emerges, an enormous power emerges. It doesn’t mean that you become weak as the ego will tell you when you accept what is. It's only then that enormous strength and intelligence emerges. Because when you're aligned with now, you're aligned with the one intelligence that lies underneath the phenomenal universe.

So that intelligence can then operate much more fully, whereas in the egoic state, there's only a trickle that comes through and that becomes thought of the human mind. So vast intelligence comes through and a great joy also comes. But to look for the joy, you can't do that because you would be looking again for future, you would be looking again to add something called joy to this accumulation of mental content. [laughs] The joy comes when you're not looking for it or demand that it should be there.

Duncan Campbell: In fact, earlier on, we talked about Joseph Campbell and I am reminded of a conversation he had with the man named Fritz Boas not long before his death. In talking with him, Fritz Boas recounts the story as follows in his book, “The Way of Myth: Talking with Joseph Campbell.” I'm quoting, “One late afternoon, Joseph Campbell said to me, ‘In my own life, I am now looking back and I can tell you that there's a wonderful moment that comes when you realize ‘I'm not striving for anything’.’

Campbell then continues, “What I'm doing now is not a means of achieving something later. After a certain age, there is not a future, and suddenly, the present becomes rich and it becomes a thing in itself which you are now experiencing.” Within a few months, he died.

Eckhart Tolle: Wonderful.

Duncan Campbell: So at the end of this long rich life, finally striving evaporated. It's very much what you're talking about that that is a choice that we can consciously make if we can see through this paradoxical notion. To stop resisting the now is, in fact, the opening to the richness and a limitlessness of the present moment.

Eckhart Tolle: Yes. So striving ceases striving towards future. It doesn’t mean, of course, that your life will not continue to unfold on the level of form, nor does it mean that you're not going to do anything anymore. But the self-seeking goes out of the doing so the doing is no longer governed by self-seeking and needing to become more complete. It arises out of the joy of this moment.

Duncan Campbell: This is such a very difficult concept to express, and yet, I think, in your book, “The Power of Now”, put it very beautifully when you make clear that to stop striving doesn’t mean that we don’t have to make any effort have any discipline. Specifically, you talk about how one can transform illness and pain into this kind of awareness or enlightenment. You say, and I'm quoting your book, “Don’t turn away from the pain. Face it, feel it fully. Feel it but don’t think about it. Express it if necessary, but don’t create a script in your mind around it. Give all your attention to the feeling. Give your complete attention to what you feel and refrain from mentally labeling it.”

That being the difference between acceptance and the effort of attention, perhaps, and the striving of wanting to make a story out of it or capture it in the mind. Then finally you say, “At first, this process may seem like a dark and terrifying place and when the urge to turn away from it comes, observe it but don’t act on it. Keep putting all of your attention on the pain. Keep feeling the grief, the fear, the dread, the loneliness, whatever it is.”

That I think is the beautiful way you express how this not doing does not mean resignation, it means letting go of the attempt to control and manipulate and possess your experience rather than actually feeling it and let it take you, as Rumi says, as a guide to the beyond, to a place that’s literally not imaginable in advance. There has to be this deep kind of trusting, this deeply intuitive not a mental content or fabrication and that’s the abyss one steps into. That’s the real courage and there has to be some awakening of the urge to do it.

In your case and in many cases, it has been that the pain of trying to hold on and trying to control your life and your identity become so overpowering, so frustrating that you finally give in as Job did through exhaustion, but it's a knowing kind of giving. It's a real surrender and not only a resignation saying, “OK, boss, I was wrong and you're right.”

Eckhart Tolle: Yes, that’s right.

Duncan Campbell: Extremely powerful.

Eckhart Tolle: Yes. It is the ultimate spiritual practice is that.

Duncan Campbell: I'm thinking of it, also from the evolutionary perspective, we started this particular Dialogue talking about Joseph Campbell’s perception that the way of the Sharman that began 40,000 years ago was perhaps the first example in the development of the human species where the collective mind began to move away from its embededness and unity and in nature and the individual experience of the path of suffering and separation began to be seen as a vehicle of transformation.

In here, I'm thinking, that when we talk about pain and suffering, it's not as if we made a mistake or there was anything wrong with the development of this egoic separation. It has been a part of this vast evolution of consciousness coming to know itself, moving into self-awareness and this painful birthing process of losing the unconscious embedded sense of unity in order to create a sense of separate--almost like an adolescent moving away from the matrix or from childhood.

Now, the species itself being challenged to either move beyond the space of separation and move into a deep maturity and co-creative bringing together of all of these experiences or as one person put it, “Committing teenage suicide.”

Eckhart Tolle: Yes.

Duncan Campbell: It's very similar at the species level to teenage suicide where the sense of isolation or not being understood, not crossing the threshold into another layer or adulthood or maturity seems so intimidating that one actually commits suicide.

Eckhart Tolle: Yes. So there's no absolute guarantee which way it will go, but the fact that we are sitting here, talking about this, the listeners are sitting somewhere else listening to this should help us to see that actually it's arising at this moment. It's not that let's hope that the new consciousness is going to rise on the planet before the old consciousness, so to speak, has destroyed it completely. The new is already arising at this very moment and so I am quite optimistic more than perhaps once before about the humanity’s possibility of surviving and go beyond this particular evolutionary stage into liberation.

Liberation, has until now, been an isolated phenomenon. Liberation from egoic mind. Liberation from thought has been an isolated phenomenon. Only a few individuals here and there became free because it was never a necessity on the planet. I call them the first flowerings of human consciousness, those few individuals the Buddha and some others that perhaps we haven’t heard of. In those, the flowering happened and those were the first flowers, the early flowers.

I was told by somebody who started the evolution of the evolution of the planet that before any flowers appeared on the planet, the planet was already covered in plant life for millions of years. Plants were everywhere but not a single flower had opened yet. So one good site to use this analogy that the flower represents a new evolutionary level in the life of plants.

There must have been a day on the life on this planet when the sun rose one morning and suddenly, the first flower opened. Maybe it didn’t survive for very long. Perhaps, a few thousand years later, two flowers opened and a few more and suddenly, a point was reached when flowers opened all over the planet.

I believe humanity has reached that point now where enlightenment, liberation, whatever you want to call it, is not a luxury anymore. It's happening now on a larger scale because if it doesn’t happen, the species will not survive humanity. Often, transitions, evolutionary leaps, evolutionary transformation happens only through necessity when there's no other choice but to evolve.

You can see this in your own personal life. You can't stand it anymore. Life becomes so dysfunctional with this self-created pain that now, you have to evolve or die. That is the point that we have reached now, that humanity has reached now. Another hundred years of the old egoic consciousness that has created the history of the 20th century which is mad, the planet will not be able to survive another 100 years of that madness.

Duncan Campbell: What do you think if, from that point of view, Eckhart, has been the evolutionary contribution or role of the development of the egoic structure which some have dated to the beginnings of agriculture, the beginnings of the domestication of animals, going back say 10,000 years where this sense of adolescent individuation began to move out of the matrix of the tribe and the collective. So we've had a whole history for maybe 2-3 million years of the collective, now at least 5,000 years of history have intense individuation getting to this point of intensification where, unless it moves now into a third stage of evolution, there will be a self-suicide of the species.

For full transcript, please contact Duncan Campbell