Eckhart Tolle reads the gospel parable of the houses built on sand and on rock as instruction in how to live a life that survives storms — by building on the rock of presence rather than the sand of conditioned reactivity.
Transcript
The world is here to challenge you. Oh, you didn't know that. You thought it would here to make you happy. It's not working, is it? There's a one of my favorite parables in the gospels that Jesus tells is the parable of a man who is building a house and he he builds a house [clears throat] on without digging a foundation. He builds a house on the sand and then the house is finished and then suddenly the the floods come and the storms come and the house is swept away in the floods and the storms. And then there's another man who builds a house first. He he digs deep. This is what the parable says. He digs deep until he reaches the rock. And when he reaches the rock, he has a deep foundation for the house. Then he builds the house. Then the floods come and the storms come and the rains come and the house is not swept away. It stands because it has a deep foundation. Obviously in this parable the house is you and Jesus adds if you if you practicing which is probably more correct than what you read. [laughter] If you if you practice my teaching which is this the spiritual teaching then you will be like this man. If you live this, if you live this teaching which is the awake, then you are like this man who builds a house and he who digs this until it reaches a foundation and then builds the house. So that means the foundation obviously is within yourself to find the dimension of being [gasps] and then life comes at you and throws all kinds of challenges in many many forms. That's what life does. What the world does to you. The world is here to challenge you. Oh, you didn't know that. You thought it would here to make you happy. It's not working, is it? Can't work. The world isn't here to make you happy. It's It is actually here to ch it's part of the evolution. It's here to challenge you. So the challenges come here comes one and then and then you that goes away and then you're okay for a little while and suddenly from behind oh oh my god and if you are not rooted in the dimension of being which Jesus calls the the the kingdom of heaven which in my paraphrase or translation is the dimension of spaciousness. Kingdom is dimension dimension of heaven. Vast spaciousness which is inner space. If you're not rooted then life is is sorrow. Life is suffering. As the Buddha said, life Buddha said, whatever situation you go into, whatever you do, sooner or later, and usually sooner, I'm paraphrasing the Buddha again. Well, the Buddha this time, uh, you will find suffering. Wherever you go, you'll find suffering unless you awaken. I teach suffering, he said, and the end of suffering. So the be the par Jesus parable about digging a digging deep [clears throat] until he reaches the foundation is a just a beautiful picture a be of what what is needed in the inner dimension. So when you are connected with rooted in the presence the being that is and one could say underneath the person then the challenges that life throws at you do not no longer create unhappiness or despair. you're not uh uh it the world loses its ability to make you unhappy and the conditions of the world. You transcend, so to speak. You transcend. Now, it doesn't mean you cut yourself. You're not cut off from everything. That's not it. It means that uh on the on the level of the person there still you you are still affected a little bit of course by the varying conditions. You experience something not good. You lose something valuable and you say, "Oh, that's a pity." or somebody close to you dies and you feel tears coming. Uh so you experience that sadness and that is there when a loved one dies or you experience the sadness if you look at the suffering of the world you may suddenly find yourself becoming sad um or your parent dies or a child dies is even more difficult to cope with a child that you have dies that's not supposed to happen and you feel you weep H but underneath it deep down there is a peace. There is sadness on the surface and underneath there remains a realm of peace. So you and and important when somebody dies sometimes people are so devastated it goes on for not for several months it goes on for years. They relive a bad situation again and again and again through the mind thinking about it and so on. But an emotional to be affected emotionally by certain situations is will still happen most likely but you're never again you're not totally devastated there the you remain in touch with a dimension of depth and in that dimension you know if that dimension could It would say all is well. There is no death. It all death is a phenomenon that happens in this dimension here. This is a dreamlike dimension. And this is where all these things happen. But the dimension doesn't speak. It's just if it could speak, it would probably say that. So this is the digging to reach the the rock. the rock, the foundation. This is what it's all about. And so we are not at the mercy anymore. Yes, you're not. There was a I believe I quoted him in a book. Um there was a philosopher in ancient Greece. He was a stoic philosopher. Stoicism is an very interesting spiritual philosophy if understood [snorts] and practiced correctly. There was a philosopher in ancient Greece and then um somebody came to him and told him or your son has died. This is a different reaction from Kim mentioned another story about an the other day about an Indian I believe an or a guru who was weeping because his son has died. That's fine. He was weeping but I'm sure there was still the he was still connected to the the being. But this philosopher, the Greek philosopher, when he was told, "Your son has just died, he's supposed to have said, I knew he was not immortal and he is supposed to have been a historic philosopher." Uh, [clears throat] now we don't know what his inner state actually was at the time. Was he completely cut off from his emotions? Was he just uh or had he gone so deep that uh the entire world around him uh appeared to him as a a dreamlike scenario that perhaps he'd gone so deep into being that he had lost interest in this dimension completely. Who knows? or was he cut off? Had he cut himself off and mistaken that for spiritual realization? We don't know. Perhaps a better answer would have been maybe that's what he actually said. It got misinterpreted. A better answer would have been, I know he is immortal. And that would have been probably closer to the truth. >> [clears throat]