You have been fighting the wrong thing | Eckhart Tolle

What happens to unhappiness when I don't mind being unhappy anymore? I'm unhappy, so what? And many people experience unhappiness as almost a habitual state, just different, different degrees of unhappiness. One could say even not being at ease with the present moment, a certain state of an underlying unease for millions of people in this world is their normal way of being. There's always an underlying sense of unease, of not something is missing here or something shouldn't be here, discontent, unease. That again is a mild form of unhappiness, but if it becomes your normal state you don't even recognize it. In the same way that you don't recognize the noise of a refrigerator that's in the background because it hasn't stopped for hours perhaps and suddenly the noise of the refrigerator stops and you say, wow, it's so much nicer suddenly, the silence in the room. And you didn't even realize that there was no silence in the room because there was this continuous hum in the background. You couldn't identify it anymore and so many people have the continuous unease that is the background to whatever they experience. And that's the state of ego-possessed state of unconsciousness. And it's a mild form of unhappiness. And then you, from there, of course, you get, these are the low levels of unhappiness in the unawakened state. Then you get the peaks of unhappiness when suddenly something, you get challenged by something and you get really unhappy. And people can carry even more pronounced forms of unhappiness with them for long, long periods of time. So if you're unhappy, again, important thing, awakening does not happen by trying to get away to some future point where you're free of that, what you're experiencing now. So if you're unhappy, it does not have to, nothing needs to be an obstacle to spiritual awakening if it is recognized for what it is. And a very quick way beyond any form of unhappiness, I'm not talking now about things, there may be certain things in your life that need changing very quickly and you need to take action. And you might be unhappy because you're sitting in your chair and it's getting cold in the room or mosquitoes are coming in or whatever, you need to take some action to change things. And you say, well, I don't really, and unhappy can arise, of course, in situations that require action, but for some reason you're afraid to take action or you're too lazy to take action and you just prefer to be unhappy. That's a separate thing. But in most cases, unhappiness comes and there's not much you can do about it. It's just there, no matter where you go and what you do, you're still unhappy. And you talk to your friends about your unhappiness and you're even more unhappy. And you go to your therapist, and if the therapist is not a transcendent therapist who can take you beyond the mind, then it doesn't free you from unhappiness. So what's the way out when unhappiness arises? It can be a huge obstacle to spiritual awakening, but doesn't have to be. It's quickly transformed by the simple fact of what happens to unhappiness when I don't mind being unhappy anymore. I'm unhappy, so what? If you completely accept that you're unhappy, okay, I'm so unhappy. There are some forms of therapy which are quite good that ask you to act out your unhappiness. Oh my God, I'm just so, so awful. And you even overact a little bit. That can help you. The awareness can arise there more quickly. I'm just so unhappy, but that's fine. I don't mind being unhappy. What happens to the unhappiness when you don't mind being unhappy? Of course, you have to be aware of your thoughts. Are your thought structures, your thoughts continuously feeding the unhappiness? Yes, you're thinking unhappy thoughts. Every minute you're thinking unhappy thoughts. Oh, well, that's an interesting realization, isn't it? Wow, I'm thinking unhappy thoughts, and they make me feel unhappy. That often is the case. There's a link between what the mind is saying and what you feel. And for many people, they have continuously negative thought patterns going through their mind, and they feed the emotion of unhappiness. And if you are attentive to the present moment, you don't need to get rid of negative thoughts. You only need to recognize, and this I'm sure will be helpful for many people, because even when you're going through the awakening process, you're going through a process, so you're not fully there. So you're overtaken, perhaps periodically, by unhappiness in whatever form. This is a generic term, unhappiness in whatever form. How does it arise? And you ask yourself that. Now, that requires a little bit of awareness to be able to even ask yourself, how does this unhappiness arise? And then you notice you're thinking unhappy thoughts, and then you can see, wow, I'm thinking all these unhappy thoughts. There it goes again. So you have a little bit of observing presence there. And when you become aware of the futility of unhappy thoughts, they tend to dissolve, sometimes fairly quickly. And suddenly you're not feeding the emotion of unhappiness anymore. But it could still be that the emotional field still lives in you, this unhappy field of unhappy emotion still lives in you. And then again, what I recommend is to become totally comfortable with whatever it is that you're experiencing at this moment, and not thinking it should be different, usually can very quickly take you into the transcendent state of consciousness.