Designed to Awaken.

In this episode, Eckhart answers questions from a live audience on such topics as

eliminating depression, dealing with a heavy pain body, and why enlightenment seems to be such a rare phenomenon.

Eckhart shares the story of his own pain body and how it finally pushed him into a state of presence.

He says, we are designed to awaken. There is a flowering of consciousness in the universe,

and we are part of that.

For many years now, I've kind of been dealing off and on with certain degrees of depression,

sometimes more intense, sometimes less intense, actually lately a lot less intense in large part

due to discovering you and kind of reading your works and stuff, which has been super helpful.

So thanks for that. But one aspect of this is that my ability to feel things has, as I feel greatly kind of diminished over time,

things that I used to be excited about, don't excite me anymore. I don't look forward to

things when I, you know, kind of hang out with my friends and things like that, which is stuff that I

enjoy. The joy kind of goes away very quickly, but what doesn't go away and what I can feel is the kind of negatives in my life, the sadness and the suffering and stuff.

And it got to a point where I started to crave it in a certain degree because feeling those type of emotions almost kind of reminded me of my ability to feel at all and sort of reminded me of my humanness.

So I guess my question is, how do you eliminate suffering when suffering in a certain way is all that you have left?

Right. What about your practice of giving attention to the present moment?

Now we give attention to the present moment.

You first become aware of whatever it is that you feel within,

and then you need to be aware within and without, that's part of the present moment, so that your attention is not

completely absorbed by whatever it is that you feel, because there's also the vastness

of the outside world. And so to be present means to be present within and without.

This is in both worlds.

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