Hello podcast listeners. I'm Oprah Winfrey and I'm truly delighted to bring you a new weekly podcast series from someone I believe is one of the great spiritual teachers of our time, Eckhart Toley.

For the first time, the Essential Teachings podcast by Eckhart is the home for his groundbreaking wisdom gathered for nearly four decades.

I hope the series of Essential Teachings will resonate with you as much as Eckhart's wisdom has with me. Follow Essential Teachings on Spotify or wherever you find your podcasts.

Transforming our consciousness through adversity.

In this episode, Eckhart reassures us that we should not panic when life's difficulties arise because they can become our greatest teachers. He says it's often hardship and suffering that play a critical role in the evolution of our consciousness.

Without it, we would not feel the urgency to change nor would we learn to lead what Eckhart calls an awakened life.

Any kind of adversity in your life, whether it's personal, the personal kind of a collective kind, the only way for it not to become converted into suffering is for you to go deeper and realize who or what you are.

If you are beyond the conditioned mind and the strange thing is that adversity is absolutely essential for the evolution of consciousness.

Although it seems to block what one could call perhaps the flowering of your life, it seems to, when you look at it superficially, all of the so-called bad things that happen to you that go wrong, they seem to block you from fully being yourself, fully expressing yourself,

being able to do what you want to do.

And so this, that's what I earlier called sabotage, that is experience as life or God, or trying to sabotage your life, that happens very frequently. But the strange paradox is, if the human being did not experience adversity,

the human would not evolve in consciousness, there would be no growing of consciousness, and that's a very strange fact.

But that not only applied to humans, it applies to all life forms.

Every life form experiences difficulties, adversity, for every life form, life is not easy, whether it's a blade of grass, it's trying to come up or a flower, or a fly, or mosquito, or fish, whatever it may be.

Every life form experiences obstacles, and the survival of every life form is precarious. Many life forms survive only very briefly in their gun, because other factors come in, it's gone.

A sapling grows out of the seed, or the acorns, the seed, the sapling grows, the chances of a sapling becoming a huge tree are relatively small, because there are so many factors that could prevent the sapling from growing, and we would kill it, lack of water, or kinds of insects could eat it,

or some other stuff could happen, and yet the world is full of trees, so many make it, and many others don't make it.

But for every life form, life is a challenge, if it were not, they would not evolve.

So I'm sure the reason why certain animals can fly is there was a need for them, because if they had not been able to overcome gravity, they would not have survived.

There must have been situations when they had to overcome, there was an absolute need to overcome gravity.

Fish, they say life developed first in the ocean, before there was any life on land, why would a fish that's comfortable in the water, why would a fish decide to suddenly start crawling on land?

My theory is there was a huge expanse of water that was gradually over a very long period of time diminishing, and so the fish could no longer survive in the water.

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