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Q: If Being, or God, is the creative source of all energy and thoughts, and thoughts from the ego are a negative form of energy, don’t these negative thoughts originate from Being?  In other words, did God create evil?

A:  That kind of question has been asked and talked about by many philosophers and it has remained a kind of stumbling block in the Christian religion.  So let’s see what the intuitive answer is.  In this sense-perceived universe, if you want to use anything here to compare God to, the most appropriate thing would be the sun.  The sun is the source of seemingly inexhaustible energy, and the giver of life.  The very heat in your body comes from the sun indirectly.  The sun of course is not eternal, but compared to the human life span it can be considered virtually eternal, it’s so much vaster.  And it gives freely of itself, millions and millions of years of pouring out energy.  Now let’s say the sun is in a process of becoming conscious of itself, because my intuition is the Universe, or rather that which underlies the Universe, or the One behind the many, is in the process of becoming conscious of itself in the dimension of time.  The One also exists in the timeless dimension, where there is no past and future.

So God, to use that word for a while, in the timeless, God is already complete and perfect.  But it seems that in the realm of time, God is becoming conscious through all these life forms.  Now if that were the sun, then in the process of becoming conscious, the sun continuously emits zillions of photons, light particles.  Let’s say the individual photon is part of the process of becoming conscious for the sun.  Now in that process, the individual photon would undergo a change of consciousness arising.  Temporarily, the individual photon, as it becomes together with the sun, as consciousness arises it mis-perceives itself as a separate entity.  It no longer realizes its oneness with the sun.  There’s a continuum, it never really loses connection with the sun.  So temporarily, as part of the process of becoming conscious, it believes itself to be separate.  It’s a temporary thing.  While it believes itself to be separate, it creates all kinds of illusions that reflect the basic illusion of separateness.  That’s basically where we are at, where humanity is at.  The human being is the photon, the sun particle, so to speak.  The consciousness within is the consciousness of God, there’s only one consciousness.  And that consciousness, in the process of the whole becoming conscious, mis-perceives itself temporarily.  And that creates the illusion of separateness in the individual human.  That creates the illusion of the identification with form, which is the illusion of separateness.  That’s seeing oneself as a separate entity.  The stronger that illusion is, the more that gets reflected in its actions outside, which then become deluded.  And that’s called evil.

Ultimately in evil, nothing is destroyed.  The essence of all life forms is eternal.  But on its own level, it’s not pleasant.  From the point of view of the larger whole, it’s only a brief dream episode that takes place as the One is becoming conscious.  So that is the answer to “Did God create evil?”  So the teachings that say that evil ultimately is not real, of course that is correct.  But it’s a question of levels.  If you look at it from one level, it has a certain reality.  The fact that it ultimately is not real does not mean that on this temporary level it does not appear very real.  But it must be recognized as deluded.  Evil can be defined as complete identification with form – that is the illusion.  The more an entity is identified with form, the more evil the entity seemingly creates, and the more suffering is created.  What’s the answer?  The answer of course is why we’re here.  We are the arising of the answer.  The answer is not just the answer, it is the end of the illusion of separateness and the end of so-called evil.

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There’s a particular dimension where creativity arises.  It’s a little bit like the wick burning the flame, and its sustenance is the oil – it’s in an oil lamp, and you are the flame.  All the analogies, by the way, are very deficient, but it’s just a distant approximation to get you into a sense of what that place is.  So you are the flame, and you feel your way into the very source – down the wick into where the oil is, inside yourself.  That’s the place, the source, so if anything is new, creative, then it has a fragrance of the source.

Somehow, humans, even humans who are still very much identified with their mind, many of them are touched by when they see or hear or whatever – come into contact with – something that came out of that deeper level, whether it’s a work of art, or a piece of music, or it could just be somebody talking.  And the words come from that deeper level.  It could just be somebody who has a good sense of humor – even that is already a form of creativity.  Spontaneous humor is to suddenly see something that one wouldn’t normally see – a connection between two seemingly unconnected things, and suddenly you connect them and everybody laughs.  Some people have that. Some people have one small area in which they can be creative, and that can be enough to provide you with fulfillment and an income, for the rest of your life – and to contribute that gift to others.

Great stand up comedians, for example, have that gift.  Of course, not everything they say is spontaneous, but when they prepare their stuff, they have to be creative.  Now I don’t know if anybody here has tried to be a standup comedian, but it’s difficult.  Many people try.  It’s hard to be funny.  But some have it, and it’s amazing – those few that have that gift.  And there too, the sense of humor is spontaneously something arises, and there it comes.  It’s being in touch with that.  It’s wonderful to be able to be in touch with that, and feel the power that flows from there, out into this world.  Now for that, of course you need some kind of vehicle, because the power needs to flow into some kind of form.

You can touch that place also, within, and it may not flow into creativity, because you have not developed a vehicle for it.  The very same power that gives rise to creativity can also manifest itself in different ways that we would not call creativity.  It could be a healing power that comes into effect the moment you enter into relationships with others.  Healing in a wider sense, not just physical healing.  You will not suddenly become a great musician if you have never touched an instrument, just because you touch that place within yourself.  It’s not going to manifest as a great scientific discovery in my case, because the vehicle is not prepared for that.  My mind is not prepared for that.  It doesn’t even work that way.  So for me to expect to come up with the Unified Field Theory that Einstein didn’t come up with – he tried after the theory of relativity, he tried for the rest of his life to come up with that – I am not going to come up with that.  It’s very unlikely.  The vehicle has not been prepared. I am not going to be a great pianist, because I don’t know how to play the piano.  So no matter how deeply I go within, it’s not going to flow into that.  You need to prepare the vehicle for creativity.

More important than that is the place – to be able to go within to that place of vibrantly alive stillness, where creativity arises.  And you can go in there, and if there’s no vehicle, it will not express itself in any form of creativity, not any conventional form of creativity.  But it may actually express itself in different ways.  I just mentioned one, which is an outflow in human interactions – and outflow of – very hard to put a word to it, but you can sense it, when you meet a person who is present in the interaction.  It’s a different energy frequency that operates.  And that is healing.  It is so formless that it does not require a previously prepared vehicle.  You can just be.  And you emanate Being.

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Have you ever experienced the dark night of the soul?  Your teachings have been so helpful through this difficult period.  Can you address this subject?

The “dark night of the soul” is a term that goes back a long time.  Yes, I have also experienced it.  It is a term used to describe what one could call a collapse of a perceived meaning in life…an eruption into your life of a deep sense of meaninglessness.  The inner state in some cases is very close to what is conventionally called depression.  Nothing makes sense anymore, there’s no purpose to anything.  Sometimes it’s triggered by some external event, some disaster perhaps, on an external level.  The death of someone close to you could trigger it, especially premature death, for example if your child dies.  Or you had built up your life, and given it meaning – and the meaning that you had given your life, your activities, your achievements, where you are going, what is considered important, and the meaning that you had given your life for some reason collapses.

It can happen if something happens that you can’t explain away anymore, some disaster which seems to invalidate the meaning that your life had before.  Really what has collapsed then is the whole conceptual framework for your life, the meaning that your mind had given it.  So that results in a dark place.  But people have gone into that, and then there is the possibility that you emerge out of that into a transformed state of consciousness.  Life has meaning again, but it’s no longer a conceptual meaning that you can necessarily explain.  Quite often it’s from there that people awaken out of their conceptual sense of reality, which has collapsed.

They awaken into something deeper, which is no longer based on concepts in your mind.  A deeper sense of purpose or connectedness with a greater life that is not dependent on explanations or anything conceptual any longer.  It’s a kind of re-birth.  The dark night of the soul is a kind of death that you die.  What dies is the egoic sense of self.  Of course, death is always painful, but nothing real has actually died there – only an illusory identity.  Now it is probably the case that some people who’ve gone through this transformation realized that they had to go through that, in order to bring about a spiritual awakening.  Often it is part of the awakening process, the death of the old self and the birth of the true self.

The first lesson in A Course in Miracles says “Nothing I see in this room means anything”, and you’re supposed to look around the room at whatever you happen to be looking at, and you say “this doesn’t mean anything”, “that doesn’t mean anything”.   What is the purpose of a lesson like that?  It’s a little bit like re-creating what can happen during the dark night of the soul.  It’s the collapse of a mind-made meaning, conceptual meaning, of life… believing that you understand “what it’s all about”.  With A Course in Miracles, it’s a voluntary relinquishment of the human mind-made meaning that is projected, and you go voluntary into saying “I don’t know what this means”, “this doesn’t mean anything”.  You wipe the board clean.  In the dark night of the soul it collapses.

You are meant to arrive at a place of conceptual meaninglessness.  Or one could say a state of ignorance – where things lose the meaning that you had given them, which was all conditioned and cultural and so on.  Then you can look upon the world without imposing a mind-made framework of meaning.  It looks of course as if you no longer understand anything.  That’s why it’s so scary when it happens to you, instead of you actually consciously embracing it.  It can bring about the dark night of the soul – to go around the Universe without any longer interpreting it compulsively, as an innocent presence.  You look upon events, people, and so on with a deep sense of aliveness.  Your sense the aliveness through your own sense of aliveness, but you are not trying to fit your experience into a conceptual framework anymore.

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Questioner: My sons drowned in the sea ten months ago. I did surrender, but when I felt the peace and calm coming over me, it felt wrong. It was not right to feel peace and calm with such a loss.

ET: The natural way of being after death of a loved one is suffering at first, then there is a deepening. In that deepening, you go to a place where there is no death. And the fact that you felt that means you went deep enough, to the place where there is no death. Conditioned as your mind is by society, the contemporary world that you live in, which knows nothing about that dimension – your mind then tells you that there is something wrong with this. Your mind says “I should not be feeling peace, that is not what one feels in a situation like this”. But that’s a conditioned thought by the culture that you live in. So instead we can recognize when this happens, when that thought comes – recognize it as a conditioned thought that is not true.

It doesn’t mean that the waves of sadness don’t come back from time to time. But in between the waves of sadness, you sense there is peace. As you sense that peace, you sense the essence of your children as well – the timeless essence. So death is a very sacred thing – not just a dreadful thing. When you react to the loss of form, that’s dreadful.

When you go deep enough to the formless, the dreadful is no longer dreadful, it’s sacred. Then you will experience the two levels, when somebody dies who is close to you. Yes it’s dreadful on the level of form. It’s sacred on the deeper level. Death can enable you to find that dimension in yourself. You’re helping countless other humans if you find that dimension in yourself – the sacred dimension of life. Death can help you find the sacred dimension of life – where life is indestructible.

Surrender can open that door for you. Complete acceptance of it. So honor that sacred dimension and realize that what your mind is saying, that it isn’t right, is just a form of conditioning – it isn’t the truth. It is supremely right.

This is always the window into the formless. As you accept it, surrender. Because the form is gone, your mind becomes still when you surrender to death. It’s not through explanations that you accept death. You can have explanations, mental explanations that say, well, he or she will move on or reincarnate, or go to some place of rest. That can be comforting, but you can go to a deeper place than that, where you don’t need explanations – a state of immediate realization of the sacredness of death, because what opens up when the form dissolves is life beyond form. That is the only thing that is sacred. That is the sacred dimension.

You can get tiny glimpses of that when you lose something, and you completely accept that it’s gone. This is a tiny glimpse of death and it can give you a tiny realization – maybe even more than tiny, if you’re ready.

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Q: You talk about Presence and Being as the keys to enjoying form, and creating positive circumstances, or softening circumstances. How does karma fit into all of that?

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Q: From the time I was a little girl, I was raised as a Catholic. I went completely full circle to denying God, not believing in God. And now, thanks to a large extent what you teach and share, I know that connectedness is there, awareness, Stillness is there. But I got the thought, why do I pray? Because if God is all-knowing, omnipotent, all-loving, and so on, I don’t think he/she/it needs me to say, “Psst – my friend is dying of cancer, can you help her?” I don’t think it’s necessary, but I enjoy praying. I’d love to hear your thoughts; what would be appropriate to pray for? Do you believe in prayer?

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Q: Can we help our children and others that we love to transcend their unconsciousness? Or is it necessary for them to go through it on their own?

ET: There are more children born nowadays who may not have to go through the deep unconsciousness that [adults] had to go through,

Inspired Stories
Since reading Eckhart Tolle's books, my life has changed considerably. I am now more concerned with living the present moment to the fullest, because as Eckhart says that is the only life we really have. I have also learned to be more compassionate in daily activities, which is something my ego never allowed me to do much. I started living the present moment more about five years ago after some major surgery that really made me think about who I really am...

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Images of Stillness
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Eckhart Teachings often receives inspirational works of art including photos, drawings, paintings, and sketches. Sometimes these images are created as a tribute to Eckhart and his teachings, and sometimes they are inspired by other sources such as the beauty and serenity of nature. This new section is dedicated to sharing your images of Stillness.

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