Pain is the touch tone to all spiritual growth.

In this episode, Eckhart talks about why difficult life circumstances often trigger awakening,

whether it's a life-threatening disease, loss of a loved one, or a breakup of a marriage.

He says pain is the touchstone to all spiritual growth.

Eckhart says many people eventually become grateful for their problems because without them,

they would not evolve.

Eckhart also describes it as liberation from the burden of oneself.

He says when the hard shell of the ego cracks open, we discover a realm of consciousness we have not known before.

It is our function and our purpose to evolve and to awaken out of the egoic consciousness.

And if you do not awaken, while you are unconscious, you create suffering for yourself and others.

The unawakened human creates suffering for themselves and others.

And strangely, that suffering eventually, potentially, brings about an awakening.

You just have to suffer enough.

And at some point, the awakening happens.

If not in this lifetime, in another lifetime, but hopefully in this lifetime.

Many human beings have come to me over many years,

and so many times have I heard people tell me,

if I had not gone through this dreadful experience,

in some cases it's a serious illness,

or it was an accident, or they got close to death, or somebody close to them, a child died, or a terrible breakup and loss of all their

possessions and loss of status in society, everything collapsed around them,

something that would normally be called really bad.

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