to most of us, life seems like a constant battle, a constant struggle to either attain something that we desire or to fend off things, to get away from things that we do not desire, that we want to avoid in life. But by the end of this video, I want to hopefully have convinced you that all this struggling, all this fighting, all this battling, and all this push and pull that we feel of things that we want and things that we want to avoid is really largely, if not completely, self-afflicted and can be stopped within a moment. And I know this is a concept that seems really radical, but in essence, and that's another thing I hope to show you, is that it's also extremely simple, and that the only thing that keeps people, and that most people come in contact with it throughout their lives, but what keeps them from seeing it, understanding it, believing it, and applying it is a very simple but fundamental misunderstanding of the entire concept. And to convince you of this fact, I'm going

to get some help from multiple people, one of them being Meister Eckhart or Master Eckhart. He was a German, well, here I'll read you more, commonly known as M. Eckhart. He was born near Gotha in Eastern Germany in around 1260. He had an illustrious career in the Dominican order, holding senior ecclesiastical and teaching posts all over Europe, including Saxony, Bohemia, Paris, Strasbourg, and Cologne. Eckhart is one of the great speculative mystics of Western Europe who sought to reconcile traditional Christian belief with the transcendental metaphysics of Neoplatonism. So, he was very much a big Christian figure, a scholar, a preacher, and he has very interesting ideas and insights about the human intellect and how we suffer through it and how we can also be saved by it. He likens the human intellect to God's intellect, who is the intellect of intellect, and how we can become like God if only we apply this God-given

gift this potential that we have. It's like Seneca says, We are born for virtue, but we are not born with virtue. We need to acquire it ourselves and master it. Earth is just um like we said, he's a Mystic. So like most other Mystics, both in the Christian as well in the Muslim tradition, uh, they're very poetic, they're very eloquent, and they're very emotional and get to the point in that way rather than a purely academic or Scholastic way, you could say. And right on page 59 of this Penguin edition of some of his work, he says, Now I say further that all suffering comes from our love for what Misfortune takes from us. If the loss of external things causes me pain, then this is a clear sign that I love external things and thus in truth love suffering. And despair is it surprising then that I suffer since I love and seek suffering and despair. And that's really the heart of the matter. And just like I've called in

the help of Master Eckhart. Master Eckhart calls in the help of another friend of ours, Sena. He says, Sena, a pagan Master asks, 'What is the best consolation in suffering and distress?' and gives this answer: It is this, that we should accept everything as if we had desired it and prayed for it, for you would have desired it if you had known that all things happen from, with, and in the will of God. Another Pagan Master says, Lord Supreme Father, Master of the highest Heavens, I am ready for all that you will give me the will to will what you will. And here we have it, and this is what all Hellenistic philosophy, what the Ancients talk about, what Christianity talks about, what Islam talks about, what Buddhism talks about, what the Bhagavad Gita talks about, and many other philosophers, schools of thought, religions, and philosophies, whoever they are, if they are in search, in an open-minded and objective way, of meaning, then they all come to the same conclusions. And you see someone like

master Eart, who lived in the 13th century, referencing Seneca, who in his own words was a pagan. Someone who lived before Christianity, yet he finds the same thought and he believes in the same thought. And what is this thought? We often say in our other videos, which are much more based on people like Seneca than Christians, such as Master Eart, that when we do not act indifferently to indifferent things, when we love externals, when we depend on externals and not on internals, when we try to control what by Nature cannot be controlled, that's when we find distress, anxiety, fear, anger, and everything else that we commonly experience in our daily lives that we want to get away from. But again, what does Seneca say? He says, If you knew that God willed it, you would have willed it too, everything that fortune throws at you. What we tend to do is when externals, such as say a job loss, say a fire in your house, say someone gets sick, say your dog runs away, it doesn't matter.

what it is when these things happen to us we immediately label them as either good or bad, and when we do label them as bad, we think we're in a bad way and that we need to now fight against these things, that we need to fight to preserve something, or fight to keep something away, but that is the same thing in essence as trying to stand up to something, to fight something that by its nature is invincible and not possible to fight, not possible to overcome. Think of it in physical terms. If you were at a beach and the water's nice and calm, but all of a sudden you see a 40ft wave come toward you, you would not try to fight that wave, you would try to get out of its way. If anything, you would not stand up against it, you would not try to win over it, you would not try to defeat it. Yet when it comes to things like death, disease, or even smaller things such as financial loss, financial ruin, even if you will, any of our possessions being damaged or destroyed.

we think we can prevent that by fighting against it. We think we can win over that, and especially with things like death. We think, well, if we never think about it, if we act like it doesn't exist, then that's us fighting against it. Maybe that way we can win over it. But no, as Epitus says, to learn how to live is to learn how to die, meaning we should not try to forget about death. We should not try to ignore it. We should not try to not think about it and act like it doesn't exist. Quite the opposite. We should study it. If we would study how to die, we would essentially study how to live, because to study how to die well is to study how to live well. And look at all those people who do not surrender. And when I say surrender, I know there are a lot of connotations attached to that. And this is exactly the misunderstanding I was speaking of. When we say that we should surrender, we always have this idea of it being an act of weakness and not an act

of strength at all, but quite the opposite. I want to convince you that surrendering that to will, what God Wills, what Fortune Wills, what happens to us, to want what is happening to us instead of trying to fight it is surrendering, and it's an act of strength, not an act of weakness. Rather, look at it this way: all those people that we sometimes hear about who end their lives because something they've experienced, terrible financial loss, or their loved ones left them, even sometimes if it's a short relationship, they say, How can I go on living? Even though they don't realize they've been living quite well up to that point before they met that person, and when they're in their lives, we say, We wish you could have adapted. We say, We wish you could have realized that this is not that big of a deal, that you could have learned to live, and that you would have come back from this, and that nothing that can happen to you is as big as you make it out to be.

this fight, this trouble, this battle, you make it out to be, and we say, I wish I could have been there to show you that, but I didn't know, I wasn't there. Sometimes we hear of these people, right, so that if anything is weakness, but to say no, I will overcome this, I will learn to want what is happening to me, and I will learn to live with it. I will learn to even like it and to draw advantage from it because we talked about earlier, in every disadvantage, there's an advantage, and in every advantage, there's a disadvantage. But again, when we face these so-called bad things, negative things in our lives, if we learn to not only accept it, but to love it, to see it as something that is happening to us, and that we should not just wish to be over and done with it, but that we can draw an experience from it, a lesson from it, an advantage from it, and to become better through it. What better thing is there? I forget who said this now, but the quote goes something like

this I step on to my Misfortune, and as a result, I stand taller, and that's that's exactly what it is. Life throws us all kinds of things. We are the ones that label them as good or bad, but what if we labeled even the so-called bad things as good things because we've learned how to turn them into our advantage? What if we could become better through all the so-called good things and also through all the so-called bad things? Wouldn't life be not only infinitely be worth more living but also would it not be a much better life even though we're so-called surrendering to these things even though we're so-called submitting to them if you try to fight something as big as a depression an economical downturn and your financial loss or if you try to find fight disease illness death in yourself or in others you will lose that battle and you will break yourself but if you are more bending more flexible if you adapt to the will of

Fortune, if you will, to will what God wills, what life wills, what the universe wills. The word does the word. God doesn't matter. You can replace it with the universe or life or whatever you want. But if you learn how to do this, your suffering will stop immediately, and everything will become easier. And another thing is, realize that every time you're battling something, every time you're fighting something, you wish to be out of that situation as quickly as possible. A battle, a fight, a struggle is not something we want to be in, so we always look for the future, for release, for relief. But not only will that future never come because with that mentality, there will always be a battle, there will always be a fight, there will always be something so-called negative and bad happening in your life. And another fact is that we only inhabit the present. The future is not here yet, and the past is gone. So it's just a simple fact that we're only moment by moment living in.

those very moments. Anyone who battles or fights or is in the middle of a war cannot inhabit the present because they don't want to be in the present. They want to do what they need to do, get over their struggle, and live a happy life afterwards, maybe, but they never get there. And that's another thing that surrendering allows you. When you try this in every situation from now on that you think is a bad situation, that you think is a negative situation, try this. Just accept the situation as what it needs to be. In fact, want what is happening to you currently. If you start doing that, you will look around for opportunities to advance yourself instead of for opportunities to exit it. This could be as simple as going to the DMV and having to wait in line for hours. It's a perfect example, even though it's very small. Of course, when we wait in a line like that, we just want to get do what we're there to do, get it over with as quickly as

possible and we're agitated the whole time through. We never stop to think and look around. But if you accept the situation, if you say the line is what it is, it's bigger than I am. If I fight something that is bigger than I am, I will lose. But ironically, it seems if I surrender to what is bigger than I am, to what is stronger than I am, then I win because I start inhabiting the only place in life that I could possibly inhabit, and that's the present, that's the now. So when I surrender, when I accept the situation, when I even want the situation to occur exactly as it is occurring right this instant, then all of a sudden I inhabit the present. I inhabit the room that I am in. I look around, I see things, I see opportunities. Maybe I can relieve someone else's stress, maybe I can put a smile on my face and make someone else realize this is not that big of a deal that we waste moment by moment, the only moment that we

have a look around for opportunities. Want what you're going through, because if you start wanting what you're going through, you start living. And as long as you're fighting, battling, and hating your current situation, the current place you're in, then you're not living. And if you never start living, you will nevertheless die without ever having lived. All right, so these are just a couple of things I would like you to think about. It's one of the biggest keys to happiness, and it's also one of the biggest keys to understanding every thought, every school of thought that has ever existed, including religions, philosophies, everyone who is after in terms of, again, a school of thought or religion, everyone who is after the truth in an objective and open-minded way, comes to these ideas. And that's why we call them universal and timeless, and we find them everywhere. So I would recommend you to read Master eart if you sort of want to dive into that. If you're a Christian, certainly you should, but even if you're

not maybe you want to see how these timeless and universal ideas, regardless of religion, regardless of school of thought, regardless of who the person is, if they are that kind of person who is looking for meaning in life, nevertheless comes to the same ideas. It's very interesting, all right. And then I also have a little bit of an announcement for those who are still watching at the end of this video. Um, I thought it'd be maybe fun to do a live stream, um, answer some questions, just have a chat live and um, in that live stream, I think I'm also going to have an announcement or two for you about the future of the work we want to do here, of the work that we can do here possibly, and that um, some maybe bigger things are coming and uh, it also just give me an opportunity to or us an opportunity to reflect together of the sort of journey we've been on, right? Um, a lot of people have joined. I'm sort of I'm a little bit amazed at at how many there are now in

terms of subscribers, and so we'll just have a little chat, have a couple announcements, answer a couple of questions, and just have a good time. I'm thinking I'll still announce this in a community post, but I'm thinking Sunday at 11 a.m. Central Time might be a good time to do it, but I'll still announce it. Look out for that, and I hope we'll have a good time, and I'll see you then.

You struggle because you want to

You struggle because you want to