Eckhart Tolle is recognized as one of the most
inspiring spiritual teachers of our time. His profound yet simple and practical teachings have helped thousands of people find inner peace,
healing and greater fulfillment in their lives. Tolle is not aligned with any particular religion or tradition, but excludes none, travels and
teaches throughout the world. At the core of his teachings lies the transformation of individual and collective human consciousness - a
global spiritual awakening.
Eckhart Tolle is the author of 'A New Earth' and 'The Power of Now', which has been widely
recognized as one of the most influential spiritual books of our time.. to see more of Eckhart's teachings visit www.eckharttolle.com
A beggar had been sitting by the side of a road for over thirty years. One day a stranger walked by. "Spare
some change?" mumbled the beggar, mechanically holding out his old baseball cap. "I have nothing to give you," said the stranger. Then he asked:
"What's that you are sitting on?" "Nothing," replied the beggar. "Just an old box. I have been sitting on it for as long as I can remember."
"Ever looked inside?" asked the stranger. "No," said the beggar. "What's the point? There's nothing in there." "Have a look inside," insisted the
stranger. The beggar managed to pry open the lid. With astonishment, disbelief, and elation, he saw that the box was filled with
gold.
I am that stranger who has nothing to give you and who is telling you to look inside. Not inside any box, as
in the parable, but somewhere even closer: inside yourself.
"But I am not a beggar," I can hear you say.
Those who have not found their true wealth, which is the radiant joy of Being and the deep, unshakable peace
that comes with it, are beggars, even if they have great material wealth. They are looking outside for scraps of pleasure or fulfillment, for
validation, security, or love, while they have a treasure within that not only includes all those things but is infinitely greater than anything
the world can offer.
The word enlightenment conjures up the idea of some
super-human accomplishment, and the ego likes to keep it that way, but it is simply your natural state of felt oneness with Being. It is a state
of connectedness with something immeasurable and indestructible, something that, almost paradoxically, is essentially you and yet is much greater
than you. It is finding your true nature beyond name and form. The inability to feel this connectedness gives rise to the illusion of separation,
from yourself and from the world around you. You then perceive yourself, consciously or unconsciously, as an isolated fragment. Fear arises, and
conflict within and without becomes the norm.
I love the Buddha's simple definition of enlightenment as "the end of suffering." There is nothing superhuman
in that, is there? Of course, as a definition, it is incomplete. It only tells you what enlightenment is not: no suffering. But what's left when
there is no more suffering? The Buddha is silent on that, and his silence implies that you'll have to find out for yourself. He uses a negative
definition so that the mind cannot make it into something to believe in or into a superhuman accomplishment, a goal that is impossible for you to
attain. Despite this precaution, the majority of Buddhists still believe that enlightenment is for the Buddha, not for them, at least not in this
lifetime.
You used the word Being. Can you explain what you mean by that?
Being is the eternal, ever-present One Life beyond the myriad forms of life that are subject to
birth and death. However, Being is not only beyond but also deep within every form as its innermost invisible and indestructible essence. This
means that it is accessible to you now as your own deepest self, your true nature. But don't seek to grasp it with your mind. Don't try to
understand it. You can know it only when the mind is still. When you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the Now, Being
can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally. To regain awareness of Being and to abide in that state of "feeling-realization" is
enlightenment.
When you say Being, are you talking about God? If you are, then why don't you say it?
The word God has become empty of meaning
through thousands of years of misuse. I use it sometimes, but I do so sparingly. By misuse, I mean that people who have never even glimpsed the
realm of the sacred, the infinite vastness behind that word, use it with great conviction, as if they knew what they are talking about. Or they
argue against it, as if they knew what it is that they are denying. This misuse gives rise to absurd beliefs, assertions, and egoic delusions,
such as "My or our God is the only true God, and your God is false," or Nietzsche's famous statement "God is dead."
The word God has become a closed concept. The moment the word is uttered, a mental image is
created, no longer, perhaps, of an old man with a white beard, but still a mental representation of someone or something outside you, and, yes,
almost inevitably a male someone or something.
Neither God nor Being nor any other word can define or explain the ineffable reality behind the
word, so the only important question is whether the word is a help or a hindrance in enabling you to experience That toward which it points. Does
it point beyond itself to that transcendental reality, or does it lend itself too easily to becoming no more than an idea in your head that you
believe in, a mental idol?
The word Being explains nothing, but nor does God. Being, however, has the advantage that it is
an open concept. It does not reduce the infinite invisible to a finite entity. It is impossible to form a mental image of it. Nobody can claim
exclusive possession of Being. It is your very essence, and it is immediately accessible to you as the feeling of your own presence, the
realization I am that is prior to I am this or I am that. So it is only a small step from the word Being to the experience of Being.
What is the greatest obstacle to experiencing this reality?
Identification with your mind, which causes thought to become compulsive. Not to be able to stop
thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don't realize this because almost everybody is suffering from it, so it is considered normal. This
incessant mental noise prevents you from finding that realm of inner stillness that is inseparable from Being. It also creates a false mind-made
self that casts a shadow of fear and suffering. We will look at all that in more detail later.
The philosopher Descartes believed that he had found the most fundamental truth when he made his
famous statement: "I think, therefore I am." He had, in fact, given expression to the most basic error: to equate thinking with Being and
identity with thinking. The compulsive thinker, which means almost everyone, lives in a state of apparent separateness, in an insanely complex
world of continuous problems and conflict, a world that reflects the ever-increasing fragmentation of the mind. Enlightenment is a state of
wholeness, of being "at one" and therefore at peace. At one with life in its manifested aspect, the world, as well as with your deepest self and
life unmanifested - at one with Being. Enlightenment is not only the end of suffering and of continuous conflict within and without, but also the
end of the dreadful enslavement to incessant thinking. What an incredible liberation this is!
Identification with your mind creates an opaque screen of concepts, labels, images, words,
judgments, and definitions that blocks all true relationship. It comes between you and yourself, between you and your fellow man and woman,
between you and nature, between you and God. It is this screen of thought that creates the illusion of separateness, the illusion that there is
you and a totally separate "other." You then forget the essential fact that, underneath the level of physical appearances and separate forms, you
are one with all that is. By "forget," I mean that you can no longer feel this oneness as self-evident reality. You may believe it to be true,
but you no longer know it to be true. A belief may be comforting. Only through your own experience, however, does it become
liberating.
Thinking has become a disease. Disease happens when things get out of balance. For example,
there is nothing wrong with cells dividing and multiplying in the body, but when this process continues in disregard of the total organism, cells
proliferate and we have disease.
Note: The mind is a superb instrument if used
rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly - you
usually don't use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken
you over.
I don't quite agree. It is true that I do a lot of aimless thinking, like most people, but I can
still choose to use my mind to get and accomplish things, and I do that all the time.
Just because you can solve a crossword puzzle or build an atom bomb doesn't mean that you use
your mind. Just as dogs love to chew bones, the mind loves to get its teeth into problems. That's why it does crossword puzzles and builds atom
bombs. You have no interest in either. Let me ask you this: can you be free of your mind whenever you want to? Have you found the "off"
button?
You mean stop thinking altogether? No, I can't, except maybe for a moment or two.
Then the mind is using you. You are unconsciously identified with it, so you don't even know
that you are its slave. It's almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself. The
beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity - the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity. The
moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of
intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter -
beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace - arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken,freeing yourself from your mind
What exactly do you mean by "watching the thinker"?
When someone goes to the doctor and says, "I hear a voice in my head," he or she will most
likely be sent to a psychiatrist. The fact is that, in a very similar way, virtually everyone hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all
the time: the involuntary thought processes that you don't realize you have the power to stop. Continuous monologues or dialogues.
You have probably come across "mad" people in the street incessantly talking or muttering to
themselves. Well, that's not much different from what you and all other "normal" people do, except that you don't do it out loud. The voice
comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes, and so on. The voice isn't necessarily relevant to the situation you find
yourself in at the time; it may be reviving the recent or distant past or rehearsing or imagining possible future situations. Here it often
imagines things going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry. Sometimes this soundtrack is accompanied by visual images or "mental
movies." Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to
your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and
judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person's own
worst enemy. Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is
the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease.
The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation.
You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive
thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by "watching the
thinker," which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence.
When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. Do not
judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. You'll soon realize: there
is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises
from beyond the mind.
So when you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of the thought but also of yourself as
the witness of the thought. A new dimension of consciousness has come in. As you listen to the thought, you feel a conscious presence - your
deeper self - behind or underneath the thought, as it were. The thought then loses its power over you and quickly subsides, because you are no
longer energizing the mind through identification with it. This is the beginning of the end of involuntary and compulsive thinking.When a thought
subsides, you experience a discontinuity in the mental stream - a gap of "no-mind." At first, the gaps will be short, a few seconds perhaps, but
gradually they will become longer. When these gaps occur, you feel a certain stillness and peace inside you. This is the beginning of your
natural state of felt oneness with Being, which is usually obscured by the mind. With practice, the sense of stillness and peace will deepen. In
fact, there is no end to its depth. You will also feel a subtle emanation of joy arising from deep within: the joy of Being.
It is not a trancelike state. Not at all.
There is no loss of consciousness here. The opposite is the case. If the price of peace were a lowering of your consciousness, and the price of
stillness a lack of vitality and alertness, then they would not be worth having. In this state of inner connectedness, you are much more alert,
more awake than in the mind-identified state. You are fully present. It also raises the vibrational frequency of the energy field that gives life
to the physical body.
As you go more deeply into this realm of no-mind, as it is sometimes called in the East, you
realize the state of pure consciousness. In that state, you feel your own presence with such intensity and such joy that all thinking, all
emotions, your physical body, as well as the whole external world become relatively insignificant in comparison to it. And yet this is not a
selfish but a selfless state. It takes you beyond what you previously thought of as "your self." That presence is essentially you and at the same
time inconceivably greater than you. What I am trying to convey here may sound paradoxical or even contradictory, but there is no other way that
I can express it.
Instead of "watching the thinker," you can also create a gap in the mind stream simply by
directing the focus of your attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to
do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not
thinking. This is the essence of meditation. In your everyday life, you can practice this by taking any routine activity that normally is only a
means to an end and giving it your fullest attention, so that it becomes an end in itself. For example, every time you walk up and down the
stairs in your house or place of work, pay close attention to every step, every movement, even your breathing. Be totally present. Or when you
wash your hands, pay attention to all the sense perceptions associated with the activity: the sound and feel of the water, the movement of your
hands, the scent of the soap, and so on. Or when you get into your car, after you close the door, pause for a few seconds and observe the flow of
your breath. Become aware of a silent but powerful sense of presence. There is one certain criterion by which you can measure your success in
this practice: the degree of peace that you feel within.
So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify
from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger. One day you may catch yourself
smiling at the voice in your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all
that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it.
Enlightenment: Rising above Thought
Isn't thinking essential in order to survive in this world?
Your mind is an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a specific task, and when the
task is completed, you lay it down. As it is, I would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless,
but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will find this to be true. It
causes a serious leakage of vital energy.
This kind of compulsive thinking is actually an addiction. What characterizes an addiction?
Quite simply this: you no longer feel that you have the choice to stop. It seems stronger than you. It also gives you a false sense of pleasure,
pleasure that invariably turns into pain.
Why should we be addicted to thinking?
Because you are identified with it, which means that you derive your sense of self from the
content and activity of your mind.
Because you believe that you would cease to be if you stopped thinking. As you grow up, you form
a mental image of who you are, based on your personal and cultural conditioning. We may call this phantom self the ego. It consists of mind
activity and can only be kept going through constant thinking. The term ego means different things to different people, but when I use it here it
means a false self, created by unconscious identification with the mind.
To the ego, the present moment hardly exists.
Only past and future are considered important. This total reversal of the truth accounts for the fact that in the ego mode the mind is so
dysfunctional. It is always concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it - who are you? It constantly projects itself into the
future to ensure its continued survival and to seek some kind of release or fulfillment there. It says: "One day, when this, that, or the other
happens, I am going to be okay, happy, at peace." Even when the ego seems to be concerned with the present, it is not the present that it sees:
It misperceives it completely because it looks at it through the eyes of the past. Or it reduces the present to a means to an end, an end that
always lies in the mind-projected future. Observe your mind and you'll see that this is how it works.
The present moment holds the key to liberation. But you cannot find the present moment as long
as you are your mind.
I don't want to lose my ability to analyze and discriminate. I wouldn't mind learning to think
more clearly, in a more focused way, but I don't want to lose my mind. The gift of thought is the most precious thing we have. Without it, we
would just be another species of animal.
The predominance of mind is no more than a stage in the evolution of consciousness. We need to
go on to the next stage now as a matter of urgency; otherwise, we will be destroyed by the mind, which has grown into a monster. I will talk
about this in more detail later. Thinking and consciousness are not synonymous. Thinking is only a small aspect of consciousness. Thought cannot
exist without consciousness, but consciousness does not need thought.
Enlightenment means rising above thought, not falling back to a level below thought, the level
of an animal or a plant. In the enlightened state, you still use your thinking mind when needed, but in a much more focused and effective way
than before. You use it mostly for practical purposes, but you are free of the involuntary internal dialogue, and there is inner stillness. When
you do use your mind, and particularly when a creative solution is needed, you oscillate every few minutes or so between thought and stillness,
between mind and no-mind. No-mind is consciousness without thought. Only in that way is it possible to think creatively, because only in that way
does thought have any real power. Thought alone, when it is no longer connected with the much vaster realm of consciousness, quickly becomes
barren, insane, destructive.
The mind is essentially a survival machine. Attack and defense against other minds, gathering,
storing, and analyzing information - this is what it is good at, but it is not at all creative. All true artists, whether they know it or not,
create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness. The mind then gives form to the creative impulse or insight. Even the great scientists have
reported that their creative breakthroughs came at a time of mental quietude. The surprising result of a nation-wide inquiry among America's most
eminent mathematicians, including Einstein, to find out their working methods, was that thinking "plays only a subordinate part in the brief,
decisive phase of the creative act itself."1 So I would say that the simple reason why the majority of scientists are not creative is not because
they don't know how to think but because they don't know how to stop thinking!
It wasn't through the mind, through thinking, that the miracle that is life on earth or your
body were created and are being sustained. There is clearly an intelligence at work that is far greater than the mind. How can a single human
cell measuring 1/1,000 of an inch across contain instructions within its DNA that would fill 1,000 books of 600 pages each? The more we learn
about the workings of the body, the more we realize just how vast is the intelligence at work within it and how little we know. When the mind
reconnects with that, it becomes a most wonderful tool. It then serves something greater than itself.
Emotion: The Body's Reaction to Your Mind
What about emotions? I get caught up in my emotions more than I do in my mind.
Mind, in the way I use the word, is not just thought. It includes your emotions as well as all
unconscious mental-emotional reactive patterns. Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. It is the body's reaction to your mind - or
you might say, a reflection of your mind in the body. For example, an attack thought or a hostile thought will create a build-up of energy in the
body that we call anger. The body is getting ready to fight. The thought that you are being threatened, physically or psychologically, causes the
body to contract, and this is the physical side of what we call fear. Research has shown that strong emotions even cause changes in the
biochemistry of the body. These biochemical changes represent the physical or material aspect of the emotion. Of course, you are not usually
conscious of all your thought patterns, and it is often only through watching your emotions that you can bring them into awareness.
The more you are identified with your thinking, your likes and dislikes, judgments and
interpretations, which is to say the less present you are as the watching consciousness, the stronger the emotional energy charge will be,
whether you are aware of it or not. If you cannot feel your emotions, if you are cut off from them, you will eventually experience them on a
purely physical level, as a physical problem or symptom. A great deal has been written about this in recent years, so we don't need to go into it
here. A strong unconscious emotional pattern may even manifest as an external event that appears to just happen to you. For example, I have
observed that people who carry a lot of anger inside without being aware of it and without expressing it are more likely to be attacked, verbally
or even physically, by other angry people, and often for no apparent reason. They have a strong emanation of anger that certain people pick up
subliminally and that triggers their own latent anger.
If you have difficulty feeling your emotions, start by focusing attention on the inner energy
field of your body. Feel the body from within. This will also put you in touch with your emotions. We will explore this in more detail
later.
You say that an emotion is the mind's reflection in the body. But sometimes there is a conflict
between the two: the mind says "no" while the emotion says "yes," or the other way around.
If you really want to know your mind, the body will always give you a truthful reflection, so
look at the emotion or rather feel it in your body. If there is an apparent conflict between them, the thought will be the lie, the emotion will
be the truth. Not the ultimate truth of who you are, but the relative truth of your state of mind at that time.
Conflict between surface thoughts and
unconscious mental processes is certainly common. You may not yet be able to bring your unconscious mind activity into awareness as thoughts, but
it will always be reflected in the body as an emotion, and of this you can become aware. To watch an emotion in this way is basically the same as
listening to or watching a thought, which I described earlier. The only difference is that, while a thought is in your head, an emotion has a
strong physical component and so is primarily felt in the body. You can then allow the emotion to be there without being controlled by it. You no
longer are the emotion; you are the watcher, the observing presence. If you practice this, all that is unconscious in you will be brought into
the light of consciousness.
So observing our emotions is as important as observing our thoughts?
Yes. Make it a habit to ask yourself: What's going on inside me at this moment? That question
will point you in the right direction. But don't analyze, just watch. Focus your attention within. Feel the energy of the emotion. If there is no
emotion present, take your attention more deeply into the inner energy field of your body. It is the doorway into Being.
An emotion usually represents an amplified and energized thought pattern, and because of its
often overpowering energetic charge, it is not easy initially to stay present enough to be able to watch it. It wants to take you over, and it
usually succeeds - unless there is enough presence in you. If you are pulled into unconscious identification with the emotion through lack of
presence, which is normal, the emotion temporarily becomes "you." Often a vicious circle builds up between your thinking and the emotion: they
feed each other. The thought pattern creates a magnified reflection of itself in the form of an emotion, and the vibrational frequency of the
emotion keeps feeding the original thought pattern. By dwelling mentally on the situation, event, or person that is the perceived cause of the
emotion, the thought feeds energy to the emotion, which in turn energizes the thought pattern, and so on. Basically, all emotions are
modifications of one primordial, undifferentiated emotion that has its origin in the loss of awareness of who you are beyond name and form.
Because of its undifferentiated nature, it is hard to find a name that precisely describes this emotion. "Fear" comes close, but apart from a
continuous sense of threat, it also includes a deep sense of abandonment and incompleteness. It may be best to use a term that is as
undifferentiated as that basic emotion and simply call it "pain." One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove that emotional pain,
which is one of the reasons for its incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily. In fact, the harder the mind
struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain. The mind can never find the solution, nor can it afford to allow you to find the
solution, because it is itself an intrinsic part of the "problem." Imagine a chief of police trying to find an arsonist when the arsonist is the
chief of police. You will not be free of that pain until you cease to derive your sense of self from identification with the mind, which is to
say from ego. The mind is then toppled from its place of power and Being reveals itself as your true nature. Yes, I know what you are going to
ask.
I was going to ask: What about positive emotions such as love and joy?
They are inseparable from your natural state of inner connectedness with Being. Glimpses of love
and joy or brief moments of deep peace are possible whenever a gap occurs in the stream of thought. For most people, such gaps happen rarely and
only accidentally, in moments when the mind is rendered "speechless," sometimes triggered by great beauty, extreme physical exertion, or even
great danger. Suddenly, there is inner stillness. And within that stillness there is a subtle but intense joy, there is love, there is
peace.
Usually, such moments are short-lived, as the mind quickly resumes its noise-making activity
that we call thinking. Love, joy, and peace cannot flourish until you have freed yourself from mind dominance. But they are not what I would call
emotions. They lie beyond the emotions, on a much deeper level. So you need to become fully conscious of your emotions and be able to feel them
before you can feel that which lies beyond them. Emotion literally means "disturbance." The word comes from the Latin emovere, meaning "to
disturb."
Love, joy, and peace are deep states of Being or rather three aspects of the state of inner
connectedness with Being. As such, they have no opposite. This is because they arise from beyond the mind. Emotions, on the other hand, being
part of the dualistic mind, are subject to the law of opposites. This simply means that you cannot have good without bad. So in the
unenlightened, mind-identified condition, what is sometimes wrongly called joy is the usually short-lived pleasure side of the continuously
alternating pain/pleasure cycle. Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within. The very thing that gives
you pleasure today will give you pain tomorrow, or it will leave you, so its absence will give you pain. And what is often referred to as love
may be pleasurable and exciting for a while, but it is an addictive clinging, an extremely needy condition that can turn into its opposite at the
flick of a switch. Many "love" relationships, after the initial euphoria has passed, actually oscillate between "love" and hate, attraction and
attack.
Real love doesn't make you suffer. How could it? It doesn't suddenly turn into hate, nor does
real joy turn into pain. As I said, even before you are enlightened - before you have freed yourself from your mind - you may get glimpses of
true joy, true love, or of a deep inner peace, still but vibrantly alive. These are aspects of your true nature, which is usually obscured by the
mind. Even within a "normal" addictive relationship, there can be moments when the presence of something more genuine, something incorruptible,
can be felt. But they will only be glimpses, soon to be covered up again through mind interference. It may then seem that you had something very
precious and lost it, or your mind may convince you that it was all an illusion anyway. The truth is that it wasn't an illusion, and you cannot
lose it. It is part of your natural state, which can be obscured but can never be destroyed by the mind. Even when the sky is heavily overcast,
the sun hasn't disappeared. It's still there on the other side of the clouds.
The Buddha says that pain or suffering arises through desire or craving and that to be free of
pain we need to cut the bonds of desire.
All cravings are the mind seeking salvation or fulfillment in external things and in the future
as a substitute for the joy of Being. As long as I am my mind, I am those cravings, those needs, wants, attachments, and aversions, and apart
from them there is no "I" except as a mere possibility, an unfulfilled potential, a seed that has not yet sprouted. In that state, even my desire
to become free or enlightened is just another craving for fulfillment or completion in the future. So don't seek to become free of desire or
"achieve" enlightenment. Become present. Be there as the observer of the mind. Instead of quoting the Buddha, be the Buddha, be "the awakened
one," which is what the word buddha means.
Humans have been in the grip of pain for eons, ever since they fell from the state of grace,
entered the realm of time and mind, and lost awareness of Being. At that point, they started to perceive themselves as meaningless fragments in
an alien universe, unconnected to the Source and to each other.
Pain is inevitable as long as you are identified with your mind, which is to say as long as you
are unconscious, spiritually speaking. I am talking here primarily of emotional pain, which is also the main cause of physical pain and physical
disease. Resentment, hatred, self-pity, guilt, anger, depression, jealousy, and so on, even the slightest irritation, are all forms of pain. And
every pleasure or emotional high contains within itself the seed of pain: its inseparable opposite, which will manifest in time.
Anybody who has ever taken drugs to get "high" will know that the high eventually turns into a
low, that the pleasure turns into some form of pain. Many people also know from their own experience how easily and quickly an intimate
relationship can turn from a source of pleasure to a source of pain. Seen from a higher perspective, both the negative and the positive
polarities are faces of the same coin, are both part of the underlying pain that is inseparable from the mind-identified egoic state of
consciousness.
There are two levels to your pain: the pain that you create now, and the pain from the past that
still lives on in your mind and body. Ceasing to create pain in the present and dissolving past pain - this is what I want to talk about
now.
