iamom | readings from The Power of Now (Reply)

Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now continues to blow my mind. I'm really enjoying it. Was reading from it to my mom today and it spawned some good discussion that was not centred on any specific philosophical interpretation, but rather on the underlying meaning of the traditions we've been studying for so long.

The section I just finished reading concerned emotions and what Tolle describes as pain-bodies. Pain-bodies are a way to describe the seeds of our emotional responses to various situations and such. As he says, if you consider pain-bodies to be entities in and of themselves, you are quite close to grasping the truth. Sometimes dormant, sometimes active, these pain-bodies may be relatively harmless or else capable of inspiring quite violent reactions in us; they are awakened to an active state when triggered by specific thoughts or events and then identified with too strongly by our own minds.

Watch out for any sign of unhappiness in yourself, in whatever form -- it may be the awakening pain-body. This can take the form of irritation, impatience, a somber mood, a desire to hurt, anger, rage, depression, a need to have some drama in your relationship, and so on. Catch it the moment it awakens from its dormant state. The pain-body wants to survive, just like every other entity in existence, and it can only survive if it gets you to unconsciously identify with it. It can then rise up, take you over, "become you," and live through you. It needs to get its "food" through you. It will feed on any experience that resonates with its own kind of energy, anything that creates further pain in whatever form: anger, destructiveness, hatred, grief, emotional drama, violence, and even illness. So the pain-body, when it has taken you over, will create a situation in your life that reflects back its own energy frequency for it to feed on. Pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy. It finds it quit indigestible.
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Unconsciousness creates [the pain-body]; consciousness transmutes it into itself... Trying to fight [the pain-body] would create inner conflict and thus further pain. Watching it is enough. Watching it implies accepting it as part of what is at that moment. The pain-body consists of trapped life-energy that has split off from your total energy field and has temporarily become autonomous through the unnatural process of mind identification.

He continues (page 33):

Let me summarize the process. Focus attention on the feeling inside you. Know that it is the pain-body. Accept that it is there. Don't think about it -- don't let the feeling turn into thinking. Don't judge or analyze. Don't make an identity for yourself out of it. Stay present, and continue to be the observer of what is happening inside you. Become aware not only of the emotional pain but also of "the one who observes," the silent watcher. This is the power of the Now, the power of your own conscious presence. Then see what happens.

What I love about this concept is how it so clearly objectifies our emotions. There's untold benefit to observing our emotions objectively and not identifying ourselves so strongly with them; so much of the pain and suffering in our own minds, and indeed our whole world, is caused by taking ourselves and our emotions too seriously. By adopting a more objective view of our emotions and developing our sense of the objective witness in general, we suddenly find ourselves free from the felt pain of those emotions, instead just living out the present moment according to whatever it may bring, exactly when and how it occurs.