NOW THOUGHTS ON ECKHART TOLLE’S ‘THE POWER OF NOW’ PART 2

So how do you know when you have a Shadow part that contributes to your pain body and keeps you out of the Now moment?

And how do you re-own it?

Just allowing a disowned part to speak, to express itself, allows you to re-own that aspect of yourself. This heals the pain body and also allows that aspect of you to mature.

Healing the pain body, by the way, might be seen as taking some aspect of life around which you have been playing a particularly serious Game Of Black and White and create a continuing war between two imaginary enemies. When you heal a Shadow aspect of yourself by re-owning it, you stop making it wrong, and in doing so, drain the Ego of some of its power.

In a process I learned a long time ago - Genpo Roshi's 'Big Mind Process', if anger is a disowned voice, you would speak 'from' the voice of anger.

When you do this, you are not the entire Self anymore, you are just that one voice, in this case, the voice of anger.

This is usually done with a facilitator, however you can do it by yourself.

It might do like this: (example only)

"I am John's anger. My job is to be angry. I am angry because other people do not notice me. They do not realise what I can contribute and I feel angry that I get left out because people do not see my value.

I am also angry that people don't care what I am feeling and that they don't help me when I need help.

I am angry that I have to work in a lousy, low paying job and that other people have more money than I have.

And I am angry (the voice of anger) that I have been pushed down into the basement, and that I haven't been allowed to speak. It feels good to finally express myself"

Of course, there may be a lot more. Just allowing a disowned voice to speak creates tremendous positive change. It stops the covert expression of that voice and it stops you from being triggered by expressions of voice you see outside yourself.

It won't stop angry people from existing, but it will stop you from attracting them into your life, because speaking from the voice of anger will heal that part of the pain body.

As a result, you will stop attracting people who ALSO have angry pain bodies.

Of course, I am just using anger as an example.

Anything that triggers you over and over in other people is a Shadow, whether it is something negative or positive and speaking from the voice of that shadow part is a fantastic way to heal the part of the pain body represented by that voice in you.

There will still be angry people in the world and you will still notice them but you will stop attracting them.

You will finally ‘retire’ from the Game Of Black and White.

Another way of dealing with Shadow and the pain body is the "3-2-1 Process" developed by Diane Hamilton.

"3-2-1" refers to the fact that you first approach the disowned part through a third person "it" perspective, then through a second person "you" perspective and finally through a first person "I" perspective.

In doing this, you fully own the disowned Shadow part and heal that part of the pain body.

In the process of re-owning it, it moves from "it," to "you," and finally to "me."

When you've identified something that has a strong and repeated emotional charge for you, some particular thing or some kind of person that repeatedly bugs you, you face that person or situation in your imagination and describe that person or situation and what bothers you about it (or, what attracts you to it, if it's a positive quality you've disowned).

This is the 3rd-person part of the process, where you treat the disowned aspect as "it." YoU might say, "I really  "I really can't stand angry people. They really piss me off. They also scare me. When I see people like this I just want to give them a good belting. Something really should be done about angry people."

And so on. You express the way you feel about "it."

The second step is to speak from a 2nd-person perspective. 

Again in your imagination, you talk directly to the person or situation, or ask it questions. "Who are you? What do you want? Where do you come from? What do you need to tell me? What gifts are you bringing me?"

You could also tell it what you think about it. Then you let the disturbing person or situation respond to you, again, in your imagination.

This is the 2nd-person part of the process, where you treat the disowned Shadow part as "you." You might say, "You really piss me off. When I see someone like you, it makes me sick. I want to punch you. You're ruining my day."

Then you might get into the questions. "What do you want? What do you have to say to me? What gift or lesson do you have for me?" And, after each question, listen for and express the answer.

The third step is to be the disowned Shadow part, by speaking (or writing, since you could also do this in writing) from a 1st-person perspective. You become the disowned Shadow part and you see and speak from the perspective you've disowned, just as you did when speaking from the voice of the disowned part, as in The Big Mind process.

It might not seem as if this would actually create much of a change, but when you do this you'll find that it's very powerful. Both processes heal the pain body, in addition to getting rid of all kinds of emotional pain, making it much easier to access and live in the Now, which means to experience the presence Tolle talks about - the transcendent.

These Shadow aspects, these disowned parts of yourself, are powerful ego forces pulling you out of the Now moment and back into the ego.

You can see that Shadow aspects of yourself, or what Tolle calls your pain body, are parts of reality around which you're playing a hard version of the Game of Black and White, which strengthens the ego, causes you pain and suffering, and pulls you out of the presence, out of the Now moment.

Eckhart Tolle talks a lot about the future and the past, so let me relate what I've said so far to the whole idea of the Now and the problem of the future and the past.

You'll remember Tolle saying that much suffering is caused by being in the past or the future instead of being in the Now. 

For example, we may regret or feel guilty about something in the past, on one hand, or hope for something better or fear something worse in the future. Notice that when you feel regret about the past, or when you feel pain from the past by pulling traumatic memories and the associated feelings into the Now, you're once again playing the Game of Black and White.

Something in the past is part of your "undesirable pile," and you're actively resisting it.

Except what you're resisting isn't even happening! It's over!

In fact, it's just a memory - and a memory is really just an idea about something that happened, but not the thing itself. It's a phantom, a fantasy. 

Not only do you want what you think is good to triumph over something else you think of as bad, you somehow want to go back in time to do it, which is impossible!

I hope you can see that this suffering is totally created by your mind, your ego, and serves no purpose - other than to possibly motivate you to wake up.

On the other hand you could be way off in the future, where you have two choices: you could fear that something from your Black pile is going to happen, or you could be hoping that something from your White pile will happen.

Once again, you're playing the Game of Black and White which, as I've said, creates suffering, keeps you from being in the present moment - which is the only place your life can really happen - and is also unwinnable anyway.

Also, as was the case when you go into the past, you're playing the Game of Black and White with something that doesn't even exist, and may never exist. In the Now there's no Game of Black and White. In fact, it's perfectly clear in the Now moment that all those distinctions and divisions into desirable and undesirable are just ideas. It's not that you can't make those distinctions in the Now moment. If you couldn't, Eckhart Tolle wouldn't be able to tell the difference between his pants and his shirt, and he might leave home looking somewhat silly.

But in the Now moment, you clearly see how everything goes together, and the big battle that goes on outside of the Now moment, that hard version of the Game of Black and White I've been talking about, doesn't happen.

So what can you do in the Now moment? In any particular Now moment, you certainly can have preferences. If you do have a preference, it is either something you can do something about, in which case you can act.

Or, it's something you cannot do something about in which case your only two choices are to surrender to what is OR resist it.

Resisting it is just another way of playing the Game Of Black and White.

I hope by now you see this is a losing proposition.

Actually, surrendering to ‘what is’ is very easy, IF you can stay in the Now moment.

In fact, in the Now moment surrender happens automatically. So the challenge is really how to get into the Now moment and stay there. 

Or, you could say, the challenge is to stay out of the future and the past, to stop identifying with the world of ideas - which automatically takes you to the world of Reality, the transcendent, the presence.

Eckhart Tolle describes a number of ways to get into the Now, but staying there is the real challenge. Once you can learn to say in the Now, there's no temptation to resist what is or play the Game of Black and White.

In fact, as Tolle has said, when you're in the Now moment, it's easy to know what to do - or to know if it's more resourceful to not do anything.

What I've found in my own experience is that when you're in the Now, the presence, the transcendent, you tap into an infinite part of yourself that Knows. 

Anyone can do this, but you do have to be present, in the Now moment, in order to do it. This part of you, once you become still and present, is able to take in all the infinite variables happening in each moment, instantly evaluate them, and know exactly how to respond. And, you can do this, moment by moment, effortlessly. When you're in the Now you don't need to analyse what is happening or use the ego to make decisions, because it's as if The Universe makes them for you, or rather, through you.

When Tolle is answering questions, in his books or in response to a question, one may wonder how he seems to know just what to say. One might marvel at the wisdom of some of his answers.

The reason his answers are wise and spontaneous is because he's tapping into that place I'm talking about. The answers are coming through him, not from him.

I want you to know that you can do the same. 

It isn't that difficult once you realise the futility of living through the ego - in other words, living by playing a serious version of the Game of Black and White.

It also means dealing with your Shadow aspects, which is just another name for healing the pain body, so it loses the ability to pull you out of the Now moment. It also means learning to quiet your mind and to stop confusing your ideas about Reality, and especially your ideas about yourself, with the real you and the real world.

So how do you do that?

There are two main ways this happens.

The first is the way it happened for Eckhart Tolle. From a place of tremendous suffering and misery, he surrendered. He let go of trying to control the world through his ego. 

However, most people do not do this.

This is where I have come to believe (for those with a personality like mine) that it is absolutely critical to get the 12 steps into our lives, stick around older sober members and do 12 step work.

Spontaneous awakening is rare.

Most people in a situation of similar suffering increase their resistance, which means they increase the intensity of their personal Game of Black and White. If you play hard enough, you eventually end up killing yourself in one way or another, through a stress induced illness, a fatal accident, or in some other way, let say for example by doing what I did, knowing I was an alcoholic, yet continued to drink.

Tolle, however, for whatever reason, surrendered, and in that surrender he suddenly found himself in the transcendent, in the Now.

Most people in a situation of similar suffering increase their resistance, which means they increase the intensity of their personal Game of Black and White.

You might think that you could decide to surrender right now, but unfortunately, surrender isn't really something you can decide to do.

Why?

Because the 'doer', in this case, is the ego. In fact, the whole idea of there being a separate you, a separate ego, who can surrender, or do anything else, for that matter, is an illusion.

I know this flies in the face of common sense, but nevertheless it's true.

This is why I described the bee and the flower and all the rest. I'm making the point that there is no separate you, that this is just a way of thinking. And, when I say that it's just a way of thinking I'm really saying that it's coming from the ego.

So there's no separate you that could decide to surrender. Surrender is really a realisation that there is no separate you, so who would surrender? And the ego is just  an idea, your idea of who you are, and an idea can't do anything.

In reality, the universe as a whole is the only doer, and it just looks like there's a separate you who goes around doing things to and with other separate things.

This is the illusion that Eckhart Tolle, and many other teachers, are trying to dispel.

It doesn't seem as if you could get by without this sense of being a separate self, but I promise you that life actually works much better without it. And, in fact, you don't have to totally get rid of it so much as know that it's just an idea, a way of thinking. In this awakened way of living, you have a separate self - in other words, you have an idea of who you are, a map of who you are - but you don't think that's who you are.

At any rate, you can't decide to surrender, because surrendering is something that happens, not something you can do. You might be lucky enough to have surrender happen, as happened to Eckhart Tolle, but I wouldn't count on it. 

This, by the way, is what is called "grace" in spiritual literature.

This leaves you with the other method, if you want to call it that. The other way to move toward the ability to be in ‘the transcendent’ all the time is to have some sort of daily practice that quiets the mind and gives you distance from it. So you more and more are the mind, the ego, rather than identifying with it.

And, at the same time, you need a daily practice that allows you to heal the pain body, or, you might say, re- own your disowned Shadow elements.

As I've said, your Shadow pulls you out of the Now. Or, you could say that Shadow elements are a way of playing a hard version of the Game of Black and White.

I've already described how to deal with the Shadow, and I'd suggest that you either get involved with Genpo Roshi's "The Big Mind Process" as it's a very potent way to work with the Shadow. Or step into Diane Hamilton's 3-2-1 Process, another powerful way to deal with your Shadow.

Once you learn that process, or learn how to speak from Shadow voices you can begin to notice when something or someone bugs you - and therefore is one of your Shadow aspects - and deal with it using one of these methods.

I would suggest that you have a regular scheduled time to do these things, so that you work on this regularly.

Otherwise you risk doing it here and there for a short while and then gradually losing interest and going back to your old living habits. Shifting the way you live so that you more and more live in the Now moment, and

I mean really doing so in your bones - is going to take a little bit of discipline, and part of that is having a practice that becomes a regular part of your day.

Believe me, it WILL be worth it.

The second thing you need is a way to quiet your mind, so it stops jumping back into the past or out into the future - in other words, so you can stay in the Now moment for longer and longer periods of time, and eventually stay there all the time.

When the mind is run, run, running all the time, as it is for most people, it's easy to identify with your mind, to identify with your idea of who you are - which is really what your ego is. When your mind becomes quiet, you clearly see who you really are.

And, you begin to see that what you thought was you, isn't you.

As this happens, being in the Now, in the transcendent, becomes effortless. You may have marvelled at how effortlessly Eckhart Tolle seems to stay in the awakened state.

You can do this, too, but to do so you'll have to quiet your mind. Once you do, your mind becomes your servant rather than being your master.

And, the best way I know of to do this is meditation.

Meditation is a way of setting aside a certain amount of time where you purposely go into the transcendent, into the Now moment.

And, just like practicing the piano or the guitar, the more you do it the better you get at it.

Again, unless you have a regular practice of doing this, you'll probably play around with it for a while, but very likely drift back into your old life habits after a while because you won't see significant results. If you set aside a time each day to practice, though, you will get better and better at it.

Over the years and after much to and fro, practicing many and varied, different methodologies, I’ve found my preference for meditation is a sound technology called Holosync. You may have heard of it, even are using it, however, I'd like to tell you a bit more about it, how it works, and how it can dramatically accelerate your ability to live in the Now.

As you may know if you've ever meditated, traditional meditation can be difficult, especially in the beginning. And, it can take a while before you see any real results.

Sadly, many people quit long before they see results.

Holosync is different. It takes you into extremely deep meditation the first and every time. It takes you right to that transcendent Now moment and allows you to remain there.

Here's how it works.

Since the 1970's scientists have known what brain waves advanced meditators are creating during meditation. In the mid-1980s, Bill Harris, the creator of Holosync, happened to find a somewhat obscure paper in Scientific American by a researcher at Mt. Sinai Medical Centre in New York that described how precise combinations of what are called sine wave tones, delivered to the brain through stereo headphones, can create any brain wave pattern in a listener. There are brainwave patterns associated with creativity, super learning, sleep, anxiety, fear, joy, enthusiasm, and many other states, including meditation.

As a long-time meditator, he was most interested in meditation. What happened and how well it worked was beyond his wildest dreams.

Holosync is a way to create deep meditation quickly and easily, just by listening to a mp3 with stereo headphones.

As you use it, you very quickly develop the ability to quiet your mind, to quiet the ego.

As this happens, the transcendent, the Now, becomes more and more obvious. Remember that the ego - which is really just your idea of who you are - is really just a kind of curtain that obscures your real self, your real life, from view.

Meditation, and especially Holosync meditation, dissolves that curtain. As it dissolves, you instantly and automatically find yourself in the Now, in the transcendent.

Holosync also heals the pain body, one of the most insidious aspects of the ego. One of the main comments heard from users is that all kinds of emotional problems fall away as they use it.

Problems with anxiety, depression, fear, anger, drug and alcohol problems, food issues, and all kinds of emotional dysfunctions, just fall away.

And, as the mind quiets, your ability to be in the world in an effective way increases. Your mind, since it isn't busy churning about the past and the future or playing the Game of Black and White becomes a laser beam of clarity.

You might remember Eckhart Tolle saying in The Power of Now that whatever problem you seem to have in any given moment, there are just two possibilities.

Either you can do something about whatever is happening, or you can't.

Those who've used Holosync find that in that moment they easily intuit what can be done, if anything, in which case they do it. Or, if nothing can be done, they more easily surrender.

Holosync certainly isn't the only way to have a daily practice that helps you to be in the transcendent Now moment and live from the place Eckhart Tolle is talking about. However, I've found it to be a very easy and powerful method.

My main point is that to really embody what Eckhart Tolle and the other teachers are saying, you're going to need some sort of daily practice. A hit and miss approach just won't cut it though. Daily practice doesn't need to be a chore. It can be fun. 

I won't kid you, though. You will meet aspects of your ego along the way, because it will fight to stay in control.

But whatever you do, do create a practice for yourself. As with anything else, the more you practice the better you become. It used to be that what Eckhart Tolle and other teachers have said was esoteric, secret, handed down one-on-one to a select few. 

Now this information is available to anyone who's interested - as perhaps you've shown that you are by reading The Power of Now and A New Earth.

The world is waking up, and God knows it needs to. You can live from an awakened perspective.

There is a price to pay to do so, but it's a joyful price and the rewards are infinitely huge.

Finally, let's look at what Eckhart Tolle refers to as your purpose. Many people I listen to and have been around say that they don't know what their purpose in life should be.

They feel they should be doing something "significant" with their life, but as far as they're concerned, they aren't. 

Tolle puts a different spin on the idea of purpose, which I tend to agree with. The type of purpose most people are seeking is an egoic purpose-in other words, the ego wants to do something that it considers to be "important," by its standards.

Tolle describes your purpose as whatever you are doing in the present moment. 

Most people are unsatisfied by this. 

How could whatever you are doing in the moment be considered a "purpose"?? 

What if you're buttering some toast, or putting on your socks?

The only way to discover what Tolle means by this is to live in the Now, in the presence, in the transcendent.

When you live from that place, you discover that, truly, whatever you are doing is your purpose. First of all, when you live in the Now moment you'll know exactly what needs to be done in that moment and exactly how to do it - including doing nothing, if that is the most resourceful, most "present" thing to do. And, the doing will happen spontaneously. When you look out into the future for a purpose, you cannot be in the Now moment, so a futurised purpose is, by definition, ‘of the ego’.

You can have such a purpose, of course, and there's nothing wrong with doing that. If you do that, you are playing that you are a separate agent, and pretending that there is somewhere to go and something to get.

I have such a purpose in the sense that I am building an extraordinary community of like minded individuals  and teaching many people how extraordinary they are.

But the fruits of an outer purpose, as Tolle calls it, are always destroyed by time. 

My businesses had a beginning and will have an end. 

On the other hand, what Tolle calls an “inner purpose”, where he means being totally present to whatever is happening Now, is eternal, and always leads to peace, because Now is eternal, and can never be destroyed or harmed.

I mentioned earlier that one of the most fundamental principles of this universe is relativity. Everything exists in relation to everything else, and everything depends upon everything else. Everything goes together. All supposed opposites are really one thing. They arise together and each side of the polarity depends upon the other side.

For this reason, the idea that there is a victory to be won or an end to be attained - that this must win out over that, or getting must win out over not getting - is just an illusion. What looks to most people to be a conflict between this and that is an illusion of the mind, an illusion of the ego, created by the false idea that White Must Win. It's as if you had a knitting needle in each hand, and you had a fight between one hand and the other, where you really tried to get each hand to win.

I certainly realise that this flies in the face of what everyone thinks of as common sense, because we're all trying to get somewhere, to achieve something, to make this happen instead of that. This is, as I've described, the Game of Black and White, and we've all been playing for so long that we've really bought into the premise that White MUST Win.

As subversive as this sounds, I'm really saying that there is no purpose to life, at least in the sense that most people mean it.

“Having a purpose” really means that there is something to be attained, somewhere to go, or some victory to be won. When you are in the Now, you see that this clearly is not true, and you can easily find this out for yourself. 

Every end, as the word "end" itself implies, is an extreme, an opposite, and exists only in relation to its other end.

I hope I've demonstrated that the idea that one end could, or should, "win" over the other end is an illusion, and the source of your suffering. 

The truth is that in life there is no goal to be attained. As soon as a goal is conceived, it becomes impossible to be in the present moment.

Once that happens, you begin to feel frustrated by life because now you are outside of life instead of being your life. 

As paradoxical as it may seem, what we think of as a purposeful life actually has no point. It hurries to get somewhere, and in doing so misses life, misses Now, misses everything. 

In not hurrying to get somewhere, the 'purposeless' life, however, misses nothing. 

It's only when there's no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world, and when that happens you are fully alive.

This might sound as if I'm telling you not to do anything.

Not at all!

I'm really asking you the question, "Who is doing something?"

The truth is that when you're in the presence, in the transcendent, in the Now moment - when you're awake - doing happens, but without a separate doer.

When you live from that place, you discover that, truly, whatever you are doing is your "purpose".

Ends are achieved and things happen, but not in the supposedly purposeful way you may have always thought of.

Without a supposed purpose, without a goal, you'll still go to work, you'll still eat, sleep, go on a holiday, start a company, plan for retirement, watch the footy , whatever it is you usually do. The only difference is that no separate you is doing any of this. 

The universe as a whole is doing it. 

There never was a separate you to do anything.

When you're present in this way everything takes care of itself, and from the outside everything looks the same.

As Jesus said, "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They toil not, neither do they spin. And yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." From the point of view of the ego, the idea that everything happens by itself seems ridiculous, perhaps even dangerous.

When you're established in the transcendent, however - when you live from an awakened perspective - you instantly see the profound truth of these words. 

Do the lilies have a purpose, in the sense that they're trying to grow, or trying to be beautiful? No, all of this happens by itself. It seems like some “separate you” needs to do something, but the message here, as weird as it sounds, is that this is an illusion.

In Zen they say something very similar: "The grass grows by itself, and the flowers flower."

In reality, everything happens by itself, though from the point of view of the ego it doesn't seem so. But the same part of you that grows your hair or beats your heart also does everything else, including those things that seem to be individual choices. It only seems as if some separate "you" does anything. When you live in the Now moment, this is obvious.

When you're in the Now moment, actions still happen, but it's clear that these are actually the actions of the entire universe, the Oneness, the transcendent, or whatever you want to call it.

They are not the actions of a separate you, a separate ego. That is an illusion created by the mind, the ego. What a relief to discover that the grass grows by itself, as does life.

When Eckhart Tolle tells you that your purpose is whatever you are doing in that moment, this is what he means. The whole idea of an “egoic purpose”, the whole idea that there is something to win, or somewhere to go, some place to arrive at, causes you to miss the moment, to miss the journey.

The truth is that life has no goal.

As Alan Watts once said, "it is a travelling without point, with nowhere to go. To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead."

The point of life, then, is the travelling, in the same way that the fun and the joy of travel is not so much in arriving as in the surprises that happen on the journey.

When in doubt, being in the Now moment always provides a solution. In fact, if you're in the Now, there are no doubts, and no problems that require a solution.

Life only seems like a problem to be solved when you see it from the perspective of the ego. Instead, see life from the Now, which means you watch. Watching places you squarely in the Now, in the presence. Watch your body. Notice its movements. Notice its feelings and sensations. Watch your emotions. Watch your thoughts and your mental pictures. 

This watching is the transcendent and from that silent place you'll see that everything flows along in a perfect way.

As the Sixth Patriarch of Zen said,

"In this moment there is nothing which comes to be. In this moment there is nothing which ceases to be. Thus there is no birth - and death - to be brought to an end.

Wherefore the absolute tranquility of nirvana is this present moment. Though it is at this moment, there is no limit to this moment, and herein is eternal delight."

I hope you've enjoyed this writing, and I look forward to the possibility of helping you in your awakening process, if that's what happens.

Blessed Be.