|
by Eckhart Tolle
The interconnectedness of all things: Buddhists have always known it, and physicists now confirm it. Nothing that happens is an isolated event; it only appears to be. The more we judge and label it, the more we isolate it. The wholeness of life becomes fragmented through our thinking. Yet the totality of life has brought this event about. It is part of the web of interconnectedness that is the cosmos.
This means: whatever is could not be otherwise.
In most cases, we cannot begin to understand what role a seemingly senseless event may have within the totality of the cosmos, but recognizing its inevitability within the vastness of the whole can be the beginning of an inner acceptance of what is and thus a realignment with the wholeness of life.
~
True freedom and the end of suffering is living in such a way as if you had completely chosen whatever you feel or experience at this moment.
This inner alignment with Now is the end of suffering.
Is suffering really necessary? Yes and no.
If you had not suffered as you have, there would be no depth to you as a human being, no humility, no compassion. You would not be reading this now. Suffering cracks open the shell of ego, and then comes a point when it has served its purpose.
Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary.
~
Unhappiness needs a mind-made “me” with a story, a conceptual identity. It needs time - past and future. When you remove time from your unhappiness, what is it that remains? The “suchness” of this moment remains.
It may be a feeling of heaviness, agitation, tightness, anger, or even nausea. That is not unhappiness, and it is not a personal problem. There is nothing personal in human pain. It is simply an intense pressure or intense energy that you feel somewhere in the body. By giving it attention, the feeling doesn’t turn into thinking and thus reactivate the unhappy “me.”
See what happens when you just allow a feeling to be.
~
Much suffering, much unhappiness arises when you take each thought that comes into your head for the truth. Situations don’t make you unhappy. They may cause you physical pain, but they don’t make you unhappy. Your thoughts make you unhappy. Your interpretations, the stories you tell yourself make you unhappy.
“The thoughts I am thinking right now are making me unhappy.” This realization breaks your unconscious identification with those thoughts.
~
What a miserable day.
He didn’t have the decency to return my call.
She let me down.
Little stories we tell ourselves and others, often in the form of complaints. They are unconsciously designed to enhance our always deficient sense of self through being “right” and making something or someone “wrong.” Being “right” places us in a position of imagined superiority and so strengthens our false sense of self, the ego. This also creates some kind of enemy: yes, the ego needs enemies to define its boundary, and even the weather can serve that function.
Through habitual mental judgment and emotional contraction, you have a personalized, reactive relationship to people and events in your life. These are all forms of self-created suffering, but they are not recognized as such because to the ego they are satisfying. The ego enhances itself through reactivity and conflict.
How simple life would be without those stories.
It is raining.
He did not call.
I was there. She was not.
~
When you are suffering, when you are unhappy, stay totally with what is Now. Unhappiness or problems cannot survive in the Now.
~
Suffering begins when you mentally name or label a situation in some way as undesirable or bad. You resent a situation and that resentment personalizes it and brings in a reactive “me.”
Excerpted from Stillness Speaks, by Eckhart Tolle, $17 hardcover.
Published by New World Library, toll free 1-800-972-6657 Ext. 52
www.newworldlibrary.com
 Top |
|
