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by Eckhart Tolle
Naming and labeling are habitual, but that habit can be broken. Start practising “not naming” with small things. If you miss the plane, drop and break a cup, or slip and fall in the mud, can you refrain from naming the experience as bad or painful? Can you immediately accept the “isness” of that moment?
Naming something as bad causes an emotional contraction within you. When you let it be, without naming it, enormous power is suddenly available to you.
The contraction cuts you off from that power, the power of life itself.
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They ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Go beyond good and bad by refraining from mentally labeling anything as good or bad. When you go beyond the habitual naming, the power of the universe moves through you. When you are in a nonreactive relationship to experiences, what you would have called “bad” before often turns around quickly, if not immediately, through the power of life itself.
Watch what happens when you don’t name an experience as “bad” and instead bring an inner acceptance, an inner “yes” to it, and so let it be as it is.
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Whatever your life situation is, how would you feel if you completely accepted it as it is - right Now?
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There are many subtle and not so subtle forms of suffering that are so “normal” they are usually not recognized as suffering and may even feel satisfying to the ego - irritation, impatience, anger, having an issue with something or someone, resentment, complaining.
You can learn to recognize all those forms of suffering as they happen and know: at this moment, I am creating suffering for myself.
If you are in the habit of creating suffering for yourself, you are probably creating suffering for others too. These unconscious mind patterns tend to come to an end simply by making them conscious, by becoming aware of them as they happen.
You cannot be conscious and create suffering for yourself.
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This is the miracle: behind every condition, person, or situation that appears “bad” or “evil” lies concealed a deeper good. That deeper good reveals itself to you - both within and without - through inner acceptance of what is.
“Resist not evil” is one of the highest truths of humanity.
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A dialogue:
Accept what is.
I truly cannot. I’m agitated and angry about this.
Then accept what is.
Accept that I’m agitated and angry? Accept that I cannot accept?
Yes. Bring acceptance into your nonacceptance. Bring surrender into your nonsurrender. Then see what happens.
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Chronic physical pain is one of the harshest teachers you can have. “Resistance is futile” is its teaching.
Nothing could be more normal than an unwillingness to suffer. Yet if you can let go of that unwillingness, and instead allow the pain to be there, you may notice a subtle inner separation from the pain, a space between you and the pain, as it were. This means to suffer consciously, willingly. When you suffer consciously, physical pain can quickly burn up the ego in you, since ego consists largely of resistance. The same is true of extreme physical disability.
You “offer up your suffering to God” is another way of saying this.
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You don’t need to be a Christian to understand the deep universal truth that is contained in symbolic form in the image of the cross.
The cross is a torture instrument. It stands for the most extreme suffering, limitation and helplessness a human being can encounter. Then suddenly that human being surrenders, suffers willingly, consciously, expressed through the words, “Not my will but Thy will be done.” At that moment, the cross, the torture instrument, shows its hidden face: it is also a sacred symbol, a symbol for the divine.
That which seemed to deny the existence of any transcendental dimension to life, through surrender becomes an opening into that dimension.
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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
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