THE POWER OF NOW by Eckhart Tolle

How can we drop negativity? By dropping it. How do you drop a piece of hot coal that you are holding in your hand? How do you drop some heavy and useless baggage that you are carrying? By recognizing that you don’t want to suffer the pain or carry the burden anymore and letting go of it.
Deep unconsciousness, such as the pain-body, or other deep pain, such as the loss of a loved one, usually needs to be transmuted through acceptance combined with the light of your presence – your sustained attention. Many patterns in ordinary unconsciousness, on the other hand, can simply be dropped once you know that you don’t want or need them anymore, and once you realize that you have a choice, that you are not just a bundle of conditioned reflexes. All this implies that you are able to access the power of Now. Without it, you have no choice.
“If you call some emotions negative, aren’t you creating a mental polarity of good and bad?”
No. The polarity was created at an earlier stage when your mind judged the present moment as bad; this judgment then created the negative emotion.
“But if you call some emotions negative, aren’t you really saying that they shouldn’t be there, that it’s not okay to have those emotions? My understanding is that we should give ourselves permission to have whatever feelings come up, rather than judge them as bad or say that we shouldn’t have them.
Of course. Once a mind pattern, an emotion or a reaction, is there, accept it. You were not conscious enough to have a choice in the matter. That’s not a judgment, just a fact. If you had a choice, or realized you have a choice, would you choose suffering or joy, ease or unease, peace or conflict? Would you choose a thought or feeling that cuts you off from your natural state of well-being, the joy of life within?
How is it possible that humans killed in excess of 100 million fellow humans in the twentieth century alone? Humans inflicting pain of such magnitude on one another is beyond anything you can imagine. And that’s not taking into account the mental, emotional and physical violence, the torture, pain and cruelty they continue to inflict on each other as well as on other sentient beings on a daily basis.
Do they act this way because they are in touch with their natural state, the joy of life within? Of course not. Only people who are in a deeply negative state, who feel very bad indeed, would create such a reality as a reflection of how they feel. Now, they are engaged in destroying nature and the planet that sustains them. Unbelievable but true.
It is certainly true that when you accept your resentment, moodiness, anger and so on, you are no longer forced to act them out blindly, and you are less likely to project them onto others. But I wonder if you are not deceiving yourself. When you have been practising acceptance for a while, as you have, there comes a point when you need to go on to the next stage, where those negative emotions are not created anymore. If you don’t, your “acceptance” just becomes a mental label that allows your ego to continue to indulge in unhappiness and so strengthen its sense of separation from other people, your surroundings, your here and now.
As you know, separation is the basis for the ego’s sense of identity. True acceptance would transmute those feelings at once. You have an idea in your mind that everything is okay, but deep down you don’t really believe it so the old mental-emotional patterns of resistance are still in place. That’s what makes you feel bad. That’s OK, too.
Are you defending your right to be unconscious, your right to suffer? Don’t worry: Nobody is going to take that away from you. Once you realize that a certain kind of food makes you sick, would you carry on eating that food and keep asserting that it is OK to be sick?

Adapted from The Power of Now, copyright 1999 by Eckhart Tolle. Reprinted with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA, 800-972-6657 (ext. 52).