The Power of Now Part 1 of 5: You are Not Your Mind
January 26, 2009 by dr. lam · 9 Comments
I really enjoyed Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. I envision the book as a refinement to many of the ideas that I have been covering over the past few weeks to months, and I have achieved a much more profound self-awareness after reading it. As a reminder to my faithful readers, I am not interested in recounting the entire book but just select passages that have had personal resonance for me and for my own personal journey toward a more enlightened and pain-free existence.
His first chapter, “You are Not Your Mind”, addresses many of the concepts that were discussed by Ruiz in his books on Toltec wisdom, which I did not cover as explicitly in the past two weeks so this should be a great addition to some of the overall concepts from Ruiz but in my opinion even better articulated. Tolle says that our egoic mind is in a state of constant buzz. We are always focused on thinking in an incessant manner so that we drown out our own experience of the present, the only time that in fact we can enjoy and the only time that really matters. We look at our past and configure ourselves in relationship to it, thinking that we are a product of our past. In essence, we make the past alive and fail to live in the moment. Or, we are so perturbed with the future and the anxiety over what may or may not be, that we are not truly alive, or conscious.
We must let go of our mind, the constant buzzing noise that goes off in our mind and experience our present moment. He talks about “watching the thinker” meaning to disengage ourselves from our constant thinking, our application of our egoic state. By putting ourselves almost as a third person looking at ourselves in the thinking mode, we start to achieve a level of deep consciousness that we would not otherwise have in the spiraling rattle of thoughts that plague our very existence.
He also talks about truly feeling the moment. Get into the feeling of one’s own breath, the typing that I am doing right now on my computer, my sense of the operatic music that envelops me as I write. We live so far in the past or the future that we cannot even begin to enjoy and relish the now, the only time that we can truly experience and enjoy. We must divorce ourselves from always thinking and thinking and thinking and worrying and worrying about the future and reflecting on our past. We must live in the rich tapestry of the moment that is right in front of us. We must feel the moment, the only time that truly matters in many ways.
By doing so, we achieve a profound inner peace and calm, an enlightened state of consciousness that is devoid of the travails of over analysis and a hyper state of the cycling mind. Instead, we become hyper acute of our surroundings and where we are currently and by doing so achieve a much happier and profoundly peaceful condition. Stop for a moment and ask yourself as you’re reading this are you aware of your surroundings? Do you hear everything around you? Feel it? Sense it? Try this and do you sense a much more profound equanimity and tranquility? Tomorrow we talk about ridding ourselves of pain.