|
As long as you are unable to access the power of the Now, every emotional pain that you experience leaves behind a residue of pain that lives on in you. It merges with the pain from the past, which was already there, and becomes lodged in your mind and body. This, of course, includes the pain you suffered as a child, caused by the unconsciousness of the world into which you were born.
This accumulated pain is a negative energy field that occupies your body and mind. If you look on it as an invisible entity in its own right, you are getting quite close to the truth. It's the emotional pain-body.
Eckhart Tolle, Practicing the Power of Now
Eckhart Tolle writes about the pain body.
Stylianos Atteshlis, a Christian mystic and healer known as The Magus of Strovolos, called them elementals--thought forms created by our feelings and our desires that take on a life of their own and feed off of our life experience.
Bill Wilson calls it, simply, alcoholism. A condition that can cause an individual to behave in ways he knows are harmful to himself and others, and over which he or she is powerless.
Vedic philosophy will speak of it as "the small 's' self," or as the ego. Individuality. Not as if it is other than what we are, but that if we are identified solely as this self, we will have an incomplete experience of life and may find ourselves at the mercy of unconscious urges, desires and reactions. In our practice of Vedic meditation we speak of this ego as being made up of the stresses stored in our body from every overwhelming reaction we've ever had in life. These stresses can cause us to feel almost incapable of having fresh experiences in the world, colored as our perceptions are by this weight of our history, and will tend to keep us chained to habitual behaviors.
In every case these divergent philosophies speak of this other thing within that can seem to have a life of its own, that consistently can cause us to act in ways we would not wish to act, and which actions then we justify through blame, shame and attack of ourself and/or others. There is the idea in each of these systems that, left to our own devices and routine unconsciousness, we are powerless at least some of the time to choose to behave differently.
Call it a pain body, elementals, alcoholism or small self, but unless we can find the way to be conscious in our daily life, we will find ourselves at the mercy of feelings, urges and ideas that will not fit into an idea of our highest self.
In our practice of meditation, twice each day we de-excite, allowing these stresses/pain bodies/elementals to dissolve from within our being. Then as they move through us, we feel the discomfort of them, we feel some version of the way they felt going in, and we simply remind ourselves they are not what we are. We are something different, something deeper. We get into the Now, into present moment awareness. We insist on seeing the opportunity for enjoyment within whatever circumstance we find ourselves.
Bill Wilson, in his book, Alcoholics Anonymous, writes,
We absolutely insist on enjoying life.
Stylianos Atteshlis says,
You don't have a soul; you are a soul.
Eckhart Tolle, again from Practicing the Power of Now, writes,
Enlightenment... is simply your natural state of felt oneness with Being.
This is our job: to recognize our oneness with Being, to know ourselves as soul, to insist on enjoying life until it becomes second nature to us. Until there is not a shadow of a doubt as to the truth of what we are. We may take our cues from wherever they may come to us.
Today I will insist on enjoying life.
Magnolia Blossom, Studio City, CA
Copyright © 2011 Jeff Kober
| 
