"... emotion from the pain-body quickly gains control of your thinking, and once your mind has been taken over by the pain-body, your thinking becomes negative. The voice in your head will be telling sad, anxious, or angry stories about yourself, or your life, about other people, about past, future, or imaginary events. The voice will be blaming, accusing, complaining, imagining. And you are totally identified with whatever the voice says, believe all its distorted thoughts. At that point the addiction to unhappiness has set in.It is not so much that you cannot stop your train of negative thoughts, but that you don't want to. This is because the pain-body at that time is living through you, pretending to be you. And to the pain-body, pain is pleasure. It eagerly devours every negative thought. In fact, the usual voice in your head has now become the voice of the pain-body. It has taken over the internal dialogue. A vicious circle becomes established between the pain body and your thinking. EVERY THOUGHT FEEDS THE PAIN-BODY, and in turn the pain-body generates more thoughts ... "
(Page 147 - A New Earth by Eckert Tolle)
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HOW ARE YOU?
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A simple question. A mundane question that is asked a thousand times a day in one form or another ... a ubiquitous question to which our usual answer is "Fine."
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How are you?
Fine, how are you?
Okay ...
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But are we?
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Are we really fine and okay ... or is that simply the easiest answer to offer to avoid looking more deeply into ourselves and confronting the reality that lurks within?
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When I'm asked - "how are you?" - my usual answer has been "Fine," but I've come to realize who misguided that answer has been ... seldom have I really been fine ...
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"For someone possessed by a heavy pain-body, it is often impossible to step outside his or her distorted interpretation, the heavily emotional "story." The more negative emotion there is in a story, the heavier and more impenetrable it becomes. And so the story is not recognized as such, but is taken to be reality. When you are completely trapped in the movement of thought and the accompanying emotion, stepping outside is not possible because you don't even know that there is an outside. You are trapped in your own movie or dream, trapped in your own hell. To you it is reality and no other reality is possible. And as far as you are concerned, your reaction is the only possible reaction." (pg 173-74)
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With a heavy pain-body, the answer to the question - "how are you?" is a simple "Fine," because there is no comprehension of the vicious circle of reality in which you yourself trapped ... the voice in your head, a voice of pain and unhappiness is the only voice you hear ... and so the answer is - "Fine" ... and the answer is wrong ...
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"At this moment, this is what you feel ..." (pg 165)
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I've come to realize the presence in my life of that voice that tells and retells the story of my pain-body ... a story that is feeding itself with the negativity of thought and action that are in turn created by the story itself ... the vicious circle is fully engaged ... and as painful as it may be to realize this, in this description, Tolle is right:
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"The pain-body is an addiction to unhappiness. It may be shocking when you realize for the first time that there is something within you that periodically seeks emotional negativity, seeks unhappiness. You need even more awareness to see it in yourself than to recognize it in another person. Once the unhappiness has taken you over, not only do you not want an end to it, but you want to make others JUST AS MISERABLE as you are in order to feed on their negative emotional reaction." (pg 145)
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This week I've come to realize that my pain-body has NOT been dormant, but has been active as it has been feeding the ego the story of unhappiness I have come to believe is the ONLY story of my life journey ... a story that folds over on itself and feeds the pain-body, which in turn continues to create that story by making it happen in order to continue to feed and grown ...
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I have been unhappy ...
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I have defined myself by that story ...
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I have fed that unhappiness by telling and living that story over and over ...
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"HOW ARE YOU?"
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In this moment, I am unhappy ...
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To a woman who came to him and shared her story of unhappiness Tolle asked:
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"'At this moment, this is what you feel,' I said. 'There is nothing you can do about the fact that AT THIS MOMENT this is what you feel. Now, instead of wanting this moment to be different from the way it is, which adds more pain to the pain that is already there, is it possible for you to completely accept the fact that this is what you feel right now?'"(pg 165)
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When the woman accepted the FACT that she IS unhappy - IN THAT MOMENT, she feels a space forming around her unhappiness ... being unhappy begins to matter less and less, and its control over her begins to diminish.
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Tolle observes that you can not be unhappy without an unhappy story.
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Unhappiness is fed and justified and perpetuated by telling and retelling the story, and with each telling living the supposed "truth" of that story by saying - "there, this proves my unhappiness ..."
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Tolle notes that;
"that moment she (the woman) stopped identifying with the feeling, the old painful emotion that lived in her, the moment she put her attention on it directly without trying to resist it, it could no longer control her thinking and so become mixed up with a mentally constructed story called "The Unhappy Me."" (pg 166)
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In that moment, as Tolle notes the pain-body begins to diminish not only its control, but it's self. It is a diminishing that comes not by fighting it and denying its presence in our lives, but rather by drawing it into the light of our consciousness and admitting that it exists, and that it HAS had control over us ...
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The Zen Buddhists call us to "SATORI" - literally stepping out of the voice in your head by finding a moment of presence where the inner clutter of thought and emotion is silenced, and the voice is muted, and we stand present to the moment and NOTHING ELSE.
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In this moment, I am not trying to be happy ... I'm not trying to NOT be unhappy ... I'm not trying to do anything, but to be present to THIS moment ... I want to live in this moment fully, as I am, without my pity party story being told and re-told ...
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"When you feel the pain-body, don't fall into the error of thinking there is something wrong with you. Making yourself into a problem - the ego loves that. The knowing needs to be followed by accepting. Anything else will obscure it again. Accepting means you allow yourself to feel whatever it is you are feeling at that moment. It is part of the is-ness of the NOW. You can't argue with WHAT IS. Well you can, but if you do, you suffer. Through allowing, you become what you are: vast, spacious. You become whole. You are not a fragment anymore, which is how the ego perceives itself. Your true nature emerges, which is one with the nature of God ..." (pg 184)
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"How are you?"
In this moment ... I'm okay ... I can feel the space around my unhappiness ... I am ALIVE !!
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... the journey continues ...
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