Version plus légère de Le pouvoir du moment présent
Practicing the Power of Now
Highlights
Chapter One: Being and Enlightenment
The word enlightenment conjures up the idea of some superhuman accomplishment, and the ego likes to keep it that way, but it is simply your natural state of felt oneness with Being. It is a state of connectedness
Chapter One: Being and Enlightenment
The inability to feel this connectedness gives rise to the illusion of separation, from yourself and from the world around you. You then perceive yourself, consciously or unconsciously, as an isolated fragment. Fear arises, and conflicts within and without become the norm.
Chapter One: Being and Enlightenment
The greatest obstacle to experiencing the reality of your connectedness is identification with your mind
Chapter One: Being and Enlightenment
we don’t realize this because almost everybody is suffering from it, so it is considered normal.
Chapter One: Being and Enlightenment
Identification with your mind creates an opaque screen of concepts, labels, images, words, judgments, and definitions that blocks all true relationship. It comes between you and yourself, between you and your fellow man and woman, between you and nature, between you and God. It is this screen of thought that creates the illusion of separateness, the illusion that there is you and a totally separate “other.” You then forget the essential fact that, underneath the level of physical appearances and separate forms, you are one with all that is.
Chapter One: Being and Enlightenment
The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly — you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.
Chapter One: Being and Enlightenment
I am realization, this sense of your own presence
Chapter One: Being and Enlightenment
With practice, the sense of stillness and peace will deepen.
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Which practice? Presence
Chapter One: Being and Enlightenment
In fact, there is no end to its depth. You will also feel a subtle emanation of joy arising from deep within: the joy of Being.
Chapter One: Being and Enlightenment
In this state of inner connectedness, you are much more alert, more awake than in the mind-identified state. You are fully present. It also raises the vibrational frequency of the energy field that gives life to the physical body.
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This is after illumination
Chapter One: Being and Enlightenment
INSTEAD OF “WATCHING THE THINKER,” you can also create a gap in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of your attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment.
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First presence glimpse
Chapter One: Being and Enlightenment
IN YOUR EVERYDAY LIFE, you can practice this by taking any routine activity that normally is only a means to an end and giving it your fullest attention, so that it becomes an end in itself. For example, every time you walk up and down the stairs in your house or place of work, pay close attention to every step, every movement, even your breathing. Be totally present. Or when you wash your hands, pay attention to all the sense perceptions associated with the activity: the sound and feel of the water, the movement of your hands, the scent of the soap, and so on. Or when you get into your car, after you close the door, pause for a few seconds and observe the flow of your breath. Become aware of a silent but powerful sense of presence.
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In everyday practice presence
Chapter One: Being and Enlightenment
There is one certain criterion by which you can measure your success in this practice: the degree of peace that you feel within.
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Criteria
Chapter One: Being and Enlightenment
One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it.
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Thought is not always serious when you don’t identify with it
Chapter One: Being and Enlightenment
As you grow up, you form a mental image of who you are, based on your personal and cultural conditioning. We may call this phantom self the ego. It consists of mind activity and can only be kept going through constant thinking.
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Definition of ego
Chapter One: Being and Enlightenment
To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important. This total reversal of the truth accounts for the fact that in the ego mode the mind is so dysfunctional. It is always concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it — who are you? It constantly projects itself into the future to ensure its continued survival and to seek some kind of release or fulfillment there. It says: “One day, when this, that, or the other happens, I am going to be okay, happy, at peace.”
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The problem of ego identification
Chapter One: Being and Enlightenment
Even when the ego seems to be concerned with the present, it is not the present that it sees: It misperceives it completely because it looks at it through the eyes of the past. Or it reduces the present to a means to an end, an end that always lies in the mind-projected future. Observe your mind and you’ll see that this is how it works.
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Still problem
Chapter One: Being and Enlightenment
The present moment holds the key to liberation. But you cannot find the present moment as long as you are your mind.
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Solution
Chapter One: Being and Enlightenment
Enlightenment means rising above thought. In the enlightened state, you still use your thinking mind when needed, but in a much more focused and effective way than before. You use it mostly for practical purposes, but you are free of the involuntary internal dialogue, and there is inner stillness.
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Benefits
Chapter One: Being and Enlightenment
When you do use your mind, and particularly when a creative solution is needed, you oscillate every few minutes or so between thought and stillness, between mind and no-mind. No-mind is consciousness without thought.
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Solution
Chapter One: Being and Enlightenment
Only in that way is it possible to think creatively, because only in that way does thought have any real power.
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Benefits
Chapter One: Being and Enlightenment
Mind, in the way I use the word, is not just thought. It includes your emotions as well as all unconscious mental-emotional reactive patterns. Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. It is the body’s reaction to your mind — or you might say a reflection of your mind in the body.
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Definition
Chapter One: Being and Enlightenment
The more you are identified with your thinking, your likes and dislikes, judgments and interpretations, which is to say the less present you are as the watching consciousness, the stronger the emotional energy charge will be, whether you are aware of it or not.
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Solution : watch your mind’s activity
Chapter One: Being and Enlightenment
IF YOU HAVE DIFFICULTY FEELING YOUR EMOTIONS, start by focusing attention on the inner energy field of your body. Feel the body from within. This will also put you in touch with your emotions.
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Practice meditation
Chapter One: Being and Enlightenment
If you really want to know your mind, the body will always give you a truthful reflection, so look at the emotion, or rather feel it in your body. If there is an apparent conflict between them, the thought will be the lie, the emotion will be the truth
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How to observe your thoughts and emotions and what to trust
Chapter One: Being and Enlightenment
To watch an emotion in this way is basically the same as listening to or watching a thought, which I described earlier. The only difference is that, while a thought is in your head, an emotion has a strong physical component and so is primarily felt in the body. You can then allow the emotion to be there without being controlled by it.
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Practice meditation with emotions
Chapter One: Being and Enlightenment
MAKE IT A HABIT TO ASK YOURSELF: What’s going on inside me at this moment? That question will point you in the right direction. But don’t analyze, just watch. Focus your attention within. Feel the energy of the emotion.
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Practice daily
Chapter One: Being and Enlightenment
If there is no emotion present, take your attention more deeply into the inner energy field of your body. It is the doorway into Being.
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Your meditation
Chapter Two: The Origin of Fear
The psychological condition of fear is divorced from any concrete and true immediate danger. It comes in many forms: unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia, and so on.
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Résistance
Chapter Two: The Origin of Fear
You are in the here and now, while your mind is in the future. This creates an anxiety gap. And if you are identified with your mind and have lost touch with the power and simplicity of the Now, that anxiety gap will be your constant companion.
Chapter Two: The Origin of Fear
as long as you are identified with your mind, the ego runs your life. Because of its phantom nature, and despite elaborate defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat.
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Ego mécanismes de défense
Chapter Two: The Origin of Fear
What message is the body receiving continuously from the ego, the false, mind-made self? Danger, I am under threat. And what is the emotion generated by this continuous message? Fear, of course.
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Problem
Chapter Two: The Origin of Fear
Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego’s fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life.
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Sign of resistance
Chapter Two: The Origin of Fear
even such a seemingly trivial and “normal” thing as the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the other person wrong — defending the mental position with which you have identified — is due to the fear of death. If you identify with a mental position, then if you are wrong, your mind-based sense of self is seriously threatened with annihilation. So you as the ego cannot afford to be wrong. To be wrong is to die. Wars have been fought over this, and countless relationships have broken down.
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Relations with ego et toujours avoir raison
Chapter Two: The Origin of Fear
Once you have disidentified from your mind, whether you are right or wrong makes no difference to your sense of self at all, so the forcefully compulsive and deeply unconscious need to be right, which is a form of violence, will no longer be there
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There is violence in ego identification
Chapter Two: The Origin of Fear
WATCH OUT FOR ANY KIND OF DEFENSIVENESS within yourself. What are you defending? An illusory identity, an image in your mind, a fictitious entity. By making this pattern conscious, by witnessing it, you disidentify from it. In the light of your consciousness, the unconscious pattern will then quickly dissolve.
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Practice shadow working meditation
Chapter Two: The Origin of Fear
This is the end of all arguments and power games, which are so corrosive to relationships
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Healthy relationship
Chapter Two: The Origin of Fear
The mind always seeks to deny the Now and to escape from it. In other words, the more you are identified with your mind, the more you suffer
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Problem
Chapter Two: The Origin of Fear
Or you may put it like this: The more you are able to honor and accept the Now, the more you are free of pain, of suffering
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Solution
Chapter Two: The Origin of Fear
REALIZE DEEPLY THAT THE PRESENT MOMENT is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life.
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How to realize? Need meditation
Chapter Two: The Origin of Fear
To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.
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Problem
Chapter Two: The Origin of Fear
The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant. Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.
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Explanation
Chapter Two: The Origin of Fear
Have you ever experienced, done, thought, or felt anything outside the Now? Do you think you ever will? Is it possible for anything to happen or be outside the Now? The answer is obvious, is it not?
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Explications Pour les plus débiles, il faut
Chapter Two: The Origin of Fear
The essence of what I am saying here cannot be understood by the mind. The moment you grasp it, there is a shift in consciousness from mind to Being
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Helpful reminder if you know what that means. Most people don’t know no-mind
Chapter Three: Entering the Now
start by observing the habitual tendency of your mind to want to escape from the Now. You will observe that the future is usually imagined as either better or worse than the present. If the imagined future is better, it gives you hope or pleasurable anticipation. If it is worse, it creates anxiety. Both are illusory.
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Observe your mind meditation
Chapter Three: Entering the Now
Through self-observation, more presence comes into your life automatically.
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Benefits
Chapter Three: Entering the Now
Whenever you are able to observe your mind, you are no longer trapped in it.
Chapter Three: Entering the Now
Notice also how often your attention is in the past or future. Don’t judge or analyze what you observe. Watch the thought, feel the emotion, observe the reaction. Don’t make a personal problem out of them.
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Practice
Chapter Three: Entering the Now
Intense presence is needed when certain situations trigger a reaction with a strong emotional charge, such as when your self-image is threatened, a challenge comes into your life that triggers fear, things “go wrong,” or an emotional complex from the past is brought up. In those instances, the tendency is for you to become “unconscious.” The reaction or emotion takes you over — you “become” it. You act it out. You justify, make wrong, attack, defend… except that it isn’t you, it’s the reactive pattern, the mind in its habitual survival mode.
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Each strong reaction should be a reminder that you should be present or you will suffer
Chapter Three: Entering the Now
Identification with the mind gives it more energy; observation of the mind withdraws energy from it.
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Law
Chapter Three: Entering the Now
The energy that is withdrawn from the mind turns into presence.
Chapter Three: Entering the Now
Once you can feel what it means to be present, it becomes much easier to simply choose to step out of the time dimension whenever time is not needed for practical purposes and move more deeply into the Now.
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Habit of presence happens after you know what is presence
Chapter Three: Entering the Now
This does not impair your ability to use time — past or future — when you need to refer to it for practical matters. Nor does it impair your ability to use your mind. In fact, it enhances it. When you do use your mind, it will be sharper, more focused.
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Like if it has rested before, it is more working better
Chapter Three: Entering the Now
If you set yourself a goal and work toward it, you are using clock time. You are aware of where you want to go, but you honor and give your fullest attention to the step that you are taking at this moment.
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This balance is of utmost importance: the present includes your objective
Chapter Three: Entering the Now
If you then become excessively focused on the goal, perhaps because you are seeking happiness, fulfillment, or a more complete sense of self in it, the Now is no longer honored. It becomes reduced to a mere stepping-stone to the future, with no intrinsic value.
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When your mind is dominating you because you identify with it this happens
Chapter Three: Entering the Now
Are you always trying to get somewhere other than where you are? Is most of your doing just a means to an end? Is fulfillment always just around the corner or confined to short-lived pleasures, such as sex, food, drink, drugs, or thrills and excitement? Are you always focused on becoming, achieving, and attaining, or alternatively chasing some new thrill or pleasure? Do you believe that if you acquire more things you will become more fulfilled, good enough, or psychologically complete? Are you waiting for a man or woman to give meaning to your life?
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Quizz diagnostic . Add : do you want to be right?
Chapter Three: Entering the Now
The past perpetuates itself through lack of presence. The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future
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Law
Chapter Three: Entering the Now
You may find it hard to recognize that time is the cause of your suffering or your problems. You believe that they are caused by specific situations in your life, and seen from a conventional viewpoint, this is true. But until you have dealt with the basic problem-making dysfunction of the mind — its attachment to past and future and denial of the Now — problems are actually interchangeable. If all your problems or perceived causes of suffering or unhappiness were miraculously removed for you today, but you had not become more present, more conscious, you would soon find yourself with a similar set of problems or causes of suffering, like a shadow that follows you wherever you go. Ultimately, there is only one problem: the time-bound mind itself.
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To convince egos that there is really a problem
Chapter Three: Entering the Now
What you refer to as your “life” should more accurately be called your “life situation.” It is psychological time: past and future. Certain things in the past didn’t go the way you wanted them to go. You are still resisting what happened in the past, and now you are resisting what is. Hope is what keeps you going, but hope keeps you focused on the future, and this continued focus perpetuates your denial of the Now and therefore your unhappiness.
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Problem
Chapter Three: Entering the Now
FORGET ABOUT YOUR LIFE SITUATION for a while and pay attention to your life. Your life situation exists in time. Your life is now. Your life situation is mind-stuff. Your life is real.
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Exercise
Chapter Three: Entering the Now
Your life situation may be full of problems — most life situations are — but find out if you have any problem at this moment. Not tomorrow or in ten minutes, but now. Do you have a problem now?
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Meditation
Chapter Three: Entering the Now
USE YOUR SENSES FULLY. Be where you are. Look around. Just look, don’t interpret. See the light, shapes, colors, textures. Be aware of the silent presence of each thing. Be aware of the space that allows everything to be.
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Contemplation practice
Chapter Three: Entering the Now
Listen to the sounds; don’t judge them. Listen to the silence underneath the sounds.
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Sound meditation
Chapter Three: Entering the Now
Touch something — anything — and feel and acknowledge its Being.
Chapter Three: Entering the Now
Observe the rhythm of your breathing; feel the air flowing in and out, feel the life energy inside your body. Allow everything to be, within and without. Allow the “isness” of all things. Move deeply into the Now.
Chapter Three: Entering the Now
FOCUS YOUR ATTENTION ON THE NOW and tell me what problem you have at this moment.
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Your mind will invent anything but it is not now
Chapter Three: Entering the Now
I am not getting any answer because it is impossible to have a problem when your attention is fully in the Now. A situation needs to be either dealt with or accepted. Why make it into a problem?
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Pragmatic
Chapter Three: Entering the Now
The mind unconsciously loves problems because they give you an identity of sorts. This is normal, and it is insane
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Un mécanisme de défense de l’égo
Chapter Three: Entering the Now
“Problem” means that you are dwelling on a situation mentally without there being a true intention or possibility of taking action now and that you are unconsciously making it part of your sense of self.
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Definition
Chapter Three: Entering the Now
you are carrying in your mind the insane burden of a hundred things that you will or may have to do in the future instead of focusing your attention on the one thing that you can do now.
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Procrastination
Chapter Five: Beauty Arises in the Tillnessof YOUR PRESENCE
LET THE BREATH TAKE YOU INTO THE BODY If at any time you are finding it hard to get in touch with the inner body, it is usually easier to focus on your breathing first. Conscious breathing, which is a powerful meditation in its own right, will gradually put you in touch with the body.
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Practice
Chapter Five: Beauty Arises in the Tillnessof YOUR PRESENCE
FOLLOW THE BREATH WITH YOUR ATTENTION as it moves in and out of your body. Breathe into the body, and feel your abdomen expanding and contracting slightly with each inhalation and exhalation. If you find it easy to visualize, close your eyes and see yourself surrounded by light or immersed in a luminous substance — a sea of consciousness. Then breathe in that light. Feel that luminous substance filling up your body and making it luminous also. Then gradually focus more on the feeling. Don’t get attached to any visual image. You are now in your body. You have accessed the power of Now.
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Meditation practice
Part Two: Relationship Asspiritual Practice
Love is a state of Being. Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you. It is not dependent on some other body
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Truth
Chapter Six: Dissolving the Pain-Body
The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is.
Chapter Six: Dissolving the Pain-Body
On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind
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In the body it is a form of tension at rest or in movement
Chapter Six: Dissolving the Pain-Body
Some spiritual teachings state that all pain is ultimately an illusion, and this is true. The question is: Is it true for you? A mere belief doesn’t make it true. Do you want to experience pain for the rest of your life and keep saying that it is an illusion? Does that free you from the pain?
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Believing is not enough. It’s a realization
Chapter Six: Dissolving the Pain-Body
What we are concerned with here is how you can realize this truth — that is, make it real in your own experience
Chapter Six: Dissolving the Pain-Body
I am talking here primarily of emotional pain, which is also the main cause of physical pain and physical disease. Resentment, hatred, self-pity, guilt, anger, depression, jealousy, and so on, even the slightest irritation, are all forms of pain
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Also this sense of ‘others’ vaguely menacing outwards. Full list of problems
Chapter Six: Dissolving the Pain-Body
every pleasure or emotional high contains within itself the seed of pain: its inseparable opposite, which will manifest in time.
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When you lose your high you feel low
Chapter Six: Dissolving the Pain-Body
WATCH OUT FOR ANY SIGN OF UNHAPPINESS IN YOURSELF, in whatever form — it may be the awakening pain-body. This can take the form of irritation, impatience, a somber mood, a desire to hurt, anger, rage, depression, a need to have some drama in your relationship, and so on. Catch it the moment it awakens from its dormant state.
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Practice meditation: observe what makes you suffer
Chapter Six: Dissolving the Pain-Body
The pain-body wants to survive, just like every other entity in existence, and it can only survive if it gets you to unconsciously identify with it. It can then rise up, take you over, “become you,” and live through you. It needs to get its “food” through you. It will feed on any experience that resonates with its own kind of energy, anything that creates further pain in whatever form: anger, destructiveness, hatred, grief, emotional drama, violence, and even illness. So the pain-body, when it has taken you over, will create a situation in your life that reflects back its own energy frequency for it to feed on. Pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy. It finds it quite indigestible.
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Explications
Chapter Six: Dissolving the Pain-Body
WHEN YOU BECOME THE WATCHER and start to disidentify, the pain-body will continue to operate for a while and will try to trick you into identifying with it again. Although you are no longer energizing it through your identification, it has a certain momentum, just like a spinning wheel that will keep turning for a while even when it is no longer being propelled.
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Be prepared for a while. This thing is like these frogs in the desert that can stay many years in dormant state, and at the first rain it will come back
Chapter Six: Dissolving the Pain-Body
At this stage, it may also create physical aches and pains in different parts of the body, but they won’t last.
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Don’t be afraid, just keep your healthy habits and pass through it
Chapter Six: Dissolving the Pain-Body
Stay present, stay conscious. Be the ever-alert guardian of your inner space. You need to be present enough to be able to watch the pain-body directly and feel its energy. It then cannot control your thinking.
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Practice: stay present effortlessly
Chapter Six: Dissolving the Pain-Body
The moment your thinking is aligned with the energy field of the pain-body, you are identified with it and again feeding it with your thoughts. For example, if anger is the predominant energy vibration of the pain-body and you think angry thoughts, dwelling on what someone did to you or what you are going to do to him or her, then you have become unconscious, and the pain-body has become “you.”
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Also you can go running or sort
Chapter Six: Dissolving the Pain-Body
Or when a dark mood comes upon you and you start getting into a negative mind-pattern and thinking how dreadful your life is, your thinking has become aligned with the pain-body, and you have become unconscious and vulnerable to the pain-body’s attack.
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Use your suffering as a warning alert
Chapter Six: Dissolving the Pain-Body
The split within is healed, and you become whole again. Your responsibility then is not to create further pain.
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Transmutation process : no more split no more separation
Chapter Six: Dissolving the Pain-Body
FOCUS ATTENTION ON THE FEELING INSIDE YOU. Know that it is the pain-body. Accept that it is there. Don’t think about it — don’t let the feeling turn into thinking. Don’t judge or analyze. Don’t make an identity for yourself out of it. Stay present, and continue to be the observer of what is happening inside you.
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Practice observe without identifying
Chapter Six: Dissolving the Pain-Body
Become aware not only of the emotional pain but also of “the one who observes,” the silent watcher. This is the power of the Now, the power of your own conscious presence. Then see what happens.
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End game is to become aware of the watcher AND the watched simultaneously
Chapter Six: Dissolving the Pain-Body
The process that I have just described is profoundly powerful yet simple. It could be taught to a child, and hopefully one day it will be one of the first things children learn in school. Once you have understood the basic principle of being present as the watcher of what happens inside you — and you “understand” it by experiencing it — you have at your disposal the most potent transformational tool.
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Learn to observe is meditation
Chapter Six: Dissolving the Pain-Body
This is not to deny that you may encounter intense inner resistance to disidentifying from your pain. This will be the case particularly if you have lived closely identified with your emotional pain-body for most of your life and the whole or a large part of your sense of self is invested in it. What this means is that you have made an unhappy self out of your pain-body and believe that this mind-made fiction is who you are. In that case, unconscious fear of losing your identity will create strong resistance to any disidentification. In other words, you would rather be in pain — be the pain-body — than take a leap into the unknown and risk losing the familiar unhappy self.
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Some people are particularly attached to pain
Chapter Six: Dissolving the Pain-Body
OBSERVE THE RESISTANCE WITHIN YOURSELF. Observe the attachment to your pain. Be very alert. Observe the peculiar pleasure you derive from being unhappy. Observe the compulsion to talk or think about it. The resistance will cease if you make it conscious.
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Practice: include any resistance within your awareness
Chapter Six: Dissolving the Pain-Body
Just as you cannot fight the darkness, you cannot fight the pain-body. Trying to do so would create inner conflict and thus further pain. Watching it is enough. Watching it implies accepting it as part of what is at that moment.
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Résumé
Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
Every addiction reaches a point where it does not work for you anymore, and then you feel the pain more intensely than ever. This is one reason why most people are always trying to escape from the present moment and are seeking some kind of salvation in the future. The first thing that they might encounter if they focused their attention on the Now is their own pain, and this is what they fear.
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Addicted people will have more hard time dealing with the now and its pains
Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
Avoidance of relationships in an attempt to avoid pain is not the answer either. The pain is there anyway
Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
For love to flourish, the light of your presence needs to be strong enough so that you no longer get taken over by the thinker or the pain-body and mistake them for who you are. To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.
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Love needs presence
Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
To disidentify from the pain-body is to bring presence into the pain and thus transmute it. To disidentify from thinking is to be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior, especially the repetitive patterns of your mind and the roles played by the ego
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Change perspective brings power
Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
If you stop investing it with “selfness,” the mind loses its compulsive quality, which basically is the compulsion to judge, and so to resist what is, which creates conflict, drama, and new pain. In fact, the moment that judgment stops through acceptance of what is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace.
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Selfness is the sense of being separated from the world and God
Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
FIRST YOU STOP JUDGING YOURSELF; then you stop judging your partner. The greatest catalyst for change in a relationship is complete acceptance of your partner as he or she is, without needing to judge or change them in any way.
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Stop wanting to judge or change you or others
Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
Love is a state of Being. Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you. It is not dependent on some other body, some external form.
Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
IN THE STILLNESS OF YOUR PRESENCE, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness. This is love.
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All is One . Solution:meditate about transcending differences, ontegrating outside inside
Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
Although brief glimpses are possible, love cannot flourish unless you are permanently free of mind identification and your presence is intense enough to have dissolved the pain-body — or you can at least remain present as the watcher. The pain-body cannot then take you over and so become destructive of love.
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Problem: Real loving relationships need presence
Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
why not accept this fact rather than try to escape from it?
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Question
Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
WHEN YOU KNOW YOU ARE NOT AT PEACE, your knowing creates a still space that surrounds your nonpeace in a loving and tender embrace and then transmutes your nonpeace into peace.
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Observe, know and accept what is
Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
EVERY MOMENT, HOLD THE KNOWING OF THAT MOMENT, particularly of your inner state. If there is anger, know that there is anger. If there is jealousy, defensiveness, the urge to argue, the need to be right, an inner child demanding love and attention, or emotional pain of any kind — whatever it is, know the reality of that moment and hold the knowing.
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Be aware of every moment practice
Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
If you observe unconscious behavior in your partner, hold it in the loving embrace of your knowing so that you won’t react.
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In love we can stay still
Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
Sanity — consciousness — can only come into this world through you. You do not need to wait for the world to become sane, or for somebody else to become conscious, before you can be enlightened. You may wait forever.
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Fact
Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
Do not accuse each other of being unconscious. The moment you start to argue, you have identified with a mental position and are now defending not only that position but also your sense of self. The ego is in charge. You have become unconscious
Note
Fact
Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
At times, it may be appropriate to point out certain aspects of your partner’s behavior. If you are very alert, very present, you can do so without ego involvement — without blaming, accusing, or making the other wrong.
Note
You can point things with love, with no secret need to be right or obtain repair
Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
When your partner behaves unconsciously, relinquish all judgment. Judgment is either to confuse someone’s unconscious behavior with who they are or to project your own unconsciousness onto another person and mistake that for who they are.
Note
Judging is ego projection
Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
either be totally free of reaction or you may react and still be the knowing, the space in which the reaction is watched and allowed to be.
Note
You can react in presence, without separating your reaction from the world or God
Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
Being the knowing creates a clear space of loving presence that allows all things and all people to be as they are. No greater catalyst for transformation exists. If you practice this, your partner cannot stay with you and remain unconscious.
Note
Good news : love is contagious
Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
express your thoughts and feelings to each other as soon as they occur, or as soon as a reaction comes up, so that you do not create a time gap in which an unexpressed or unacknowledged emotion or grievance can fester and grow.
Note
Avoid creating a time gap : express your emotions healthily as they come up
Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
LEARN TO GIVE EXPRESSION to what you feel without blaming. Learn to listen to your partner in an open, nondefensive way.
Note
Practice listening is like meditation
Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
Give your partner space for expressing himself or herself. Be present.
Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
Giving space to others — and to yourself — is vital. Love cannot flourish without it.
Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
the ego needs problems, conflict, and “enemies” to strengthen the sense of separateness on which its identity depends.
Note
Problem
Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
The need for argument, drama, and conflict is not being met.
Note
Ego needs
Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
In Being, male and female are one. Your form may continue to have certain needs, but Being has none. It is already complete and whole. If those needs are met, that is beautiful, but whether or not they are met makes no difference to your deep inner state.
Note
Being ls already, thus it doesn’t need anything
Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
do you need to have a relationship with yourself at all? Why can’t you just be yourself? When you have a relationship with yourself, you have split yourself into two: “I” and “myself,” subject and object. That mind-created duality is the root cause of all unnecessary complexity, of all problems and conflict in your life.
Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
In the state of enlightenment, you are yourself — “you” and “yourself ” merge into one. You do not judge yourself, you do not feel sorry for yourself, you are not proud of yourself, you do not love yourself, you do not hate yourself, and so on. The split caused by self-reflective consciousness is healed, its curse removed. There is no “self ” that you need to protect, defend, or feed anymore
Note
As you see the illusory nature of ego you let go of fighting over it. You can still judge and improve but you stop identifying with it so it’s not challenging or threatening
Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
When you are enlightened, there is one relationship that you no longer have: the relationship with yourself. Once you have given that up, all your other relationships will be love relationships.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
There are cycles of success, when things come to you and thrive, and cycles of failure, when they wither or disintegrate, and you have to let them go in order to make room for new things to arise, or for transformation to happen.
Note
All is well
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
Dissolution is needed for new growth to happen. One cycle cannot exist without the other.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
Failure lies concealed in every success, and success in every failure. In this world, which is to say on the level of form, everybody “fails” sooner or later, of course, and every achievement eventually comes to naught. All forms are impermanent.
Note
Anicca
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
A cycle can last for anything from a few hours to a few years. There are large cycles and small cycles within these large ones.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
Many illnesses are created through fighting against the cycles of low energy, which are vital for regeneration. The compulsion to do, and the tendency to derive your sense of self-worth and identity from external factors such as achievement, is an inevitable illusion as long as you are identified with the mind.
Note
To all Americans
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
the intelligence of the organism may take over as a self-protective measure and create an illness in order to force you to stop, so that the necessary regeneration can take place.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
nothing lasts in this dimension where moth and rust consume. Either it ends or it changes, or it may undergo a polarity shift: The same condition that was good yesterday or last year has suddenly or gradually turned into bad. The same condition that made you happy then makes you unhappy. The prosperity of today becomes the empty consumerism of tomorrow. The happy wedding and honeymoon become the unhappy divorce or the unhappy coexistence. Or a condition disappears, so its absence makes you unhappy.
Note
Anicca
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
TO OFFER NO RESISTANCE TO LIFE is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad.
Note
Promesse
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
All inner resistance is experienced as negativity in one form or another. All negativity is resistance. In this context, the two words are almost synonymous.
Note
Definition
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
Negativity ranges from irritation or impatience to fierce anger, from a depressed mood or sullen resentment to suicidal despair. Sometimes the resistance triggers the emotional pain-body, in which case even a minor situation may produce intense negativity, such as anger, depression, or deep grief.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
The ego believes that through negativity it can manipulate reality and get what it wants. It believes that through it, it can attract a desirable condition or dissolve an undesirable one. If “you” — the mind — did not believe that unhappiness works, why would you create it?
Note
Believe
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
negativity does not work. Instead of attracting a desirable condition, it stops it from arising. Instead of dissolving an undesirable one, it keeps it in place.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
Once you have identified with some form of negativity, you do not want to let go, and on a deeply unconscious level, you do not want positive change. It would threaten your identity as a depressed, angry, or hard-done-by person. You will then ignore, deny, or sabotage the positive in your life. This is a common phenomenon. It is also insane.
Note
Est-ce que ces gens peuvent être sauvés ? Problème
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
WATCH ANY PLANT OR ANIMAL AND LET IT TEACH YOU acceptance of what is, surrender to the Now
Note
Practice
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
any changes that you make, whether they have to do with your work, your relationships, or your surroundings, are ultimately only cosmetic unless they arise out of a change in your level of consciousness. And as far as that is concerned, it can only mean one thing: becoming more present.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
as long as negativity is there, use it. Use it as a kind of signal that reminds you to be more present.
Note
Ta résistance indique que tu peux être présent
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
WHENEVER YOU FEEL NEGATIVITY ARISING WITHIN YOU, whether caused by an external factor, a thought, or even nothing in particular that you are aware of, look on it as a voice saying, “Attention. Here and Now. Wake up. Get out of your mind. Be present.”
Note
Practice
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
Even the slightest irritation is significant and needs to be acknowledged and looked at; otherwise, there will be a cumulative buildup of unobserved reactions.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
You may be able to just drop it once you realize that you don’t want to have this energy field inside you and that it serves no purpose. But then make sure that you drop it completely. If you cannot drop it, just accept that it is there and take your attention into the feeling. AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO DROPPING A NEGATIVE REACTION, you can make it disappear by imagining yourself becoming transparent to the external cause of the reaction.
Note
Practice
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
I recommend that you practice this with little, even trivial, things first. Let’s say that you are sitting quietly at home. Suddenly, there is the penetrating sound of a car alarm from across the street. Irritation arises. What is the purpose of the irritation? None whatsoever. Why did you create it? You didn’t. The mind did. It was totally automatic, totally unconscious. Why did the mind create it? Because it holds the unconscious belief that its resistance, which you experience as negativity or unhappiness in some form, will somehow dissolve the undesirable condition. This, of course, is a delusion. The resistance that it creates, the irritation or anger in this case, is far more disturbing than the original cause that it is attempting to dissolve.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
FEEL YOURSELF BECOMING TRANSPARENT, as it were, without the solidity of a material body. Now allow the noise, or whatever causes a negative reaction, to pass right through you. It is no longer hitting a solid “wall” inside you.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
As I said, practice with little things first. The car alarm, the dog barking, the children screaming, the traffic jam. Instead of having a wall of resistance inside you that gets constantly and painfully hit by things that “should not be happening,” let everything pass through you.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
Somebody says something to you that is rude or designed to hurt. Instead of going into unconscious reaction and negativity, such as attack, defense, or withdrawal, you let it pass right through you. Offer no resistance. It is as if there is nobody there to get hurt anymore. That is forgiveness. In this way, you become invulnerable.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
You can still tell that person that his or her behavior is unacceptable, if that is what you choose to do. But that person no longer has the power to control your inner state. You are then in your power — not in someone else’s, nor are you run by your mind. Whether it is a car alarm, a rude person, a flood, an earthquake, or the loss of all your possessions, the resistance mechanism is the same.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
DON’T LOOK FOR PEACE. Don’t look for any other state than the one you are in now; otherwise, you will set up inner conflict and unconscious resistance.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
Forgive yourself for not being at peace. The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peace. Anything you accept fully will get you there, will take you into peace. This is the miracle of surrender.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
When you accept what is, every moment is the best moment. That is enlightenment.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
HAVING GONE BEYOND THE MIND-MADE OPPOSITES, you become like a deep lake. The outer situation of your life, whatever happens there, is the surface of the lake. Sometimes calm, sometimes windy and rough, according to the cycles and seasons. Deep down, however, the lake is always undisturbed. You are the whole lake, not just the surface, and you are in touch with your own depth, which remains absolutely still.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
You don’t resist change by mentally clinging to any situation. Your inner peace does not depend on it. You abide in Being — unchanging, timeless, deathless — and you are no longer dependent for fulfillment or happiness on the outer world of constantly fluctuating forms
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
You can enjoy them, play with them, create new forms, appreciate the beauty of it all. But there will be no need to attach yourself to any of it.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
Compassion is the awareness of a deep bond between yourself and all creatures
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
Nothing that was real ever died, only names, forms, and illusions.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
At this deep level, compassion becomes healing in the widest sense. In that state, your healing influence is primarily based not on doing but on being. Everybody you come in contact with will be touched by your presence and affected by the peace that you emanate, whether they are conscious of it or not.
Note
Reward
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
To some people, surrender may have negative connotations, implying defeat, giving up, failing to rise to the challenges of life, becoming lethargic, and so on. True surrender, however, is something entirely different. It does not mean to passively put up with whatever situation you find yourself in and to do nothing about it. Nor does it mean to cease making plans or initiating positive action. SURRENDER IS THE SIMPLE but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life. The only place where you can experience the flow of life is the Now, so to surrender is to accept the present moment unconditionally and without reservation.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
Inner resistance is to say “no” to what is, through mental judgment and emotional negativity. It becomes particularly pronounced when things “go wrong,” which means that there is a gap between the demands or rigid expectations of your mind and what is. That is the pain gap.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
Acceptance of what is immediately frees you from mind identification and thus reconnects you with Being. Resistance is the mind.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
In fact, it is not the overall situation that you need to accept when you surrender, but just the tiny segment called the Now. For example, if you were stuck in the mud somewhere, you wouldn’t say: “Okay, I resign myself to being stuck in the mud.” Resignation is not surrender. YOU DON’T NEED TO ACCEPT AN UNDESIRABLE OR UNPLEASANT LIFE SITUATION. Nor do you need to deceive yourself and say that there is nothing wrong with it. No. You recognize fully that you want to get out of it. You then narrow your attention down to the present moment without mentally labeling it in any way. This means that there is no judgment of the Now. Therefore, there is no resistance, no emotional negativity. You accept the “isness” of this moment. Then you take action and do all that you can to get out of the situation. Such action I call positive action. It is far more effective than negative action, which arises out of anger, despair, or frustration.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
Non-surrender hardens your psychological form, the shell of the ego, and so creates a strong sense of separateness. The world around you and people in particular come to be perceived as threatening. The unconscious compulsion to destroy others through judgment arises, as does the need to compete and dominate. Even nature becomes your enemy and your perceptions and interpretations are governed by fear
Note
Problem
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
paranoia is only a slightly more acute form of this normal but dysfunctional state of consciousness.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
your body — becomes hard and rigid through resistance. Tension arises in different parts of the body, and the body as a whole contracts. The free flow of life energy through the body, which is essential for its healthy functioning, is greatly restricted.
Note
Problem
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
Bodywork and certain forms of physical therapy can be helpful in restoring this flow, but unless you practice surrender in your everyday life, those things can only give temporary symptom relief since the cause — the resistance pattern — has not been dissolved.
Note
Problem
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
IF YOU FIND YOUR LIFE SITUATION UNSATISFACTORY or even intolerable, it is only by surrendering first that you can break the unconscious resistance pattern that perpetuates that situation.
Note
Solution
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
IN THE STATE OF SURRENDER, you see very clearly what needs to be done, and you take action, doing one thing at a time and focusing on one thing at a time. Learn from nature: See how everything gets accomplished and how the miracle of life unfolds without dissatisfaction or unhappiness. That’s why Jesus said: “Look at the lilies, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin.”
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
IF THERE IS NO ACTION YOU CAN TAKE, and you cannot remove yourself from the situation either, then use the situation to make you go more deeply into surrender, more deeply into the Now, more deeply into Being.
Note
Practice
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
Do not confuse surrender with an attitude of “I can’t be bothered anymore” or “I just don’t care anymore.” If you look at it closely, you will find that such an attitude is tainted with negativity in the form of hidden resentment and so is not surrender at all but masked resistance.
Note
Warning
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
As you surrender, direct your attention inward to check if there is any trace of resistance left inside you. Be very alert when you do so; otherwise, a pocket of resistance may continue to hide in some dark corner in the form of a thought or an unacknowledged emotion.
Note
Practice
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
START BY ACKNOWLEDGING THAT THERE IS RESISTANCE. Be there when it happens, when the resistance arises. Observe how your mind creates it, how it labels the situation, yourself, or others. Look at the thought process involved. Feel the energy of the emotion.
Note
Practice
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
By witnessing the resistance, you will see that it serves no purpose. By focusing all your attention on the Now, the unconscious resistance is made conscious, and that is the end of it.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
You cannot be conscious and unhappy, conscious and in negativity. Negativity, unhappiness, or suffering in whatever form means that there is resistance, and resistance is always unconscious, Would you choose unhappiness? If you did not choose it, how did it arise? What is its purpose? Who is keeping it alive? Even if you are conscious of your unhappy feelings, the truth is that you are identified with them and keep the process alive through compulsive thinking. All that is unconscious. If you were conscious, that is to say totally present in the Now, all negativity would dissolve almost instantly. It could not survive in your presence. It can only survive in your absence.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
Until you practice surrender, the spiritual dimension is something you read about, talk about, get excited about, write books about, think about, believe in — or don’t, as the case may be. It makes no difference.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
NOT UNTIL YOU SURRENDER does the spiritual dimension become a living reality in your life.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
It is true that only an unconscious person will try to use or manipulate others, but it is equally true that only an unconscious person can be used and manipulated.
Note
Fact
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
If you resist or fight unconscious behavior in others, you become unconscious yourself.
Note
Warning
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
surrender doesn’t mean that you allow yourself to be used by unconscious people. Not at all. It is perfectly possible to say “no” firmly and clearly to a person or to walk away from a situation and be in a state of complete inner nonresistance at the same time.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
WHEN YOU SAY “NO” to a person or a situation, let it come not from reaction but from insight, from a clear realization of what is right or not right for you at that moment.
Note
Practice
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
Let it be a nonreactive “no,” a high-quality “no,” a “no” that is free of all negativity and so creates no further suffering.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
If you cannot surrender, take action immediately: Speak up or do something to bring about a change in the situation — or remove yourself from it. Take responsibility for your life.
Note
Practical solution if you can’t help yourself
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
IF YOU CANNOT TAKE ACTION — if you are in prison, for example — then you have two choices left: resistance or surrender. Bondage or inner freedom from external conditions. Suffering or inner peace.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
Your relationships will be changed profoundly by surrender. If you can never accept what is, by implication you will not be able to accept anybody the way they are. You will judge, criticize, label, reject, or attempt to change people.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
Feel the mental-emotional energy behind your need to be right and make the other person wrong. That’s the energy of the egoic mind. You make it conscious by acknowledging it, by feeling it as fully as possible.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
Observe the attachment to your views and opinions
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
one day, in the middle of an argument, you will suddenly realize that you have a choice, and you may decide to drop your own reaction — just to see what happens. You surrender.
Note
Picture of state with solution
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
I don’t mean dropping the reaction just verbally by saying “Okay, you are right,” with a look on your face that says, “I am above all this childish unconsciousness.” That’s just displacing the resistance to another level, with the egoic mind still in charge, claiming superiority. I am speaking of letting go of the entire mental-emotional energy field inside you that was fighting for power.
Note
True clarification of surrender
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
IF YOU SUDDENLY FEEL VERY LIGHT, CLEAR, AND DEEPLY AT PEACE, that is an unmistakable sign that you have truly surrendered.
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Criteria
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
Nonresistance doesn’t necessarily mean doing nothing. All it means is that any “doing” becomes nonreactive.
Note
Clarification of action in flow
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
Having said that, “doing nothing” when you are in a state of intense presence is a very powerful transformer and healer of situations and people. It is radically different from inactivity in the ordinary state of consciousness, or rather unconsciousness, which stems from fear, inertia, or indecision. The real “doing nothing” implies inner nonresistance and intense alertness.
Note
Doing nothing is good too if present
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
if action is required, you will no longer react from your conditioned mind, but you will respond to the situation out of your conscious presence. In that state, your mind is free of concepts, including the concept of nonviolence. So who can predict what you will do?
Note
You are totally free in presence
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
In surrender, you no longer need ego defenses and false masks. You become very simple, very real. “That’s dangerous,” says the ego. “You’ll get hurt. You’ll become vulnerable.” What the ego doesn’t know, of course, is that only through the letting go of resistance, through becoming “vulnerable,” can you discover your true and essential invulnerability.
Note
Next step
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
BY FOCUSING ON THIS INSTANT and refraining from labeling it mentally, illness is reduced to one or several of these factors: physical pain, weakness, discomfort, or disability. That is what you surrender to — now. You do not surrender to the idea of “illness.”
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Solution for illness
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
Allow the suffering to force you into the present moment, into a state of intense conscious presence. Use it for enlightenment.
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
Surrender does not transform what is, at least not directly. Surrender transforms you. When you are transformed, your whole world is transformed, because the world is only a reflection.
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
WHEN YOU ARE ILL OR DISABLED, do not feel that you have failed in some way, do not feel guilty. Do not blame life for treating you unfairly, but do not blame yourself either. All that is resistance.
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Well, this can be felt as too hard and restrictive to respect all that. Allow you to feel your anger fully. By accepting that you stop resistance naturally
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
If you have a major illness, use it for enlightenment. Anything “bad” that happens in your life — use it for enlightenment.
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Negativity tells you that you can be present
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
Withdraw time from the illness. Do not give it any past or future. Let it force you into intense present-moment awareness — and see what happens.
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
Are you seriously ill and feeling angry now about what I have just said? Then that is a clear sign that the illness has become part of your sense of self and that you are now protecting your identity — as well as protecting the illness.
Note
True story
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
The condition that is labeled “illness” has nothing to do with who you truly are.
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
Whenever any kind of disaster strikes, or something goes seriously “wrong” — illness, disability, loss of home or fortune or of a socially defined identity, break-up of a close relationship, death or suffering of a loved one, or your own impending death — know that there is another side to it, that you are just one step away from something incredible: a complete alchemical transmutation of the base metal of pain and suffering into gold. That one step is called surrender.
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
I do not mean to say that you will become happy in such a situation. You will not. But fear and pain will become transmuted into an inner peace and serenity that come from a very deep place — from the Unmanifested itself. It is “the peace of God, which passes all understanding.”
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
With this radiant peace comes the realization — not on the level of mind but within the depth of your Being — that you are indestructible, immortal. This is not a belief. It is absolute certainty that needs no external evidence or proof from some secondary source.
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
YOUR FIRST CHANCE IS TO SURRENDER each moment to the reality of that moment. Knowing that what is cannot be undone — because it already is — you say yes to what is or accept what isn’t. Then you do what you have to do, whatever the situation requires.
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
In certain extreme situations, it may still be impossible for you to accept the Now. But you always get a second chance at surrender.
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
It may look as if the situation is creating the suffering, but ultimately this is not so — your resistance is.
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True that
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
NOW HERE IS YOUR SECOND CHANCE AT SURRENDER: If you cannot accept what is outside, then accept what is inside. If you cannot accept the external condition, accept the internal condition.
Note
Practice meditation
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
This means: Do not resist the pain. Allow it to be there. Surrender to the grief, despair, fear, loneliness, or whatever form the suffering takes. Witness it without labeling it mentally. Embrace it.
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
When your pain is deep, all talk of surrender will probably seem futile and meaningless anyway. When your pain is deep, you will likely have a strong urge to escape from it rather than surrender to it. You don’t want to feel what you feel. What could be more normal? But there is no escape, no way out. There are many pseudo escapes — work, drink, drugs, anger, projection, suppression, and so on — but they don’t free you from the pain. Suffering does not diminish in intensity when you make it unconscious. When you deny emotional pain, everything you do or think as well as your relationships become contaminated with it.
Note
Problem
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
don’t turn away from the pain. Face it. Feel it fully. Feel it — don’t think about it! Express it if necessary, but don’t create a script in your mind around it. Give all your attention to the feeling, not to the person, event, or situation that seems to have caused it.
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
Don’t let the mind use the pain to create a victim identity for yourself out of it. Feeling sorry for yourself and telling others your story will keep you stuck in suffering.
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
Since it is impossible to get away from the feeling, the only possibility of change is to move into it; otherwise, nothing will shift.
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
Stay alert, stay present — present with your whole Being, with every cell of your body. As you do so, you are bringing a light into this darkness. This is the flame of your consciousness. At this stage, you don’t need to be concerned with surrender anymore. It has happened already.
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
Full attention is full acceptance, is surrender
Note
Formula
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
THE ACCEPTANCE OF SUFFERING is a journey into death. Facing deep pain, allowing it to be, taking your attention into it, is to enter death consciously. When you have died this death, you realize that there is no death — and there is nothing to fear. Only the ego dies.
Note
Mal dit. C’est plutôt qu’on se rend compte que ce qu’on est véritablement ne meurt pas, et que la vie vécue est comme un rêve par rapport au socle du non-manifesté
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
Imagine a ray of sunlight that has forgotten it is an inseparable part of the sun and deludes itself into believing it has to fight for survival and create and cling to an identity other than the sun. Would the death of this delusion not be incredibly liberating?
Note
C’est exactement ça : tu es le non manifeste qui rêve la manifestation et en particulier qui rêve être un corps et tu crois que tu es une petite partie de la manifestation
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
let the light of your presence shine away the heavy, time-bound self you thought of as “you.”
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
How much more time do you think you will need before you are able to say, “I will create no more pain, no more suffering?” How much more pain do you need before you can make that choice? If you think that you need more time, you will get more time — and more pain. Time and pain are inseparable.
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Invitation
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
Choice implies consciousness — a high degree of consciousness. Without it, you have no choice. Choice begins the moment you disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns, the moment you become present. Until you reach that point, you are unconscious, spiritually speaking. This means that you are compelled to think, feel, and act in certain ways according to the conditioning of your mind. Nobody chooses dysfunction, conflict, pain. Nobody chooses insanity. They happen because there is not enough presence in you to dissolve the past, not enough light to dispel the darkness. You are not fully here. You have not quite woken up yet. In the meantime, the conditioned mind is running your life.
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
Similarly, if you are one of the many people who have an issue with their parents, if you still harbor resentment about something they did or did not do, then you still believe that they had a choice — that they could have acted differently. It always looks as if people had a choice, but that is an illusion. As long as your mind with its conditioned patterns runs your life, as long as you are your mind, what choice do you have? None. You are not even there. The mind-identified state is severely dysfunctional. It is a form of insanity. Almost everyone is suffering from this illness in varying degrees. The moment you realize this, there can be no more resentment. How can you resent someone’s illness? The only appropriate response is compassion.
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
If you are run by your mind, although you have no choice you will still suffer the consequences of your unconsciousness, and you will create further suffering. You will bear the burden of fear, conflict, problems, and pain. The suffering thus created will eventually force you out of your unconscious state.
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
YOU CANNOT TRULY FORGIVE YOURSELF or others as long as you derive your sense of self from the past. Only through accessing the power of the Now, which is your own power, can there be true forgiveness. This renders the past powerless, and you realize deeply that nothing you ever did or that was ever done to you could touch even in the slightest the radiant essence of who you are.
Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering
Suddenly, a great stillness arises within you, an unfathomable sense of peace. And within that peace, there is great joy. And within that joy, there is love. And at the innermost core, there is the sacred, the immeasurable, That which cannot be named.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
Remember the deep wisdom underlying the practice of Eastern martial arts: don’t resist the opponent’s force. Yield to overcome.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
Then observe what happens to the other person’s mental position as you no longer energize it through resistance. When identification with mental positions is out of the way, true communication begins.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
The ego is cunning, so you have to be very alert, very present, and totally honest with yourself to see whether you have truly relinquished your identification with a mental position and so freed yourself from your mind.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
WHEN YOU BECOME INVOLVED IN AN ARGUMENT or some conflict situation, perhaps with a partner or someone close to you, start by observing how defensive you become as your own position is attacked, or feel the force of your own aggression as you attack the other person’s position.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
Focus not on the hundred things that you will or may have to do at some future time but on the one thing that you can do now. This doesn’t mean you should not do any planning. It may well be that planning is the one thing you can do now. But make sure you don’t keep running “mental movies” that continually project yourself into the future, and so lose the Now. Any action you take may not bear fruit immediately. Until it does — do not resist what is.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
Surrender is a purely inner phenomenon. It does not mean that on the outer level you cannot take action and change the situation.
Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now
If you have lived long enough, you will know that things “go wrong” quite often. It is precisely at those times that surrender needs to be practiced if you want to eliminate pain and sorrow from your life