A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

by Eckhart Tolle

Indirectly, an emotion can also be a response to an actual situation or event, but it will be a response to the event seen through the filter of a mental interpretation, the filter of thought, that is to say, through the mental concepts of good and bad, like and dislike, me and mine. For example, it is likely you won’t feel any emotion when you are told that someone’s car has been stolen, but when it is your car, you will probably feel upset.

Although the body is very intelligent, it cannot tell the difference between an actual situation and a thought.

It reacts to every thought as if it were a reality.

To the body, a worrisome, fearful thought means “I am in danger,” and it responds accordingly, even though you may be lying in a warm and comfortable bed at night. The heart beats faster, muscles contract, breathing becomes rapid. There is a buildup of energy, but since the danger is only a mental fiction, the energy has no outlet. Part of it is fed back to the mind and generates even more anxious...

The voice in the head tells a story that the body believes in and reacts to. Those reactions are the emotions.

This is the vicious circle between unexamined thoughts and emotions, giving rise to emotional thinking and emotional story-making.

The voice of the ego continuously disrupts the body’s natural state of well-being.

but from within the mind.

What is a negative emotion? An emotion that is toxic to the body and interferes with its balance and harmonious functioning.

Fear, anxiety, anger, bearing a grudge, sadness, hatred or intense dislike, jealousy, envy—all disrupt the energy flow through the body, affect the heart, the immune system, digestion, production of hormones, and so on.

An emotion that does harm to the body also infects the people you come into contact with and indirectly, through a process of chain reaction, countless others you never meet.

unhappiness.

They do, indeed, but we need to differentiate between positive emotions that are ego-generated and deeper emotions that emanate from your natural state of connectedness with Being.

Ego-generated emotions are derived from the mind’s identification with external factors which are, of course, all unstable and liable to change at any moment.

The deeper emotions are not really emotions at all but states of Being. Emotions exist within the realm of opposites. States of Being can be obscured, but they have no opposite.

But this is how most humans live all the time.

The mind and the mind-made “me and my story” keep it going.

Everything natural, every flower or tree, and every animal have important lessons to teach us if we woul...

Flap your wings—which translates as “let go of the story”—and return to the only place of...

you get a sense of what life is like for the majority of people on our planet.

It is only when memories, that is to say, thoughts about the past, take you over completely that they turn into a burden, turn problematic, and become part of your sense of self.

Your personality, which is conditioned by the past, then becomes your prison.

most people carry a large amount of unnecessary baggage, both mental and emotional, throughout their lives.

Their emotional thinking has become their self, and so they hang on to the old emotion because it strengthens their identity.

almost everyone carries in his or her energy field an accumulation of old emotional pain, wh...

We can learn to break the habit of accumulating and perpetuating old emotion by flapping our wings, metaphorically speaking, and refrain from mentally dwelling on the past, regardless of wheth...

We can learn not to keep situations or events alive in our minds, but to return our attention continuously to the pristine, timeless present moment rathe...

to return our attention continuously to the pristine, timeless present moment rather than be caug...

Our very Presence the...

Nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from...

Any negative emotion that is not fully faced and seen for what it is in the moment it arises does not completely dissolve.

Children in particular find strong negative emotions too overwhelming to cope with and tend to try not to feel them. In the absence of a fully conscious adult who guides them with love and compassionate understanding into facing the emotion directly, choosing not to feel it is indeed the only option for the child at that time. Unfortunately, that early defense mechanism usually remains in place when the child becomes an adult. The emotion still lives in him or her unrecognized and manifests indirectly, for example, as anxiety, anger, outbursts of violence, a mood, or even as a physical illness. In some cases, it interferes with or sabotages every intimate relationship.

nobody can go through childhood without suffering emotional pain.

This energy field of old but still very-much-alive emotion that lives in almost every human being is the pain-body.

The collective pain-body is probably encoded within every human’s DNA, although we haven’t discovered it there yet.

Other babies may cry frequently because they can sense the emanation of their mother’s and father’s negative emotion, and it causes them pain and also causes their pain-body to grow already by absorbing energy from the parents’ pain-bodies.

People with heavy pain-bodies usually have a better chance to awaken spiritually than those with a relatively light one.

Christ can be seen as the archetypal human, embodying both the pain and the possibility of transcendence.

The pain-body is a semiautonomous energy-form that lives within most human beings, an entity made up of emotion.

Like all life-forms, it periodically needs to feed—to take in new energy—and

Any emotionally painful experience can be used as food by the pain-body. That’s why it thrives on negative thinking as well as drama in relationships.

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 emotio...

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...

In most people, the pain-body has a dormant and ...

In rare cases the pain-body can lie in hibernation for years before it gets triggered by some event.

If you live alone or there is nobody around at the time, the pain-body will feed on your thoughts.

All thought is energy and the pain-body is now feeding on the energy of your thoughts.

It can only feed on negative thoughts because only those thoughts are compatible with its own energy field.

Thoughts consist of the same energy vibrating at a higher frequency than matter, which is why they cannot be seen or touched.