A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

by Eckhart Tolle

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.

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. At some point, after a few hours or even a few days, it has replenished itself and returns to its dormant stage, leaving behind a depleted organism and a body that is much more susceptible to illness. If that sounds to you like a psychic parasite, you are right. That’s exactly what it is.

At some point, after a few hours or even a few days, it has replenished itself and returns to its dormant stage, leaving behind a depleted organism and a body that is much more susceptible to illness. If that sounds to you like ...

If there are other people around, preferably your partner or a close family member, the pain-body will attempt to provoke them—push their buttons, as the expression goes—so it can feed on the ensuing drama.

It is hard to resist another person’s pain-body that is determined to draw you into a reaction. Instinctively it knows your weakest, most vulnerable points. If it doesn’t succeed the first time, it will try again and again. It is raw emotion looking for more emotion. The other person’s pain-body wants to awaken yours so that both pain-bodies can mutually energize each other.

Many relationships go through violent and destructive pain-body episodes at regular intervals. It is almost unbearably painful for a young child to have to witness the emotional violence of their parents’ pain-bodies, and yet that is the fate of millions of children all over the world, the nightmare of their daily existence. That is also one of the main ways in which the human pain-body is passed on from generation to generation. After each episode, the partners make up, and

Excessive consumption of alcohol will often activate the pain-body, particularly in men, but also in some women. When a person becomes drunk, he goes through a complete personality change as the pain-body takes him over.

Some couples who may think they have “fallen in love” are actually feeling drawn to each other because their respective pain-bodies complement each other.

If you have ever lived with a cat, you will know that even when the cat seems to be asleep, it still knows what is going on,

In intimate relationships, pain-bodies are often clever enough to lie low until you start living together and preferably have signed a contract committing yourself to be with this person for the rest of your life. You don’t just marry your wife or husband, you also marry her or his pain-body—and your spouse marries yours. It can be quite a shock when, perhaps not long after moving in together or after the honeymoon, you find suddenly one day there is a complete personality change in your partner. Her voice becomes harsh or shrill as she accuses you, blames you, or shouts at you, most likely over a relatively trivial matter. Or she becomes totally withdrawn. “What’s wrong?” you ask. “Nothing is wrong,” she says. But the intensely hostile energy she emanates is saying, “Everything is wrong.” When you look into her eyes, there is no light in them anymore; it is as if a heavy veil has descended, and the being you know and love which before was able to shine through her ego, is now totally obscured. A complete stranger seems to be looking back at you, and in her eyes there is hatred, hostility, bitterness, or anger. When she speaks to you, it is not your spouse or partner who is speaking but the pain-body speaking through them. Whatever she is saying is the pain-body’s version of reality, a reality completely distorted by fear, hostility, anger, and a desire to inflict and receive more pain. At this point you may wonder whether this is your partner’s real face that you had neve...

It would be hard to find a partner who does not carry a pain-body, but it would perhaps be wise to choose someone whose pain-body is not excessively dense.

seething ball of unhappy emotion in them just underneath the surface, waiting for the next event to react to, the next person to blame or confront, the next thing to be unhappy about. Their pain-bodies can never get enough, are always hungry. They magnify the ego’s need for enemies.

in them just underneath the surface, waiting for the next event to react to, the next person to blame or confront, the next thing to be unhappy about. Their pain-bodies can never get enough, are always hungry. They magnify the ego’s need for enemies.

Through their reactivity, relatively insignificant matters are blown up out of all proportion as they try to pull other people into their drama by getting them to react. Some get involved in protracted and ultimately pointless battles or court cases with organizations or individuals. Others are consumed by obsessive hatred toward an ex-spouse or partner. Unaware of the pain they carry inside, by their reaction, they project the pain into events and situations. Due to a complete lack of self-awareness, they cannot tell the difference between an event and their reaction to the event. To them, the unhappiness and even the pain ...

one of the things that would amaze you is that millions of people love and pay money to watch humans kill and inflict pain on each other and call it “entertainment.”

Why do violent films attract such large audiences? There is an entire industry, a large part of which fuels the human addiction to unhappiness. People obviously watch those films because they want to feel bad. What is it in humans that loves to feel bad and calls it good? The pain-body, of course.

then those films can fulfill a vital function in the awakening of humanity.

Some of the best antiwar films are films that show the reality of war rather than a glamorized version of it.

Pain-bodies just love it.

Almost every woman has her share in the collective female pain-body, which tends to become activated particularly just prior to the time of menstruation. At that time many women become over whelmed by intense negative emotion.

Although women have egos, of course, the ego can take root and grow more easily in the male form than in the female.

The female form is less rigidly encapsulated than the male, has greater openness and sensitivity toward other life-forms, and is more attuned to the natural world.

three-hundred-year period between three and five million women were tortured and killed by the “Holy Inquisition,” an institution founded by the Roman Catholic Church to suppress heresy. This surely ranks together with the Holocaust as one of the darkest chapters in human history. It was enough for a woman to show a love for animals, walk alone in the fields or woods, or gather medicinal plants to be branded a witch, then tortured and burned at the stake.

Other cultures and religions, such as Judaism, Islam, and even Buddhism, also suppressed the female dimension, although in a less violent way. Women’s status was reduced to being child bearers and men’s property. Males

The evolving ego in them. It knew it could gain full control of our planet only through the male form, and to do so, it had to render the female powerless.

The sacred feminine, because it is suppressed, is felt by many women as emotional pain.

it has become part of their pain-body, together with the accumulated pain suffered by women over millennia through childbirth, rape, slavery, torture, and violent death.

But things are changing rapidly now. With many people becoming more conscious, the ego is losing its hold on the human mind. Because the ego was never as deeply rooted in woman, it is ...

This is why older nations tend to have stronger pain-bodies.

In some nations, for example, in the Middle East, the collective pain-body is so acute that a significant part of the population finds itself forced to act it out in an endless and insane cycle of perpetration and retribution through which the pain-body renews itself continuously.

China’s heavy pain-body is to some extent mitigated by the widespread practice of t’ai chi, which amazingly was not declared illegal by the Communist government that otherwise feels threatened by anything it cannot control.

Spiritual practices that involve the physical body, such as t’ai chi, qigong, and yoga, are also increasingly being embraced in the Western world.

They will play an important role in the global awakening.

The collective racial pain-body is pronounced in Jewish people, who have suffered persecution over many centuries.

as well in Native A...

In Black Americans too the collective pain-bod...

There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet: human unconsciousness.

With forgiveness, your victim identity dissolves, and your true power emerges—the power of Presence.

The beginning of freedom from the pain-body lies first of all in the realization that you have a pain-body.

more important,

to stay present enough, alert enough, to notice the pain-body in yourself as a heavy influx of negative e...

It is your conscious Presence that breaks the identification with the pain-body.

Your thinking ceases to be clouded by emotion; your present perceptions are no longer distorted by the past.

This is why many of the wisest, most enlightened men and women on our planet once had a heavy pain-body.

When you can’t stand the endless cycle of suffering anymore, you begin to awaken.

Suppressed pain-bodies are extremely toxic, even more so than openly active ones, and that psychic toxicity is absorbed by the children and contributes to the development of their own pain-body.

Not all unhappiness is of the pain-body. Some of it is new unhappiness, created whenever you are out of alignment with the present moment, when the Now is denied in one way or another.

The pain-body’s unhappiness is always clearly out of proportion to the apparent cause. In other words, it is an overreaction. This is how it is recognized, although not usually by the sufferer, the person possessed.