Note: he uses the words pain-body together to name something like our feeling selves--which is counter intuitive to most of of us. Not that we don't all experience plenty of emotional pain. But we also experience and enjoy positive feelings. His concept of pain-body and thinker is the same thing as the Buddha's catch-all word for life's most deep-seated problem: SUFFERING: the thing about human existence that makes us hurt and keeps us unhappy; the very thing we need to understand and learn to work with in order to be happy.
Anyway...read it a few times. Then read it again a few times. Then, if you're able, come back and read it more. And more.
If Tolle's words don't ring true for you find something that does.
You know, unfortunately, insight by itself doesn't change us much. We have to steep in it. We have to live with what makes us whole at least as much as we live with what makes us crazy, fragmented, and unhappy.
It's just the way it is. Awareness is not a quick fix--it's a path. We're either on it or we're not.
---
For love (and life) 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.
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.
If you stop
investing thinking 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 judgment stops through acceptance of what is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy,
for peace.
