Tag: Eckhart Tolle

Acceptance Is the Key to Contentment

Recently I read Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth in the space of about 24 hours. It’s a book that gave me a lot of joy, peace and aliveness. It gave me awareness of my ego, and in times it has cropped up in life. His wisdom and the way he brings it to the reader is very impressive and incredibly useful for anyone.

One of the stand-out topics for me was the idea of acceptance. I think it’s a concept that is so hard for most people to grasp and live out, and that’s why I see a lot of unhappiness in the world today.

Here are a few quotes on acceptance:

“Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at this moment.”

“The gap between ‘I want’ and ‘what is’ is a constant source of anguish.”

“Right now, this is how it is. I can either accept it, or let it make me miserable.”

“The primary source of unhappiness is never the situation but the thoughts about it. Situations are always neutral.”

“Instead of making up a story, stick to the facts.”

“Seeking happiness leads to the antithesis of happiness.”

“If you can be absolutely comfortable with not knowing who you are, then what’s left is who you are.”

“Let go of story and return to the present moment. If the past cannot prevent you from being present now, what power does it have?”

“If you don’t mind being unhappy, what happens to the unhappiness?”

“You cannot be happy without an unhappy story.”

“Be what you already are. You can’t argue with what is.”

“Nonresistance, nonjudgement and nonattachement are the three aspects of true freedom and enlightened living.”

Want to read more? Here are articles on the mind and on the need to be right.

Why the Need to Be Right Is Holding Us Back

It turns out that being right is the primary motivating factor in almost anything we do. Here are a few examples:

I was once on a hike up a mountain with some friends. Once we reached the final saddle, I asked one of my friends how long they thought it would take to reach the summit. My friend estimated another hour. I disagreed and said we could probably do it in half the time. Instantly, and unconsciously, I picked up the pace. The leisurely stroll turned into tough work as I tried to summit faster. After a few minutes, my friend told me to slow down. “Stop walking so fast just because you want to be right.”

A friend was telling me about some health problems they were having one time, where they were visiting with doctors to find out what was wrong. My friend had to wear a monitoring device so the doctor could have a better idea of what the problem could have been. I told my friend, “I hope everything is normal and healthy and you don’t have to go back to the doctors again!”

My friend replied, “I don’t, I just want to find out what’s wrong with me.” I was taken aback. My friend would have preferred being right about the belief that there was something wrong with them, than simply just being healthy.

People who fall out with others because their social or political views get challenged. They confuse opinions and viewpoints with facts, and don’t understand or tolerate anyone who may have an alternative view to what they have. They’d rather be right and make others wrong, even if they were initially close friends or family members.

Being right also helps us reinforce anything we believe in ourselves. If we truly believe ourselves as hard-working, intelligent and courageous, we want to make ourselves right about it and do things to confirm those beliefs. On the other hand, if we see ourselves as drug addicts, failures, or unhealthy, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and we get a small kick in telling ourselves we were right all along. We’d rather be right than be at peace.

The need to be right comes from a lack of security, and the need to feel good. This is because it feels good to be right and it feels bad to be wrong. But if we are trying to make ourselves feel good at the expense of others’ feelings by making them wrong, it comes from a lack of consciousness. We can often even make ourselves right at the expense of ourselves! Eckhart Tolle describes in A New Earth that the need to be right comes from our ego, and that we aren’t the same as our ego. The ego isn’t something we should take too seriously, it’s just something that pops up from time to time, craving your attention. If we identify with it, that where it starts to grow and we become unconscious again.

Can Pain Be an Effective Call to Action?

If you are trapped in the nightmare you will probably be more strongly motivated to awaken than someone who is just caught in the ups and downs of an ordinary dream.

Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now

The quote above rings true. Why do we will ourselves to wake up during a nightmare, while we remain blissfully ignorant during regular or pleasant dreams?

Tony Robbins describes in his book Awaken the Giant Within the following scenario:

I believe that life is like a river, and that most people jump on the river of life without ever really deciding where they want to end up. So, in a short period of time, they get caught up in the current: current events, current fears, current challenges.

When they come to forks in the river, they don’t consciously decide where they want to go, or which is the right direction for them. They merely ‘go with the flow’. They become a part of the mass of people who are directed by the environment instead of by their own values. As a result, they feel out of control.

They remain in this unconscious state until one day the sound of the raging water awakens them, and they discover that they’re five feet from Niagara Falls in a boat with no oars. At this point, they say, ‘Oh shoot!’. 

Tony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within

This scenario is similar to the nightmare scenario is that we only really awaken when we realize that catastrophe is looming. We can no longer ignore the pain we are experiencing and are forced into action.

One of the biggest human motivators is the avoidance of pain, even more than pursuing pleasure. It’s been shown in experiments that humans refuse to gamble on a coin toss until the ratio of the reward is twice as much as their initial stake they could lose. This is explained by Daniel Kahneman’s Nobel Prize-winning theory of loss aversion – people hate losing more than they enjoy winning.

So how do we avoid noticing that life is going sour before it’s too late? One way is to increase our reference points in our lives. This is the same as raising our standards, or turning up a metaphorical thermostat. This applies to our finances, health, relationships, and any other area of our life. If we have higher standards, we will feel ‘pain’ even when other people may not, which we can use as motivation to get where we deem is acceptable.

Therefore, pursuing a goal means you must be willing to sacrifice. To get something “better” you will have to give up something – be it energy, time, even sense of current identity. Having a higher level of reference will mean that you have to be ready to meet the challenge of living life at a higher level – taking more responsibility and using up more effort.

You Are Not Your Mind

In Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now, Tolle describes the time in his life in which he had an epiphany which you could describe as a spiritual awakening:

“I cannot live with myself any longer.” This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then I suddenly became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. “Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: The ‘I’ and the ‘self’ that ‘I’ cannot live with.” “Maybe,” I thought, “only one of them is real.”

The ‘self’ that Tolle was describing was the personification of his mind. The state he was in before he had the epiphany was a state of unconsciousness. He was identifying with his mind – he thought his mind was himself. Unconscious mind identification happens to all of us, and is a major source of our suffering.

It’s freeing to detach from mind identification. The same mind that constantly comes up with negative, self-defeating thoughts or projecting to the future or revisiting past events – you can simply observe. Observation of the mind brings a new level of awareness and consciousness and brings you into the Now.

If you were to have these same thoughts and identify with your mind, you will suffer. You end up attaching too much to your thoughts. You don’t end up using your mind – your mind uses you. Whenever you are able to observe your mind, you are no longer trapped in it.