“You cannot fight the ego and win, just as you cannot fight darkness and win. What you need is the light of consciousness. You are that light.”
Eckhart Tolle
The book A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle is one of the books I most often recommend to people who are going through periods of great suffering. This is suffering whose intensity is either disproportionate to the stimulus that provokes it, or appears completely causeless and irrational. Yet there is a cause, and it lies in the transpersonal layers of the human psyche—what Tolle calls the “dense pain-body.”
The concept of the “dense pain-body” does not originate in psychology, yet it is psychologically very precise and fills a gap to which this field has yet to make its full contribution. It describes a specific type of suffering whose “density,” that is, its intensity, arises from the collective layers of the human psyche and therefore does not correspond to the facts of the current life situation.
In addition to accurately describing this type of suffering, Eckhart Tolle also offers the most effective means of dealing with it—what he calls “presence.” Because transpersonal suffering is not subject to control by a person’s conscious attitude, one cannot free oneself from it through the force of personal will. Through a shift in mental attitude, however, one can be freed from neurotic suffering. This means non-resistance to these painful experiences and transforming them into a means for dissolving ego identifications.
Presence in experience and the observation of thoughts passing through the mind is also the essence of Vipassana meditation. In both cases, we turn our attention inward, observe, register, but do nothing to change what is happening. People who have experience with this practice know that the moment the mind’s argument with reality stops, emotional pain sharply decreases and turns into a bodily sensation. If one continues with an attitude of neutrality and non-identification, it eventually disappears altogether. For this reason, knowledge of and practice with Eckhart Tolle’s ideas are an excellent aid when encountering archetypal material and avoiding the danger of ego inflation.
Words are energy, and when they come from someone like Tolle—who has gone beyond the pendulum of duality—that energy is deeply healing. I am reminded of a client of mine who had been taking antidepressants for quite some time. Alongside reading his book, she had also begun listening to recordings of his lectures on YouTube. What she later shared with me was that the moment she began listening to him, something inside her would start to calm down. Two weeks later, she was able to stop one of the medications she had been taking—the one prescribed for obsessive thoughts. The word of this enlightened teacher had become her new medicine.
There are several publications on the site featuring quotes from this invaluable book, but the best thing is for one to read it in its entirety. And not just once. Fortunately, it is also available for free reading online.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
