Who We Think We Are

Who we think we are is floating in the vast spaciousness of who we truly are.  And our mind (the struggling self) constantly seeks to deny this and to keep itself caught in struggle

Here is Eckhart Tolle’s definition of the struggling aspect of the ego quoted from The Power of Now.

“As long as you are unable to access the power of the Now, every emotional pain leaves behind a residue of pain that lives on in you. It merges with the pain from the past and becomes lodged in your mind and body.  This accumulated pain is a negative energy field that occupies your body and mind.  If you look on it as an invisible entity in its own right you are getting quite close to the truth.  It is the emotional pain body

And it has 2 modes of being: dormant and active.  Anything can trigger it, particularly if it resonates with a pain pattern from you past.  The pain body wants to survive just like every other entity in existence and it can only survive if it gets you to unconsciously identity with it.  It can then rise up, take you over, ‘become you.’  It will feed on any experience that resonates with its own kind of energy, anything that creates further pain in whatever form: anger, destructiveness, hatred, grief, emotional drama, violence and even illness.

If you were truly conscious of it, the pattern would dissolve.  It is actually afraid of the light of your consciousness.  It is afraid of being found out. Its survival depends on your unconscious identification with it as well as your unconscious fear of facing the pain that lives in you.  But if you don’t face it, you will be forced to relive it again and again.  The pain body may seem to you like a dangerous monster that you cannot bear to look at, but I assure you that it is an insubstantial phantom that cannot prevail against the power of your present.

The moment you observe it, feel its energy field within you and take your attention into it, the identification is broken. A higher dimension of consciousness has come.  I call it presence.  You are now the witness or the watcher of the pain body.  This means that it cannot use you anymore by pretending to be you, it can no longer replenish itself through you.  You have then found your own innermost strength.  You have accessed the power of Now.”

We can relate to the pain within us rather than being identified with it.

Know that whatever struggles come are here to highlight your particular brand of pain body so you can SEE it and realize you are NOT it.

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