From Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now: “Most people are so distracted by their thoughts, so identified with the voices in their heads, they can no longer feel the aliveness within them. To be unable to fee the life that animates the physical body, the very life that you are, is the greatest deprivation that can happen to you.” __________________

The “aliveness within” is not just pleasant feelings but unpleasant feelings or pain. If we don’t feel the pain we make no gain. We are conditioned to pursue pleasure (happiness) and avoid pain. When we avoid the feeling of pain by blaming it on the world or another, we avoid our own life. To be alive we have to accept, we have to welcome everything the body offers. There can be no resistance. It is resistance to the pain of life that creates the separate sense of self as a somebody that exists outside of experience. This, says the Buddha is Dukkha or the pain of separation or duality. Feeling the aliveness is feeling the pain, but when there is no resistance, there is no karma, there is no avoidance of life which means you live entirely in thought, which is an abstraction of life. Thought is an avoidance of the living body that is you, so we take refuge in thought, which is time, to avoid our true nature which is always already Now.