“When you surrender to what is and so become fully present, the past ceases to have any power. You do not need it anymore. Presence is the key. The Now is the Key.” Eckhart Tolle (from A New Earth)_______________________
We are conditioned (thanks Freud) to believe that we are determined by our past, by what our mother did too us, and that if we could dig down into the landfill and pull out the single cause of our current misery, we would be OK. This is a mechanistic way of thinking because when you fix a machine you find the single cause of the problem, remove it, and the machine is restored to its original perfection.
Using the Objective View of science, we try to fix ourselves with the same tool box and manual writing by psychologies, our Mind Mechanics. Using this logic Tolle Teaching doesn’t make sense. If you have a tooth ache, surrendering to the pain, being full present to the pain, doesn’t get rid of the bad tooth. The cause of the tooth ache exists in time and it can be fixed as a thing in time.
Of course, this works when working with the pains of your body which is a thing, but it doesn’t work when it comes to the pain of your mind, which not a thing. A mechanistic view of life stops working when it comes to our mind. We need a new logic, a Tolle Logic.
The mechanist view of the problem requires that as the mechanic you are outside of the machine you are working on. The therapist is outside of your mind. The problem you must see is that you are the mind you are working on, and you as mind can’t work on your own mind. The dentist can’t work on his own teeth. The mind can’t get outside of itself.
“When you surrender” means to stop working on your own teeth. The mental pain you are experience is caused by your mind working on itself. We work on a machine in time but your mind is a Time Creator, so there is not time in which you can fix your mind, since you ARE time. There is no past in which you can find the problem of your mind because there is no You outside of the mind’s time. Time is your creation so “you do not need it anymore.”
The pain of the mind is believed to be caused by time past, but “when you surrender” to the timeless reality of Mind itself, there is no past, and there is no pain caused by the past. “Presence is the key.” Being fully present means seeing that Time as mind doesn’t exist, and Time only exists when you have a view point that is outside of time.
If time were a river, you couldn’t see it unless you were on the bank watching it flow past. The Tolle Shift is that while being on the river bank is necessary to fix your tooth, to fix your mind you have to jump into the river and BE the river. We think we have to give up being on the river bank to jump into the river, one or the other. But that is a big mistake. Being time, and Being in time are two sides of the same coin that is YOU. Jumping into the river fixes the pain of the mind—but you can’t do it in order to fix your mind in time.
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