Freeing yourself from your mind-Day 11-25 Day Reading Challenge-The Power of Now-Eckhart Tolle
FREEING YOURSELF FROM YOUR MIND
What exactly do you mean by "watching the thinker”?
When someone goes to the doctor and says, “I hear a voice in
my head," he or she will most likely be sent to a psychiatrist. The fact
is that, in a very similar way, virtually everyone hears a voice, or several
voices, in their head all the time: the involuntary thought processes that you
don't realize you have the power to stop. Continuous monologues or dialogues.
You have probably come across "mad" people in the
street incessantly talking or muttering to themselves. Well, that's not much
different from what you and all other "normal" people do, except that
you don't do it out loud. The voice comments, speculates, judges, compares,
complains, likes, dislikes, and so on. The voice isn't necessarily relevant to
the situation you find yourself in at the time; it may be reviving the recent
or distant past or rehearsing or imagining possible future situations. Here it
often imagines things going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry.
Sometimes this soundtrack is accompanied by visual images or "mental
movies." Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will
interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your
conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of
the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the
present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It
is not uncommon for the voice to be a person's own worst enemy. Many people
live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them
and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and
unhappiness, as well as of disease.
The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind.
This is the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. Start
listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular
attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that
have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by
"watching the thinker," which is another way of saying: listen to the
voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence.
When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially.
That is to say, do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing
so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door.
You'll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it,
watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a
thought.It arises from beyond the mind.
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