Tolle pain body. Eckhart Tolle. from the book "New Earth. Awakening to your life purpose." Body of pain. What is this

If you do not have access to the power of the Now, if you are unable to accept it, then any emotional pain you feel will be hidden behind the residual pain that lives within you. It mixes with pain from the past that is already there and becomes a burden on both the mind and body. It, of course, includes both the pain from which you suffered as a child, and the pain generated by the world's unconsciousness, under the conditions of which you were born.

This accumulated pain is a negative energy field occupying your body and mind. If you believe it to be an invisible object or an entity that lives according to its own laws, then you are pretty close to the truth. This is the emotional pain body. He has two forms of life: dormant and active. The pain body may be dormant 90 percent of the time; although in a deeply unhappy person it can be active up to 100 percent of the time. Some people live through their pain body almost their entire lives, while others may only feel it in certain situations, such as during intimacy, or in situations somehow related to a past loss or betrayal, or intended to cause harm. them physical or emotional pain, etc. Anything can switch it into an active state, especially if it resonates with a pattern of pain caused to you in the past. When it is ready to awaken from its dormant state, even a thought or an innocent remark made by someone close to it can activate it.

Some pain bodies are unpleasant and difficult to bear, but are relatively harmless, such as a child who does not want to stop whining and whining. Others are evil and all-crushing monsters, real demons. Some of them do not shun physical violence; and there are countless topics that allow themselves to use emotional violence. Some attack others or loved ones, while others can attack you, their own master. In this case, your thoughts and feelings about your own life become deeply negative and self-destructive. Illnesses and accidents often occur in this way. Some pain bodies drive their owners to suicide.

When you think you know someone well and suddenly for the first time in the history of your relationship you come into confrontation with this alien, disgusting degenerate, you can experience quite a shock. However, it is much more important to observe this shock in yourself than in someone else. Keep track of any signs of dissatisfaction that arise in you, which can appear in any form - it is possible that this is the awakening body of pain. It can take some form of irritation, impatience, a gloomy, joyless mood, a desire to harm, it can manifest itself in the form of embitterment, an attack of intense anger, depression, the need to dramatize personal relationships, etc. Catch it at the moment when it just begins to wake up and emerge from its dormant state.

Just like any other being, the pain body wants to live, and it will only survive if it can persuade you to identify with it. Then it will be able to rise up, take you into circulation, “become you” and live through you. It needs you to receive “food”. It will feed any sensation you have that resonates with either its own type of energy or anything else, as long as it continues to create further pain in any form: in the form of anger, destructiveness, hatred, grief, emotional drama, violence and even in the form of illness. Thus, when you are overcome by the pain body, it creates a situation in your life that mirrors and returns its own energy back to it, which it feeds on. Pain feeds only on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy. She is unable to digest it.

Once the pain body takes over you, you begin to want even more pain. You become a victim or a criminal. You want to hurt or suffer pain, or both. There is no significant difference between one and the other. Of course, you will not realize this and therefore you will argue furiously and fiercely repeat that you do not want pain at all. However, when you take a closer look, you will find that your thought process and behavior are organized in such a way as to continue and maintain this pain in yourself and others. If you was truly aware of this, then her model would dissolve, for to desire more pain is madness, because no one is consciously insane.

The pain body, which appears as a dark shadow cast by the ego, is actually very afraid of the light of your awareness. It is afraid of being discovered. The continuation of his existence, as well as the existence of the unconscious fear of pain living in you, is a consequence of your unconscious identification with him and is completely dependent on this identification. But if you do not look at this pain directly, if you do not bring it into the light of your awareness, then again and again you will find yourself forced to allow its claws to sink its claws into you. The pain body may seem like a dangerous monster to you that you cannot even glance at, but I assure you that it is just an intangible phantom that cannot resist the power of your presence.

Some spiritual teachings state that ultimately all pain is an illusion, and this is true. The only question is: do you consider this to be your truth? Weak faith does not make it true. Do you want to experience pain for the rest of your days, continuing to insist that this is an illusion? Does it free you from pain? What we're doing here is finding a way in which you can get to comprehension this truth, so as to turn it into the reality of your sensations.

The painbody doesn't want you to observe it directly and see it for what it is. The moment you look at him, when you feel his energy field inside you, when you turn your attention to him, your identification with him crumbles. A higher level of consciousness opens. I call him presence. Now you become a witness or observer of the pain body. This means that it can no longer pretend to be you and use you to replenish its strength. This means that you have found your own, greatest inner strength and firmness. You have accessed the power of the Now.

What happens to the pain body when we become so aware that we are able to break our identification with it?

The pain body is created by unconsciousness, but awareness transmutes it into itself. St. Paul expressed this universal principle perfectly:

“Everything becomes visible when brought into the light, and whatever is presented to the light becomes light itself.”

Just as you cannot fight darkness, you cannot fight the pain body. Such attempts will create internal conflict and thereby create even more pain. Tracking is sufficient. Noticing the pain body involves accepting it as part of what There is At the moment.

The pain body consists of a portion of life energy that is captured and retained by it, split off from your total, integral energy field, which, as a result of the unnatural process of mental identification, becomes autonomous for some time. It turns sharply on itself and becomes anti-life, like an animal trying to eat its tail. Why do you think our civilization has become so destructive to all forms of life? However, even the force that destroys life is still life energy.

When you begin to disidentify with the mind and become an observer, the pain body remains active for some time and will try to switch you into the mode of identification with it. However, by identifying yourself with it, you will stop feeding it with energy, although the pain body has a certain moment of inertia and, just like a spinning wheel, will continue to spin for some time even when no one is spinning it anymore. At this stage of its existence, it will still be able to create physical pain in different parts of your body, but this pain will no longer last. Stay present, stay aware. Always be alert and guard your inner space. In order to gain the ability to track the pain body and directly feel its energy, you need to be sufficiently present. Then it will not be able to control your thoughts. As soon as the vector of your thoughts aligns with the vector of the energy field of the pain body, you immediately identify with it again and again begin to feed it with the energy of your thoughts.

For example, if anger is the predominant, dominant energetic vibration of the pain body, and if you are immersed in evil thoughts, going into thoughts that someone, somewhere, sometime has harmed you in some way, or if you you have a desire to somehow teach this scoundrel a lesson, then you become unconscious, and the pain body becomes “you”. If there is anger, then there is always pain underneath it. Or if you get into a dark mood and start to delve into various negative mental models and think about how worthless and futile your life is, then the vector of thoughts becomes aligned with the pain body, and you become unconscious and vulnerable to attacks from the pain body. The meaning of the word “unconsciousness” that I use here comes down to identification with some mental or emotional pattern or stereotype. This implies the complete absence of an observer.

Prolonged conscious attention breaks the connection between the pain body and the thought process and carries out the process of transmutation. It is as if the pain has become fuel for the flame of your awareness, which will only burn brighter as a result. This is the esoteric meaning and purpose of the ancient art of alchemy: the transmutation of base metals into gold, suffering into awareness. The stratification of consciousness stops, and it is healed, and you become whole again. Then you become responsible for not creating further pain.

Let me sum it up a bit. Focus your attention on your inner feelings. Know that this is the pain body. Accept what it is. Not think about him - don’t let your feelings turn into thoughts. Don't judge or analyze. Don't create your personality by giving it qualities that come from him. Stay present and continue to observe what is happening within you. Be fully aware not only of the presence of emotional pain, but also of the presence of “one who is watching,” become a silent witness. This is the power of the moment Now, the power of your own conscious presence. And watch what happens.

For many women, the pain body awakens especially clearly in the period preceding the menstrual cycle. A little later I will talk about this and the reasons for this awakening. Now let me say this: if you are able to remain alert, present in time and track everything that you feel inside yourself, and not be crushed by it, you have the opportunity to engage in the most powerful spiritual practice, and then the rapid transmutation of all past pain becomes real.

Thinking for most people is, to a large extent, involuntary, automatic and endlessly repeated thinking. A kind of mental noise, a kind of mental static, devoid of any purpose. Strictly speaking, you don't think. Thinking happens on its own. The statement “I think” implies the presence of will or desire. It contains the assumption that you yourself are involved in the process, that it is your choice, and that you have decided to do it. But for most people this is not the case. The expression “I think” is a mistake. It is on the same level as statements like “I digest food” or “I circulate blood.” Digestion happens, blood circulation happens, thinking happens.

For thousands of years, people became more and more obsessed with the mind, because they could not recognize in the essence that had taken possession of them something different from themselves. As a result of a person's complete identification with his mind, he developed a false sense of himself - the ego. The density of the ego depends on the degree to which you - consciousness - are identified with the mind, with thinking. Thinking is just a tiny part of all consciousness, all that you are.

Different people have different degrees of identification with the mind. Some people like periods when they are freed from it, at least for a short time. The peace, joy and vitality they experience at such moments makes their life worth living. These are moments of creativity, love, empathy. Others are constantly in captivity of the egoic state. They became strangers not only to themselves, but also to other people, along with the entire world around them. If you look at them, you can notice tension on their faces, maybe deep wrinkles between the eyebrows, an absent or intent gaze. Most of their attention is absorbed in their own thoughts, so they hardly see you, and are unlikely to listen. They are not present in any situation, their attention is directed either to the past or to the future - which, of course, exist only in the form of thought forms, or have the same relation to you as the role you are playing, and therefore are not you. Many are alienated from who they are, but alienated to such an extent that their behavior and communication with others is recognized by almost everyone as “false” - except for those who are themselves just as false and equally alienated from their essence.

Alienation means that you never, in any situation, in any place, with any person, not even with yourself, feel free. You always strive to “go home”, but you never feel at home anywhere. Some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, such as Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce considered alienation to be a common factor in the global dilemma of human existence. They may have experienced it deep inside and therefore were able to express it so brilliantly in their works. They don't offer solutions. Their contribution is that they showed us the problem of humanity in a way that we too could see it clearly. Seeing your problem clearly is the first step to overcoming it.

Birth of emotion

Added to the flow of thoughts is another, although not entirely separate, dimension of the ego—emotion. It cannot be said that all thinking and all emotions come from the ego. They turn into ego only when you identify with them. Then they completely replace you, in other words, they become your “I”.

The physical body, your organism, like any other living organism, has its own intelligence. And this intellect reacts to what your mind says, it reacts to your thoughts. Therefore, an emotion is a reaction of the body to a state of mind. ...

An emotion is the body's reaction to a thought. Indirectly, any emotion can also be a response to a real situation or event - but to an event perceived through the filter of mental interpretation, the filter of thinking, in other words, through the mental concepts of “bad” and “good”, “like - don’t like”, "me" and "mine". For example, you probably wouldn't feel any emotion if you were told that someone's car was stolen, but if it was your car, you might be upset. It's amazing how much emotion can be generated by such a small, mentally created idea as "mine."

Although the body is very intelligent, it is still unable to distinguish between a real situation and a mental one. It reacts to any thought as if it were reality. The body doesn't know that it's just a thought. For the body, an anxious, frightening thought means “I am in danger,” and it reacts accordingly, even if you are lying in a warm and cozy bed at night. Heart rate and breathing increase, muscles contract. Energy grows, but since this danger is imaginary, the energy does not find a way out. Some of it returns to the mind and gives rise to even more disturbing thoughts. The remaining energy becomes toxic and interferes with the harmonious functioning of the body.

Emotions and Ego

Dysfunctional thinking is something to which the body responds with negative emotion.

The voice in your head tells a story, which your body believes and reacts accordingly. These reactions are emotions. Emotions, in turn, return energy to the thoughts that aroused the original emotion. It is a vicious cycle of unexamined thoughts and emotions that give rise to emotional thinking and emotional storytelling.
The emotional component varies from person to person. Some have a larger ego, others have a smaller one. Thoughts that trigger the body's emotional responses sometimes come so quickly that the mind does not yet have time to express them, when the body already responds with emotion, and this emotion already becomes a reaction. These thoughts exist at a non-verbal stage, and we can call them unspoken, unconscious expectations. They originate in a person's past conditioning, usually in early childhood. An example of such an unconscious expectation in a person whose initial relationships, for example with parents or siblings, were neither supportive, trusting, nor inspiring, is the attitude “people cannot be trusted.” Here are some examples of the most common unconscious assumptions: “No one respects or values ​​me. To survive, I must fight. There is always not enough money. Life always hits you over the head. I don't deserve wealth. Abundance is not for me. I don't deserve love." Unconscious assumptions form emotions in the body, which in turn excite mental activity and/or cause an immediate reaction. This is how they create your personal reality.

The voice of the ego constantly undermines the natural state of the body - a state of well-being and health. The body of almost any person experiences severe tension and stress, not from some external factor, but coming from within, their mind. The body has an ego attached to it, so the body cannot help but respond to all the mental models of behavior that constitute the ego that disrupt its normal functioning. As a result, a continuous stream of obsessive thoughts is accompanied by a stream of negative emotions. What is a negative emotion? It is an emotion that is toxic to the body and disrupts its balance and harmonious functioning. Fear, anxiety, anger, resentment, sadness, hatred or strong antipathy, jealousy, envy - all this disrupts the normal flow of energy in the body, affects the heart, immune system, digestion, hormone production, etc. Even mainstream medicine, although it still knows very little about the mechanism of action of the ego, is beginning to recognize the existence of a connection between negative emotional states and physical illness. An emotion that harms the body is also transmitted to people with whom you come into contact, and indirectly, along the chain, infects countless other people with whom you have no contact at all. For all negative emotions there is one definition: “I’m so unhappy.”

Do positive emotions have the opposite effect on the physical body? Do they strengthen the immune system, give strength and heal the body? Yes, of course, but we need to be able to distinguish between positive emotions generated by the ego and deeper emotions that come from your natural state of connection with Being.

Positive emotions generated by the ego initially contain their opposite, into which they quickly turn. Here are some examples: what the ego calls love is possession and painful attachment that can turn into hatred in a second. Expectation about an upcoming event, which the ego overestimates in advance, easily turns into its opposite - displeasure or disappointment if the event has already ended or did not live up to expectations. Today, praise and recognition makes you feel alive and happy; tomorrow criticism and indifference will make you dejected and unhappy. The pleasure of a wild party turns into chills and a hangover the next morning. Without bad there is no good, without bottom there is no top.

Emotions generated by the ego are derived from mental identification with external factors, none of which are stable and can change at any moment. Deeper emotions are not emotions at all, but states of Being. Emotions exist in a world of opposites. The states of Being can be obscured, but they have no opposite. They radiate from within you as love, joy and peace, which is your true nature.

Duck with a human mind

In the book The Power of Now, I mentioned my observations of ducks when two of them got into a small fight, which they never have for long, and then went off in opposite directions. Then each made several energetic wing beats, releasing the excess energy that had accumulated during the fight. Flapping their wings, they swam as peacefully as before, as if there had been no fight.

If a duck had a human mind, it would continue to fight mentally, making up different stories. One of these duck stories could be: “I can’t even believe what she did just now. She came less than five inches closer to me. She probably thinks this whole pond belongs to her. She has no respect for my personal space. Next time she will try to do something else just to annoy me. I'm sure she's already planning something. But I'm not going to put up with it. I’ll teach her a lesson that she won’t forget.” And so on and so forth, the mind spins its tales, thinking and telling them days, months and even years later. As for the body, the fight is still going on, and in response to all these thoughts and emotions, corresponding energy is generated, generating even more thoughts. It becomes the emotional thinking of the ego. It is easy to understand how difficult a duck's life would be if it had a human mind. But most people live like this all the time. No situation or event is ever truly over. The mind and the “me and my story” created by it keep them in a permanently active state.

We are lost creatures. Anything natural, any flower or tree, any animal, can teach us an important lesson, can teach us a lot, if only we stop, look and listen. The lesson taught by the duck is: flap your wings - which translates to "let go of your story" - and return to the only place of power - the present moment.

Burden of the past

The story of two Zen monks Tanzan and Ekido perfectly illustrates the inability, or rather the unwillingness, of the human mind to let go of the past. The monks were walking along a country road muddy from the rains, and near the village they met a young woman. She tried to cross the road, but there was so much mud that the woman could have hopelessly ruined her silk kimono. In an instant, Tanzan picked her up and carried her to the other side. The monks walked on in silence. Five hours later, already approaching the temple where shelter was waiting for them, Ekido could no longer contain himself.
- Why did you carry that girl across the road? - he asked. “We monks are not supposed to do this.”
“I put the girl on the ground a few hours ago,” Tanzan said. -Are you still carrying it?

Now imagine what the life of a person must be like, living like Ekido, unable or unwilling to internally let go of the situation, accumulating more and more rubbish inside himself, and you will be able to imagine how most people on our planet live and what a heavy burden of the past they carry. peace in your mind.

The past lives in you in the form of memories, but they themselves are not the problem. In fact, it is thanks to memory that we can learn from the past, learn from past mistakes. Only when memories, that is, thoughts about the past, completely take over you, do they become a burden, become a problem and become part of your sense of self. And then your personality, conditioned by past experiences, becomes your prison. You begin to imbue memories with your sense of self, and your story becomes who you think you are. This "little self" is nothing more than an illusion that obscures your true self - the timeless and formless Presence.

However, your history consists not only of mental memories, but also of emotional memories - old emotions that are constantly being resurrected. Like the monk who carried a load of resentment with his thoughts for five hours, most people carry a lot of unnecessary baggage, both mental and emotional, throughout their lives. They limit themselves to resentment, regret, hostility and guilt. Their emotional thinking has become their self, and they cling to old emotions because they reinforce their self-image.

Because people tend to perpetuate old emotions, almost everyone includes previously accumulated emotional pain in their energy field, which I call the “pain body.”

However, we can stop replenishing and nourishing the pain body we already have. We can learn this and break the habit of accumulating and perpetuating old emotions, metaphorically speaking, learn, by flapping our wings, to keep ourselves from staying in the past, regardless of whether it happened yesterday or thirty years ago. We can learn not to relive situations or events in our minds, and not to fall into the bait of our own mental movie script, but all the time to return attention to the original, timeless, pure and untouched present moment. Our identity then becomes the true Presence, not thoughts and emotions.

Whatever happened in the past cannot stop you from being present in the present. And if the past cannot prevent you from being present in the present, then what power does it have?

In most cases, suffering and pain can be avoided. The cause of pain is ourselves, because our lives are guided by the mind - the mind that we do not observe. The pain we create is always a sign of rejection, unconscious resistance to what is.

At the level of thinking, this resistance manifests itself as condemnation. At the emotional level, it spills out with negative emotions. The stronger the resistance to the present, the greater the pain. The intensity of resistance, in turn, depends on the degree of identification with the mind. The mind is always trying to reject the Now and run from it.

In other words, the more closely you identify with the mind, the more you suffer. Another way to put it is: the greater your ability to appreciate and accept the Now, the less pain and torment you suffer - and the freer you are from the egoistic mind.

According to some spiritual teachings, pain is an illusion. This is true. The question is whether this is true for you. Conviction alone is not enough. Or maybe you want to suffer in pain all your life, continuing to claim that pain is an illusion? Will this help you get rid of your pain? The most important thing here is how you realize this truth, that is, how you embody it in your own experience.

As long as you identify yourself with the mind (in the spiritual sense - as long as you are not self-aware), you are doomed to endure pain. Mainly I mean mental pain - the main cause of physical pain and physical illness. Resentment, hatred, self-pity, guilt, anger, depression, envy, even mild irritation - all these are types of pain. In any pleasure or emotional upsurge there is a grain of pain, the integral opposite of pleasure, which sooner or later will definitely make itself felt.

Anyone who has ever used drugs knows: the “high” inevitably turns into a decline, pleasure becomes pain. Many of us know firsthand how easily relationships with a loved one turn from a source of joy into a source of pain. If you dig deeper, it becomes clear that these opposites, positive and negative, are two sides of the same coin, two components of deep pain; pain is an integral part of the egocentric consciousness fused with the mind.

Until you have access to the potential of the Present, the sediment of the suffering accumulates inside. This “remnant” will combine with the pain already present in you from the past and become firmly established in the body and mind. Part of this pain, of course, is that childhood pain that was once caused to you by the unawareness of our world, into which you had just arrived.

Such deposits of pain are nothing more than a field of negative energy that has taken over your body and mind. You will not sin too much against the truth if you begin to perceive this field as some kind of invisible entity that deserves a separate discussion. This is the emotional pain body.

The pain body has two modes of existence: passive and active. Existing in passive mode can be ninety percent of the time. In the life of a deeply unhappy person, the pain body can be one hundred percent active. Some of us live a lifetime of suffering, while others experience pain only occasionally: when things go wrong in relationships, when it hurts physically or psychologically, when remembering past losses, and so on.

Anything can activate the pain body - especially resonance with pain from the past. When the pain body is ready to enter active mode, any trifle can be a catalyst - a thought, an innocent remark from a loved one - anything.

Disidentification with the pain body

The pain body does not want to be examined and determined what it really is. When you observe the pain body, feel its energy field within you and direct your attention within it, identification ceases.

A higher level of consciousness opens up to you. I call it presence. Now you are observing the pain body, contemplating it. This means that the pain body can no longer pretend to be you and thus use you, cannot “recharge” through you. You gain your innermost power.

Some pain bodies are quite unpleasant, but relatively harmless - just like crybaby children are harmless. Others resemble evil monsters-destroyers, demons incarnate. There are fields that bring physical pain; most of all those that hurt the soul. Some fields hurt loved ones, and indeed everyone who happens to be nearby; others hurt the “owner”: you see life in dark tones, your thoughts and feelings begin to destroy you. This often causes illness and accidents. It happens that pain fields drive their owners to suicide.

When you think that you know a person as yourself, but then for the first time you encounter the alien and disgusting creature of his pain body, you, of course, experience a strong shock. On the other hand, it is much more important to observe this essence in yourself, and not in another person,

BE ATTENTION TO THE SIGNS OF DESPAIR IN YOURSELF - in any form: these can be the messengers of the awakening pain body. The pain body often manifests itself as irritation, impatience, despondency, and a desire to hurt someone; like anger, rage, depression, the need to dramatize relationships... Catch the moment when it awakens from a passive state.

The pain body, like any other entity, strives to survive. And it can survive only if you unconsciously identify yourself with it. Then the pain body will come to life, take over you, “become you” and live through you.

The pain body can only receive “food” through you. It feeds on experiences that resonate with its type of energy and can be embodied in a variety of manifestations of pain: anger, the desire to destroy, hatred, grief, violence, mental anguish and even illness. Thus, when the pain body takes over the reins of power, it creates a situation in which its energetic frequencies return to it, thus nourishing it. Pain feeds solely on pain. Pain cannot be nourished by joy: joy causes indigestion.

When the pain body crushes you under itself, you yourself are drawn to the pain. Become either a victim or a criminal. You want to hurt or suffer pain. Or both together, the difference is small. Of course, you are not aware of this and claim that you do not seek pain. But take a closer look at yourself - and you will definitely see: your thoughts and actions are subordinated to the desire to prolong the pain, to make yourself and others suffer. If you really realized this, the desire for pain would disappear: wanting pain is abnormal, and it is impossible to be consciously abnormal.

The pain body, that dark shadow of the ego, is truly afraid of the light of your consciousness. It is afraid of being discovered. Your unconscious identification with it, as well as the unconscious fear of encountering the pain living in you, is a guarantee of the survival of the pain body. But if you do not open this pain, do not illuminate it with a ray of consciousness, you will experience it again and again.

Perhaps the pain body seems to you a dangerous monster that is impossible to even look at. But in reality it is a disembodied phantom, unable to tolerate the power of your presence.

WHEN YOU BECOME A WITNESS and begin the process of disidentification, the pain body will not immediately give up its position: it will definitely try to force you to merge with it again. You no longer feed it with identification, but the pain body has inertia - remember how a spinning wheel rotates by inertia when no one is spinning it anymore. At this stage, pain may occur in different parts of the body, but this pain is short-lived.

Be present, live consciously. Be prepared to protect your interior space. To observe the pain body and feel its energy, you need to be sufficiently present in the Now. Then the pain body will not be able to control your thoughts.

When your thoughts connect with the energy field of the pain body, you identify with it and feed it again with thoughts. Suppose anger is the dominant energy vibration of the pain body. You get angry, mentally focus on grievances and revenge - and fall into unconsciousness, the pain body becomes “you”. Where there is anger, pain always lurks.

When a person in a bad mood thinks about how terrible his life is, thoughts merge with the pain-body, awareness disappears and the person is easily attacked by the pain-body.

By "unconscious" I mean identification with some mental or emotional pattern. Such identification means the complete absence of an observer.

Transforming suffering into consciousness

Continuous conscious attention breaks the connection between the pain body and the thought process, turning suffering into consciousness. Pain seems to become fuel that feeds consciousness, and the light of consciousness burns brighter.

This is the esoteric meaning of the ancient art of alchemy: the transformation of metal into gold, suffering into consciousness. The internal split heals, you regain integrity. Your responsibility now is not to increase the pain.

FOCUS YOUR ATTENTION ON YOUR INNER SENSATIONS. Become aware that you are experiencing the pain body. Acknowledge its presence. Don't think about it, don't let the feeling turn into a thought. Don't evaluate or analyze. Don't identify yourself with him. Be present and observe what is happening within you.

Become aware not only of the heartache, but also of the “one who is watching,” the silent witness. This is the power of the Present, the power of your conscious presence. See what happens next.

Identification of the ego with the pain body

The technique described above is both effective and simple. You can even teach it to a child - perhaps the time will come when schoolchildren will be taught exactly this first thing. Having realized the basic principle of being present as an observer of internal processes - and this can only be realized through experience - you will master the most powerful tool of transformation.

This does not mean that pain will not resist disidentification. The resistance will be stronger the stronger and longer you identify yourself with the pain-body of emotions and the more you invest your “I” in it. This means that you have created a certain “I” (a very unhappy one) out of pain and believed that this phantom generated by the mind is your true essence. In this case, the unconscious fear of loss of identity will make you resist disidentification with all your might. In other words, you will prefer pain to jumping into the unknown, to the risk of losing the unhappy “I” that has become familiar - that is, you will choose to be a pain body.

WATCH THE RESISTANCE WITHIN YOU. Observe attachment to pain. Be very careful. Observe the peculiar pleasure that your misfortune brings you. Observe the persistent desire to talk and think about your bitter fate. If you can realize all this, resistance will disappear.

One can then direct attention within the pain body, be present as an observer, and thus begin the process of transformation. ׳

Only you can do this. No one can replace you. But if you are lucky enough to find someone who is fully present in the Now, and if you can be with them and follow their example of presence, it can greatly help you speed up the transformation. Your light will burn faster.

If a log that has just begun to smolder is placed next to a log engulfed in flames and then separated from it, the log will burn brighter. The fire is the same. One of the functions of a spiritual teacher is to be such a flame himself. Some doctors can also cope with this function, provided that they were able to rise above the level of the mind and are intensely and consciously present in the Now while working with you.

Remember once and for all: as long as you identify yourself with pain, you cannot get rid of it. As long as you invest part of yourself in your heartache, you will unknowingly throw away or sabotage your attempts to heal from the pain.

Why? Yes, because pain has become the most important part of your nature, and you will take care of yourself and protect yourself from any attacks. This process is unconscious; you have to become aware of it - that's the only way to deal with it.

The power of your presence

THE SUDDEN REALIZATION that you are or have been attached to pain can come as a great shock. But it is at the moment of such awareness that attachment disappears.

The pain body is an energy field, almost a being, that temporarily invades your inner space. It is captive life force, immobilized energy.

Of course, the pain body did not arise just like that - its existence is conditioned by some events of the past. Past events still live in you, and if you identify yourself with past experiences, then you identify yourself with the past.

The victim position is the belief that the past is stronger than the present; in fact it's the other way around. According to the victim, other people and the insults they caused are to blame for her suffering and inability to be herself; The victim places responsibility for his current essence on others.

The truth is that the only real power is in the Now: the power of your presence. When you realize this, you will also understand that now you, and only you, are responsible for your inner space, and that the past is powerless before the power of the Present.

The unconscious creates pain, and consciousness turns pain into consciousness. St. Paul beautifully stated this universal principle: “Everything that is revealed is made manifest by the light, and whatever is made manifest is light.”

It is impossible to defeat the pain body, just as it is impossible to defeat darkness. Attempts to stifle pain will provoke internal conflict and cause even more pain. All you need is observation. Observing the pain body means recognizing it as part of the Present.

The present moment has great power. If a person is not able to accept it, then every pain that came through will be hidden behind the remnants of the pain of other experiences. This pain from past experiences has not yet gone away; it becomes a constant companion and burden. There is so much in it - starting from the first childhood experiences.

Over time, pain only accumulates and becomes your companion in the form of a negative energy field. It controls both body and mind. It lives its own life, but is completely invisible. This is also the pain body network. It can live in us and lie dormant, or it can be actively awake. Basically, the pain body may be asleep almost always, but unhappy people experience an active phase all the time. Typically, the pain body awakens when people make love or when a serious loss occurs. Even something similar to an experience that brought pain in the past can wake him up.

Sometimes the pain body can be completely harmless, even if its presence is not easy to bear. But sometimes, the pain body becomes a real monster that haunts and does not want to let go of its owner. It can even cause physical pain. Moreover, the pain body is so insidious that it can instill thoughts about the meaninglessness of one’s own life, and this triggers a mechanism of self-destruction. Many diseases are the result of such waking pain. Often for this reason, life ends in suicide.

Sometimes you can know a person almost your entire life, but never encounter the pain body. And one day it wakes up, and you see its disgusting embodiment. It can even be a very powerful and shocking experience. But the most important thing will still be to observe the pain body in oneself, and not from the outside. The pain body can take many forms, from simple irritation to depression. You need to carefully monitor him in order to stop the awakening that has begun in time.

Like any creature, pain wants to live, and it can only come to life when you connect yourself with it. Only then will it be able to grow inside you, begin to live instead of its owner, and the owner himself will live by it. But in fact, this pain needs us because we give it food. And so that there is more food, pain feeds all our emotions. Often this takes turns such as anger, envy, destructive behavior. Violence is nothing more than a manifestation of the activity of the pain body. But in fact, all these manifestations are the opposite of what we ourselves are. It’s just that pain can only feed on the same pain, but not on joy.

Therefore, when a person has a pain body, he begins to want more pain, so we bifurcate into the victim and the hunter. A person suffers from pain and at the same time wants to hurt himself. And there is no longer any difference between these concepts. Of course, no one admits that they want to hurt themselves. But if you carefully observe yourself and the course of your thoughts, you will notice that all thoughts are aimed at ensuring that pain is constantly present inside at the same level. However, desiring pain is madness. Therefore, only aware people can dissolve the presence of pain within themselves.

It is our ego that gives such a dark shadow. But in fact, awareness is the enemy of pain, because it is afraid of being exposed. Often the pain body can look like a dangerous monster that we cannot even look at without fear. We convince ourselves that in reality it does not exist and is only an incorporeal substance, and in fact this is almost the case. Because our strength is much greater than the strength of this pain.

Many teachings indicate that pain cannot be more than an illusion. This is true, but often the illusion becomes strong if it is supported by faith. It is possible to live your whole life feeling this very illusion of pain as truth.

Boli does not like being looked at closely because she risks appearing to you as she really is. But as soon as we turn our gaze to it, as to an object that exists separately from us, the body of pain ceases to exist. This is how we move to a new level in our consciousness. Now we can easily observe the presence of pain, but it will no longer be able to control or feed on us. Now we ourselves have independent strength, because the moment itself gives us its strength.

The pain body itself is created due to unawareness. Everything that is brought within the limits of consciousness becomes visible and conscious.

It is impossible to fight darkness, and you cannot fight pain. This will only cause conflict again and again, which in turn will lead to new pain. So it’s enough just to watch her. To attend to pain means to accept it as part of the present moment.

Pain captures your life energy, that's what it consists of. In fact, it is only a piece of the whole, but over time it becomes an autonomous unit. It's like life in reverse because it can devour itself. But still, even that which is capable of destroying life still remains one of the types or forms of manifestation of the energy of life.

When a person begins to destroy his connection with the mind and turns into an outside observer, then the pain body will remain in active mode for some time. Therefore, it will try to capture the freed mind. But having broken its connection with the pain body, it will cease to receive external energy supply. True, for some time, due to inertia, the pain will still accompany. At this stage, she may even have a physical form, but this will not last long. You need to remain in a conscious state, constantly be in a state ready to protect your inner space from encroachment. In order to always recognize the pain body in time and immediately understand its energy, you need to be in a state of presence. Then pain will not be able to guide thoughts and reason.

When anger takes hold, it becomes the dominant expression of the pain body. People are often immersed in thoughts and memories of how someone once did something bad to them, all thoughts circle around the idea of ​​vengeance. At this moment, we lose the chance to be sufficiently aware of everything that is happening. And the pain is already beginning to live with us. Anger always has pain at its root. As soon as you feel that you are plunging into a bad mood, sad thoughts take over you more and more, especially about the meaninglessness of existence, you again become an excellent target for pain. Because the observer is completely absent here.

When you can maintain your observer position for a long time, the connection between pain and mind will be lost. Now your awareness feeds on the pain, gives it energy. Now consciousness can gain integrity. And the person himself is responsible for ensuring that pain does not appear in the future.

To sum it up, we need to learn to focus our attention on the feelings that are inside us. The ability to accept everything as it is is a valuable gift. Therefore, there is no need to think too much about it, you cannot draw conclusions, judge or analyze. One's own personality is not created on the basis of qualities that do not belong to it. You need to observe from the outside and be present at what is happening inside. When we experience emotional pain, we need to understand that there is this pain, and there is also someone who can observe it from the outside. This is the importance of the moment in which we are fully aware and present.

pain body

The thinking of most people is, to a large extent, involuntary, automatic and endlessly repeated thinking. A kind of mental noise, a kind of mental static, devoid of any purpose. Strictly speaking, you don't think. Thinking happens on its own. The statement “I think” implies the presence of will or desire. It includes the assumption that you are involved in the process, that it is your choice, and that you have chosen to do it. But for most people this is not the case. The expression “I think” is wrong. It's like saying, "I digest food" or "I circulate blood." Digestion happens, blood circulation happens, thinking happens.

The voice in your head lives an independent life. Most people are at the mercy of this voice; they are controlled by the mind, thinking. But since the mind is conditioned by the past, you are forced to reproduce it again and again. In the East this is called karma. If you have identified with this voice, then, of course, you have no idea about it. Knowing this, you would not be an object of possession, because you can only truly be possessed if you mistake the entity that owns you for who you are, merge with it and become that entity itself.
For thousands of years, the mind has increasingly captured humanity, which has never been able to understand that the entity that owns it is “not-me.” The beginning of the false sense of self - the ego - was total identification with the mind. The density of the ego depends on the degree to which you - consciousness - are identified with the mind, with thinking. Thinking is nothing more than a thin layer of the totality of consciousness, the totality of who you are.

Different people have different degrees of identification with the mind. Some people like periods when they are freed from it, at least for a short time. The peace, joy and vitality they experience at such moments tell them that life is worth living. These are moments of creativity, love, empathy. Others are constantly trapped in an egoic state. They became strangers not only to themselves, but also to other people, along with the entire world around them. You can notice tension on their faces, maybe deep folds between the eyebrows, an absent or intent gaze.

Their attention is absorbed in their own thoughts, so they practically do not see you, and are unlikely to listen. They are not present in any situation, their attention is directed either to the past or to the future - which, of course, exist only in the form of thought forms, or relate to you through something like a role played, and therefore are not themselves. Many are alienated from who they are, but alienated to such an extent that their behavior and communication with others is recognized by almost everyone as “false” - except for those who are themselves just as false and equally alienated from their essence.

Alienation means that you never, in any situation, in any place, with any person, not even with yourself, feel free. You always strive to “go home”, but you never feel at home anywhere. Some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, such as Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce considered alienation to be a common factor in the global problem of human existence. They may have experienced it deep inside and therefore were able to express it so brilliantly in their works. They don't offer solutions. The merit of these people is that they showed us the problem of humanity so that we too could see it clearly. Seeing the problem clearly is the first step to moving beyond it.

Birth of emotion

Added to the flow of thoughts is another, although not entirely separate, dimension of the ego—emotion. It cannot be said that all thinking and all emotions come from the ego. They turn into ego only when you identify with them. Then they completely replace you, in other words, they become your “I”.

The physical body, your organism, like any other living organism, has its own intelligence. This intellect reacts to what the mind says, it reacts to your thoughts. Therefore, an emotion is a reaction of the body to a state of mind. The intelligence of the body, of course, is inseparable from the intelligence of the Universe, and is one of its countless manifestations. It provides a temporary connection with the atoms and molecules that make up your body. This is the organizing principle of the operation of all its systems and organs, together with the processes occurring in them - the conversion of oxygen and food into energy, the contraction of the heart and blood circulation, immune defense against external invasion, the conversion of signals from receptors into nerve impulses and their transmission to the brain, where they are recognized and form a coherent internal picture of external reality. At the same time, thousands of other functions are coordinated. You don't control the body. It's his intelligence that does it. It is also responsible for the body's responses to environmental conditions.

This is true for all living beings. The same intelligence causes plants to appear in their physical form, and then manifests itself in the flowers that grow on them, opening their petals to the morning rays of the sun and closing them at sunset. This is the same intelligence that manifests itself as Gaia - the collective living being, the center of life, Mother Earth or planet Earth.

This intelligence gives rise to the body's instinctive reactions to any threat or challenge. In animals, it causes reactions similar to human emotions: anger, fear, pleasure. These instinctive responses can be considered the primary form of emotion. In certain situations, instinct also works in people. In the face of danger that threatens the life of the body, the heartbeat and breathing increase, the muscles contract, and the body prepares to fight, take flight, or fly away. This is primal fear. If you are backed into a corner, your body experiences a sudden surge of energy so powerful that it gains strength like it has never had before. This is primal anger. These instinctive responses seem similar to emotions, but in the true sense of the word they are not emotions.

The main difference between an instinctive response and an emotion is that the former is the body's response to an external situation. Emotion, on the contrary, is the body's reaction to a thought. Indirectly, any emotion can also be a response to a real situation or event - but to an event perceived through the filter of mental interpretation, thinking, in other words, through the mental concepts of “bad” and “good”, “like - don’t like”, “ me" and "mine". For example, you probably won't feel any emotion if you're told someone's car has been stolen, but if it's your car, you'll probably be upset. It's amazing how much emotion can be generated by such a small, mentally created idea as "mine."

Although the body is very intelligent, it is still unable to distinguish between a real situation and a mental one. It reacts to any thought as if it were reality. The body doesn't know that it's just a thought. For the body, an anxious, frightening thought means “I am in danger,” and it reacts accordingly, even if you are lying in a warm and cozy bed at night. Heart rate and breathing increase, muscles contract. Energy grows, but since this danger is imaginary, the energy does not find a way out. Some of it returns to the mind and gives rise to even more disturbing thoughts. The remaining energy becomes toxic and interferes with the harmonious functioning of the body.

Emotions and Ego

We have already seen what kind of thoughts this egoic voice is most often involved in, and what functional disturbances it builds into the structure of its thought process, regardless of the context. Dysfunctional thinking is what the body responds to with negative emotion.

The voice in your head tells a story that your body believes and responds to accordingly. These reactions are emotions. Emotions, in turn, return energy to the thoughts that aroused the original emotion. It is a vicious cycle of unexamined thoughts and emotions that give rise to emotional thinking and story-making.

The emotional component of the ego is different for different people. Some people have more egos, others have less. Thoughts that cause emotional responses from the body sometimes appear so quickly that the mind does not yet have time to voice them, and the body already responds with an emotion that turns into a reaction. These thoughts exist at a non-verbal stage, and we can call them unspoken, unconscious expectations. They originate in a person's past conditioning, usually in early childhood.

An example of such an unconscious expectation in a person whose first relationships, for example, with parents or siblings were neither supportive, trusting, nor encouraging, is the attitude “people cannot be trusted.” Here are some examples of the most common unconscious expectations and attitudes: “No one respects or values ​​me. To survive, I must fight. There is always not enough money. Life always hits you over the head. I don't deserve wealth. Abundance is not for me. I'm not worthy of love." Unconscious expectations form emotions in the body, which in turn excite mental activity and/or cause an immediate reaction. This is how they create your personal reality.

The voice of the ego constantly undermines the natural state of the body - a state of health and well-being. Almost every person's body is very tense and under stress, and not because it is threatened by some external factor - it is threatened by a factor living inside the mind. The body has an ego attached to it, so any mental model of behavior that the ego consists of and that disrupts the normal functioning of the body is sure to cause a response. Thus, a stream of incessant and obsessive thinking receives an escort from a stream of negative emotions.

What is a negative emotion? It is an emotion that is toxic to the body and disrupts its balance and harmonious functioning. Fear, anxiety, depression, despondency, hatred or strong dislike, jealousy, envy - all this disrupts the normal flow of energy in the body, affects the heart, immune system, digestion, hormone production, etc. Even modern medicine, still poorly aware of the workings of the ego, is beginning to recognize the existence of a connection between negative emotional states and physical illness. Any emotion that harms your body becomes contagious, first of all, to people with whom you come into direct contact, and, in addition, indirectly, along the chain, affects countless other people with whom you have never met. All negative emotions can be characterized by one common term for them - a feeling of inescapable unhappiness.