Eckhart Tolle describes the pain body, an egoic structure that feeds on negative thoughts and emotions, keeping people addicted to unhappiness. He explains how recognizing and disidentifying from it through awareness can break the cycle of habitual negative reactivity.
You are addicted to your own negative emotion and your negative thought processes. And at those times, you do not want them to end. If anybody suggested to you that it is possible to snap out of it, you would become very angry because you don't want to snap out of it at that moment. You're addicted to your unhappiness. And this addiction to unhappiness is not uncommon in people. People are addicted to their unhappiness, which periodically. It may always be in the background, but periodically it comes up very strongly. And every therapist knows that it is not uncommon for the patients or clients or whatever term they use, to resist becoming more conscious because they are so identified with a negative state. It's become part of their sense of self. So they don't want to let go. And there is a perverse pleasure in indulging in that unhappiness. Don't take my unhappiness away from me. I've lived with it for so many years. Because who am I without it, without all the things that I've continued to complain about in my mind, which is part of the unhappy thought structure? Who am I without that, can't let go of that. That first. What I just said just now. I learned a lot when I started many years ago doing counseling sessions with individual people. And this the first time when I was working with a lady who had an enormous pain body. It was in relation to her husband. Her husband triggered her pain body, even without trying to. Just his mere presence triggered her pain body. And so she complained to me every time she came. All the things that she found so irritating. Just can't stand it anymore. The way he. The way he eats his food or the way he picks up his. The way he chews his food and then the noises he makes and the little. The quirks and characteristics and how he does that and that and awful, awful, dreadful. And gradually we worked towards more consciousness in her, more presence. And she began to realize that the main problem was not her husband. It was her continuous reactivity. The problem was her reactivity, not the way the husband chewed his food. And that was only one of hundreds of things that irritated her. So we were approaching this threshold of becoming aware that you can actually be free of all that. And at one point she suddenly almost shouted and said, but if I let go of that, what have I got left? If I let go of all that, which is all the reactivity in that, which. That was her life. It's been her life for years. What have I got left without that? That came out of her mouth? Well, she awakened to some extent, but not completely. She became ill and then for a while, and then I didn't see her anymore. She made some progress, but I don't believe she became free of that pattern completely. But she made some progress, and she and many others helped me enormously and became a part of this teaching, which would not have happened if I had not spent hundreds of hours listening to the human mind. In addition to, of course, knowing my own mind and recognizing all those patterns in the mind. So the pain body then is, one could say, is an aspect, but doesn't have to be. It usually is an aspect of the ego. It's an emotional aspect. One of the emotional aspects of the egoic consciousness. As long as it takes you over, you're completely identified with it. Then it's part of the ego. Very unpleasant, very, very sinister and dark part of the ego. As long as. However, the key to becoming free of the pain body is to recognize it for what it is when it arises. Always easier to recognize in the other, much easier than in yourself. So you are more likely to recognize it in your partner when it starts. But the more important thing is to recognize it in yourself. When the energy field comes and begins to take you over. By recognizing it, you disidentify from it. It cannot take you over totally if you recognize it. Because to recognize means there is an awareness there. Now, you are aware that this is in your energy field. If you're not aware that it's in your energy field, it becomes you. If you're aware it's still there, but it hasn't taken you over completely. And then it is no longer part of the ego. It just exists there as the pain body. Ego means complete identification with it, complete unconsciousness. And that's the same, by the way, with thoughts in your head. Complete identification with thoughts that you have means ego. Ego is complete identification of thought. But if you know, if you recognize certain thoughts as for what they are, then they're no longer egoic thoughts. As soon as there's an awareness, you're stepping out of ego. And so to become free of the pain body, Even more important than becoming totally free of the pain body, is to be able to disidentify from the pain body. Then really you are to some extent already free of being possessed by it. So you need, first you need to recognize it retrospectively, perhaps in past relationships. Perhaps you still experience it periodically in present relationships that you have. And so you recognize it for what it is. And then if it's not if it doesn't manifest in relationships. If it manifests more through your thought processes, then you recognize it. When your thoughts become suddenly, deeply negative and you do emotional thinking, by the way, whenever emotion flows into your thought processes, then your ability to be intelligent and think intelligently and rationally gets greatly diminished. When emotion flows into your mind and you think with and through your emotions, then whatever decisions you make on that basis and whatever you say or you do is probably not very intelligent because the emotion diminishes your iq. Well, I don't really. It's not really. It's more than iq. I don't think that much of IQ anyway. Mine is quite low, by the way. I just can't do it. These weird tests just doesn't make sense to me. And I never found out what my IQ is because I get tired with these tests. I can't. What is this? I can't do it. So emotional thinking is unintelligent, very unintelligent thinking. Particularly if the emotion is the pain body. Then however you interpret the world in those moments is a total distortion of reality. So you would see the world and the world that includes. However you interpret your own life, however you interpret who somebody else is. Anything that you interpret is a total distortion of reality and you don't know it. And some people make life decisions on the basis of when they're in that deluded state. So the key is then to recognize it directly as something that is in you. And the emotion is usually felt in your body. The emotion is felt here.
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