PNTV: The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle (#76)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got Eckhart Tolle's Power of Now. As always, great book, six page PDF Philosopher's Note. I've got about a dozen big ideas and let's jump into several now. So this book is packed with big ideas we can apply to our lives right now. And let's look at some of my favorite ones. Might come back to that one. So one of my favorite ideas of all the different ideas, we have over a thousand of them in the hundred notes here is this idea that in order to get into the present moment, into the power of now, whatever is happening in our life, we should accept it as if we chose it. He's got an awesome line here where literally accept whatever is happening and act as if we chose it. From the most unfortunate getting laid off or even a home foreclosure, whatever it is that's really stressing you out, an illness, something like that, accept it. Fighting it is not going to do anything to solve the challenge, to move beyond it. Accept it. And the best way to accept it, I think, is to act as if you actually wanted that to happen. See if you can alchemize the event and into an opportunity for growth. Can you see the most positive benefits in it and actually act as if. Accept it as if you had chosen it. Really powerful idea. So whatever is stressing you out, see if you can shift your consciousness that way and not get stuck in kind of the barrier thoughts that positive psychologists would call it, where you're kind of grinding against the negative thought patterns. Step back, look at it, accept it, and then challenge the thoughts you have about it and, and see if you can create more constructive, empowering ideas. Another big idea he has is this idea of watching the thinker, right? So we're constantly thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking. And the mind can be a very powerful tool when connected to, you know, our highest selves. But when it's just rattling around and the monkey is swinging from vine to vine to vine, or little gremlins, as I like to say, are running around, we get in trouble. So his idea here of watching the thinker and actually seeing the thinking mind and realize that the part of you that can see the thinking mind, that's much closer to your actual essence, right? That's who you really are. You're not that fleeting thought, that fleeting thought and that fleeting thought. So the more we can step back and watch the thinker and make that a practice, especially when we find ourselves going in all those Negative loops. And typically we make ourselves nauseous through anxiety and overwhelm with the same thoughts going. And if we could simply step back and have the presence to see it, to watch the thinker. It's a really big practice, I think that you get a lot of benefit out of. As you know, if you've read the book, it talks about our pain bodies. I'm not going to go into detail on that. But this basic idea that we store up a lot of our suffering, everyone does, and it's their pain body. It's like we walk around with this pain body that's energetically emanating around us. And you know what it's like if you walk around different people. You walk into a room and people just really stress. There's kind of like this vibration. A lot of that is the pain body being activated and kind of just coming at us, really. And he says we need to observe our own pain bodies. And we need to observe immediately when our pain bodies are coming into action, when they're coming into play, and we can know they're getting going by simple things like we're getting angry, we're getting frustrated, we're starting to get depressed. Any of these negative experiences, he says, are the pain body coming up and we want to notice it immediately when it starts arising and we want to stop it. Pema Chodrun has a great story as well. She says, whenever you find yourself feeling any of those negative emotions, notice it again. This awareness, this consciousness that isn't just the experience. See it and then break the habit. Do not allow it to continue. Do not allow it to continue to groove its pattern into your consciousness. And she says, do whatever you need to do. Just don't continue that line, whether it's yelling or checking out, numbing out with another beer or glass of wine or hour on Facebook or watching TV or whatever it is you do to distract yourself when you start feeling that anxiety, do something else. Break that tendency, Break that habit. Jump on a rebounder. We got one right there. Go for a walk. Talk to someone you love. Do something that's proactive, that really breaks that habit. So catch your pain body the moment it awakens. Really cool idea. One of the things that I'm talking about more these days is the idea of embracing both the future and becoming and the beingness of this moment. And Tal Ben Shahar, one of my favorite teachers, talks about this, and he says we need to be careful that we don't get caught in a rat racing trap where we're constantly chasing something in the future. And we need to be careful we don't get caught in the hedonist trap, where we're only in this moment and we need to be careful that we don't get caught in a nihilist trap, where we give up both everything, we just kind of give up the game, we're like, screw it all kind of thing. He says the ideal is not only going for the future, which is a rat racer, or only being in the moment, which I call the Tolle trap. In the chapter I'm writing in a new book of mine where we get stuck and we misread some of this Tolle stuff, we misread the Bhagavad Gita, and we're just in the moment. But that's not what it's about. Happiness, Tal Ben Shahar tells us, and I completely agree, is all about embracing a goal worthy of us, then being in the moment and loving this moment. It's having a destination while enjoying the journey, while enjoying the process. It's truism, but oftentimes I find when I'm in conversations with people who are really into Tolle and work like this, they kind of just get into the moment in the hedonist style, where they think that any future thinking is inherently wrong. And Eckhart Tolle doesn't say that. So bringing it back to Tolle, he says what we need to do is, is we need to make sure we manage clock time versus psychological time. So having goals is an important part of our external human experiences. He says we've got to have goals to move forward on now. We use clock time to do so effectively. Okay. By 5pm on Friday, I want to have this accomplished within three months. I want to have this accomplished. That's using clock time. What he says we don't want to do, we do want to do that. What we don't want to do is use psychological time where we're getting anxious about the future. We're worrying about whether we're going to be able to make that deadline or lifeline, as Tall Ben Shahar calls it. Or we have regret and shame and guilt about the past, that psychological time that takes us out of the present moment. But we want to set goals that really inspire us. Use clock time and then enjoy the process, love the moment as we move toward it. We're going to talk about that a lot more. It's a really powerful idea that I'm really excited to explore more and more with you in the months and years and decades ahead. Another Great idea. He says. If it makes you sick, quit eating it. Great idea. If you do this and you do that, you do this and you do that, and those things make you feel terrible. It's not enough to accept a certain emotion. He says at some point, you got to quit eating the stuff that makes you sick. It doesn't do you any good to accept something that you need to stop doing. So if you have certain habits that you know make you feel ill, quit doing them. Quit eating that stuff. It's kind of like the cheese trap idea from Pema Chodron's the Places that Scare youe that we talked about. We need to recognize our cheese traps. What are the traps we go to? We eat the cheese right again. Whether it's a glass of wine or more time online, whatever it is, we gotta quit eating that cheese with the trap of suffering that comes after it. He's got some great ideas along. Taking responsibility. He says if you're in a situation that you don't like, you have three choices. Number one, you can remove yourself from that situation. If you can't do that, change the situation, alter it so it's more to your liking. If you can't remove yourself or change it, accept it totally. You have three choices. Remove yourself, change it, or accept it. To do anything other than that just is not effective. We talked about future goals and stuff like that. A really important idea here he has is the idea that we need to take responsibility for our actions, but let the fruits take care of themselves. The fruits, the income we make, the fame we might get, the power we might accumulate as we expand in our consciousness and do what we're here to do. Those things are byproducts. What we want to pay attention to and put all of our energy into is actions. That's how we're able to hold goals and take the next step and enjoy the moment. But if we get caught up in the rat racer idea of wanting to get something, then we're going to be attached and we're going to suffer. We talk about that a lot. He's got some great quotes in here that are pretty powerful. And then the final idea here is, he says, be an alchemist. Turn whatever is stressing you out into something positive. It's like the philosopher's stone basically could take base metal and turn it into gold. Well, that was a metaphor for our consciousness. Can we take a negative experience, accept it, love it, and be able to alchemize it into something positive? Ultimately, that's what all this work is about. To go out and be able to transmute anything into a blissful experience. So there you go. Power of now super quickly. Hope you dug it. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. See ya.