Personal Growth: Staying in the present moment April 23, 2019
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Living in the Now.Tags: Eckhart Tolle, focussing, life, negative thinking, personal growth, philosophy, self-actualization, The Power of Now, the present moment, writing
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Most of us won’t admit it, but we often spend a large proportion of our mind-time on revisiting the past and particular in visiting the future by anticipating and visualizing how our life situation is likely to unfold; and in so looking, we tend not to foresee options but rather make assumptions on probabilities, often negatively.
In trying to be in two places at once, we miss opportunities in the most important third place…the present moment.
Eckhart Tolle sums up this paradox nicely in his book The Power of Now:
“To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time; the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation…This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future.
The Now is the most precious thing there is. The eternal present is the space in which your whole life unfolds.
Life is now.”
Personal growth: The counter-energy of carrying the past October 4, 2017
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Living in the Now.Tags: A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle, ego management, life, living in the past, philosophy, psychology, self-actualization, writing
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One of the ways we can obscure our true selves and thereby block our advance to more complete self-actualization is through our tendency to burden our thought processes with the weight of the past.
If we are not careful, over time, we can add so many individual internalized concerns to “the voice in our heads” that it seems as if we are making our self-improvement journey while wearing 25-pound shoes on our feet.
This tendency of not living in the Now, in the present, can negate our efforts to reach our personal development potential.
In his book, A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle tells an illustrative story:
Two Zen monks were walking in the country and came across a young girl who could not cross a road covered in deep mud, for fear of ruining her silk kimono.
One monk picked the girl up and carried her to the other side, and the monks walked on in silence.
Finally, after five hours, the other monk could not restrain himself: “Why did you carry that girl across the road? We monks are not supposed to do things like that.” The other monk replied, “I put the girl down hours ago. Are you still carrying her?”
Tolle suggests we should try to imagine what life would be like for someone like that irritated monk, who cannot seem to “let go internally of situations, accumulating more and more ‘stuff’ inside…”
“Stuff” such as grievances, regrets, hostility, and guilt.
The lingering “stuff” inside eventually becomes our dominant intellectual and emotional “story,” a story that can take over our perception of ourselves, and become a negatively limiting identity, Tolle believes.
In A New Earth Tolle seeks to advise us how to extricate ourselves from this trap.
— Dennis Mellersh
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