Personal growth: Do we really control our thoughts? September 30, 2017
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal growth.Tags: A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle, inspiration, life, philosophy, psychology, self-actualization, writing
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Can we control our thoughts, or is thinking an automatic process like digesting our food, as Eckhart Tolle suggests.
In his book A New Earth, Tolle writes:
“The voice in the head [thinking]* has a life of its own. Most people are at the mercy of that voice; they are possessed by thought, by the mind. And since the mind is conditioned by the past, you are then forced to re-enact the past again and again.”
This can have a cumulative effect, which Tolle compares to an emotional energy field:
“This energy field of old but still very-much-alive emotion that lives in almost every human being is the pain-body.”
This phenomenon can be highly damaging to our emotional development.
Fortunately, Tolle spends a lot of time in the book providing advice on how we can limit the negative outcomes that might result from our personal pain-bodies.
A New Earth is not an easy book to thoroughly understand and implement, but it is well worth making the effort to do so.
* My parentheses
– Dennis Mellersh
Personal development: The implications of acceptance August 31, 2017
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Personal Development Potential.Tags: acceptance, controlling ego, Eckhart Tolle, life, philosophy, resistance, surrender, The Power of Now, writing
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In much of the literature of personal growth theory there is a repeating theme of the need to bring the practice of acceptance into our lives.
We are told that without adhering to the principle of acceptance, we will be frozen into the judgemental world we are trying so hard to escape through programs directed at reaching our full personal development potential.
Eckhart Tolle, in his book, Practicing the Power of Now, views acceptance as a form of surrender, and compares it with its opposite, resistance: “Bondage or inner freedom from external conditions. Suffering or inner peace.”
Non-surrender ultimately means expending significant intellectual and moral energy on the act and implications of resistance:
“If you can never accept what is, by implication you will not be able to accept anybody the way they are. You will judge, criticize, label, reject, or attempt to change people.”
— Dennis Mellersh
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