This chapter was short, but full of insight.
Many readers seem to struggle with this chapter and I think I know some reasons why.
As a recovering Christian, I had issues with some of the church teachings to deny the body and feelings. I am a very sensitive feeling individual and I felt betrayed having to stifle my innermost feelings as sinful or wrong. I learned to mistrust my gut intuition and that made me soul-sick.
I love how Eckart Tolle encourages us to feel our inner body and trust our inner Being.
This chapter recalled me to the teachings, writings, videos, and sessions of Joe Dispenza.
I think many of us fear what we don’t know or what we’ve been taught to believe as magic, witchcraft, new age, or otherwise false teachers. Some of what is out there is misinformation for sure. Some is oversimplified. If it doesn’t work for everyone all the time in the same way, then it is the teacher’s fault and surely not the student’s.
Western society wants quick fixes, instant gratification. But the irony is that we fear anything that seems too simplistic. Surely we must run a gauntlet to be healed? Surely we can’t just dip in the river seven times? That seems silly.
I love the idea that if we are connected to Inner Being, we can heal ourselves and stay young longer. I certainly can see this for people who have a glow and seem to exude positive energy vs. those who are negative and just look gray and haggard. My parents are very bitter people and have always seems old to me. I’ve known others their same age who look and seem decades younger.
Chapter Six: The Inner Body
Favorite quotes from this chapter:
Being can be felt as the ever-present I am that is beyond name and form. To feel and thus to know that you are and to abide in that deeply rooted state is enlightenment, is the truth that Jesus says will make you free.
This “illusion of the self,” as the Buddha calls it, is the core error. Free from fear in its countless disguises as the inevitable consequence of that illusion — the fear that is your constant tormentor as long as you derive your sense of self only from this ephemeral and vulnerable form. And free from sin, which is the suffering you unconsciously inflict on yourself and others as long as this illusory sense of self governs what you think, say, and do.
It is not a question of guilt. But as long as you are run by the egoic mind, you are part of the collective insanity.
You cannot stop thinking. Compulsive thinking has become a collective disease. Your whole sense of who you are is then derived from mind activity.
Why have so few seekers become finders?
Transformation is through the body, not away from it.
All spiritual teachings originate from the same Source.
As long as you are in conscious contact with your inner body, you are like a tree that is deeply rooted in the earth, or a building with a deep and solid foundation. The latter analogy is used by Jesus in the generally misunderstood parable of the two men who build a house. One man builds it on the sand, without a foundation, and when the storms and floods come, the house is swept away. The other man digs deep until he reaches the rock, then builds his house, which is not swept away by the floods.
Attention does not mean that you start thinking about it. It means to just observe the emotion, to feel it fully, and so to acknowledge and accept it as it is.
Non-forgiveness is often toward another person or yourself, but it may just as well be toward any situation or condition — past, present, or future — that your mind refuses to accept. Yes, there can be nonforgiveness even with regard to the future. This is the mind’s refusal to accept uncertainty, to accept that the future is ultimately beyond its control.
Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life — to allow life to live through you.
The moment you truly forgive, you have reclaimed your power from the mind.
Feeling will get you closer to the truth of who you are than thinking.
If you are twenty years old now, the energy field of your inner body will feel just the same when you are eighty. It will be just as vibrantly alive.
As there is more consciousness in the body, its molecular structure actually becomes less dense. More consciousness means a lessening of the illusion of materiality.
Most illnesses creep in when you are not present in the body.
When you are unoccupied for a few minutes, and especially last thing at night before falling asleep and first thing in the morning before getting up, “flood” your body with consciousness. Close your eyes. Lie flat on your back. Choose different parts of your body to focus your attention on briefly at first: hands, feet, arms, legs, abdomen, chest, head, and so on. Feel the life energy inside those parts as intensely as you can. Stay with each part for fifteen seconds or so. Then let your attention run through the body like a wave a few times, from feet to head and back again. This need only take a minute or so. After that, feel the inner body in its totality, as a single field of energy. Hold that feeling for a few minutes. Be intensely present during that time, present in every cell of your body. Don’t be concerned if the mind occasionally succeeds in drawing your attention out of the body and you lose yourself in some thought. As soon as you notice that this has happened, just return your attention to the inner body.
Conscious breathing, which is a powerful meditation in its own right, will gradually put you in touch with the body.
We could say: don’t just think with your head, think with your whole body.
When listening to another person, don’t just listen with your mind, listen with your whole body. Feel the energy field of your inner body as you listen. That takes attention away from thinking and creates a still space that enables you to truly listen without the mind interfering. You are giving the other person space — space to be. It is the most precious gift you can give. Most people don’t know how to listen because the major part of their attention is taken up by thinking. They pay more attention to that than to what the other person is saying, and none at all to what really matters: the Being of the other person underneath the words and the mind. Of course, you cannot feel someone else’s Being except through your own. This is the beginning of the realization of oneness, which is love. At the deepest level of Being, you are one with all that is.
Most human relationships consist mainly of minds interacting with each other, not of human beings communicating, being in communion.
We are all connected. We all have Inner Being.
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