Eckhart Tolle,
The Power of Now:
A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When I was asked recently if my life has turned out the way I wanted it to, I found myself saying:
My life looks nothing at all like I thought it was supposed to look, but it feels better than I ever thought it could feel.
Thirty years ago my interior life was a mess. Darkness and despair and neediness, all of which was enough to set me on a search for something better, something other than the experience of life I was having, which was primarily the experience of suffering.
Much has happened in the intervening years. I've had many experiences, learned much, forgotten more. The single most encompassing thing I can say about the change that has taken place, though, is embodied in what Mr. Tolle states above: I have learned, by and large, to disidentify with the mind. I have come to know myself as something other than this mind. Not always, but most of the time. In disidentifying with the mind, I am not constrained to seeing myself as the mind. I am not at the mercy of what the mind is telling me about myself, about you, about the universe. I do not have to do what the mind tells me to do, I do not have to be who the mind tells me I must be.
In finding our identity as something other than the mind, we put ourselves in the hands of the universe, of nature Itself. What does nature have in store for us? Our true life. Our true place as individual expressions of nature. Nature wants for us as individuals what it wants for itself: wholeness, fulfillment, happiness, freedom. The sure and certain knowledge that we are in the right place at the right time doing the right thing for the right reasons--that we are in our right life.
This is all any of us want, really, and it is almost ridiculously simple to begin to stake our claim to it. We meditate, twice each day; we insist on getting present to the world rather than to our thinking about the world; we remember always that we are meant to be happy, that the universe wants nothing for us but good; and we insist on love, we insist on enjoying our life.
Now.
Today I will choose to listen to the big wide world, rather than to the inside of my head. I will choose to look someone in the eye when we speak. I will choose to feel my feet against the ground as I walk, feel my bottom in the chair as I sit. I will choose to smell the scent of life as I walk out my door. I will choose to be in the world and with the world, rather than with my thoughts about the world. I will choose life.
