Wednesday 30 November 2016

Finding the mind’s pause button



THE POWER OF NOW by Eckhart Tolle
For this book, ‘thought-provoking’ is a huge understatement. The book makes you question so much in your thoughts, feelings and even consciousness that it is a slow, slow read, you stop every few pages and wish you had someone to talk to, to share your latest discovery. The only parallel in anything I had read before is Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation  – where getting away from thinking is part of the struggle to move closer to God.
But here it’s much stronger – the mind, the ego, is an absolute tyranny with its self-dramatization, its mental movies about a better tomorrow, and so many more little tricks that distract you from consciousness of yourself, your deep body, your current existence, your immediate problems now.
Achieving all this is a big ask, of course. One of the many annotations I have written, early on in the book, says, ‘If you are saint!’, next to one of Tolle’s calm injunctions to ‘watch the mechanics of your mind.’ For a person with health problems and pain it might be too late to try and adopt the principles of this book, much as Tolle tries to get us to understand pain and tolerate it.
Following this book is scary but liberating at the same time. It chimes very closely with some of my own thoughts as I’ve faced up, this autumn, to a world without my father in it. This grief needed a strategy to make it tolerable. Also he presented a sad example of over-reliance on the mind, even to burning it out while the body limped on.
Since reading this book I have found myself less bored, less frustrated, less impatient. As Tolle says, ‘Waiting is a state of mind. It means you want the future; you don’t want the present.’ (That sounds rather like a late Leonard Cohen lyric – one of those phrases that, like the best coaching questions, are simple but very perceptive.) I have noticed the beauty of my surroundings; even sitting in a traffic jam this morning the sunlight on the frosty field was glorious. I have concentrated more on what I am actually doing now.
The mind is so powerful, it can churn away day and night with thousands of images and sounds and feelings. But it can hold you back from action, too. I remember going to ‘Go Ape’, a tree climbing experience where you make your way through high treetops across wobbly rope bridges and zip wires. Every movement was preceded by a fiddly process of fastening and refastening the three rope slings that were connected to my safety harness. Of course I was glad of the harness, but still all those loops, carabiners and buckles slowed down my progress. In the same way, the mind can surround you with a fog of thoughts, rationalisations and interesting patterns that have to be spotted before the next step can happen.
Also it sets you up with too much self-image, a compilation of image and sound that you have to see coming true. That builds up the pressure to succeed to an almost unbearable tension.
The other problem with these mental movies is that when they are optimistic they are often less vivid than the pessimistic ones. The prospect of change is less easy to imagine than the prospect of staying the same; rejections are intensely familiar because they come so often. If they are allowed to become mental movies then we can gravitate towards them. That’s the trouble.
This book helps you find the off switch. The mind has its essential uses, but like every television, it needs to be turned off at the end of the programme you wanted to watch.