måndag 28 juli 2014

Good quotes about relationships, Stilness speaks

As long as the ego runs your life, most of your thoughts, emotions, and actions arise from desire and fear. In relationships you then either want or fear something from the other person. What you want from them may be pleasure or material gain, recognition, praise or attention, or a strengthening of your sense of self through comparison and through establishing that you are, have, or know more than they. What you fear is that the opposite may be the case, and they may diminish your sense of self in some way.


When you make the present moment the focal point of your attention — instead of using it as a means to an end — you go beyond the ego and beyond the unconscious compulsion to use people as a means to an end, the end being self-enhancement at the cost of others. When you give your fullest attention to whoever you are interacting with, you take past and future out of the relationship, except for practical matters. When you are fully present with everyone you meet, you relinquish the conceptual identity you made for them — your interpretation of who they are and what they did in the past — and are able to interact without the egoic movements of desire and fear. Attention, which is alert stillness, is the key. How wonderful to go beyond wanting and fearing in your relationships. Love does not want or fear anything. If her past were your past, her pain your pain, her level of consciousness your level of consciousness, you would think and act exactly as she does. With this realization comes forgiveness, compassion, peace. The ego doesn't like to hear this, because if it cannot be reactive and righteous anymore, it will lose strength.


Tolle, Eckhart (2009-03-25). Stillness Speaks (Kindle Locations 578-584). New World Library. Kindle Edition.


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Do you experience frequent and repetitive drama in your close relationships? Do relatively insignificant disagreements often trigger violent arguments and emotional pain? At the root of such experiences lie the basic egoic patterns: the need to be right and, of course, for someone else to be wrong; that is to say, identification with mental positions. There is also the ego's need to be periodically in conflict with something or someone in order to strengthen its sense of separation between “me” and the “other” without which it cannot survive. In addition, there is the accumulated emotional pain from the past that you and each human being carries within, both from your personal past as well as the collective pain of humanity that goes back a long, long time. This “pain-body” is an energy field within you that sporadically takes you over because it needs to experience more emotional pain for it to feed on and replenish itself. It will try to control your thinking and make it deeply negative. It loves your negative thoughts, since it resonates with their frequency and so can feed on them. It will also provoke negative emotional reactions in people close to you, especially your partner, in order to feed on the ensuing drama and emotional pain. How can you free yourself from this deep-seated unconscious identification with pain that creates so much misery in your life? Become aware of it. Realize that it is not who you are, and recognize it for what it is: past pain. Witness it as it happens in your partner or in yourself. When your unconscious identification with it is broken, when you are able to observe it within yourself, you don't feed it anymore, and it will gradually lose its energy charge.


Tolle, Eckhart (2009-03-25). Stillness Speaks (Kindle Locations 624-625). New World Library. Kindle Edition.


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To know another human being in their essence, you don't really need to know anything about them — their past, their history, their story. We confuse knowing about with a deeper knowing that is non-conceptual.


Knowing about and knowing are totally different modalities. One is concerned with form, the other with the formless. One operates through thought, the other through stillness. Knowing about is helpful for practical purposes. On that level, we cannot do without it. When it is the predominant modality in relationships, however, it becomes very limiting, even destructive. Thoughts and concepts create an artificial barrier, a separation between human beings. Your interactions are then not rooted in Being, but become mind-based. Without the conceptual barriers, love is naturally present in all human interactions.


Tolle, Eckhart (2009-03-25). Stillness Speaks (Kindle Locations 589-594). New World Library. Kindle Edition.


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When you look upon another human being and feel great love toward them, or when you contemplate beauty in nature and something within you responds deeply to it, close your eyes for a moment and feel the essence of that love or that beauty within you, inseparable from who you are, your true nature. The outer form is a temporary reflection of what you are within, in your essence. That is why love and beauty can never leave you, although all outer forms will.
Tolle, Eckhart (2009-03-25). Stillness Speaks (Kindle Locations 627-630). New World Library. Kindle Edition.


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What a miserable day. He didn't have the decency to return my call. She let me down. Little stories we tell ourselves and others, often in the form of complaints. They are unconsciously designed to enhance our always deficient sense of self through being “right” and making something or someone “wrong.” Being “right” places us in a position of imagined superiority and so strengthens our false sense of self, the ego. This also creates some kind of enemy:
yes, the ego needs enemies to define its boundary, and even the weather can serve that function.


Through habitual mental judgment and emotional contraction, you have a personalized, reactive relationship to people and events in your life. These are all forms of self-created suffering, but they are not recognized as such because to the ego they are satisfying. The ego enhances itself through reactivity and conflict. How simple life would be without those stories. It is raining. He did not call. I was there. She was not.


Tolle, Eckhart (2009-03-25). Stillness Speaks (Kindle Locations 769-775). New World Library. Kindle Edition.
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When you are suffering, when you are unhappy, stay totally with what is Now. Unhappiness or problems cannot survive in the Now.
Tolle, Eckhart (2009-03-25). Stillness Speaks (Kindle Locations 776-777). New World Library. Kindle Edition.

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