The Power of Now Revealed: Why You're Not Your Body (And How to Escape the Nightmare)

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

Do you start where you are tomorrow? Do you plan in yesterday? or is it the day before? Can you eat, sleep or drink in the next hour? Do you feel the pain when you stumble and hit your toe tomorrow at 9:05 AM? Obviously no, you may answer. The reality is we are constantly anticipating with our imagination what may or may not happen. If we are not anticipating the "future", we are ruminating on the past. Thinking of things that we might have done differently. We get stuck in, what seems like infinite loops, repeating thought patterns that are self destructive. Living negative life circumstances again and again like a recurring nightmare. There is only one way to get out of the infinite loop. It's with a "break" statement. You can do this by being aware of whatever that pattern is. If you see the pattern, you can steer your car, you are in the driver's seat. You can take corrective action and break out of the loop. However if you are not self aware, you are figuratively speaking, asleep, and a sleeping man/woman sits in the backseats at the mercy of the sanity of a not so sane driver. Eckhart states in his book that being aware of the negative in life is what is known as alchemy.

You might have heard about the myth of the philosopher's stone. A stone that turns lead (inexpensive metal) into gold. The first Harry Potter book is called Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Inner alchemy is about being aware of these destructive thought patterns (lead) and negative circumstances (lead) that keep happening in your life again and again and being aware of them. Putting your complete sustained undivided attention on them. That will be painful. Suffering consciously turns these negative painful happenings into "consciousness" (gold). It's like a flame eating wood and turning anything it touches to itself, the flame grows. By doing this (according to Eckhart) these circumstances, pain either physical (in your body) or emotional, and negative circumstances will stop from recurring like a living nightmare. This is your break statement in programming lingo.

Let's not get too set on naming. We are not competing for any ISO certificate or spelling bees here. Call it inner alchemy, call it a cat in a hat. The name does not matter, the dogma does not matter either. You can skip whatever we are talking about here entirely and keep reliving the pain and staying in the loop. You can try it for a day and see if there is any truth to it. To my knowledge Eckhart hasn't monetized mindfulness and has no patent on it. It also costs 0.00$ last I checked. You may end up trying the cat in a hat ("inner alchemy") and finding you took the red pill Morpheus handed Neo in the movie The Matrix when you enter the gap.

The gap is where you will get after a couple of days of practice. Beginners get lucky too so that's a bonus. You will find yourself getting free gap time. According to Eckhart, when you focus on your thoughts long enough, they cease for short time, maybe 2 seconds at first. When your thoughts stop, you are in the gap. You go beyond thought, not below thought. You will be. This state is really hard to describe. I would even go as far as saying it is impossible to describe. I will do the impossible in a minute. The reason I say it is difficult to explain is because when you are in the gap, if you start analyzing the gap (using your left analytical thoughtful mind) you get booted out of it before you can even count to one. When you stop thinking you must just be. You can't think how is this happening. Being in the gap is literally the opposite of thinking. To cut a long story short. Being in the gap is when you are yourself. You are in the flow state which many athletes attribute their success to. But who is "yourself" really? The gap is where you put the conscious mind behind you and use your deeper subconscious. To be more accurate, let it use you. You will be passively acting in this state.

You might say I am {{Your First Name}}. If I tell you, no you aren't {{Your First Name}} you might think I am either crazy or trying to gaslight you. But the truth is that you really aren't your name! I can prove this by getting you a fake ID that says banana pie (will you become a banana or a pie?), or by calling you by your nickname, you would still reply back. You might even prove this to yourself by going to the proper governmental institute and officially change your name! Did YOU or YOURSELF change after changing your name? No you are still who you are! So what are you really? You must definitely be your body then. This is what you haul around daily and take with you wherever you are.

Your skin cells change every 30 days. Red blood cells take 120 days to be replaced. Your liver is replaced after 500 days. You have a new skeleton every 10 years. Why, look at your photos from 10 years ago. Is that body you? If yes, how is not the same body you have today? It can't be you if it changes because your essence does not change. What if I told you that even your body (according to metaphysics) does not even exist. Matter, your body included, is 99.99999999999% empty. That is thirteen nines after the decimal point, and it's a percent! This is due to the vast space between the electrons and the nucleus of an atom. To put this into a "tangible" sense. In a football field that is 100 meters large, imagine a pea of a size of 1cm in the middle. This is how far an electron is from the nucleus. How come then can't we put our hands through each other's like ghosts? I will leave that up to you to read on. If you are still insisting that you are your body. Recall any dream you had. Was your physical body in the dream? I don't think so. If that was the case I would love to hear how you got something physical in the dream, maybe I will be able to reverse engineer your method and take gold from my dreams to the real world.

So who are you? If you are not your name, because it changes. If you are not your body, because it changes. Then you are definitely your mind. Exactly! But not really. You can cease thoughts. How can you cease something you are? You are not your job. It can be changed. You are not your nationality. You can change that as well. By a deliberate process of elimination. You reach your consciousness. Are you your awareness? are you your consciousness? Can you say you are there, if you are not conscious? Can you say you are there if your body is not there but your consciousness is (think dream or imagination)? I will leave that up to you.

The ugly truth no one will tell you. Practicing mindfulness and being aware one stimulus is easy. For a minute before your thoughts start racing like a racehorse. You might even get that lucky card and get the beginners luck boost, but you may go back to your old ways after a while and getting drawn into the mindlessness of the backseat of the car. Just like strengthening your body, strengthening your mind needs actual practice. Not just an hour or two a day, because the day has 16 waking hours. You may need to integrate the practice into your daily life. I will go more on detail on that on the summary of the book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Pronounced MEE HIGH CHECK SENT ME HIGH.

The book is the best I have read out of all others. It has real life tangible direct and massive positive impact. If you hate reading you can subscribe to any audiobook app like Storytel and listen to audiobooks. Not sponsored by the way, it's just what I use. It's cheap and has many books. Ending this blog article [Harry Potter Philosopher's Stone spoiler alert] I would like to end this article with a quote from Albus Dumbledore to Harry Potter when Harry discovered that the alchemist Nicolas Flamel broke his physical philosopher stone and that the alchemist and his wife Perenelle are going to die because the stone gave them infinite life.

"To one as young as you, I’m sure it [death] seems incredible, but to Nicolas and Perenelle Flamel, it really is like going to bed after a very, very long day. After all, to the well-organised mind, death is but the next great adventure.” (UK/Bloomsbury edition, page 213)"