Massive Progress

It's been a few days since my last post. I've been working so hard on my projects that I've actually found myself ahead of schedule. I read a book last week called "A New Earth". It was great. It had a profound impact on my life. I have experienced more progress toward my goals in the last few days than in the last year and a half. I can attribute it to the awareness that the author discusses. The space between thoughts. It works. It puts everything into perspective and the rest seems to fall in to place. Today was the first day I really noticed it. It was uncanny how well things go when I was truly aware of what was going on.

Thinking about that book, I realized that I have been holding myself back for a long time. My negativity clouded thinking that could’ve been productive. I guess it’s like a computer’s processor; if you allow some programs to constantly run, that can interfere with other programs you are trying to run. If I concentrate on bad things that have happened in the past and replay them over and over in my head, I’m unable to think productively. Not just that, but I never accepted the present moment. I never appreciated the present moment. To just sit back, exist, and be happy is the secret to inner peace.

At first, I had a hard time grasping the concept of the ego being separate from my real identity. I understand now but still have trouble with it. Does that mean that all emotions experienced by the ego are, in a sense, not really real? I wonder if inner peace originates from that detachment. The reason this book is so popular is because it’s so different from other “self help” books. Instead of telling you what you need to do with your life, Tolle simply points out things that exist, but go unnoticed. Primarily, the inner awareness that we all have, but ignore because we spend too much time “thinking”. We, as humans, never accept the present moment. We are too busy thinking about the past or the future. We either dwell on past incidents, or we live in the future. I was probably the best example of this dysfunctional thinking. I was either depressed about how my life had gone in the past, or I was lost in thought about the future. In the future, I’d have money and I could finally be happy. In the future, I’d be fit and then I could be happy. I ignored the wonderful aspects of my present situation. I never thought about “right now”. Nor did I ever allow my thinking to become quiet and still. Tolle says that there is a space between thoughts in which that quiet awareness (your true consciousness) exists. I think Stephen Covey was on to this in his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, when he stated that “there is a gap between stimulus and response”.