Now and the Body
3rd installment of a series of commentary on Eckhart Tolle’s the Power of Now
Today I’m going to comment on how the teacher regards the relationship between the physical body and the concept of finding presence to access your true self.
There really is no narrative in the work. He bounces around and comes back to some topics, like the thinking mind versus the present mind many times. Other interesting topics he throws a brief chapter in on.
You really have to pay attention and read each bit as a standalone thought. You can’t read it through like a novel. You have to sit back and think about some of these things and maybe take some notes, like I’m doing, to let it sink in.
Previously we discussed the notion that most human suffering is caused by not living in or being able to access the present ‘now’. Eckhart spend a lot of time talking about how dwelling on the past or projecting into the future is a construct of the thinking mind that only causes suffering.
His solution is to find ways to ‘be’ in the ‘now’. Only by being present can you find your true self or your inner ‘being’ and that will ultimately bring you peace and ease your suffering.
He returns to these themes often.
One of the next and obvious questions you might have, and I certainly did, is how to resolve the apparent conflict of focusing on the now with setting goals and working towards some worthy thing in the future that requires focus and effort?
It seems that, at least in our western culture, there is much focus on goals and goal setting. In fairness to the goal setting culture their intent is to create an emotional gap between the present and the goal. In essence the goal is designed to create negative or positive tension that drives a person into action.
This same emotional tension gap between the present and the future goal can be characterized as suffering. It seems to me that the goal setting crowd are leveraging this tension gap tactically, on purpose, to create the tension, or the suffering, in your head to drive or inspire you to action to relieve the tension.
Eckhart talks to this a bit. He says that the goals are fine as long as they are rooted in a strong sense of self or generated from a strong sense of self. If those goals emerge from a strong sense of self found by spending time in the now then you are more likely to own them and more likely to energize your whole being to achieve them. Although the achievement will likely no longer be the emotion driver or will take a different form.
It may be that we can see this as replacing the negative emotional tension of creating a future goal to drive us into action (to get out of suffering) with positive emotional energy of using our core self to create positive emotional tension to inspire us into action.
It’s nuanced but it does resolve the conflict. To be fair to the goal setting gurus they do talk about understanding and owning your core purpose before setting tactical goals.
Then he briefly speaks to how these glimpses of the pure self you will get when you spend time in the ‘now’ may be considered divine. You could write a whole book on this thought alone, but he just does a fly-by. When you find you pure, true self in the now this is divine, i.e. a glimpse of or the presence of God with a big ‘G’.
For those of you with the proclivity to worship a particular deity, this is where the concept of ‘being’ intersects with that. Your ability to find the ‘now’ enables you to find and interact with your personal version of God.
Like I said, that’s a deep topic, and he flies right by and moves on to the next topic that is near and dear to we endurance athletes – the relationship of that present being and living in the power of the now with the corporeal existence of the physical body.
I do think about this topic a lot. On the one hand I see how my endurance sports pursuits have transformed me physically and mentally over the last 20 years, but on the other hand I understand the physical body is not transcendent in itself.
It has been the tradition of most religions and philosophies to see the physical body as something crude and animal like – something to be transcended to reach that pure spiritual plain. In most cases there is a spirit or a soul that is just riding around in this flesh-corpse looking for a way out. Anything to do with the physical body is to be hidden, avoided and shamed, right?
How do we square that concept of the body full of sin and dirt with our own experience of that body as a holistic partner in a transcendent life? Anyone who crosses that starting line with me in Hopkinton with me on Monday, or even better the finish line on Boylston Street will tell you that we go way beyond the physical. Our physical is a rocket ship fueled by the spiritual.
Much to my surprise Eckhart resolves these things exactly how they resolve in our experience as endurance athletes. I will quote directly now:
“The body can become a point of access into the realm of Being.”
Instead of shaming the body as some dirty animal legacy to be transcended he sees it as a conduit that may enable access to the state of now and being. I don’t know about you, but that is exactly my experience.
He does note that the body in itself is still just a physical shell for the spirit. Certainly the worship of the body itself without the spiritual is a perverse form. Trying to interpret the ‘now’ through the filter of the physical will give you a distorted signal.
How can this physical body become an access point?
We all know that a long run in the woods on a spring day with a dog is a great way to glimpse your being. His methods are more mundane and will be familiar. He talks about the classic meditation technique of stopping the thinking mind by focusing on your body.
In the simplest form this is breathing meditation. It is also that meditation technique where you focus on one body part at a time and work your way top down or bottom up, relaxing and moving your focus as you go. And here I will quote again:
“…Being can be felt in the first instance as the invisible energy field that gives life to what you perceive as the physical body”
As you practice this body meditation you may even feel your body start to tingle or glow. This is that energy of the now or the being translating through the body. It becomes a holistic inner body awareness where you connect with being.
I love the way he resolves this apparent conflict between the physical and the spiritual. The body is not some dirty, animal thing to be transcended. It is your partner in finding that inner peace in the now.
And for me, and you, as endurance athletes we have supercharged this access point. We have spent so much time listening to our bodies that we are able to access that inner peace and quiet the thinking mind on command.
We already know that one of the best ways to access that ‘now’ that ‘being’ is through a deep and understanding partnership with our physical shell.
I like that. It works for me.