Question: If you know that a certain person or situation is likely to trigger your pain body, is it better to avoid them altogether, or is it helpful for the development of Consciousness to stay with them and observe your pain body?
Eckhart Tolle: There is no clear answer to this – it depends on the situation. In some situations, he can’t even leave. There may be a situation at work or anywhere that requires you to be there in that moment and all you can do is be present with your Pain Body. In other situations, it may be better to walk away rather than engage in useless arguments or conflicts; Sometimes it’s better to walk away from a situation and let someone else’s Pain Body wear itself out than to stay with that person. No one can give clear guidelines as to whether this is right or not, you have to take individual situations and get a feel for what you should do.
There is no way to completely avoid Painbody. If you live in this world, there will always be situations in your life that trigger it, unless you are a total hermit. Even if you are a complete recluse, this can happen because your own Pain Body can arise as a result of certain thoughts that can trigger it. There is no way to avoid encountering the Pain Bodies. And of course, you can’t run away every time you encounter someone else’s Pain Body. Your spiritual practice should be an increase in presence as you notice someone close to you engaging in the deep unconsciousness of identification with the Pain Body.
The intensity of Presence must arise to counteract the pull of the deep, powerful unconsciousness of the other person’s Pain Body, which wants your Pain Body to respond – an emotional response from you. It’s like a dimmer switch, you have to turn up the dimmer switch to be intensely present while the other person’s Pain Body is trying to elicit some kind of response from you. It’s a very subtle thing, and it can easily be confused with shutting off or shutting yourself off from the other person.
When I talk about intense Presence, it has nothing to do with closing in on the other person, shutting ourselves off – this is energetically completely different. If you close it and say “nothing can touch me now, I won’t react”, it will turn off. You can fool yourself into thinking that you are so present that nothing can touch you. You put a barrier between yourself and the other person. This is not what I mean by increasing Presence. By increasing presence, there is complete openness to your environment, to the Other, but there is that high degree of alertness, and this alertness is open to what is. After a while, you will realize that you do this automatically, it is not a decision-making process.
When unconsciousness lingers in a situation, you become more and more alert. When you find yourself being challenged, you become more alert – like turning on a light. This is wonderful because then it means that whatever the challenge is, its function is to push you into heightened Presence. It’s the only way to avoid being drawn into someone else’s Pain Body.
As you realize that this is possible, you will find that in certain situations the intensity of the Presence within you will change. It becomes very intense the moment you are challenged by a difficult situation. You will immediately find that instead of being knocked unconscious by a challenge, which is the case with most people, you are increasing your presence.
According to Eckhart Tolle, the pain body is a product of the ego, and the way to separate your true self from the ego is to observe and learn more about how dissolve the pain body here.
