Events and Reactions to Events

Well Eckhart Tolle is on the front page, as it were, so I'm going to add another quotation from his book A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose. I think a normal reaction to the book is to jump to the goal - being in the now and to quickly skip over the impediments to getting there, not that Big Frank has arrived by any means. One of the main impediments, as Tolle points out, is the Ego. This is the king of the hill, the entity that dominates our lives and that we tend most to identify with, not recognizing what a tyrant it actually is. I think what Tolle has to say about ego is in many ways that best part of his book. Here's excerpt on events and reactions to events.

"Every ego confuses opinions and viewpoints with facts. Furthermore, it cannot tell the differnce between an event and its reaction to that event. Every ego is a master of selective perception and distorted interpretation. Only through awareness -- not through thinking -- can you differentiate between fact and opinion. Only through awareness are you able to see. There is the situation and here is the anger I feel about it, and then realize there are other ways of approaching the situation, other ways of seeing it and dealing with it. Only through awareness can you see the totality of the situation or person instead of adopting one limited perspetive."

Marcus Aurelius, addressing the same topic put it this way:

"The mind is that which is roused and directed by itself. It makes of itself what it choses. It makes what is chooses of its own experiences."

And Shakespeare:

“Nothing is either bad or good, only thinking makes it so.”

And then there is Big Frank Dickinson:

"Thinking is the ego's way of making judgements; learning to see through other eyes can pierce the judgemental fog."