“Thinking and consciousness are not synonymous. Thinking is only a small aspect of consciousness. Thought cannot exist without consciousness, but consciousness does not need thought.” — Eckhart Tolle
And you believed, that with all the years of preponderance in the various thought processes that you have embraced, you were experiencing full consciousness of being. To really assimilate those words, and completely understand the full meaning or impact is rather daunting for all of us. If nothing else, we assumed our thinking embraced a level of some consciousness, but upon further investigation that may not be the case at all . . . quite a revelation no matter at what time of this life’s journey that is illuminated. For the sake of possibility, regarding further introspection into this question, Eckhart Tolle suggests . . . “Instead of asking ‘what do I want from life’ a more powerful question is, what does life want from me?” This is not the approach many of us learned early on, however, it may be what we come to understand through experience, after years of becoming aware of who we are, why we are here and where we are going.
The twists, turns, conflicts, frustrations, dead ends, unresolved questions, and failures that all of us have experienced, sometimes leads to what has been called a dark night of the soul. This manifests itself differently for everyone . . . no exceptions. We have become so conditioned to solve what isn’t working by any means necessary, we forget another obvious suggestion by Eckhart Tolle . . . “Wisdom comes with the ability to be still.” Easy to say . . . hard to do. The obvious noise that filters our existence gives us no rest, and peace is a commodity that challenges our sanity. As we know all to well, change can be frightening, beyond challenging and paralyzing due to the unknown. A dark night of the soul, or the lack of conscious awareness in our daily lives that short circuits our true source, leaves us depleted of hope, joy, energy, courage, and faith in ourselves to turn it around. Understanding where we are, and how we got there is the first step in a process. Knowing that we will achieve freedom of that over-shadowing veil of darkness, comes slowly with a conscious awareness of peace, understanding, patience, wisdom, knowledge and yes, faith.
Some individuals go through this process a few times in their lives, and then others do not. There is no right or wrong to any of this, just process in the continuing awareness of NOW, as Eckhart Tolle succinctly states without equivocation, “To end the misery that has afflicted the human condition for thousands of years, you have to start with yourself and take responsibility for your inner state at any given moment. That means NOW.” There exists no better time than the present . . . JLR