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    Excerpt from transcript of Oprah and Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth Online Class Podcast

OPRAH WINFREY (HOST): Well, tonight we're discussing Chapter 5. So glad we're in "The Pain-Body."

So I wanted to just start with my idea of an overview of this chapter. You say that in this chapter that the human mind seems to be hooked on my, me and my story, constant mind chatter that keeps negative emotions alive and personalizes everything.

You say at the beginning of this chapter — on page 129 I'm on, everybody — that the greatest part of most people's thinking is "involuntary, automatic, and repetitive.

It is no more than a kind of mental static and fulfills no real purpose. Strictly  speaking, you don't think: Thinking happens to you. The statement 'I think' implies volition," you say. 

"It implies that you have a say in the matter, that there's a voice involved on your part." But, really, you say, "'I think' is just a false statement as 'I digest' or 'I circulate my blood.' Digestion happens, circulation happens, thinking happens." Yeah.   

ECKHART TOLLE (author of A NEW EARTH: AWAKENING TO YOUR LIFE'S PURPOSE): So it's becoming aware that thinking happens to you all the time. The key is becoming aware of it.

It's happening to everybody until awareness occurs, you are identified with that voice in the head, with its repetitive thought patterns.

And that is what most people are trapped in, and it makes up their superficial personality with all the continuous repetitive judgment, and likes and dislikes, and prejudices and whatever makes up the content of their egoic mind.

So people are trapped in that and derive a sense of self from that, which is ultimately insubstantial, conditioned by the past and not who they are.   

OPRAH : Absolutely. And you say also in Chapter 5, "The Pain-Body," you show how this addiction to these thoughts in our head, to this negativity, is at the root of humanity's problems. On page [138] you write, "We are a  species that has lost its way."   

ECKHART TOLLE : AWAKENING TO YOUR LIFE'S PURPOSE): Yes.  And we are lost, I could say. We are a species lost; we are lost in thought. We've lost ourselves in  the mind.

So looking for some kind of identity in the movement of thinking without ever really finding it. So the most important step in any point of awakening is to realize that there is a voice in the head that doesn't stop speaking.

When you realize, "Oh there's..." and then you begin to realize what kinds of  things the voice is saying: repetitive judgments and so on, negative thoughts about yourself, about  other people, about situations you are in.

Especially all these repetitive negative thoughts that many people are trapped with. You become aware of that.   

OPRAH : Yes, and you, then you become aware that it's really just the story that you've told yourself about yourself. And that's all it is.   

ECKHART TOLLE : Yes.

OPRAH : All right, that it has no power. Past has no power over you.   

ECKHART TOLLE : No  power. The power comes in with your awareness that there is a voice. Because the awareness is not part of it. And that is part of being, becoming present.   

OPRAH : Yes. One of my favorite quotes of this chapter is, "Nothing," on page 141, "Nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now; and if the past  cannot prevent you from being present now, what power does it have?"   

ECKHART TOLLE : Yes. Yes. Cause many people are so attached to the past that they carry a burden, like carrying a huge sack on your back, a burden. You're identified with that.

And they believe that they're unable to be present because the past prevents them from being present.

But it can't do that. You can step out of the stream of thinking. Take your attention into present, and immediately the past no longer has that power over you.   

OPRAH : Because nothing ever happened in the past that could prevent you from  being present now.   

ECKHART TOLLE : Yes.  

OPRAH : You say that the core of all this is the pain-body. On page 141, we read  that, "Any negative emotion that is not fully faced and seen for what it is in the moment it arises does not completely dissolve. ...

"The energy field of old but still very much alive emotion that lives in almost every human being is the pain-body."

And Chapter 5 introduces us to the pain-body. Amazing. You know, when I read this, I thought about my childhood. Now, I've shared my childhood with lots of people, and as a child, I was raised by my grandmother for the first six years.

And my grandmother used to whip me often. Like, I used to get beatings on a regular basis. And it was really a part of our culture, and I know many of you were raised this way too, that not only would you get beaten for almost, you know, for doing nothing, for, you broke a glass or you, you know, spoke out of turn or  whatever the adults deemed was inappropriate for you in that moment.

But I would get beaten, and then I was never allowed to have any emotion about it. And I remember feeling—many times my  grandmother would whip me with switches.

She would braid the switches together, and I'd get a  whipping, and then in the middle of whipping me, she'd say, "Stop your crying. Stop your crying."  And I'd get whipped until I would stopped crying.

And then afterward she would say, "You better wipe that pout off of your face. You better put a smile on your face. So you'd have to now act as  though the beating that you just had didn't happen.

And when I read this—that "any negative emotion that is not fully faced and seen for what it is in the moment it arises does not completely dissolve. It leaves behind a remnant of pain" — I realized that that pain of not being able to express the motion of just being able to be angry.

I mean, now I see kids today, when their parents say something, and they don't like it, the kids can say, "I don't like you," or "That upset me," or you know, God forbid, "I hate you," which, you know, in my culture was never allowed.

You had to suppress that, whatever you're  feeling, if you're beaten, "Wipe that pout off of your face. Wipe your tears. Stop crying right now." 

And so that would be a huge pain-body that I would end up carrying. Especially as a child. Cause you say children especially carry it.   

ECKHART TOLLE : Yes. Yes. So did you find then that as you grew up that there was a lot of unexpressed negative emotion in  you?   

OPRAH : I didn't. It wasn't unexpressed. It was repressed ability to—it's what  caused me to have the disease to please for so long.

A desire to please everybody because the ability to say in the moment, "This upsets me," or "This really bothers me," or "What you're doing I don't like,"  was not something I felt I could do for the longest time. Yeah.  

ECKHART TOLLE :  Yes. So all these negative remnants of negative emotions, they become, they accumulate in the  body. And then together they form what I call, because, now, we need to realize that any emotion that you have is a form of energy. That's acceptable, I think, to most people. Just as every thought you have is a form of energy.   

OPRAH : Right.   

ECKHART TOLLE : Every thought is energy, so there's nothing spooky about that. So when we say, when I say that the pain-body can be considered almost an entity in its own right that lives in you, some people find that's a little spooky, but all that I'm trying to say is here that it's an energy form.

Entity is another word for it. So an energy form lives in you that you may not be aware of all the time because some of the time it is dormant, and it's only active for a certain percentage of the time.

So first realization is that there is something in me that seeks unhappiness, that seeks unpleasant experiences, that seeks more negativity because it feeds on those things.

Those things, negative thoughts, will feed the pain-body.  That is one of the favorite ways the pain-body feeds, is on your own thinking.

So this is very important for people to realize, to observe within themselves that periodically in many people, an addiction to negativity arises. And if you can recognize that as it arises, then you're no longer totally at the mercy  of it.  

OPRAH : And so back at this point, though. Whenever there is negativity in your  life that you never fully dealt with, that negativity—the energy of that negativity—has to go  someplace.

And you're saying where it goes is inside us. And for me, everybody knows I've struggled with my weight for years, for me. That's the form that it takes. For a lot of other people, it makes them, you know, outwardly, you know, angry or negative toward other people.

But it has to take some form. For some people it makes them sick, makes them ill.   

ECKHART TOLLE : Yes. And a very frequent manifestation of it—perhaps the most frequent manifestation of the pain-body — is in intimate relationships where, periodically, partners have to go through their drama.

They have to re-enact drama every few weeks. So, in some cases, every few days they go through intense emotional negativity.

And usually the pain-body awakens first in one, in either the man or the woman first. And when the pain-body awakens, it wants some kind of reaction, negative emotional reaction.   

OPRAH : It's seeking that from the other person.   

ECKHART TOLLE :  Because it feeds on it. So many people have realized when I've spoken about it, they realize, "Oh yes, this is happening in our relationship."

That periodically the need, the pain-body arises, and it then will attempt to push the partner's buttons, as they're called in some form of psychotherapy, they say. 

Pushing the person's buttons means the pain-body knows exactly what buttons to push in your partner, buttons that will certainly bring a negative reaction.   

OPRAH : Now, is the pain-body ultimately this feeling of not being good enough?  Is the pain-body there because of a feeling of not being worthy, of not knowing its sense of presence or  consciousness? Is that why it's a pain-body?  

ECKHART TOLLE : Well,  it's the emotional aspect of the ego. So, really, the pain-body is part of the ego, and it's a very unhappy entity.

But because its very existence consists of this unhappy vibration, it does not want an end to its unhappiness because an end to its unhappiness is the end to the pain-body.

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Article from transcript of Oprah and Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth Online Class - Chapter 5.

Free podcasts available at Oprah.com and Learn Out Loud

The class is a discussion of his book A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose.

Also available as an audio CD.

Eckhart Tolle was educated at the Universities of London and Cambridge, and at the age of 29 experienced what he considered a spiritual transformation that marked the beginning of his life as a counselor and spiritual teacher. He is author of The Power of Now and Oprah's Book Club selection A New Earth.

More articles by Eckhart Tolle.

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Positive psychology......Positive psychology books

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