Non-Reaction is not Weakness but Strength

As I spend my Sunday morning alone on a quaint little patio in central Jersey, I continue to read along to Eckhart Tolle’s ‘A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose’. 

Each page flipped through the novel enters me further and further into an untouched world, a life far beyond the one I experience here and I’m slowly awakened. 

‘Non-reaction is not weakness but strength’, Eckhart projects as I read the latest section on complaining and resentment. I think about my family as the words from the pages bounce around my brain and resonate with my soul. I can picture each person interacting with one another over the course of my almost three decades here on Earth and I’m amazed how these teachings are just being discovered. 

All the years I’ve tried to step in, to dissolve tension, to bring joy, peace and light during hard times, and yet, today I am receiving an intense explanation of the negative interactions and responses witnessed all those years before. 

It’s not always bad, and frankly, it’s certainly not comparable to I’m sure what many others endure on the daily, but life is relative, and we are each here to learn. These moments are intended to help me and my family grow and it’s becoming so evident how bogged down we are by the ‘ego’. The egoic mind is the sense of self that interprets our memories, our opinions, our reactions and emotions. It is the central core of the mind that people repetitively identify ‘self’ with. However, the true crime in it all is that we are NOT our mind. We are not our egos. Instead, we are the awareness of all that which we think. And so to turn others against ourselves, to separate self from proclaimed enemy, we only strengthen those negative thoughts and beliefs that we turn into our personal identities. 

So eloquently yet simply stated, “To forgive is to overlook, or rather to look through...the ego to the sanity that is in every human being as his or her essence.” 

When we can go beyond those harsh, strong, persistent, often skewed thoughts, we can recognize the ego for exactly what it is: “an old, conditioned mind-pattern”. In that moment, we push the human collective mind forward. 

Tolle, Eckhart. (2006). A New Earth: Awakening to You’re Life’s Purpose. First Plume Printing.