1) Tolle's 'pain body' and relationship to ego
Sometimes I'll have urges to do things that don't seem like ego, they seem more like what Tolle describes as the pain body. It'll be a knotty type of impenetrably dark energy that wells up inside and creates a compulsion. The compulsion could be for on-the-face-of-it-innocuous thing (going to the fridge and loading up to feel full, despite not being hungry), or something that definitely wouldn't past the 'mum test', it's all the same at the core of it - the flavor of the compulsion merely changes depending on whatever floats the boat (in a positive, or more usually negative sense) at the time. The pain body energy and associated act-out are usually non-verbal, more primitive/instinctual.
Questions:
a) Is this completely different to ego, or somehow related?
b) If not related to ego, do you see this thing as important to address (it didn't spring out at me as something that was in the methodology)?
c) Would this knotty energy be more quickly dispelled by refusing to act out the compulsion, or by giving it high-beam attention when it's in effect?
2) Ego-driven action identified - abort or continue?
Since I'm at least partially distanced from ego, I feel (although this may well be an illusion at one level or another) the appearance of choice coming into play. If the ego says 'aha! you have an opportunity in this conversation to slip in something that will make you seem clever/senior to this other person, which will cement a germinating image on either side' I don't actually have to do it. But because I've already spotted it, in a way it doesn't really seem to matter whether I do it or not, because at that point it's already lost its power. It's like the ego knows it's failed, and what was some kind of karma-laden act has now turned into a transparent karma-free action.
Question: Is doing the opposite of what the ego wants helpful? Or is simply the noticing of the ego-led action enough?
3) Self-talk - what's the bearing?
Is the idea to:
a) Reduce ego chatter a lot, or
b) Silence the ego chatter completely, or
c) Let the chatter continue, just get more and more distance (to increasingly regard it as content rather than be immersed in it as subject)
d) Some other option (possibly a combo of the above)
4) Revolver
I watched the US version of this yesterday. I'd seen it before a few years ago and felt it was 'significant', but of course a whole new layer is there this time. I have the European version as well now, which I think is the better one according to other posts on this forum, and I'll watch that tonight. Some stuff I thought was all surface level is now rather obviously symbolic, and I can identify the existence of other symbols that are opaque to me. For instance 'Slim Biggins' - I'm not sure whether this guy might represent consciousness of divine law (gone away, but not truly gone, capable of redemption), or an at-arms-length plausibly-deniable hit man for ego (which is itself just a highly disguised bit of ego, but which is sufficiently distanced from itself to think it is autonomous, so much so that it attempts to switch sides when it sees its former master becoming weak, but which is effectively suicide).
Question: Should I make effort to decrypt the opaque symbols as much as possible (creating and testing hypotheses, reading around the references etc), or is it enough to simply watch it at various times and see what jumps out during each viewing?
(Edit: Perhaps beyond the obvious meanings, the only possible meanings are those which {} lets you see, which are right for your specific situation/phase at the time)
Cheers,
James
