Originally Posted By: Revlgking


Shall I tell people not to worry; that an enlightened one smile has assured me that all tragedies, with all that pain and suffering, are just illusions?

No that would be foolish. You neither understand the concept nor have you been assured. One non understanding person trying to tell another what they don't understand won't create anything more than more misunderstanding.
Originally Posted By: Revlgking

When I hurt--even from the memory of past hurts--I hurt in the NOW.

Actually, no you don't.
In order to be in the NOW as referred to by Tolle, would mean there were no preconceived ideas about the experience based on the past or any projections into the future that are from the stored emotional attachments you have with experience. Perfect innocence with absolutely no fear.
By replacing the past impressions with the NOW, any experience would be experienced as if it were new, and the first time.
When we layer past impressions onto experience with fear, judgment drives up the emotional content of experience often creating the idea that pain is even more intense and dramatic than it really is.

Originally Posted By: Revlgking

Were I to say otherwise I would be lying. Were I to say that there is nothing I can do to prevent at least some of what causes pain and suffering, which comes my way, I would need to try to delude myself and give in to mental chicanery and sophistic reasoning.

Were you feeling something and trying to say you weren't would be a false statement, and would have little meaning. Were you to say you could or couldn't prevent suffering would be relative to what you know about reality and your relationship with it as you understand it.
Originally Posted By: Revlgking

Currently, from a wise health professional, I am receiving much help in dealing with a serious prostate situation. That therapist believes in the basic principle of Tolle and others. She has assured me: somatic conditions are real, not just illusions.

They are very real to one who is immersed in the condition of the body and the world. To someone who is immersed in the soul and spirit of the body, the condition is reflective of belief and beliefs change not only the experience but how it is created.

The entire Gospel according to Jesus refers to this illusion of identifying with the limitations of the body.
But you don't believe he really healed anyone or raised the dead so it would be a moot point.

Originally Posted By: Ellis
It is cruel and inhuman to assume that tragedies, pain and suffering are illusions, brought upon the sufferer by their own sin, fate or happenstance-- or due to a crease in the Space-Time continuum or some such unfeeling rubbish.

Any assumption is only an assumption, and is neither cruel or inhuman but just plain ignorance.
Originally Posted By: Ellis

Illness and suffering have many causes, some of which we are unable to change, others which we can foresee and remediate.

All illness and suffering is created by stress. The medical industry knows this much. How it accumulates within the personality is by choice, how far it goes to invade the mechanics of the body is due to how much one piles into belief and into the emotional body.
This carries on in ones life and continues into lives that follow if one does not change their relationship with reality.
Originally Posted By: Ellis

Some cope through prayer, others offer help and support and others condemn with spiritual superiority. May the latter never need the comfort of others.

Simply coping with the beliefs that create stress and sickness, never approaches the cause. Just as most medical doctors cannot predict the nature of individual health based on the environment because everyone deals with it different emotionally, and some don't react to the same stress the same way, the best they can do is treat the symptoms.
Medicine is not an exact science. At best they can created drugs that might temporarily become effective but if one continues to maintain the stress within the body the sickness can return. The average age of a physician is less than the human who has little knowledge of medicine and yet we are willing to give doctors the authority to tell us how to live our lives. The inadequacies of the medical profession are just a reflection of how little man knows about itself.

In just about every case where healing takes place in life threatening disease, doctors have noted that the patient has made a fundamental shift in their way of thinking, and instead of ignoring their reality become more aware of it and how they interact with it. Rather than making illusory assumptions they become more conscious of how they have come to be where they are, and how they can make changes to create a different life and a healthier body.

People still believe if you go outside without warm clothes in the cold you will catch a cold, when it has nothing to do with catching a virus which won't matter if you are dressed warm or not.
This is just a simple example of illusion created from lack of knowledge and misunderstanding of reality.
People also assume when someones body dies their consciousness dies with it, and so they not only mourn their attachment to the person but the loss that the dead person has suffered by dying.

If someone throws garbage on your lawn the only suffering is the attachment to a certain order of things. Life goes on and no one has been physically damaged. One could easily walk out into the yard and pick it up and go one with their life. Instead most pile up the anxiety and in extreme cases allow it to create health problems.
How ridiculous is it to let such a thing cause such a condition?
This is just the tip of the iceberg. The more people have, the more they fear to lose.
One who has nothing has nothing to lose and will not accumulate that stress. Instead they might stress about something completely different.
Each individual creates their own illusive reality within their beliefs, and like a herd of animals people get together to discuss their pain and their fear to make it as real as they can and as dramatic as they can.

Older people who start losing friends begin to make the obituary page a priority read at the breakfast table instead of planning the day. More focus is put on death than on life for people addicted to this way of thinking.

Spiritual science approaches the reality of the everlasting soul and by giving that which is forever the attention, it fundamentally changes the experience of that which is temporary.

People think they have evolved beyond the stone age but superstition has not changed with the attachments that are created by fear and ego since man lived in caves.
That way of thinking, projecting outward from the collective fear of mortality, is the illusion which produces beliefs based in fantasy and ignorance.

Whenever the enlightened approach the ego with the truth the ego fights until the death to protect its illusions. So the enlightened do not try to change anyone with their ego so conditioned to be on the defense.
The best someone can do with the truth is to plant seeds and allow fertile soil to sprout the experience of truth when the conditions are right.

As long as the ego is unwilling to see or hear anything other than what is conditionally protected in the personal box. Truth remains illusive.


I was addicted to the Hokey Pokey, but then I turned myself around!!