Included in the beginning of the biographical sketch of Eckhart Tolle (click on Episode Detail on the upper left of this introductory summary) is the following sentence: “Eckhart Tolle is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, The Power of Now (translated into 33 languages) and the highly acclaimed follow-up A New Earth, which are widely regarded as two of the most influential spiritual books of our time.”

Consistent with the evolutionary perspective and thematic thread of all my Living Dialogues -- that we are now embarked in a planetary quantum leap of consciousness, a new great awakening beyond both religious or secular scientism dogma -- my two-part dialogue with Eckhart explores the connection between our personal search for true happiness and the cessation of proliferating suffering and violent conflicts worldwide.

The kind of world that will be brought about in the 21st century is directly linked to the quality of worldviews and manner and content of communication that we bring to our personal and collective relating. We are developing with one another a new vision – a co-creative and participatory cosmology -- bringing the best of our ancient and modern heritage together in a journey characterized, using Martin Buber’s phrase, by the transition from an “I-It” to an I-Thou” mutually respectful and creative relationship with all that is.

One of the signature trademark expressions of Living Dialogues is: “Global Talk Unites Us.” These two dialogues between myself and Eckhart can also serve as an illuminating and deepening complement to the unprecedented interactive live webcast inaugurated and conducted by Oprah and Eckhart for 10 weeks from the beginning of March to the beginning of May 2008, with over 11 million people coming together each week online “to the same place – with the same purpose – to create a new earth”. (See www.oprah.com to participate live during that timeframe or listen anytime to those archived programs.)

Here is an excerpt from this dialogue Program 45, in which Eckhart and I explore the origin of suffering, the path to real happiness in the present and not some anticipated future, and the nature of our human heritage and possibility from an evolutionary perspective, relating to what Eckhart terms the personal and collective “pain body”:

“Duncan Campbell: The fascinating thing about this archetypal journey [to an enduring presence of happiness, equanimity] in how you explain this from your own personal experience is that the path to the present and the path away from the future is often, perhaps for most, if not all of us, through pain, through suffering. I recall, a great Buddhist teacher once being asked by a student, “Why did the Buddha call the First Noble Truth the ‘Truth of Suffering’? Why is it noble?”

He replied, “Because without it, there's no doorway into liberation from the imprisonment of ego.” That’s why the First Noble Truth [of the Four Noble Truths used by the Buddha to describe his own experience of “awakening”] is called “suffering”. The Second Noble Truth is discovering the source of suffering: the desire and attachment, not desire by itself, but desire and attachment. Then the Third Noble Truth being the possibility of liberation and the Fourth being meditation or the practice to achieve liberation.

What I'm thinking of now is a poem recently translated by Coleman Barks of the great Persian poet Rumi, talking about the role of grief. He says, and this is Rumi from the 13th century: “I have broken through to longing now, filled with the grief I have felt before but never like this. The center leads to love so opens to creation’s core. Hold on to your particular pain. That, too, can take you to God.” (See also Program 3 on this Living Dialogues site with Coleman Barks on The Soul of Rumi.)

“Hold on to your particular pain. That, too, can take you to God.” I have the sense that many people are going through this particular longing and grieving that may be familiar but it adds a new level of intensity. As you've described it, it is also the suffering and frustration of people in many countries around the world who have perhaps been many years on the so called “spiritual search” and experienced a new kind of hopelessness, a level of despair that they’ve not experienced before.

This may be the doorway to a collective awakening as you suggest in your book. This is not an isolated experience but what I call an emerging democratization of the mystical experience that traditionally has been seen as isolated in only a few people in different traditions such as Rumi in the Sufi Tradition, such as Jesus, such as Buddha, such as Meister Eckhart in the Christian tradition and so on. But now, there seems to be a very wide experience of this and as a result, I'd like you to talk a little bit more about what you mean by the pain body.

Again, as you put it, because you yourself had a particularly heavy karmic pain body, your personal pain was particularly heavy; it literally drove you “out of your [thinking, self-referential] mind”. You talk about the pain body not as an individual experience only but as a kind of collective experience. So perhaps we could spend our time for the remainder of this first Dialogue talking about the pain body, and how our individual and collective experience are merging and mutually informing.

Eckhart Tolle: What I call “pain body”, of course, like everything else, in this particular language of mine is one perspective on something among other perspectives. So nothing that we speak about is the ultimate truth, whatever language expresses is always a relative truth. Knowing that, we can talk about this particular perspective that I have on human pain. What I call pain body is the accumulation of emotional pain from the past, not only of one’s own personal past--and of course, there's an accumulation of pain from everybody’s childhood and life also--but also, pain that is part of collective human pain.

If you look at human history, you can see a very large part of human history is the history of self-inflicted suffering of humans inflicting dreadful suffering on each other, on themselves also, of course. The 20th century was the supreme example of that, what I call “the collective madness” where I believe nobody knows the exact figure but perhaps 100 million people were killed by other humans and this is the height of madness.

This has been going on, this magnified knowledge through science and technology, so it's the destructiveness of all of that. But yet, this has been going on forever since recorded history and before that, I'm sure, so that incredibly so much pain in human history collectively has accumulated. I'm sure that pain gets genetically passed on, it's probably even built into the DNA, every DNA has a built-in pain. So every human being partakes of collective human emotional pain.

Now, most human beings don’t know that. They believe their own pain is a very personal matter. They don’t realize very often that the pain they carry inside, a lot of that is simply human pain. So what I call pain body is an accumulation, an energy field, a residue left by past pain, an emotional field of heaviness or turbulence or tightness that lives in the body as that heaviness, that tightness. The way I look on the pain body--and I believe it's a very useful perspective--is to say it's almost as if it were an entity, an independent-like parasitic entity that lives in you. Don’t take it as the ultimate choice of language, it's just a useful perspective.

So that pain body lives in each human being, in some it manifests more strongly than in others. It is not always active, it has a dormant stage and it has an active stage. So at times, the pain body, you can hardly feel it, or it may just be in the background. Then something happens, a trigger happens, a thought comes into your head or somebody says something or a little thing goes wrong and that suddenly produces an enormous influx of emotional pain. When that happens, that means the accumulated pain needs to come up and feed on more pain. I call that “the pain body awakens.” Suddenly, you are flooded with emotional pain.

So this pain body, this parasitic entity, ultimately, it's not an enemy at all but it's just a way of looking at it, it needs periodically to feed. When the time comes for it to feed, it will use any excuse in your surroundings or in your mind to wake up. Suddenly, intense anger or intense depression or great fear arises and that moves into your mind and suddenly controls your thinking. All your thinking then becomes aligned with the painful energy field, what you feel, the thinking becomes dominated by the pain body.”

We go on from there to describe how to break that vicious cycle, as I put it: “particularly at a time when the collective consciousness worldwide through global communications, the Internet, cable TV, and the particular horror unleashed after 9/11 with the tremendous ongoing struggle between competing worldviews at the meta level”, continues to feed our pain body through seemingly all-pervasive infotainment. I then invite us “to explore in our next Dialogue [Program 46 following] this great paradox that when suffering ceases, it doesn’t mean that you’ve added the state of happiness to the content of your consciousness. In fact, you may still experience unhappiness, but you’re not suffering [because you’ve released attachment to a particular future]. That’s one of the great paradoxes that is addressed in The Power of Now.”

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