Eckhart Tolle

I've been listening to Eckhart Tolle's "The Art of Presence" in the car as I drive to work, etc.  I find his ideas resonate with the teachings of one of my martial arts masters, Peter Ralston, which in turn finds some of his inspiration from the works of Taoism and Zen.  Tolle's work places great emphasis on the witnessing consciousness, or the essence of your being.  He says that we are not our individual stories, or the thoughts and emotions that torture us, or even give us joy.  He teaches that our true nature is of the observer, the witness...Presence itself as our inherent nature.  He also talks about the pain-body which I will go into more detail on a later post, but which is basically an aggregate of all the emotional pain that one has experienced, a share of the emotional pain of humanity, one's culture, one's race, one's family, and even of the part of the world where one lives in.  He speaks of the pain-body as if it were an entity unto itself, that tries to get into our minds and take us over whenever it wants to feel more pain, and only continual vigilance and observation, not suppression, of this pain-body will eventually dissipate it and release the trapped emotional energy that makes it up.