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We’ve all had those moments when we stared dumbfounded at a partner, before we retaliated. Remember that time she lost it and turned into somebody you didn’t want to know? The time his countenance actually changed right before your eyes — as if with special effects?

Are we all capable of turning into monsters?

That’s one way to say it. According to Eckhart Tolle, in his much acclaimed “A New Earth,” we have a “pain-body” that can, at a moment’s notice, erupt like a dormant volcano.

Tolle explains what he calls the “pain-body” as the accumulation of old emotional pain that we carry with us, because of our tendency to perpetuate it. He uses an example of “the duck with a human mind” to make his point. After two ducks get into a fight, which is always short-lived, they separate and float off in opposite directions. Then each duck vigorously flaps its wings a few times, releasing the surplus energy that built up, and continues peacefully, as if nothing had happened. Ah, but if the duck had a human mind, it would keep the fight alive.

Tolle says the duck’s story would sound something like this: “I don’t believe what he just did.… More

To become the wise elder, is to reclaim the innocent child and birth awareness of oneness.… More