10.2. ECKHART TOLLE: HELPING PEOPLE ACHIEVE INNER PEACE AND GREATER FULFILLMENT, A PREREQUISITE TO OPTIMIZED TRADING AND LIVING

Eckhart Tolle has become one of the great spiritual teachers of our time. The Power of Now has had a hugely positive impact on the planet and has been translated into fifteen different languages. The essence of his teaching is simple: Remain in the present, for that is all we have. But so many people find this challenging as they obsess about the past on some wrong that was done to them or some mistake they made.

Here are some examples of the mental games traders can play:

• "I can't believe I sold that stock under what I paid, so even though it's set up to buy again, I won't touch it. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

  So this trader lets his emotions get in the way of his rational thinking. He got burned once by this stock, so now he has a negative bias against it, even though it may still be a perfectly good stock with a great buy point.

• "I am so upset I held onto this position too long, so I'll just wait until it gets back to where I paid so I can at least break even on the trade."

  Meanwhile, their focus is often taken away from new stocks that are buyable so they miss out on new profitable opportunities.

Just as with obsessing about the past, many people worry about the future. For example:

• "I hope the stock I bought goes higher even though it's well under what I paid for it."

  Instead of hoping, they should fear instead the possibility that the stock will go lower and so it should be sold.

• "I'm afraid the stock will drop since it has risen so much, so I had better sell it up here to lock in profits, and you can't go broke taking profits."

  Selling a stock because one is fearful that it has risen "too much" is not a reason to sell a stock if the stock has done nothing wrong and continues to act properly. Instead, traders should be hoping it continues to act well and move to a higher price, and thereby hold onto the stock.

• "How will I pay my bills if that stock doesn't get back to my breakeven point?"

  As O'Neil has said, never trade from a position of fear. Scared money never wins.

So while obsessing about the past or worrying about the future can take one's focus away from the present, that is not to say that there is no place for what Tolle calls "clock time" where one strategizes and plans for the future. What Tolle tells us to guard against is "psychological time" where the person gets stuck in the past or continuously worries about the future. Such distraction can derail a person from staying focused in the present. If people spend too much time thinking about their circumstances, rather than simply doing something in the present to make incremental progress, they are more likely to fail. To use an American football analogy, the player found "small holes," but he ran through every one of them, finally getting to the goal line. O'Neil would tell us to always work hard and to understand that progress is often incremental, and to just keep "running for daylight, wherever you see it."

Life is rarely still, but we can maintain a state of peace and harmony by staying in the present and dealing with whatever challenges life throws at us. An analogy we have always loved is that every person is like an ocean. Life is the stuff on the surface that happens. Sometimes, the surface can be quite turbulent and volatile, but it is still only on or near the surface. The real you is all the depth under the surface, which cannot be disturbed and is connected to all other oceans. So whatever challenges or setbacks may occur, know that this depth is the real you, and acknowledging and focusing on this depth will keep you grounded, so that when life's challenges arise, you will be best equipped to handle the situation. Like the great redwoods that live for thousands of years, they let life unfold naturally, absent of worry.

Worry and unhealthy obsession are rooted in the ego, and the ego often fuels the mind with obsessive thoughts that can dominate one's focus and take them out of the present. Leaving your ego behind can be the best prescription for staying in the present. Tolle says that the next time something bad happens, instead of going into mental overdrive, observe yourself thinking, as if you were an outside observer observing you. When you do this, you may see that all this thinking noise that goes on inside your head is not really you, and any tough times that arise are also not you, but just stuff that passes through. Keep a comfortable space, an "inner stillness," between you and whatever is happening. Whenever the market does something completely unexpected and which could cause big losses in one's trading account, one market wizard we knew was famous for addressing the situation by calmly saying to himself, "Isn't this interesting," and then proceed to quietly observe the situation unfolding, taking any needed action in the present. This inner stillness will keep you in the present so that you can take the best possible course of action since you will be able to maintain your focus. This inner stillness is your true self-esteem. Do not let your ego disconnect you from this. Also, once you can let go of your ego, you will no longer be attached to labels nor hurt by criticism.

Inner stillness is the true you which is analogous to the depth of the ocean. Your words and actions that flow from this spaciousness, this inner stillness, will be helped by universal forces, since you attract and manifest according to what is going on inside of you. Like radio waves that are emitted through the atmosphere, you send out various levels of energy based on how you feel, and how you feel is referred to as your "vibrational state." A high vibrational state corresponds to feelings of joy, euphoria, and passion while a low vibrational state corresponds to boredom, depression, anger, and self-pity. This is discussed in more detail in the following section on Esther Hicks who writes that the higher the frequency of your vibrational state, the more positive the circumstances you will attract into your life. It is therefore important to accept and embrace whatever happens to you, because you are then in the strongest state and therefore best equipped to deal with the situation. In a sense, after tragedy occurs, true acceptance of what has happened is when the healing begins. This is akin to Seykota's TTP where traders emotionally embrace what Fred is telling their CM, which simply means that their CM fully acknowledges Fred's message, and this leads them to their Aha! moment. TTP essentially short-circuits and bypasses the stages of denial, anger, bargaining, and depression that occur when tragedy strikes. That said, as Tolle writes in Practicing the Power of Now (Novato: New World Library, 2001, 135), "Don't let the mind use the pain to create a victim identity for yourself out of it. Feeling sorry for yourself and telling others your story will keep you stuck in suffering. Since it is impossible to get away from the feeling, the only possibility of change is to move into it; otherwise, nothing will shift." Tolle advocates moving into the painful emotion, embracing it, surrendering to it just as Ed Seykota's TTP would advise; otherwise you will be likely to repeat it by way of the subconscious mind, re-creating the same situations over and over again. True acceptance of what has occurred is akin to the CM fully acknowledging Fred's message.

True acceptance of any negative news or tragedy should not be confused with negative mind-sets or negative attitudes, both of which are poison. O'Neil used to tell his employees that anyone with a persistently negative attitude would be fired. A negative state of mind can be caused by letting one's ego rule one's thinking, and such thinking often leads to negative, worrying, and often obsessive thoughts. When asked how one drops negativity, Tolle simply answers in The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (Novato: New World Library, Vancouver: Namaste Publishing, 2004, 79), "By dropping it. How do you drop a piece of hot coal that you are holding in your hand? How do you drop some heavy and useless baggage that you are carrying? By recognizing that you don't want to suffer the pain or carry the burden anymore and letting go of it."

Practicing the Power of Now includes several exercises we have found useful:

• Watch your thoughts and emotions as well as your reactions to various situations. Notice if your attention is in the past or future. Like darkness that cannot escape the light, such attention dissolves when you shine the light of consciousness on it. Whenever you feel negativity rising within you, tell yourself to get out of your mind and be present. Keep a trading diary where you note your thoughts and feelings as your react to the daily twists and turns of the stock market.

• Stay focused on whatever you are doing. Do not get sidetracked by wondering when the gains will come or by the gains that have come. This is akin to counting the money in your trading account or making the market pay for luxuries you don't yet have. Focus on making decisions in real time and reacting to what the market is actually doing, rather than what you think it should be doing, or what you fear or hope it might do.

• Monitor your mental and emotional state through self-observation. Your interest should be more on what goes on inside you than on what happens outside. If your inside is in alignment, the outside falls into place. Do you ever feel guilt, pride, resentment, anger, regret, or self-pity? If so, you are reinforcing a false sense of self and accelerating the aging process by building up a storehouse of the past in your psyche. These negative feelings can take away your focus from the matter at hand, namely trading, which requires being fully in the now.

• Give up waiting as a state of mind. Just be, and enjoy being. If you are in the now, you never have to wait for anything. Don't say to yourself, "Someday, I will have made enough money in the market to own that big house." Life is in the now.

• Become aware of your breathing as you trade. This can help restore focus. This is a particularly powerful technique for anyone, and especially for those who meditate. "Blanking" the mind will paradoxically lead to answers because it enables a person to access inner stillness. One can also focus attention on the body, a technique that can take one's attention away from one's thinking. Ask yourself, "Is my body alive? Can I feel life and energy in my hands, arms, legs, and feet?" As you breathe, observe how your lower abdomen gently expands and contracts. When you can feel your inner body's energy, let go of any visual image and focus exclusively on the feeling. Become one with it, so that there is no boundary between you and your body, no boundary between your inner and outer self, and no boundary between you and all that is—as you become one with all that is. The more consciousness you direct into your inner body, the higher its vibrational frequency, much like a light that grows brighter as you turn up the dimmer. In this state, you tend to attract positivity that reflects this higher frequency. You are anchored in the now, where the external world and your egoic mind cannot overtake you.

• Whenever you need to find an answer to a problem or are looking for a creative solution, stop thinking. Focus your attention on your inner self for at least a few minutes. While doing this, the answers may come. If not, at least your thinking will be fresh and creative when you resume your task. We have come up with some of our more creative trading ideas and research ideas in this manner, and sometimes will even "dream" on it.

• Offer no resistance to life. This means being in a state of ease and lightness. Should the market go against your positions, you are relaxed and can take the best course of action. You maintain clarity. You lose the need for things to be in a certain way. Your dependence on outer form is gone. Paradoxically, when you reach this state, the general conditions of your life, that is, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly. All good things, of course, will still eventually come to an end, but with your dependence on form gone, you have no fear, and life easily flows.

• Should someone say or do something that is rude or hurtful, instead of unconsciously reacting by attacking or defending or withdrawing, let it pass right through you. Do not resist. You can still tell people their behavior is unacceptable, but you are in control of your inner state. You are then in your power, not someone else's, nor are you controlled by your ego. Watch out for any kind of defensiveness within yourself. Is your ego trying to protect itself? By identifying your defensiveness, you remove your identification with it. In the light of your conscious awareness of it, this defensiveness will dissolve. Arguments and power mind games, which are destructive to relationships, also dissolve. While this relates to dealing with others, it can spill over into one's trading if one's focus is temporarily derailed due to some prior disagreement that is festering in one's mind.

• Paradoxically, do not look for peace. Forgive yourself if you are not at peace, namely, if you find yourself obsessing about the past or worrying about the future. As you accept and surrender to not being at peace, you are accepting what is, which is essential to being in the now, and every moment can become the best moment, which, in its purest essence, is enlightenment. Surrendering brings about important change. By surrendering, Tolle does not mean giving up or failing to rise to the challenges of life. Instead, you see clearly what needs to be done, doing one thing at a time, focusing on one thing at a time. As Tolle writes in Practicing the Power of Now (Novato: New World Library, 2001, 115), "Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life. The only place where you can experience the flow of life is the Now, so to surrender is to accept the present moment unconditionally and without reservation. It is to relinquish inner resistance to what is." Thus, should your positions in the market take a nosedive, you don't need to deceive yourself by hoping they will bounce back, or worse, by denial or by blocking out the situation, as some traders have been known to bury their trades in such dire situations. You accept the situation fully; then you take action by doing everything you can to repair the situation. That might mean taking a loss on multiple positions. But losses, whether big or small, can always become bigger, so deal with the issue now.

We conclude Tolle with a powerful passage from his seminal bestseller A New Earth (New York: Penguin Group, 2005):

There are many accounts of people who experienced that emerging new dimension of consciousness as a result of tragic loss at some point in their lives. Some lost all of their possessions, others their children or spouse, their social position, reputation, or physical abilities. Whatever they had identified with, whatever gave them their sense of self, had been taken away. Then suddenly and inexplicably the anguish or intense fear they initially felt gave way to a sacred sense of Presence, a deep peace and serenity and complete freedom from fear. When forms that you had identified with, that gave you your sense of self, collapse or are taken away, it can lead to a collapse of the ego, since ego is identification with form. When there is nothing to identify with anymore, who are you? When forms around you die or death approaches, your sense of Beingness, of I Am, is freed from its entanglement with form: Spirit is released from its imprisonment in matter.

You realize your essential identity as formless, as an all-pervasive Presence, of Being prior to all forms, all identifications. You realize your true identity as consciousness itself, rather than what consciousness had identified with. The ultimate truth of who you are is not I am this or I am that, but I Am.

When you yield internally, when you surrender, a new dimension of consciousness opens up. If action is possible or necessary, your action will be in alignment with the whole and supported by creative intelligence, the unconditioned consciousness which in a state of inner openness you become one with. Circumstances and people then become helpful, cooperative. Coincidences happen. If no action is possible, you rest in the peace and inner stillness that come with surrender (56–58).