A Conversation with Barnet Bain and Eckhart Tolle
Since then, I have made What Dreams May Come as a Producer and the Celestine Prophecy movie as a Writer and Producer, and Homeless to Harvard, which was nominated for three Emmies including Best Movie. And I’ve made others….
OMTimes: Barnet, what is Mindfulness to you and why is mindfulness so important today?
Barnet Bain: Mindfulness is developing an awareness of the thoughts that move through and feelings that we move through without getting drawn into the meanings or being drawn into taking action or getting sucked into the story… and then like house guests, eventually they all leave.
One thing that mindfulness practice does is it allows us to pay attention to all the thoughts and all the feelings that wander through our awareness and we become more attuned to being a container for those things and less identified with them.
So now we begin to have a relationship with all our structured imaginings and in doing so, life begins to take on, from my perspective, a more enchanted, more dreamy experience. What is possible for us begins to expand because we are not so rigidly contained by the way that our thoughts and imaginations have been structured.
Mindfulness has never been more important considering how quickly the events of the world move in such an accelerated, such a frantic time. We are battered around like a cat with a toy. Our attention goes from here, to the next thing, to the next thing and we’re triggered from one response of fear, to another one of connection, to the threat of loss. It’s just constantly, constantly in play in ways that 15, 20, 30 years ago didn’t exist because things moved at such a different cadence. And so it is more critical than ever if you believe, as we do that our experience of reality is the result of the magical alchemy of the creation of our thoughts, our beliefs, our decisions, our attitudes, our feelings. All of these are, for the most part, unconscious. Mindfulness allows us to watch these thoughts and choices and decisions without being triggered and having to take action and give meaning. And so suddenly we are able to see beyond the waterline to see the iceberg. We are seeing with x-ray glasses, the ability to see what is below the surface of the way we do life.
