Much psychological suffering is claimed to arise from treating passing thoughts as identical with the self.
The observation that one can notice a thought rather than inhabit it is the operative move in several evidenced therapies, where it is called defusion or decentring and has measurable effects on distress. Tolle presents it within a metaphysics that the clinical versions do not require and for which no evidence has been offered.
In practice
- A person who can say they are having the thought that they will fail relates to it differently than one who says they will fail.
- A technique that works in a clinical protocol is not thereby evidence for the cosmology it arrived in.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation is that a thought treated as a report about the self commands belief and action, while the same thought observed as a passing event does not, so the relationship to the thought is what changes.
- In its favour
- The move has research support under other names, since cognitive defusion in acceptance and commitment therapy and decentring in mindfulness-based approaches both measure it and both help.
- Against it
- It is presented inside a metaphysics the clinical versions do not require and for which no evidence has been offered, and the popular form promises more than the measured techniques deliver.
- Standing
- The nearest researched relatives are cognitive defusion in acceptance and commitment therapy and decentring in mindfulness-based approaches, both of which have trial evidence. Tolle's version is a spiritual teaching offered without one.
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- Moralists, aphorists and the self-help tradition