Dealing With the Past on the Level of the Present the Key to Beating Depression

Here is a key passage from Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment:

[D]eal with the past on the level of the present. The more attention you give to the past the more you energize it, and the more likely you are to make a "self" out of it. Don't misunderstand: Attention is essential, but not to the past as past. Give attention to the present; give attention to your behavior, to your reactions, moods, thoughts, emotions, fears, and desires as they occur in the present. There's the past in you. If you can be present enough to watch all those things, not critically or analytically but nonjudgmentally, then you are dealing with the past and dissolving it through the power of your presence. You cannot find yourself by going into the past. You find yourself by coming into the present.

Depression results when we give up contact with reality, which can only be realized in the present moment, for the mental construct called the past. The past is a present moment that doesn't exist anymore, but people often continue to live in it for long stretches at a time as if it did continue to exist.

Balthasar Gracian and the Pain-body

Understanding of what Eckhart Tolle calls the pain-body has been around a long time. Here is one of Balthasar Gracian's maxims from The Art of Worldly Wisdom, written in 1637:

lxix Do Not Give Way to Every Common Impulse.

He is a great man who never allows himself to be influenced by the impressions of others. Self-reflection is the school of wisdom. To know one's disposition and to allow for it, even going to the other extreme so as to find the juste milieu between nature and art. Self-knowledge is the beginning of self-improvement. There be some whose humours are so monstrous that they are always under the influence of one or other of them, and put them in place of their real inclinations. They are torn asunder by such disharmony and get involved in contradictory obligations. Such excesses not only destroy firmness of will; all power of judgment gets lost, desire and knowledge pulling in opposite directions. [Italics added]

What has been less clearly stated is exactly what to do about the pain-body, how to dissolve it. Tolle says you dissolve the pain-body through simply becoming aware of it. This is a two-step process.