Very Relevant to the Current Situation

A New Earth is Eckhart Tolle's sequel to The Power of Now.  I am over halfway finished condensing A New Earth.  (So far it's barely condensed at all because the material flows together so well.)

This is a very relevant excerpt from A New Earth to the current situation.  Again, "pain-body" can be interchanged with "lurker-mind."  Actually, "lurker-body" could be used as well because the lurker entangled itself within the physical body. 

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"The pain-body is a semi autonomous energy form that lives within most human beings, an entity made up of emotion.  It has its own primitive intelligence, not unlike a cunning animal, and its intelligence is directed primarily at survival.  Like all life forms, it periodically needs to feed – to take in new energy – and the food it requires to replenish itself consists of energy that is compatible with its own, which is to say, energy that vibrates at a similar frequency.  Any emotionally painful experience can be used as food by the pain-body.  That's why it thrives on negative thinking as well as drama in relationships.  The pain-body is an addiction to unhappiness.

It may be shocking when you realize for the first time that there is something within you that periodically seeks emotional negativity, seeks unhappiness.  You need even more awareness to see it in yourself than to recognize it in another person.  Once the unhappiness has taken you over, not only do you not want an end to it, but you want to make others just as miserable as you are in order to feed on their negative emotional reactions.

In most people, the pain-body has a dormant and an active stage.  When it is dormant, you easily forget that you carry a heavy dark cloud or a dormant volcano inside you, depending on the energy field of your particular pain-body.  How long it remains dormant varies from person to person:  A few weeks is the most common, but it can be a few days or months.  In rare cases, the pain-body can lie in hibernation for years before it gets triggered by some event.

The pain-body awakens from its dormancy when it gets hungry, when it is time to replenish itself.  Alternatively, it may get triggered by an event at any time.  The pain-body that is ready to feed can use the most insignificant event as a trigger, something somebody says or does, or even a thought.  If you live alone or there is nobody around at the time, the pain-body will feed on your thoughts.  Suddenly, your thinking becomes deeply negative.  You were most likely unaware that just prior to the influx of negative thinking, a wave of emotion invaded your mind – as a dark and heavy mood, as anxiety, or fiery anger.  All thought is energy, and the pain-body is now feeding on the energy of your thoughts.

It cannot feed on any thought.  You don't need to be particularly sensitive to notice that a positive thought has a totally different feeling tone than a negative one.  A happy, positive thought is indigestible to the pain body.  It can only feed on negative thoughts because only those thoughts are compatible with its own energy field.

The usual pattern of thought creating emotion is reversed in the case of the pain-body, at least initially.  Emotion from the pain-body quickly gains control of your thinking, and once your mind has been taken over by the pain-body, your thinking becomes negative.  The voice in your head will be telling sad, anxious, or angry stories about yourself or your life, about other people, about past, future, or imaginary events.  The voice will be blaming, accusing, complaining, imagining.  And you are totally identified with whatever the voice says – you believe all its distorted thoughts.  At that point, the addiction to unhappiness has set in.

It is not so much that you cannot stop your train of negative thoughts, but that you don't want to.  This is because the pain-body at that time is living through you, pretending to be you.  And to the pain-body, pain is pleasure.  It eagerly devours every negative thought.  In fact, the usual voice in your head has now become the voice of the pain-body.  It has taken over the internal dialogue.  A vicious circle becomes established between the pain-body and your thinking.  Every thought feeds the pain-body, and in turn the pain-body generates more thoughts.  At some point, after a few hours or even a few days, it has replenished itself and returns to its dormant stage, leaving behind a depleted organism and a body that is much more susceptible to illness.  If that sounds to you like a psychic parasite, you are right.  That's exactly what it is."