Closing Your Gap: Another Kind of Gap

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Another Kind of Gap – The Anxiety Gap

Posted by: John

I’m currently reading Eckhart Tolle’s “Practicing The Power of Now” which has introduced me to what he calls “The Anxiety Gap”. Tolle defines the anxiety gap as the result of our Inner Being being in the Now while our minds are focused on the future:

You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection — you cannot cope with the future.

This is one of those insights that caused me to go “Wow!” when I read it. I’ve often experienced the uncertainty of what the future holds. Until I read that line, I didn’t really know why. I’ve been through some difficult times, as have we all, and can attest to our ability to cope with what’s going on in the present moment. It never seems as difficult at the time as it does in hindsight! I’d always chalked that up to being so busy dealing with the situation that I didn’t have time to think about it and get overwhelmed. There may be some of that in the equation, but basically it’s because our minds can get hold of it once it’s manifested.

By the same token, we often dread the future and come to discover that whatever happens isn’t as bad as we anticipated it to be. In any case, we’re able to cope with it once it becomes our current reality because we can quantify it. Our minds cannot handle that which they can’t quantify.

In other words, unless we are absolutely sure what is going to happen in the future (which is rarely, if ever, the case) our minds cannot get enough of a grip on it to be secure about it. Any variable causes the mind to start exploring all possible outcomes based on the known possibilities of that variable. More variables simply increase the number of possibilities geometrically. And then there are always those possibilities that we couldn’t know ahead of time that cause our carefully considered strategies to break down in the face of a result we didn’t expect.

Despite being a bit late to the Eckhart Tolle party, so to speak, I’m finding Practicing The Power Of Now fascinating. In the short time I’ve been doing the exercises I’ve found that I can change my mood completely by simply returning to the Now and focusing on the present moment.

I’m sure this is what Abraham means by “getting in the Vortex”, or at least releasing the resistance to the present moment. I have to admit that lately I’ve been feeling a bit of frustration when hearing Abraham say “just get in the Vortex”. Perhaps that’s why I’ve attracted Tolle’s work into my “reality” at this time. I’m ready to hear his message now where I was not previously. Once again, the Universe has provided exactly the right resource at exactly the right time!

Closing Your Gap

Abraham