Men are disturbed not by events, but by the views which they take of them.
Epictetus

I fall upon this quote from a slave who was born years after Christ and who became a great philosopher in Greece.  I think that is serendipitous being that  I am talking about getting beyond our thoughts and circumstances  and accepting what is. What does this quote imply?  It is not what is happening to us...it is how we perceive these things and how we react that counts. 

Tolle, in The New Earth writes that there are three levels of encountering external events that tend to "bug us" or set us off.  In the first and most obvious level we encounter the external thing...that could be a person's behaviour, what they are saying to us, external noise or chaos, a life situation that we do not want: a trauma, a loss. On the second level we react...we adopt a thought related to this, usually based on past experience and belief.  We feel something like anger, shock, frustration, despair, shame etc.  Then we behave a certain way based on this emotion. We resist, say something back, run away from the situation. Many times we react negatively.  Then on the third level we watch from that place That Is the external events as well as our reaction.  The observer observes the first two levels neutrally. 

This is where we want to put our awareness...on observing.  By stepping back and just noticing the event and noticing how we are choosing to react without judgment or blame will help us to remove the negative from the situation. We go beyond thought. The more we practice this observation , we will find that we naturally  begin to react differently to those things that bother us.  We accept what is as it is.  We see that the idea of a "problem" does not come from the external event but from our emotional and mental  attachment to it or our resistance of it. 

All is well in my world.