Unraveling and Peeling Away: The Core of the Ego – Chapter 3 in “A New Earth”

by Bryan Rice on August 2, 2011.

Chapter 3 of Eckhart Tolle’s best seller book “A New Earth” focused a great deal on the egoic mind, unconsciousness, reactivity, and holding grievances as they relate to delusional thinking.

He made a point of saying that most people are “possessed” by their minds – by an “incessant stream of involuntary and compulsive thinking.” Many of us if we were completely honest would affirm this to be true. Buddhists and eastern spiritual seekers call this the “monkey mind”. Chatter. Chatter. Chatter. If a person is not aware of this they will mistake the “thinker” to be who they are. This being the egoic mind, egoic because there is a “sense of “I” (ego) in all our thoughts, memories, reactions, and emotions. This Tolle said, is “unconsciousness” in a spiritual sense.

It is important to point out that thinking is conditioned by the past and many other factors. Again, honest introspection would show us that we identify with persistent thoughts, emotions, and reactive patterns. When we say “I” we mean the ego, not our real self. Furthermore, this I, says Tolle, “consists of thoughts and emotions – a bundle of memories that people identify with as ‘me and my story’ “. The false “I” also personally identifies with possessions, opinions, external appearances, long standing resentments, or even concepts of oneself as “better than or not as good as others – as a success or failure”. Egos survive on separation.

Thoughts and emotions are nothing more than fleeting information and energy, as Deepak Chopra might say. Most unenlightened people live through their mind-made self. So, if every ego strives to survive, to “protect and enlarge itself”, others will be seen as enemies.

Now we can begin to see the structure of personal and collective egos. One egoic pattern, rather on one side of the scale, the ego consists of the compulsive habit of “fault finding” and complaining about others, and at the other end of the spectrum are the seeds to physical violence between individuals and warfare between nations. The basic component at work is that, when a person criticizes (condemns) another, it makes them feel bigger and superior.

Complaining and resentment as a topic was a big part of this chapter. Engaging in this kind of behavior is a strategy of the ego to strengthen itself, it is part of the “mind-made story”. Some egos can’t find anything better to do than to survive on complaining. This happens many times, out of unconscious and habitual neural grooves that are formed in the brain. We love to apply labels to people, to name call, egos need to be right, to triumph. Lower consciousness causes a person to shout, scream, and resort to physical violence.

Resentment as an emotion is linked to complaining. It gives energy to the ego. Resentment really means to feel “bitter, indignant, aggrieved, of offended”. What becomes problematic, is that rather than overlooking another’s unconsciousness, our egos make it their identity. We misinterpret through projection and we strengthen in ourselves what we react to in another.

How does a person go beyond reactivity? Well, Tolle says that non-reaction to the ego in others is one of the most effective ways to go beyond the ego in oneself and also “dissolving the collective ego”. Moreso, one can “only be in a state of non-reaction if they recognize the ego or product of collective dysfunction in another”. More importantly, refraining from reacting to someone else’s ego, creates the potential to bring out the “sanity” in others – the unconditioned consciousness.

The greatest protection to falling into unconsciousness and acting out negative emotions is to be “conscious”. Continuing with the idea of non-reaction, it is not weakness in any way” to not – react. Tolle says it is strength. Non-reaction is equated with forgiveness – “of looking through another’s ego to see their essence”.

When we peel away to the core of the ego we see that it resents situations, not just people. The ego gets more energy by making enemies. Voices underlying egoic mind-made thinking, for example are “This should not be happening”, or “I don’t want to be here,” and “I don’t want to be doing this,” also “I’m being treated unfairly”.

A very important point to make note of from this chapter it that the ego’s greatest enemy is the present moment. We must remain neutral if we are to feel any sense of peace. The little “me” enjoys making someone wrong. The ego does NOT want to change. It would be content to go on complaining. To reiterate, the ego is a conditioned mind pattern. But, you are NOT the ego voice, rather you are the one who is AWARE of it. “You are the awareness that is aware of the voice”. Once you become aware of the ego inside you, it becomes just an old, conditioned mind pattern. Since the ego equates to unawareness, awareness and the ego cannot co-exist. Therefore, once noticed, the ego is weakened.

A big section in chapter 3 was subtitled “Reactivity and Grievances.” It talked about how people become addicted to being angry and upset, in the same way someone becomes addicted to a drug. Many people says Tolle, are “just waiting to find something else to react against, to feel annoyed or disturbed about”. No doubt, this is toxic. Such feelings are strengthened through continuous reactivity.

The way the planet is effected by not only individual egos, but the collective ego, is that collective grievances are potentially dangerous and can lead to cycles of violence between nations.

Tolle defines a grievance as “a strong negative emotion connected to an event in the sometimes distant past that is being kept alive by compulsive thinking – by re-telling the story in the head or out loud of ‘what someone did to me’ (or us)”. Furthermore, to show the effects of grievances he went on to point out that they contaminate other areas of people’s lives. For one, it creates negative emotional energy. Secondly, it distorts perception of people or events in the present. Also, it negatively influences behavior and speech, and it keeps you in the grip of the ego.

By forgiving enemies and keeping our grievances in check, we can target one of the many egoic structures of the mind. In essence, grievances are baggage of old thought and emotion and by focusing on something from the past, we cannot exist in the “Present”.

Other sections of the chapter dealt with the temptations of wanting or needing to be right and make another wrong, thereby strengthening your false sense of I (enhancing the false self by making it morally superior to others). Another section talked about how we defend ego illusions by taking everything personally and over-identifying with the mind and a mental position. Basically what was said in that section was that every ego is a master of selective perception and distorted interpretation and that again, only through awareness and NOT thinking can a person differentiate between fact and opinion.

Under the section “Truth: Relative or Absolute”, the distinction between defending insane points of view of misperceived notions of having possession of “absolute truth” has led in history, to such things as torturing and burning people who held different opinions. The Catholic Church was one such institution that used the notion of “absolute truth” to justify violence. Tolle made a strong point: “Absolute Truth is NOT found in doctrines, ideologies, sets of rules, and stories (made up of thought)”. Thought can point to truth he said, but never be the truth. The major trap of religion is for one to claim that “my” religion is the only true one. This only creates illusory thinking and division and conflict with people.

All these things mentioned point to why we need to help create “A New Earth” or a “New World Order”. We in essence are each, potential saviors. If we would only transcend the ego, by undoing it, we could live in the power of our True Presence. In the Now. Not in the past, not in hurts, not in grievance, not in negativity, not through defending what we perceive to be absolute truth when it is really relativism, not by separating ourselves from others in an “us” versus “them” mentality, and not through underlying dysfunction or mental illness. The reason the planet is caught in an insane spiral of perpetration and retribution, action and reaction is because collectively and individually, we don’t go to the root, or the core of the problem. It is the complete identification with thought and emotion that is leading to the destruction of earth. This is the old way, the non-evolved way. Our greed, our selfishness, our exploitation, cruelty, and violence all act as a time bomb that could destroy us all. Once we recognize that war is a mindset and that we can’t fight unconsciousness with unconsciousness, by making ourselves right and others wrong, we can peel away at the ego and see it for what it is: the insanity of the human mind. Through awareness and the presence of our Being, or through the I Am Presence found in each of us, we can exchange reactivity for forgiveness and compassion. It is only through radical honesty that we can in fact create “A New Earth”.

Many Faces of the Ego : Chapter 4 “A New Earth”

Chapter 4 in Eckhart Tolle’s book “A New Earth” centered on the roles that egos assume and the “many faces” of individual and collective egos.

To get its needs met, an ego will play a “role”. Things it may try to get from someone are material gain,  a sense of power, superiority, specialness, and gratification – either physical or psychological.

People are usually unaware of the roles they assume. Other things the ego through a role will seek are attention and psychic energy. They will seek the energy outside themselves because they are unconscious that it exists within them. So attention, recognition, praise, admiration, wanting to be noticed, and needing to have its existence acknowledged are aims of the ego roles that are assumed.

Egos derive from a conceptual sense of self, whether positive or negative – positive might be (I’m the greatest) and negative might be (I am no good). Tolle says that behind every positive self-concept is the hidden fear of not being good enough and behind every negative self-concept is the hidden desire of being greater or better than others. For instance, the shy, inadequate ego that feels inferior has a strong sense of superiority.

VILLAINS

Some egos will settle for other forms of attention through a “villain”-like role if it can’t get praise or admiration. Not getting positive attention, they seek the negative , maybe by provoking someone else to get a negative reaction out of them. For example, we see children misbehaving to get attention.  An important point made in the text was that the playing of negative roles is pronounced when the ego is magnified by the pain body, rather emotional pain from the past that wants to renew itself through more pain. You see this when people commit crimes for fame or seek attention through notoriety and condemnation. The voice behind the seeking is “please tell me I exist, that I am not insignificant”.

VICTIM

Playing the victim is a common role of the ego that consists of the personal drama of “me and my story”. Egos don’t want the false stories to end. They think that problems equal their identity. The voice that very well might drive this type of person is “I am treated unfairly by life and God.”

LOVER

Role playing the lover is done to attract and keep a relationship going or to initiate one with a person who will make a given ego happy, make them feel special, and they believe that a certain person will fulfill all their needs. Falling in love is really, in most cases an intensification of egoic wanting or needing.  Egos become addicted to people, rather the image they have of them. Falling in love, most of the time has nothing to do with true love. It is a matter of “I want you” vs. “I love you”.

LETTING GO OF SELF-DEFINITIONS

This section focused on the idea of having roles being conditioned by environmental and social structures. In this modern world, people are confused about where they fit in and who they are. Tolle’s main point under this subheading was that “when you fully accept that you don’t know (if you look to thought for an identity) then you enter a state of peace and clarity that is closer to who you are.”

PRE-ESTABLISHED ROLES

When you play roles, you are unconscious. But, when you catch yourself in a role, you “create a space.” This is the beginning of freedom from a given role. Some people totally identify with their roles, for example a doctor who doesn’t see their patient as human, but just a case history.

When people do identify with pre-established roles or function, “human interactions are inauthentic, dehumanized, and alienating.” Furthermore, “pre-established roles can give the comforting sense of identity, but ultimately, you lose yourself in them”. Functions in heirarchical organizations lend themselves to becoming role identities. For instance, in a government institution, the military, church structure, and in corporations.

Some pre-established roles are “social archetypes” such as the middle-class housewife (diminishing), the tough macho male, the female seductress, the “non-conformist” artist or performer, people of culture, and the adult. As a note, the Hippie Movement was a rejection of social archetypes, roles, and pre-established patterns of behavior in addition to egoically based social and economic structures. “Hippies” refused to play roles imposed on them. The 1950s were about conforming while the 1960s was about rejecting conformity. The Hippie movement made possible the movement of Eastern wisdom and spirituality to come to the West and play a part in Global Awakening.

To summarize more efficiently, Tolle spent time debunking false happiness and roles people assume, examined the roles and functions that enter parenthood, such as manipulating children through unconscious behavior versus being alert, aware, still, and present in the moment, he talked about conscious suffering and how suffering both comes as a result of the ego, but also burns the energy of the ego up, using the “man on the cross as an archetypal image to show how suffering does in fact erode the ego, he talked about how hard it is to give up the roles, fearing a loss of identity versus coming to know yourself as being, and then he examined the pathological, paranoid, schizophrenic, and split-personality nature of the ego and its roles.

The Ego: Fascination with Form and Optical Illusions of Consciousness – Chapter 2 “A New Earth”

by Bryan Rice August 2011

Eckhart Tolle was not the only one who had something to say about the nature of the ego, mistaken for the true “I”, or reality or misperception. Albert Einstein used the phrase Optical Illusion of Consciousness to discuss the very same topic examined by Tolle in Chapter 2 of “A New Earth”. The illusion Einstein spoke of in essence had to do with being mislead into misperceiving reality. “Nothing real can be threatened”, says A Course in Miracles. The ego, blurs reality for us and in the work of A Course in Miracles, the ego must be undone to remove the blocks to the reality of love.
So, in talking about the ego, the words delusion, illusion, inflation, and erroneous come up. But before going any further with the characteristics, I want to comment on what Tolle said beginning in Chapter 2.

“Words are a hypnotic spell,” he says. Just because we know a word, doesn’t mean we know what the word signifies. When dealing with words and mechanics of perception, Tolle used the image of seeing only the tip of the iceberg to understand how the ego radar works. He is very clear in “A New Earth” and even in “The Power of Now”, that humanity is possessed by thought. That obviously is not the optimum situation for us to be in. We have to sense “beingness” found in all things and in life circles. It is hard to see the real essence of things, when we are hypnotized by the sign posts, or the meaning to which words point.

I agree with Tolle, when he said that a great miracle needs to take place – we need to experience the true self before labels were either self-constructed by our mind or by the minds of others. These labels of the mind lead to disentanglement and we thereby sacrifice creativity, wisdom, joy, and love. Getting back to words, we are not only possessed by them, but we are imprisoned by them. The funny thing about words is that they are just basic sounds assigned a meaning by the mind. These basic sounds, Tolle says cannot explain our being.

The false sense of “I” is the greatest truth or error, as stated in the book. The very existence of the ego-illusory self is a primordial error in falsely identifying the “I”.

On a positive note, if you are able to recognize an illusion as illusion, it dissolves. That should be our goal in dealing with the false identities we construct for ourselves.

Returning to the idea of reality versus unreality, it is true that the ego’s survival depends on our mistaking IT for reality. For instance, when we say “I”, we are not referring to our true self in God or Being. To understand the workings of the ego, think of a baby. He or she equates “I” with their name, then the next step in ego development they look at things in terms of “me” or “mine”. The primitive ego, unaffected by advanced consciousness and awareness represents things as their self.

The mental construct of “I”, rather the egoic self ties into gender identity, identifying with possessions, it relates to a sense perceived body, it identifies with a certain race, and also a religion.

Transcending the mind is a big focus point for Eckhart Tolle. In more than one of his books, he refers to thought as compulsive, mostly repetitive, and pointless. Most people, he says, are spiritually unconscious, meaning that they have no sense of “I” apart from their thoughts.

The voice in a given individual’s head causes one to be absorbed in thoughts, unaware of their surroundings, thinking through the intellect that as an individual who thinks, we are alive and have meaning.

Tolle clearly states that we must shift from thinking to detached, observing awareness. But so many of us are content to let the mind possess us with unhappiness. Since thinking is only a small fraction of the consciousness that we are, we need to free ourselves from compulsive thought.

To summarize briefly, the crux of Tolle’s argument about how we must undo and understanding the structure and content of the ego, centers around moving beyond the structure of “my” in relation to things. He touches on the nature of the consumer society, advertising, and how it feeds the “hungry mind” and “greed” in people. He goes on to say that there is “an unchecked striving for more and more and more, for endless possessing – this being a dysfunction and disease. Tolle compared this dysfunction with the spreading and manifestation of cancer cells in a sick person.

Lack leads to wanting. People who’s ego feel diminished will become self-grasping. According to Tolle, when you know longer feel life within you, it is easy to look for something to “fill” you, from outside of you. Detectors for the ego are signs of anger and defensiveness that one might feel when they experience the loss of something they identified with.

Being is a favorite word of Tolle, and is a synonym for God or the I AM presence. He says being must be felt, not thought. The ego, by nature, cannot know being because it is thought.
The key is, with things, is to remain detached. But, the illusion of ownership creeps in with regularity in each of us, if we were honest about that fact. Reality says that no thing ever has anything to do with who we are. Unfortunately, it is not until being on the brink of death that we examine, and realize that our truest essence really in fact wanted to be identified with being. Blessed are the poor in spirit can mean not having any identification with things. No attachments. And no mental positions.

The start of transforming your consciousness happens when you are able to say to yourself that you are the awareness that is aware that there is an attachment (to be overcome).
Tolle spent a great deal of time in chapter 2 talking about “wanting” and the “need for more”. The ego, not the true self identifies itself with having. Voices and demons that are concealed within us remain deep-seated notions of dissatisfaction, of an incompleteness, of a feeling of “not enough”. The voices that drive the ego are : “I don’t have enough yet” and “I am not enough yet.”

In essence, having is a fiction that the ego creates to give it solidity and permanence, to make itself “stand out”, and be “special”.

Wanting gives the ego life juice. Pursuing in a manner spoken of by Tolle, in a grim and ruthless determination can lead to a person’s downfall and can create hell on earth for them and other people in their life. The real thing that the ego and people identified with the ego do not want is to encounter the present moment – the
power of “now”.

The sense of lack can thereby lead to destruction and continued unconscious choosing and behaving. “No content will ever satisfy you, as long as the egoic structure remains in place.”
The last section of Chapter 2 dealt with body and gender identification. I found it quite strikingly true, the observation Tolle made about people who are afflicted in some way. The voices “I’m sick, I’m a patient, I’m a sufferer” are one way people negatively identify with the egoic structure as well.

So, the incessant compulsive thought of the ego can turn reality into a nightmare. We must move bravely past identification with form, things, and especially our thinking and wanting. Basically, hunger of the mind can lead to insatiable hunger in the body. That can be tragic, for in the body is where Being and Presence are felt.

 

Messianic Consciousness: The Way to Christhood

Eckhart Tolle was not the only one who had something to say about the nature of the ego, mistaken for the true “I”, or reality or misperception. Albert Einsten used the phrase Optical Illusion of Consciousness to discuss the very same topic examined by Tolle in Chapter 2 of “A New Earth”. The illusion Einstein spoke of in essence had to do with being mislead into misperceiving reality. “Nothing real can be threatened”, says A Course in Miracles. The ego, blurs reality for us and in the work of A Course in Miracles, the ego must be undone to remove the blocks to the reality of love.
So, in talking about the ego, the words delusion, illusion, inflation, and erroneous come up. But before going any further with the characteristics, I want to comment on what Tolle said beginning in Chapter 2.

“Words are a hypnotic spell,” he says. Just…

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