A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

by Eckhart Tolle

Ego is always identification with form, seeking yourself and thereby losing yourself in some form.

Ego is a conglomeration of recurring thought forms and conditioned mental-emotional patterns that are invested with a sense of I, a sense of self.

Ego arises when your sense of Beingness, of “I Am,” which is formless consciousness, gets mixed up with form.

forgetfulness o...

Jean-Paul Sartre. He looked at Descartes’s statement “I think, therefore I am” very deeply and suddenly realized, in his own words, “The consciousness that says ‘I am’ is not the consciousness that thinks.”

What did he mean by that? When you are aware that you are thinking, that awareness is not part of thinking. It is a different dimension of consciousness. And it is that awareness that says “I am.”

When you know you are dreaming, you are awake within the dream. Another dimension of consciousness has come in.

The implication of Sartre’s insight is profound, but he himself was still too identified with thinking to realize the full significance of what he had discovered: an emerging new dimension of consciousness.

It is indeed a peace that doesn’t seem to make sense, and the people who experienced it asked themselves: In the face of this, how can it be that I feel such peace?

When there is nothing to identify with anymore, who are you? When forms around you die or death approaches, your sense of Beingness, of I Am, is freed from its entanglement with form: Spirit is released from its imprisonment in matter.

You realize your true identity as consciousness itself,

rather than what consciousness had identified with.

That’s the peace of God. The ultimate truth of who you are is not I am this ...

This thought form and the emotions it creates, such as anger, resentment, self-pity, and so on, they strongly identify with, and it immediately takes the place of all the other identifications that have collapsed through the loss. In other words, the ego quickly finds a new form. The fact that this new form is a deeply unhappy one doesn’t concern the ego too much, as long as it has an identity, good or bad.

Yielding means inner acceptance of what is. You are open to life.

When you yield internally, when you surrender, a new dimension of consciousness opens up.

This is the egoic mind. We call it egoic because there is a sense of self, of I (ego), in every thought—every memory, every interpretation, opinion, viewpoint, reaction, emotion. This is unconsciousness, spiritually speaking.

In other words: Egos only differ on the surface. Deep down they are all the same. In what way are they the same? They live on identification and separation. When you live through the mind-made self comprised of thought and emotion that is the ego, the basis for your identity is precarious because thought and emotion are by their very nature ephemeral, fleeting.

To uphold the I-thought, it needs the opposite thought of “the other.” The conceptual “I” cannot survive without the conceptual “other.”

Resentment is the emotion that goes with complaining and the mental labeling of people and adds even more energy to the ego. Resentment means to feel bitter, indignant, aggrieved, or offended. You resent other people’s greed, their dishonesty, their lack of integrity, what they are doing, what they did in the past, what they said, what they failed to do, what they should or shouldn’t have done. The ego loves it. Instead of overlooking unconsciousness in others, you make it into their identity.

Nonreaction to the ego in others is one of the most effective ways not only of going beyond ego in yourself but also of dissolving the collective human ego.

But you can only be in a state of nonreaction if you can recognize someone’s behavior as coming from the ego, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it’s not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were.

This you can do without making them into enemies. Your greatest protection, however, is being conscious.

Nonreaction is not weakness but strength.

And the ego’s greatest enemy of all is, of course, the present moment, which is to say, life itself.

Sometimes it becomes obvious that the ego doesn’t really want change so that it can go on complaining.

Whenever you notice that voice, you will also realize that you are not the voice, but the one who is aware of it.

Awareness and ego cannot coexist.

disagree

Being right is identification with a mental position—a perspective, an opinion, a judgment, a story. For you to be right, of course, you need someone else to be wrong, and so the ego loves to make wrong in order to be right. In other words: You need to make others wrong in order to get a stronger sense of who you are.

Furthermore, it cannot tell the difference between an event and its reaction to that event. Every ego is a master of selective perception and distorted interpretation.

The history of Christianity is, of course, a prime example of how the belief that you are in sole possession of the truth, that is to say, right, can corrupt your actions and behavior to the point of insanity.

The Truth was considered more important than human life. And what was the Truth? A story you had to believe in; which means, a bundle of thoughts.

They are made up of thought. Thought can at best point to the truth, but it never is the truth. That’s why Buddhists say “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.” All religions are equally false and equally true, depending on how you use them.

Human action can reflect the Truth, or it can reflect illusion. Can the Truth be put into words? Yes, but the words are, of course, not it. They only point to it.

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Atman, the indwelling God.

and being in touch with it is your natural state, not some miraculous achievement—all

“Love and do what you will,” said St. Augustine.

By far the greater part of violence that humans have inflicted on each other is not the work of criminals or the mentally deranged, but of normal, respectable citizens in the service of the collective ego.

you fall into the error of personalizing them. You construct a conceptual identity for an individual or group, and you say: “This is who he is. This is who they are.” When you confuse the ego that you perceive in others with their identity, it is the work of your own ego that uses this misperception to strengthen itself through being right and therefore superior, and through reacting with condemnation, indignation, and often anger against the perceived enemy.

All this is enormously satisfying to the ego.

It strengthens the sense of separation between yourself and the other, whose “otherness” has become magnified to such an extent that you can no longer feel your common humanity, nor the rootedness in the one Life t...

Only if you mistake it for who you are can observing it within you be threatening to your sense of self.

Fighting unconsciousness will draw you into unconsciousness yourself.

Unconsciousness, dysfunctional egoic behavior, can never be defeated by attacking it. Even if you defeat your opponent, the unconsciousness will simply have moved into you, or the opponent reappears in a new disguise.

Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you ...

Once you see the ego for what it is, it becomes much easier to remain nonreactive toward it. You don’t take it personally anymore.

Nobody is wrong. It is the ego in someone, that’s all. Compassion arises when you recognize that all are suffering from the same sickness of the mind, some more acutely than others. You do not fuel the drama anymore that is part of all egoic relationships. What is its fuel? Reactivity. The ego thrives on it.

In other words, can you awaken at that moment of unconsciousness? Can you feel that there is something in you that is at war, something that feels threatened and wants to survive at all cost, that needs the drama in order to assert its identity as the victorious character within that theatrical production? Can you feel there is something in you that would rather be right than at peace? BEYOND

It is not easy at first to be there as the witnessing Presence, especially when the ego is in survival mode or some emotional pattern from the past has become activated, but once you have had a taste of it, you will grow in Presence power, and the ego will lose its grip on you. And so a power comes into your life that is far greater than the ego, greater than the mind. All that is required to become free of the ego is to be aware of it, since awareness and ego are incompatible.

Awareness is the power that is concealed within the present moment. This is why we may also call it Presence.