The Seer

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Inquirer — “I just started reading one of your books for the first time A New Earth. I am still having a hard time understanding why we have an ego and why it seems to be our enemy. Can you explain it more simply for me so I understand the ego’s purpose?”

Eckhart Tolle — The ego is a stage in the evolution of human consciousness. It is not your enemy. To perceive somebody or something as an enemy is in fact one of the main misperceptions or delusions of the egoic unconsciousness. So, you cannot fight against the ego and win that fight. If you think you have won the fight against the ego, it is the ego in you that thinks so and it has enlarged itself.

So the ego is not an enemy, but a dysfunction. Looked at from one point of view, it is an entity that the mind created. From another perspective, however, it is simply a delusion, resulting in a distorted way of perceiving reality and consequently in dysfunctional behavior. This second perspective is probably a more helpful one.

A delusion dissolves when you recognize it as delusion, and so does the ego. The ego is the by-product, as it were, of the rapid development of our faculty of thought over the past six thousand years. We lost ourselves in thought, that is to say became identified with it to such an extent that we now derive our sense of who we are from thinking. Thought is a particular way for universal intelligence to express itself. It is no more than a tiny aspect of that vast intelligence.

Thought, through naming things, analyzes, dissects, and separates reality into bits and pieces. Thinking can be a helpful practical tool, but when you identify with thinking the delusion of separation arises. Your reality becomes fragmented. You lose your original sense of connectedness with Being (“paradise”). You become unhappy, needy, discontented, full of ever unfulfilled desire, and you are always unconsciously attempting to regain your lost sense of being, of who you are.

Life is one and I am one with all life.

When you know this truth, the ego dissolves. To know means to realize. How, then, do you realize this truth?

At this moment – the only moment there is – there are some thoughts moving across your mind (the words you are reading and whatever your mind is adding to them). However, you can also KNOW that these thoughts are moving across your mind. That knowing is the dimension of awareness. It has nothing to do with thinking. While thinking happens, you can know yourself as the awareness behind the thinking, the alert stillness in the background – ungraspable, indefinable, elusive.

When you disidentify from thinking, you may also discover a growing ability within you to perceive things and people without immediately naming them. In this way, the ego, which is the unconscious habit of identifying with every thought that arises, begins to dissolve.