Allowing the diminishment of the ego April 1, 2014
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Ego Management.Tags: A New Earth, awareness, controlling ego, Eckhart Tolle, ego management, managing the ego, personal development, personal growth, philosophy, spirituality
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As we have learned in our ongoing efforts with our personal development, our ego can have a negative effect on our ability to realize our growth goals.
This is because the ego frequently works against what we consciously know to be our best interests.
Eckhart Tolle has written and spoken extensively about these negative tendencies of the ego and of how we can control or better manage the ego’s destructive tendencies.
In his book, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, Tolle offers a number of techniques to accomplish this.
One of these is “allowing the diminishment of the ego.”
Tolle considers the emotion of anger to be one of the ego’s main repair mechanisms. He cites the example of our being in a situation in which the ego wants us to react with immediate angry words.
Instead, Tolle suggests we resist the urge to react immediately and defensively. Instead, say nothing for a few moments, collect ourselves, and then speak with deliberation and calmness.
Reacting with anger Tolle says, “causes a temporary, but huge ego inflation.”
By contrast, reacting with calmness, yet still responding firmly and clearly, “diminishes” the ego and its defensiveness…There will be power behind your words, yet no reactive force,” Tolle explains.
By practicing this frequently, the ego’s repair mechanism of anger is thwarted, and the ego is diminished, thus making us more conscious and in better control.
The ego and the unconscious formation of prejudices March 12, 2014
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal development, Ego Management.Tags: A New Earth, awareness, controlling ego, Eckhart Tolle, ego management, managing the ego, personal development, personal development potential, personal growth
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If we are to realize our personal development potential, an important goal for us should be to try to diminish as much as we can the role our ego plays in our lives.
The ego – a phenomenon which Eckhart Tolle describes as a constantly chattering voice in our head; a voice which can interfere with taking our personal growth to a higher level of consciousness.
For Tolle, the need for discipline in the conscious management of our ego is one of the foundational requirements for discovering our true inner being. It is the pervading principle underlying personal growth realization in Tolle’s 313-page book, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose.
Paraphrasing Tolle’s view of the ego, we can say that, left to its own devices, the ego will construct many prejudices (1), and one of the ways it does this is by continually categorizing practically all of our experiences onto a neat bookshelf of attitudes.
In A New Earth, Tolle comments, “The quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental labels to things, people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless your reality becomes, and the more deadened you become to reality; the miracle of life that continuously unfolds within and around you. In this way, cleverness may be gained, but wisdom is lost, and so are joy, love, creativity, and aliveness.” (2)
The problem, for most of us, of course, is that the formation of these verbal and/or mental labels about things, people, and situations is something we are not consciously aware of; because the process is performed unconsciously by the ego.
And this ego-process is something must make a constant, daily effort to resist.
One of the reasons why personal development/growth is a lifelong effort, and not a quick-fix program.
(1) I am using the word prejudices in the sense of forming any pre-judgements about externals.
(2) Page 26, Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth; a Plume Book, paperback
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