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The ego and the unconscious formation of prejudices March 12, 2014

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal development, Ego Management.
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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

Ego management: Eckhart Tolle on controlling psychological time January 9, 2013

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Ego Management.
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Eckhart Tolle tells us that one of the main causes of emotional and mental distress is the tendency of the ego or mind to dwell in the past and the future, rather than focusing on the present.

Tolle considers this past/present thought process of the ego or mind to be psychological time, as opposed to “clock” time. Clock time might involve activities such as preparing a report for a meeting on Friday, or getting our kids ready to take them to a doctor’s appointment in the afternoon. Psychological time or mind-time, ego-time, by contrast would be worrying about possible outcomes of presenting your report on Friday, or fretting about what the doctor’s report will be this afternoon.

Tolle believes that there are serious emotional and mental consequences from our tendency to dwell frequently in psychological time. In The Power of Now, he writes, “All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry—all forms of fear – are caused by too much future and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, and all forms of non-forgiveness are caused by too much past and not enough presence.”

For Tolle, one of the first steps we can take to get out of this endless mind/ego loop is to simply recognize this tendency, to be watchful, and observe when we are doing it. He does say, however, that this approach will take a lot of practice because the mind and ego are so fixed in this tendency that we are constantly dwelling in the past and future, and thereby coloring our thought process, that we do not usually recognize that it is happening.

Tolle recognizes that it is difficult to grasp that “time”, and more specifically psychological time, is the cause of our problems, and says that although everyone has problems in their “life situation” that need to be either dealt with or accepted, he says the biggest problem we have is ultimately the “time-bound mind itself.”

Tolle devotes close one-third of his 230-page book explaining this problem and working to convince us of the emotional and intellectual difficulties it causes. Then, for the most, part the remainder of The Power of Now is dedicated to presenting strategies and tactics to help remove ourselves from this conundrum.