Ego management: The power of personal grievances April 12, 2014
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Ego Management.Tags: A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle, ego management, managing the ego, negative thinking, pain-body, personal development, personal growth, philosophy, self-improvement
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Unless we first take steps to control our ego, our efforts within a personal growth program will amount to little.
That is one inference we can make about the huge influence of the ego, and particularly what Eckhart Tolle calls the ego’s creation, the pain-body, on our overall thinking, actions, and development.
Interpreting Tolle broadly, each person’s pain-body, is a collection of grievances accumulated by the ego (the voice in our head), and this though-accumulation has a pronounced effect on our entire behaviour pattern.
In his book, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, Eckhart Tolle observes:
“The voice in the head has a life of its own. Most people are at the mercy of that voice; they are possessed by thought, by the mind. And since the mind is conditioned by the past, you are then forced to re-enact the past again and again.”
This can lead to a vast collection by the ego of grievances – a storehouse of real and imagined slights, injustices, and examples of unfairness in our lives.
Welcome to the pain-body.
“The voice will be blaming, accusing, complaining, imagining. And you are totally identified with whatever the voice says, believe all its distorted thoughts. At that point, the addiction to unhappiness has set in,” Tolle says.
How to control or manage the processes of the ego and the ego’s use of the pain-body is one of the main subjects Tolle discusses in A New Earth.
Further reading:
A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, Eckhart Tolle, A Plume Book, Penguin Books Ltd., A Namaste Publishing Book, 2006, 315 pages
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.
Personal Development Ideas 