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Ego management: The power of personal grievances April 12, 2014

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Ego Management.
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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

 

Concept of personal development: Compassion April 11, 2014

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal development.
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Personal growth experts often suggest that in order to acquire a virtue or positive behavioural attribute we need to perform positive actions within the definition of the attribute.

So, if we want to develop the personal quality of compassion we should perform acts of compassion. The more compassionate acts we perform, the more compassionate will likely become.

However, an additional approach to becoming more compassionate is to use logic to:
(a) Understand our lack of compassion (and the presence of resentment and prejudice [prejudging]);
(b) Become more compassionate; and
(c) Substantially reduce, and ideally, eliminate our prejudices.

If we understand the reasons for our lack of compassion and the reasons for the presence of our prejudice against certain situations or groups of people, then we will be more successful in correcting our overall attitude and behaviour.

One example of a lack of compassion, and the presence of prejudice might be in the often prevailing attitude that any kind of financial assistance to poor people should be used by them only to buy the “necessities of life” and not for any “frivolous” purposes.

The influential 18th essayist, moralist, and literary critic Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), commented however that there is a logical reason why people in constant financial stress might want some luxuries. He did not see their desire for enjoyment as a deficiency of character. His comment also reveals some of the meanness that can be present in our minds – meanness caused by a lack of understanding.

“Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding; yet for the poor we delight in stripping it still barer, and are not ashamed to show even visible displeasure if ever the bitter taste is taken from their mouths.” (*)

Perhaps we can also apply logic to achieve better understanding of our other prejudices, and thereby increase the probability of our becoming more compassionate.

(*) Samuel Johnson: A Biography, John Wain, The Viking Press, New York, 1975, 388 pages

Further reading

A Wikipedia article on Samuel Johnson can be found at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Johnson