developing ego of
teenagers, some of whom are in a permanent state of negativity and
dissatisfaction. The physical needs for food, water , shelter , clothing, and basic comforts
could be easily met for all humans on the planet, were it not for the
imbalance of resources created by the insane and rapacious need for
more, the greed of the ego. It finds collective expression in the economic
structures of this world, such as the huge corporations, which are egoic
entities that compete with each other for more. Their only blind aim is
profit. They pursue that aim with absolute ruthlessness. Nature, animals,
people, even their own employees, are no more than digits on a balance
sheet, lifeless objects to be used, then discarded. The thought forms of me and mine, of more than, of I want, I need, I
must have, and of not enough pertain not to content but to the structure
of the ego. The content is interchangeable. As long as you don't
recognize those thought forms within yourself, as long as they remain
unconscious, you will believe in what they say; you will be condemned
to acting out those unconscious thoughts, condemned to seeking and not
finding because when those thought forms operate, no possession, place,
person, or condition will ever satisfy you. No content will satisfy you, as
long as the egoic structure remains in place. No matter what you have or
get,
you won't be happy . Y ou will always be looking for something else that
promises greater fulfillment, that promises to make your incomplete
sense of self complete and fill that sense of lack you feel within.A New Earth
I D E N T I F I C A T I O N  W I T H  T H E  B O D Y
Apart from objects, another basic form of identification is with my body . Firstly , the body is male or female, and so the sense of being a man or
woman takes up a significant part of most people's sense of self. Gender
becomes identity . Identification with gender is encouraged at an early
age, and it forces you into a role, into conditioned patterns of behavior
that af fect all aspects of your life, not just sexuality . It is a role many
people become completely trapped in, even more so in some of the
traditional societies than in W estern culture where identification with
gender is beginning to lessen somewhat. In some traditional cultures, the
worst fate a woman can have is to be unwed or barren, and for a man to
lack sexual potency and not be able to produce children. Life's
fulfillment is perceived to be fulfillment of one's gender identity . In the W est, it is the physical appearance of the body that contributes
greatly to the sense of who you think you are: its strength or weakness,
its perceived beauty or ugliness relative to others. For many people, their
sense of self?worth is intimately bound up with their physical strength,
good looks, fitness, and external appearance. many feel a diminished
sense of self?worth because they perceive their body as ugly or
imperfect. In some cases, the mental image or concept of my body is a complete
distortion of reality . A young woman may think of herself as overweight
and therefore starve herself when in fact she is quite thin. She cannot see
her body anymore. All she sees is the mental concept of her body , which
says I am fat or I will become fat. At the root of this condition lies
identification with the mind. As people have become more and more
mind?identified, which is the intensification of egoic dysfunction, there
has also been a dramatic increase in the incidence of anorexia in recent
decades. If the suf ferer could look at her body without the interfering
judgments of her mind or even recognize those judgments for what they
are instead of believing in them or better still, if she could feel her body
from within this would initiate her healing.Those who are identified with their good looks, physical strength, or
abilities experience suf fering when those attributes begin to fade and
disappear , as of course they will. Their very identity that was based on
them is then threatened with collapse. In either case, ugly or beautiful,
people derive a significant part of their identity , be it negative or
positive, from their body . T o be more precise, they derive their identity
from the I?thought that they erroneously attach to the mental image or
concept of their body , which after all is no more than a physical form
that shares the destiny of all forms? impermanence and ultimately decay . Equating the physical sense?perceived body that is destined to grow old,
wither , and die with I always leads to suf fering sooner or later . T o refrain
from identifying with the body doesn't mean that you neglect, despise, or
no longer care for it. If it is strong, beautiful, or vigorous, you can enjoy
and appreciate those attributes while they last. Y ou can also improve the
body's condition through right nutrition and exercise. If you don't' equate
the body with who you are, when beauty fades, vigor diminishes, or the
body becomes incapacitated, this will not af fect your sense of worth or
identity in any way . In fact, as the body begins to weaken, the formless
dimension, the light of consciousness, can shine more easily through the
fading form. It is not just people with good or near?perfect bodies who are likely to
equate it with who they are. Y ou can just as easily identify with a
problematic body and make the body's imperfection, illness, or disability
in to your identity . Y ou may then think and speak of yourself as a
suf ferer of this or that chronic illness or disability . Y ou receive a great
deal of attention from doctors and others who constantly confirm to you
your conceptual identity as a suf ferer or a patient. Y ou then
unconsciously cling to the illness because it has become the most
important part of who you perceive yourself to be. It has become another
thought form with which the ego can identify . Once the ego has found an
identity , it does not want to let go. Amazingly but not infrequently , the
ego in search of a stronger identity and can and does create illnesses in
order to strengthen itself through them.A New Earth
F E E L I N G  T H E  I N N E R  B O D Y
Although body?identification is one of the most basic forms of ego, the
good news is that it is also the one that you can most easily go beyond. This is done not by trying to convince yourself that you are not your
body ,
but by shifting your attention from the external form of your body and
from thoughts about your body beautiful, ugly , strong, weak, too fat, too
thin to the feeling of aliveness inside it. No matter what your body's
appearance is on the outer level, beyond the outer form it is an intensely
alive ener gy field. If you are not familiar with inner body awareness, close your eyes for a
moment and find out if there is life inside your hands. Don't ask your
mind. It will say , I can't feel anything. Probably it will also say , Give me
something more interesting to think about. So instead of asking your
mind, go to the hands directly . By this I mean become aware of the
subtle feeling of aliveness inside them. It is there. Y ou just have to go
there with your attention to notice it. you may get a slight tingling
sensation at first, then a feeling of ener gy or aliveness. If you hold your
attention in your hands for a while, the sense of aliveness will intensify . Some people won't even have to close their eyes. They will be able to
feel their inner hands at the same times as they read this. Then go to your
feet, keep your attention there for a minute or so, and begin to feel your
hands and feet at the same time. Then incorporate other parts of the body
legs, arms, abdomen, chest, and so on into that feeling until you are
aware of the inner body as a global sense of aliveness. What I call the inner body isn't really the body anymore but life ener gy ,
the bridge between form and formlessness. Make it a habit to feel the
inner body as often as you can. After a while, you won't need to close
your eyes anymore to feel it. For example, see if you can feel the inner
body whenever you listen to someone. It almost seems like a paradox:
When you are in touch with the inner body , you are not identified withyour body anymore, nor are you identified with your mind. This is to say ,
you are no longer identified with form but moving away from form? identification toward formlessness, which we may also call Being. It is
your essence identity . Body awareness not only anchors you in the
present moment, it is a doorway out of the prison that is the ego. It also
strengthens the immune system and the body's ability to heal itself.A New Earth
F O R G E T F U L N E S S  O F  B E I N G
Ego is always identification with form, seeking yourself and thereby
losing yourself in some form. Forms are not just material objects and
physical bodies. More fundamental than the external forms things and
bodies are the thought forms that continuously arise in the field of
consciousness. They are ener gy formations, finer and less dense than
physical matter , but they are forms nonetheless. What you may be aware
of as a voice in your head the at never stops speaking is the stream of
incessant and compulsive thinking. When every thought absorbs your
attention completely , when you are so identified with the voice in your
head and the motions that accompany it that you lose yourself in every
thought and every emotion, then you are totally identified with form and
therefore in the grip of ego.. Ego is a conglomeration of recurring
thought forms and conditioned mental?emotional patterns that are
invested with a sense of I, a sense of self. Ego arises when your sense of
Beingness, of I Am, which is formless consciousness, gets mixed up with
form. This is the meaning of identification. This is for getfulness of
Being, the primary error , the illusion of absolute separateness that turns
reality into a nightmare.A New Earth
F R O M  D E S C A R T E S ' S  E R R O R  T O
S A R T R E ' S  I N S I G H T
The seventeenth?century philosopher Descartes, regarded as the founder
of modern philosophy , gave expression to this primary error with his
famous dictum (which he saw as primary truth): I think, therefore I am. This was the answer he found to the question Is there anything I can
know with absolute certainty? He realized that the fact that he was
always thinking was beyond doubt, and so he equated thinking with
Being, that is to say , identity I am with thinking. Instead of the ultimate
truth, he had found the root of the ego, but he didn't know that. It took almost three hundred years before another famous philosopher
saw something in that statement that Descartes, as well as everybody
else, had overlooked. His name was Jean?Paul Sartre. He looked at
Descartes's statement I think, therefore I am very deeply and suddenly
realized, in his own words, The consciousness that says 'I am' is not the
consciousness that thinks. What did he mean by that? When you are
aware that you are thinking, that awareness is not part of thinking. It is a
dif ferent dimension of consciousness. And it is that awareness that says I
am. If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn't even know
you are thinking. Y ou would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he is
dreaming. Y ou would be as
identified with every thought as the dreamer is with every image in the
dream. Many people still live like that, like sleepwalkers, trapped in old
dysfunctional mind?sets that continuously re?create the same
nightmarish reality . When you know you are dreaming, you are awake
within the dream. Another dimension of consciousness has come in. The implication of Sartre's insight is profound, but he himself was still
too identified with thinking to realize the full significance of what he had
discovered: an emer ging new dimension of consciousness.A New Earth
T H E  P E A C E  T H A T  P A S S E S  A L L
U N D E R S T A N D I N G
There are many accounts of people who experienced that emer ging new
dimension of consciousness as a result of tragic loss at some point in
their lives. Some lost all of their possessions, others their children or
spouse, their social position, reputation, or physical abilities. In some
cases, through disaster or war , they lost all of these simultaneously and
found themselves with nothing. W e may call this a limit?situation. Whatever they had identified with, whatever gave them their sense of
self, had been taken away . Then suddenly and inexplicably , the anguish
or intense fear they initially felt gave way to a scared sense of Presence,
a deep peace and serenity and complete freedom from fear . This
phenomenon must have been familiar to St. Paul, who used the
expression the peace of God which passeth all understanding. It is indeed
a peace that doesn't seem to make sense, and the people who experienced
it asked themselves: In the face of this, how can it be that I feel such
peace? The answer is simple, once you realize what the ego is and how it works. When forms that you had identified with, that gave you your sense of
self, collapse or are taken away , it can lead to a collapse of the ego, since
ego is identification with form. When there is nothing to identify with
anymore, who are you? When forms around you die or death approaches,
your sense of Beingness, of I Am, is freed from its entanglement with
form: Spirit is released from its imprisonment in matter . Y ou realize your
essential identity as formless, as an all?pervasive Presence, of Being
prior to all forms, all identifications. Y ou realize your true identity as
consciousness itself, rather than what consciousness had identified with. That's the peace of God. The ultimate truth of who you are is not in I am
this or I am that, but I Am. Not everybody who experiences great loss also experiences this
awakening, this disidentification from form. Some immediately create a
strong mental image or thought form in which they see themselves as avictim, whether it be of circumstances, other people, an unjust fate, or
God. This thought form and the emotions it creates, such as anger ,
resentment, self?pity , and so on, they strongly identify with, and it
immediately takes the place of all the other identifications that have
collapsed through the loss. In other words, the ego quickly finds a new
form. The fact that this new form is a deeply unhappy one doesn't
concern the ego too much, as long as it has an identity , good or bad. In
fact, this new ego will be more contracted, more rigid and impenetrable
than the old one. Whenever tragic loss occurs, you either resist or you yield. Some people
become bitter or deeply resentful; others become compassionate, wise,
and loving. Y ielding means inner acceptance of what is. Y ou are open to
life. Resistance is an inner contraction, a hardening of the shell of the
ego. Y ou are closed. Whatever action you take in a state of inner
resistance (which we could also call negativity) will create more outer
resistance, and the universe will not be on your side; life will not be
helpful. If the shutters are closed, the sunlight cannot come in. When you
yield internally , when you surrender , a new dimension of consciousness
opens up. If action is possible or necessary , your action will be in
alignment with the whole and supported by creative intelligence, the
unconditioned consciousness which in a state of inner openness you
become one with. Circumstances and people then become helpful,
cooperative. Coincidences happen. If no action is possible, you rest in
the peace and inner stillness that come with surrender . Y ou rest in God.C H A P T E R  T H R E E  T H E  C O R E  O F  E G O
Most people are so completely identified with the voice in the head the
incessant stream of involuntary and compulsive thinking and the
emotions that accompany it that we may describe them as being
possessed by their mind. As long as you are completely unaware of this
you take the thinker to be who you are. This is the egoic mind. W e call it
egoic because there is a sense of self, of I (ego), in every thought every
memory , every interpretation, opinion, viewpoint, reaction, emotion. This is unconsciousness, spiritually speaking. Y our thinking, the content
of your mind, is of course conditioned by the past: your upbringing,
culture, family background, and so on. The central core of all your mind
activity consists of certain repetitive and persistent thoughts, emotions,
and reactive patterns that you identify with most strongly . This entity is
the ego itself. In most cases, when you say I, it is the ego speaking, not you, as we have
seen. It consists of thought and emotion, of a bundle of memories you
identify with as me and my story , of habitual roles you play without
knowing it, of collective identifications such as nationality , religion,
race, social class, or political allegiance. It also contains personal
identifications, not only with possessions, but also with opinions,
external appearance, long? standing resentments, or concepts of yourself
as better than or not as good as others, as a success or failure. The content of the ego varies from person to person, bu in every ego the
same structure operates. In other words: Egos only dif fer on the surface. Deep down they are all the same. In what way are they the same? They
live on identification and separation. When you live through the mind? made self comprised of thought and emotion that is the ego, the basis for
your identity is precarious because thought and emotion are by their very
nature ephemeral, fleeting. So every ego is continuously struggling for
survival, trying to protect and enlar ge itself. T o uphold the I?thought, it
needs the opposite thought of the other . The conceptual I cannot survive
without the conceptual other . The others are most other when I see them
as my enemies. At one end of this scale of this unconscious egoic pattern
lies the egoic compulsive habit of faultfinding and complaining about
others. Jesus referred to it when he said, Why to do you see the speck
that is in yourbrother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? At the
other end of the scale, there is physical violence between individuals and
warfare between nations. In the Bible, Jesus' question remains
unanswered, but the answer is, of course: Because when I criticize or
condemn another , it makes me feel bigger , superior .A New Earth
C O M P L A I N I N G  A N D  R E S E N T M E N T
Complaining is one of the ego's favorite strategies for strengthening
itself. Every complaint is a little story the mind makes up that you
completely believe in. Whether you complain aloud or only in thought
makes no dif ference. Some egos that perhaps don't have much else to
identify with easily survive on complaining alone. When you are in the
grip of such and ego, complaining, especially about other people, is
habitual and, of course, unconscious, which means you don't know what
you are doing. Applying negative mental labels to people, either to their
face or more commonly when you speak about them to others or even
just think about them, is often part of this pattern. Name?calling is the
crudest form of such labeling and of the ego's need to be right and
triumph over others: jerk, bastard, bitch ? all definitive pronouncements
that you can't ar gue with. On the next level down on the scale of
unconsciousness, you have shouting and screaming, and not much below
that, physical violence. Resentment is the emotion that goes with complaining and the mental
labeling of people and adds even more ener gy to the ego. Resentment
means to feel bitter , indignant, aggrieved, or of fended. Y ou resent other
people's greed, their dishonesty , their lack of integrity , what they are
doing what they did in the past, what they said what they failed to do,
what they should for shouldn't have done. The ego loves it. Instead of
overlooking unconsciousness in others, you make it in to their identity . Who is doing that? The unconsciousness in you, the ego. Sometimes the
fault that you perceive in another isn't even there. It is a total
misinterpretation, a projection by a mind conditioned to see enemies and
to make itself right or superior . At other times, the fault may be theirs,
but by focusing on it, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, you
amplify it. And what you react to in another , you strengthen in yourself. Non?reaction to the ego in others is one of the most ef fective ways not
only of going beyond ego in yourself but also of dissolving the collective
human ego. But you can only be in a state of nonreaction if you canrecognize someone's behavior as coming from the ego, as being an
expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it's not
personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were. By not
reacting to the ego, you will often be able to bring out the sanity in
others, which is the unconditioned consciousness as opposed to the
conditioned. At times you may have to take practical steps to protect
yourself from deeply unconscious people. This you can do without
making them into enemies. Y our greatest protection, however , is being
conscious. Somebody becomes an enemy if you personalize the
unconsciousness that is the ego. Non reaction is not weakness but
strength. Another word for nonreaction is for giveness. T o for give is to
overlook, or rather to look through. Y ou look through the ego to the
sanity that is in every human being as his or her essence. The ego loves to complain and feel resentful not only abut other people
but also about situations. What you can do to a person, you can also do
to a situation: make it into an enemy . The implication is always: This
should not be happening; I don't want to be here; I don't want to be doing
this; I'm being treated unfairly . And the egos greatest enemy of all is, of
course, the present moment, which is to say , life itself. Complaining is not to be confused with informing someone of a mistake
or deficiency so that it can be put right. And to refrain from complaining
doesn't necessarily mean putting up with bad quality or behavior . There
is no ego in telling the waiter that your soup is cold and needs to be
heated up if you stick to the facts, which are always neutral. How dare
you serve me cold soup... That's complaining. There is a me here that
loves to feel personally of fended by the cold soup and is going to make
the most of it, a me that enjoys making someone wrong. The
complaining we are talking about is in the service of the ego, not of
change. Sometimes it becomes obvious that the ego doesn't really want
change so that it can go on complaining. See if you can catch, that is to say , notice, the voice in the head, perhaps
in the very moment it complains about something, and recognize it for
what it is: the voice of the ego, no more than a conditioned mind?pattern,
a thought. Whenever you notice that voice, you will also realize that you
are not the voice, but the one who is aware of it. In fact, you are the
awareness that is aware of the voice. In the background, there is theawareness. In the foreground, there is the voice, the thinker . In this way
you are becoming free of the ego, free of the unobserved mind. The
moment you become aware of the ego in you, it is strictly speaking no
longer the ego, but just an old, conditioned mind?pattern. Ego implies
unawareness. A wareness and ego cannot coexist. The old mind?pattern
or mental habit may still survive and reoccur for a while because it has
the momentum of thousands of years of collective human
unconsciousness behind it, but every time it is recognized, it is
weakened.A New Earth
R E A C T I V I T Y  A N D  G R I E V A N C E S
Whereas resentment is often the emotion that goes with complaining, it
may also be accompanied by a stronger emotion such as anger or some
other form of upset. In this way , it becomes more highly char ged
ener getically . Complaining then turns into reactivity , another of the ego's
ways of strengthening itself. There are many people who are always
waiting for the next thing to react against, to feel annoyed or disturbed
about and it never takes long before they find it. This is an outrage, they
say . How dare you... I resent this. They are addicted to upset and anger
as others are to a drug. Through reacting against this or that they assert
and strengthen their feeling of self. A long?standing resentment is called a grievance. T o carry a grievance is
to be in a permanent state of against, and that is why grievances
constitute a significant part of many people's ego. Collective grievances
can survive for centuries in the psyche of a nation or tribe and fuel a
never? ending cycle of violence. A grievance is a strong negative emotion connected to an event in the
sometimes distant past that is being kept alive by compulsive thinking,
by retelling the story in the head or out loud of what someone did to me
or what someone did to us. A grievance will also contaminate other areas
of your life. For example, while you think about and feel your grievance,
its negative emotional ener gy can distort your perception of an event that
is happening in the present or influence the way in which you speak or
behave
to ward someone in the present. One strong grievance is enough to
contaminate lar ge areas of your life and keep you in the grip of the ego. It requires honesty to see whether you still harbor grievances, whether
there is someone in your life you have not completely for given, an
enemy . If you do, become aware of the grievance both on the level of
thought as well as emotion, that is to say , be ware of the thoughts that
keep it alive, and feel the emotion that is the body's response to thosethoughts. Don't try to let go of the grievance. T rying to let go, to for give,
does not work. For giveness happens naturally when you see that it has
no purpose other than to strengthen a false sense of self, to keep the ego
in place. The seeing is freeing. Jesus' teaching to For give your enemies is
essentially about the undoing of one of the main egoic structures in the
human mind. The past has no power to stop you from being present now . Only your
grievance about the past can do that. And what is a grievance? The
baggage of old thought and emotion.A New Earth
B E I N G  R I G H T ,  M A K I N G  W R O N G
Complaining as well as faultfinding and reactivity strengthen the ego's
sense of boundary and separateness on which tis survival depends. But
they also strengthen the ego in another way by giving it a feeling of
superiority on which it thrives. It may not be immediately apparent how
complaining, say , about a traf fic jam, about politicians, about the greedy
wealthy or the lazy unemployed, or your colleagues or ex?spouse , men
or women, can give you a sense of superiority . Here is why . When you
complain, by implication you are right and the person or situation you
complain about or react against is wrong. There is nothing that strengthens the ego more than being right. Being
right is identification with a mental position a perspective, an opinion, a
judgment, a story . For you to be right, of course, you need someone else
to be wrong, and so the ego loves to make wrong in order to be right. In
other words: you need to make others wrong in order to get a stronger
sense of who you are. Not only a person, but also a situation can be made
wrong through complaining and reactivity , which always implies that
this should not be happening. Being right places you in a position of
imagined moral
superiority in relation to the person or situation that is being judged and
found wanting. It is that sense of superiority the ego craves and through
which it enhances itself.A New Earth
I N  D E F E N C E  O F  A N  I L L U S I O N
Facts undoubtedly exist. If you say: Light travels faster than sound, and
someone else says the opposite is the case, you are obviously right, and
he is wrong. The simple observation that lightning precedes thunder
could confirm this. So not only are you right, but you know you are
right. Is there any ego involved in this? Possibly , but not necessarily . If
you are simply stating what you know to be true, the ego is not involved
at all, because there is no identification. Identification with what? W ith
mind and a mental position. Such identification, however , can easily
creep in. If you find yourself saying, Believe me, I know or Why do you
never believe me? then the ego has already crept in. It is hiding in the
little word me. A simple statement: Light is faster than sound, although
true, is now in service of illusion, of ego. It has become contaminated
with a false sense of I; it has become personalized, turned into a mental
position. The I feels diminished or of fended because somebody doesn't
believe what I said. Ego takes everything personally . Emotion arises, defensiveness, perhaps
even aggression. Are you defending the truth? No, the truth, in any case,
needs no defense. The light or sound does not care about what you or
anybody else thinks. Y ou are defending yourself, or rather the illusion of
yourself, the mind?made substitute. It would be even more accurate to
say that the illusion is defending itself. If even the simple and
straightforward realm of facts can lend itself to egoic distortion and
illusion, how much more so the less tangible realm of opinions,
viewpoints, and judgments, all of them thought forms that can easily
become infused with a sense of I. Every ego confuses opinions and viewpoints with facts. Furthermore, it
cannot tell the dif ferences between an event and its reaction to that event. Every ego is a master of selective perception and distorted interpretation. Only through awareness not through thinking can you dif ferentiate
between fact and opinion. Only through awareness are you able to see:
There is the situation and here is the anger I feel about it, and then realizethere are other ways of approaching the situation, other ways of seeing it
and dealing
with it. Only through awareness can you see th totality of the situation or
person instead of adopting one limited perspective.A New Earth
T R U T H :  R E L A T I V E  O R  A B S O L U T E ? Beyond the realm of simple and verifiable facts, the certainty that I am
right and you are wrong is a dangerous thing in personal relationships as
well as in interactions between nations, tribes, religions, and so on. But if the belief I am right; you are wrong is one of the ways in which
the ego strengthens itself, if making yourself right and others wrong is a
mental dysfunction that perpetuates separation and conflict between
human beings, does that mean there is no such thing as right or wrong
behavior , action, or belief? And wouldn't that be the moral relativism that
some contemporary Christian teachings see as the great evil of our
times? The history of Christianity is, of course, a prime example of how the
belief that you are in sole possession of the truth, that is to say , right , can
corrupt your actions and behavior to the point of insanity . For centuries,
torturing and burning people alive if their opinion diver ged even in the
slightest from Church doctrine or narrow interpretations of scripture (the
T ruth) was considered right because the victims were wrong. They were
so wrong that they needed to be killed. The T ruth was considered more
important than human life. And what was the T ruth? A story you had to
believe in; which means, a bundle of thoughts. The one million people that mad dictator Pol Pot of Cambodia ordered
killed included everybody who wore glasses. Why? T o him, the Marxist
interpretation of history was the absolute truth, and according to his
version of it, those who wore glasses belonged to the educated glass, the
bour geoisie, the exploiters of the peasants. They needed to be eliminated
to make room for a new social order . His truth also was a bundle of
thoughts. The Catholic and other churches are actually correct when they identify
relativism, the belief that there is no absolute truth to guide human
behavior , as one of the evils of our times; but you won't find absolute
truth if you look for it where it cannot be found: in doctrines, ideologies,sets of rules, or stories. What do all of these have in common? They are
made up of thought. Thought can at best point to the truth, but it never is
the truth. That's why Buddhists say The finger pointing to the moon is
not the moon. All
religions are equally false and equally true, depending on how you use
them. Y ou can use them in the service of the ego, or you can use them in
the service of the T ruth. If you believe only your religion is the T ruth,
you are using it in the service of the ego. used in such a way , religion
becomes ideology and creates an illusory sense of superiority as well as
division and conflict between people. In the service of the T ruth,
religious teachings represent signposts or maps left behind by awakened
humans to assist you in spiritual awakening, that is to say , in becoming
free of identification with form. There is only one absolute T ruth, and all other truths emanate from it. When you find that T ruth, your actions will be in alignment with it. Human action can reflect the T ruth, or it can reflect illusion. Can the
T ruth be put into words? Y es, but the words are, of course, not it. They
only point to it. The T ruth is inseparable from who you are. Y es, you are the truth. If you
look for it elsewhere, you will be deceived every time. The very Being
that you are is T ruth. Jesus tried to convey that when he said, I am the
way and the truth and the life. These words uttered by Jesus are one of
the most powerful and direct pointers to the T ruth, if understood
correctly . If misinterpreted, however , they become a great obstacle. Jesus
speaks of the innermost I Am, the essence identity of every man and
woman, every life? form, in fact. He speaks of the life that you are. Some
Christian mystics have called it the Christ within; Buddhists call it your
Buddha nature; for Hindus, it is Atman, the indwelling God. When you
are in touch with that dimension within yourself and being in touch with
it is your natural state, not some miraculous achievement all your actions
and relationships will reflect the oneness with all life that you sense deep
within. This is love. Laws, commandments, rules, and regulations are
necessary for those who are cut of f from who they are, the T ruth within. They prevent the worst excesses of the ego, and often they don't even do
that. Love and do what you will, said St. Augustine. W ords cannot get
much closer to the T ruth than that.A New Earth
T H E  E G O  I S  N O T  P E R S O N A L
On a collective level, the mind?set W e are right and they are wrong is
particularly deeply entrenched in those parts of the world where conflict
between two nations, races, tribes, religions, or ideologies is long? standing, extreme, and endemic. Both sides of the conflict are equally
identified with
their own perspective, their own story , that is to say , identified with
thought. Both are equally incapable of seeing that another perspective,
another story , may exist and also be valid. Israeli writer Y . Halevi speaks
of the possibility of accommodating a competing narrative, but in many
parts of the world, people are not yet able or willing to do that. Both
sides believe themselves to be in possession of the truth. Both regard
themselves as victims and the other as evil, and because they have
conceptualized and thereby dehumanized the other as the enemy , they
can kill and inflict all kinds of violence on the other , even on children,
without feeling their humanity and suf fering. They become trapped in an
insane spiral of perpetration and retribution, action and reaction. Here it becomes obvious that the human ego in its collective aspect as us
against them is even more insane that n the me, the individual ego,
although the mechanism is the same. By far the greater part of violence
that humans have inflicted on each other is not the work of criminals or
the mentally derange, but of normal, respectable citizens in the service of
the collective ego. One can go far as to say that on this planet normal
equals insane. What is it that lies at the root of this insanity? Complete
identification with thought and emotion, that is to say , ego. Greed, selfishness, exploitation, cruelty , and violence are still all? pervasive on this planet. When you don't recognize them as individual
and collective manifestations of an underlying dysfunction or mental
illness, you fall into the error of personalizing them. Y ou construct a
conceptual identity for an individual or group, and you say: This is who
he is. This is who they are. When you confuse the ego that you perceivein others with their identity , it is the work of your own ego that uses this
misperception to strengthen itself through being right and therefore
superior , and through reacting with condemnation, indignation, and often
anger against the perceived enemy . All this is enormously satisfying to
the ego. It strengthens the sense of separation between yourself and the
other , whose otherness has become magnified to such an extent that you
can no longer feel your common humanity , nor the rootedness in the one
Life that you share with each human being, your common divinity . The particular egoic patterns that you react to most strongly in others and
misperceive as their identity tend to be the same patterns that are also in
you, but that you are unable or unwilling to detect within yourself. In
that
sense, you have much to learn from your enemies. What is it in them that
you find most upsetting, most disturbing? Their selfishness? Their
greed? Their need for power and control? Their insincerity , dishonesty ,
propensity to violence, or whatever it may be? Anything that you resent
and strongly react to in another is also in you. But it is no more than a
form of ego, and as such, it is completely impersonal. It has nothing to
do with who that person is, nor has it anything to do with who you are. Only if you mistake it for who you are can observing it within you be
threatening to your sense of self.A New Earth
W A R  I S  A  M I N D ? S E T
In certain cases, you may need to protect yourself or someone else from
being harmed by another , but beware of making it your mission to
eradicate evil, as you are likely to turn into the very thing you are
fighting against. Fighting unconsciousness will draw you into
unconsciousness yourself. Unconsciousness, dysfunctional egoic
behavior , can never be defeated by attacking it. Even if you defeat your
opponent, the unconsciousness will simply have moved into you, or the
opponent reappears in a new disguise. Whatever you fight, you
strengthen, and what you resist, persists. These days you frequently hear the expression the war against this or
that, and whenever I hear it, I know that it is condemned to failure. There
is the war against drugs, the war against crime, the war against terrorism,
the war against cancer , the war against poverty , and so on. For example,
despite the war against crime and drugs, there has been a dramatic
increase in crime and drug?related of fenses in the past twenty?five years. The prison population of the United States has gone up from just under
300,000 in 1980 to a staggering 2.1 million in 2004. The war against
disease has given us, amongst other things, antibiotics. At first, they
were spectacularly successful, seemingly enabling us to win the war
against infectious diseases. Now many experts agree that the widespread
and indiscriminate use of antibiotics has created a time bomb and that
antibiotic?resistant strains of bacteria, so?called super bugs, will in all
likelihood bring about a reemer gence of those diseases and possibly
epidemics. According to the Journal of the American Medical
Association, medical treatment is the third?leading cause of death after
heart disease and cancer in the United States. Homeopathy and Chinese
medicine are two examples of possible alternative approaches to disease
that do not treat the illness as an enemy and therefore do not create new
diseases. W ar is a mind?set, and all action that comes out of such a mind?set will
either strengthen the enemy , the perceived evil, or , if the war is won, willcreate a new enemy , a new evil equal to and often worse than the one
that was defeated. There is a deep interrelatedness between your state of
consciousness and external reality . When you are in the grip of a mind? set such as war , your perceptions become extremely selective as well as
distorted. In other words, you will see only what you want to see and
then misinterpret it. Y ou can imagine what kind of action comes out of
such a delusional system. Or instead of imagining it, watch the news on
TV tonight. Recognize the ego for what it is: a collective dysfunction, the insanity of
the human mind. When you recognize it for what it is, you no longer
misperceive it as somebody's identity . Once you see the ego for what it
is, it becomes much easier to remain nonreactive toward it. you don't
take it personally anymore. there is no complaining, blaming, accusing,
or making wrong. Nobody is wrong. It is the ego in someone, that's all. Compassion arises when you recognize that all are suf fering from the
same sickness of the mind, some more acutely than others. Y ou do not
fuel the drama anymore that is part of all egoic relationships. What is its
fuel? Reactivity . The ego thrives on it.A New Earth
D O  Y O U  W A N T  P E A C E  O R  D R A M A ? Y ou want peace. There is no one who does not want peace. Y et there is
something else in you that wants the drama, wants the conflict. Y ou may
not be able to feel it at this moment. Y ou may have to wait for a situation
or even just a thought that triggers a reaction in you: someone accusing
you of this or that, not acknowledging you, encroaching on your
territory , questioning the way you do things, an ar gument about money ....
Can you then feel the enormous sur ge of force moving through you, the
fear , perhaps being masked by anger or hostility? Can you hear your own
voice becoming harsh or shrill, or louder and a few octaves lower? Can
you be aware of your mind racing to defend its position, justify , attack,
blame? In other words, can you awaken at that moment of
unconsciousness? Can you feel that there is something in you that is at
war , something that feels threatened and wants to survive at all cost, that
needs the drama in order to assert its identity as the victorious character
within that theatrical production? Can you feel there is something in you
that would rather be right than at peace?A New Earth
B E Y O N D  E G O :  Y O U R  T R U E  I D E N T I T Y
When the ego is at war , know that it is no more than an illusion that is
fighting to survive. That illusion thinks it is you. It is not easy at first to
be there as the witnessing Presence, especially when the ego is in
survival mode or some emotional pattern from the past has become
activated, but once you have had a taste of it, you will grow in Presence
power , and the ego will lose its grip on you. And so a power comes into
your life that is far greater than the ego, greater than the mind. All that is
required to become free of the ego is to be aware of it, since awareness
and ego are incompatible. A wareness is the power that is concealed
within the present moment. This is why we may also call it Presence. The ultimate purpose of human existence, which is to say , your purpose
is to bring that power into this world. And this is also why becoming free
of the ego cannot be made into a goal to be attained at some point in the
future. Only Presence can free you of the ego, and you can only be
present Now , not yesterday or tomorrow . only Presence can undo the
past in you and thus transform your state of consciousness. What is spiritual realization? The belief that you are spirit? No, that's a
thought. A little closer to the truth than the thought that believes you are
who your birth certificate says you are, but still a thought. Spiritual
realization is to see clearly that what I perceive, experience, think, or feel
is ultimately not who I am, that I cannot find myself in all those things
that continuously pass away . The Buddha was probably the first human
being to see this clearly , and so anata (no self) became one of the central
points of his teaching. And when Jesus said, Deny thyself, what he
meant was : Negate (and thus undo) the illusion of self. If the self ego
were truly who I am, it would be absurd to deny it. What remains is the light of consciousness in which perceptions,
experiences, thoughts, and feelings come and go. That is Being, that is
the deeper , true I. When I know myself as that, whatever happens in my
life is no longer of absolute but only of relative importance. I honor it,
but it loses its absolute seriousness, its heaviness. The only thing thatultimately matters is this: Can I sense my essential Beingness, the I Am,
in the background of my life at all times? T o be more accurate, can I
sense the I Am that I Am at this moment? Can I sense my essential
identity as consciousness itself? Or am I losing myself in what happens,
losing myself in the mind, in the world?A New Earth
A L L  S T R U C T U R E S  A R E  U N S T A B L E
Whatever form it takes, the unconscious drive behind ego is to
strengthen the image of who I think I am, the phantom self that came
into existence when thought a great blessing as well as a great curse
began to take over and obscured the simple yet profound joy of
connectedness with Being, the Source, God. Whatever behavior the ego
manifests, the hidden motivating force is always the same: the need to
stand out, be special, be in control; the need for power , for attention, for
more. And, of course, the need to feel a sense of separation, that is to say ,
the need for opposition, enemies. The ego always wants something from other people or situations. There
is always a hidden agenda, always a sense of not enough yet, of
insuf ficiency and lack that needs to be filled. It uses people and
situations to get what it wants, and even when it succeeds, it is never
satisfied for long. Often it is thwarted in its aims, and for the most part
the gap between I want and what is becomes a constant source of upset
and anguish. the famous and now classic pop song, (I Can't Get No)
Satisfaction, is the song of the ego. The underlying emotion that governs
all the activity of the ego is fear . The fear of being nobody , the fear of
nonexistence, the fear of death. All its activities are ultimately designed
to eliminate this fear , but the most the ego can ever do is to cover it up
temporarily with an intimate relationship, a new possession, or winning
at this or that. Illusion will never satisfy you. Only the truth of who you
are, if realized, will set you free. Why fear? Because the ego arises by identification with form, and deep
down it knows that no forms are permanent, that they are all fleeting. So
there is always a sense of insecurity around the ego even if on the outside
it appears confident. As I was walking with a friend through a beautiful nature reserve near
Malibu in California, we came upon the ruins of what had been once a
country house, destroyed by a fire several decades ago. As weapproached the property , long over grown with trees and all kinds of
magnificent plants, there was a sign by the side of the trail put there by
the park authorities. It read: DANGER. ALL STRUCTURES ARE
UNST ABLE. I said to my friend, That's a profound sutra [sacred
scripture]. And we stood there in awe. Once you realize and accept that
all structures (forms ) are unstable , even the seemingly solid material
ones, peace arises within you. This is
because the recognition of the impermanence of all forms awakens you
to the dimension of the formless within yourself, that which is beyond
death. Jesus called it eternal life.A New Earth
T H E  E G O ' S  N E E D  T O  F E E L  S U P E R I O R
There are many subtle but easily overlooked forms of ego that you may
observe in other people and, more important, in yourself. Remember:
The moment you become aware of the go in yourself, that emer ging
awareness is who you are beyond ego, the deeper I. The recognition of
the false is already the arising of the real. For example, you are about to tell someone the news of what happened. Guess what? Y ou don't know yet? Let me tell you. If you are alert
enough, present enough, you may be able to detect a momentary sense of
satisfaction within yourself just before imparting the news, even if it is
bad news. It is due to the fact that for a brief moment there is, in the eyes
of the ego, an imbalance in your favor between you and the other person. For that brief moment, you know more than the other . The satisfaction
that you feel is of the ego, and it is derived from feeling a stronger sense
of self relative to the other person. Even if he or she is the president or
the pope, you feel superior in that moment because you know more. Many people are addicted to gossiping partly for this reason. In addition,
gossiping often carries an element of malicious criticism and judgment
of others, and so it also strengthens the ego through the implied but
imagined moral superiority that is there whenever you apply a negative
judgment to anyone. If someone has more, knows more, or can do more than I, the ego feels
threatened because the feeling of less diminishes its imagined sense of
self relative to the other . It may then try to restore itself by somehow
diminishing, criticizing, or belittling the value of the other person's
possessions, knowledge, or abilities. Or the ego may shift its strategy ,
and instead of competing with the other person, it will enhance itself by
association with that person, if he or she is important in the eyes of
others.A New Earth
E G O  A N D  F A M E
The well?known phenomenon of name dropping, the casual mention of
who you know , is part of the ego's strategy of gaining a superior identity
in the eyes of others and therefore in its own eyes through association
with
someone important. The bane of being famous in this world is that who
you are becomes totally obscured by a collective mental image. Most
people you meet want to enhance their identity the mental image of who
they are through association with you. They themselves may not know
that they are not interested in you at all but only in strengthening their
ultimately fictitious sense of self. They believe that through you they can
be more. They are looking to complete themselves through you, or rather
through the mental image they have of you as a famous person, a lar ger? than?life collective conceptual identity . The absurd over?valuation of fame is just one of the many
manifestations of egoic madness in our world. Some famous people fall
into the same error and identify with the collective fiction, the image
people and the media have created of them, and they begin to actually
see themselves as superior to ordinary mortals. As a result, they become
more and more alienated from themselves and others, more and more
unhappy , more and more dependent on their continuing popularity . Surrounded only by people who feed their inflated self?image, they
become incapable of genuine relationships. Albert Einstein, who was admired as almost superhuman and whose fate
it was to become one of the most famous people on the planet, never
identified with the image the collective mind had created of him. He
remained humble, egoless. In fact, he spoke of a grotesque contradiction
between what people consider to be my achievements and abilities and
the reality of who I am and what I am capable of. This is why it is hard for a famous person to be in a genuine relationship
with others. A genuine relationship is one that is not dominated by theego with its image?making and self?seeking. In a genuine relationship,
there is an outward flow of open, alert attention toward the other person
in which there is no wanting whatsoever . That alert attention is Presence. It is the prerequisite of any authentic relationship. The ego always either
wants something, or if it believes there is nothing to get from the other , it
is in a state of utter indif ference: It doesn't care about you. And so, the
three predominant states of egoic relationship are: wanting, thwarted
wanting (anger , resentment, blaming, complaining), and indif ference.C H A P T E R  F O U R  R O L E ? P L A Y I N G :  T H E
M A N Y  F A C E S  O F  T H E  E G O
An ego that wants something from another and what ego doesn't will
usually play some kind of role to get its needs met, be they material gain,
a sense of power , superiority , or specialness, or some kind of
gratification, be it physical or psychological. Usually people are
completely unaware of the roles they play . They are those roles. Some
roles are subtle; others are blatantly obvious, except to the person
playing it. Some roles are designed simply to get attention from others. The ego thrives on others' attention, which is after all a form of psychic
ener gy . The ego doesn't know that the source of all ener gy is within you,
so it seeks it outside. It is not the formless attention which is Presence
that the ego seeks, but attention in some form, such as recognition,
praise, admiration, or just to be noticed in some way , to have its
existence acknowledged. A shy person who is afraid of the attention of others is not free of ego,
but has an ambivalent ego that both wants and fears attention from
others. The fear is that the attention may take the form of disapproval or
criticism, that is to say , something that diminishes the sense of self rather
than enhances it. So the shy person's fear of attention is greater than his
or her need of attention. Shyness often goes with a self?concept that is
predominantly negative, the belief of being inadequate. Any conceptual
sense of self seeing myself as this or that ? is ego, whether
predominantly positive (I am the greatest) or negative (I am no good). Behind every positive self?concept is the hidden fear of not being good
enough. Behind every negative self?concept its the hidden desire of
being the greatest or better than others. Behind the confident ego's
feeling of and continuing need for superiority is the unconscious fear of
inferiority . Conversely , the shy , inadequate ego that feels inferior has a
strong hidden desire for superiority . Many people fluctuate between
feelings of inferiority and superiority , depending on situations or the
people they come into contact with. All you
need to know and observe in yourself is this: whenever you feel superior
or inferior to anyone, that's the ego in you.A New Earth
V I L L A I N ,  V I C T I M ,  L O V E R
Some egos, if they cannot get praise or admiration, will settle for other
forms of attention and play roles to elicit them. If they cannot get
positive attention, they may seek negative attention instead, for example,
by provoking a negative reaction in someone else. Some children already
do that too. They misbehave to get attention. The playing of negative
roles becomes particularly pronounced whenever the ego is magnified by
an active pain?body , that is to say , emotional pain from the past that
wants to renew itself through experiencing more pain. Some egos
perpetrate crimes in their search for fame. They seek attention through
notoriety and other people's condemnation. Please tell me that I exist,
that I am not insignificant, they seem to say . Such pathological forms of
ego are only more extreme versions of normal egos. A very common role is the one of victim, and the form of attention it
seeks is sympathy or pity or others' interest in my problems, me and my
story . Seeing oneself as a victim is an element in many egoic patterns,
such as complaining, being of fended, outraged, and so on. Of course,
once I am identified with a story in which I assigned myself the role of
victim, I don't want it to end, and so, as every therapist knows, the ego
does not want an end to its problems because they are part of its identity . If no one will listen to my sad story , I can tell it to myself in my head,
over and over , and feel sorry for myself, sand so have an identity as
someone who is being treated unfairly by life or other people, fate or
God. It gives definition to my self?image, makes me into someone, and
that is all that matters to the ego. In the early stages of many so?called romantic relationships, role? playing is quite common in order to attract and keep whoever is
perceived by the ego as the one who is going to make me happy , make
me feel special, and fulfill all my needs. I'll play who you want me to be,
and you'll play who I want you to be. That's the unspoken and
unconscious agreement. However , role?playing is hard work, and so
those roles cannot be sustainedindefinitely , especially once you start living together . When those roles
slip, what do you see? Unfortunately , in most cases, not yet the true
essence of that being, but that which overs up the true essence: the raw
ego divested of its roles, with its pain?body , and its thwarted wanting
which now turns into anger , most likely directed at the spouse or partner
for having failed to remove the underlying fear and sense of lack that is
an intrinsic part of the egoic sense of self. What is commonly called falling in love is in most cases and
intensification of egoic wanting and needing. Y ou become addicted to
another person, or rather to your image of that person. It has nothing to
do with true love, which contains no wanting whatsoever . The Spanish
language is the most honest in regard to conventional notions of love: T e
quiero means I want you as well as I love you. The other expression for I
love you, te amo, which does not have this ambiguity , is rarely used
perhaps because true love is just as rare.A New Earth
L E T T I N G  G O  O F  S E L F ? D E F I N I T I O N S
As tribal cultures developed into the ancient civilizations, certain
functions began to be allotted to certain people: ruler , priest or priestess,
warrior , farmer , merchant, craftsman, laborer , and so on. A class system
developed. Y our function, which in most cases you were born into,
determined your identity , determined who you were in the eyes of others,
as well as in your own eyes. Y our function became a role, but it wasn't
recognized as a role: It was who you were, or thought you were. Only
rare beings at the time, such as the Buddha or Jesus, saw the ultimate
irrelevance of caste or social class, recognized it as identification with
form and saw that such identification with the conditioned and the
temporal obscured the light of the unconditioned and eternal that shines
in each human being. In our contemporary world, the social structures are less rigid, less
clearly defined than they used to be. Although most people are, of
course, still conditioned by their environment, they are no longer
automatically assigned a function and with it an identity . in fact, in the
modern world, more and more people are confused as to where they fit
in, what their purpose is, and even who they are. I usually congratulate people when they tell me, I don't know who I am
anymore. Then they look perplexed and ask, Are you saying it is a good
thing to be confused? I ask them to investigate. What does it mean to be
confused? I don't know is not confusion. Confusion is: I don't know , but I
should know or I don't know , but I need to know . is it possible to let go
of the belief that you should or need to know who you are? In other
words, can you cease looking to conceptual definitions to give you a
sense of self? Can you cease looking to thought for an identity? When
you let go of the belief that you should or need to know who you are,
what happens to confusion? Suddenly it is gone. When you fully accept
that you don't know , you actually enter a state of peace and clarity that is
closer to who you truly are than thought could ever be. Defining yourself
through thought is limiting yourself.A New Earth
P R E ? E S T A B L I S H E D  R O L E S
Of course dif ferent people fulfill dif ferent functions in this world. It
cannot be otherwise. As far as intellectual or physical abilities are
concerned knowledge, skills, talents, and ener gy levels human beings
dif fer widely . What really matters is not what function you fulfill in this
world, but whether you identify with your function to such an extent that
it takes you over and becomes a role that you play . When you play roles,
you are unconscious. When you catch yourself playing a role, that
recognition creates a space between you and the role. It is the beginning
of freedom from the role. When you are completely identified with a
role, you confuse a pattern of behavior with who you are, and you take
yourself very seriously . Y ou also automatically assign roles to others that
corresponding to yours. For example, when you visit doctors who are
totally identified with their role, to them you will not be a human being
but a patient or a case history . Although the social structures in the contemporary world are less rigid
than in ancient cultures, there are still many pre?established functions or
roles that people readily identify with and which thus become part of the
ego. This causes human interactions to become inauthentic,
dehumanized, alienating. Those pre?established roles may give you a
somewhat comforting sense of identity , but ultimately , you lose yourself
in them. The functions people have in hierarchical or ganizations, such as
the military , the church, a government institution, or lar ge corporation,
easily lend themselves to
becoming role identities. Authentic human interactions become
impossible when you lose yourself in a role. Some pre?established roles we could call social archetypes. T o mention
just a few: the middle?class housewife (not as prevalent as it used to be,
but still widespread); the tough macho male; the female seductress; the
nonconformist artist or performer; a person of culture (a role quite
common in Europe) who displays a knowledge of literature, fine art, andmusic in the same way as others might display an expensive dress or car . And then there the universal role of adult. When you play that role, you
take yourself and life very seriously . Spontaneity , lightheartedness, and
joy are not part of that role. The hippie movement that originated on the W est Coast of the United
States in the 1960's and then spread throughout the W estern world came
out of many young people's rejection of social archetypes, of roles, of
pre? established patterns of behavior as well as egoically based social
and economic structures. They refused to play the roles their parents and
society wanted to impose on them. Significantly , it coincided with the
horrors of the V ietnam W ar , in which more than 57,000 young
Americans and 3 million V ietnamese died and through which the
insanity of the system and the underlying mind?set was exposed for all to
see. Whereas in the 1950s, most Americans were still extremely
conformist in thought and behavior , in the 1960s, millions of people
began to withdraw their identification with a collective conceptual
identity because the insanity of the collective was so obvious. The hippie
movement represented a loosening of the hitherto rigid egoic structures
in the psyche of humanity . The movement itself degenerated and came to
an end, but it left behind an opening, and not just in those who were part
of the movement. This made it possible for ancient Eastern wisdom and
spirituality to move west and play an essential part in the awakening of
global consciousness.A New Earth
T E M P O R A R Y  R O L E S
If you are awake enough, aware enough, to be able to observe how you
interact with other people, you may detect subtle changes in your speech,
attitude, and behavior depending on the person you are interacting with. At first, it may be easier to observe this in others, then you may also
detect it in yourself. The way in which you speak to the chairman of the
company may
be dif ferent in subtle ways from how you speak to the janitor . How you
speak to a child may be dif ferent form how you speak to an adult. Why is
that? Y ou are playing roles. Y ou are not yourself, neither with the
chairman nor with the janitor or the child. When you walk into a store to
buy something, when you go to a restaurant, the bank, the post of fice,
you may find yourself slipping into pre?established social roles. Y ou
become a customer and speak and act as such. And you may be treated
by the salesperson or waiter , who is also playing a role, as a customer . A
range of conditioned patterns of behavior come into ef fect between two
human beings that determine the nature of the interaction. Instead of
human beings, conceptual mental images are interacting with each other . the more identified people are with their respective roles, the more
inauthentic the relationships become. Y ou have a mental image not only of who the other person is, but also of
who you are, especially in relation to the person you are interacting with. So you are not relating with that person oat all, but who you think you
are is relating to who you think the other person is and vice versa.
_OceanofPDF.com_A_New_Earth_-_Tolle_Eckhart.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        developing ego of
teenagers, some of whom are in a permanent state of negativity and
dissatisfaction. The physical needs for food, water, shelter, clothing, and basic comforts
could be easily met for all humans on the planet, were it not for the
imbalance of resources created by the insane and rapacious need for
more, the greed of the ego. It finds collective expression in the economic
structures of this world, such as the huge corporations, which are egoic
entities that compete with each other for more. Their only blind aim is
profit. They pursue that aim with absolute ruthlessness. Nature, animals,
people, even their own employees, are no more than digits on a balance
sheet, lifeless objects to be used, then discarded. The thought forms of me and mine, of more than, of I want, I need, I
must have, and of not enough pertain not to content but to the structure
of the ego. The content is interchangeable. As long as you don't
recognize those thought forms within yourself, as long as they remain
unconscious, you will believe in what they say; you will be condemned
to acting out those unconscious thoughts, condemned to seeking and not
finding because when those thought forms operate, no possession, place,
person, or condition will ever satisfy you. No content will satisfy you, as
long as the egoic structure remains in place. No matter what you have or
get,
you won't be happy. Y ou will always be looking for something else that
promises greater fulfillment, that promises to make your incomplete
sense of self complete and fill that sense of lack you feel within. A New Earth
I D E N T I F I C A T I O N  W I T H  T H E  B O D Y
Apart from objects, another basic form of identification is with my body. Firstly, the body is male or female, and so the sense of being a man or
woman takes up a significant part of most people's sense of self. Gender
becomes identity. Identification with gender is encouraged at an early
age, and it forces you into a role, into conditioned patterns of behavior
that af fect all aspects of your life, not just sexuality. It is a role many
people become completely trapped in, even more so in some of the
traditional societies than in W estern culture where identification with
gender is beginning to lessen somewhat. In some traditional cultures, the
worst fate a woman can have is to be unwed or barren, and for a man to
lack sexual potency and not be able to produce children. Life's
fulfillment is perceived to be fulfillment of one's gender identity. In the W est, it is the physical appearance of the body that contributes
greatly to the sense of who you think you are: its strength or weakness,
its perceived beauty or ugliness relative to others. For many people, their
sense of self. worth is intimately bound up with their physical strength,
good looks, fitness, and external appearance. many feel a diminished
sense of self. worth because they perceive their body as ugly or
imperfect. In some cases, the mental image or concept of my body is a complete
distortion of reality. A young woman may think of herself as overweight
and therefore starve herself when in fact she is quite thin. She cannot see
her body anymore. All she sees is the mental concept of her body, which
says I am fat or I will become fat. At the root of this condition lies
identification with the mind. As people have become more and more
mind. identified, which is the intensification of egoic dysfunction, there
has also been a dramatic increase in the incidence of anorexia in recent
decades. If the suf ferer could look at her body without the interfering
judgments of her mind or even recognize those judgments for what they
are instead of believing in them or better still, if she could feel her body
from within this would initiate her healing. Those who are identified with their good looks, physical strength, or
abilities experience suf fering when those attributes begin to fade and
disappear, as of course they will. Their very identity that was based on
them is then threatened with collapse. In either case, ugly or beautiful,
people derive a significant part of their identity, be it negative or
positive, from their body. T o be more precise, they derive their identity
from the I. thought that they erroneously attach to the mental image or
concept of their body, which after all is no more than a physical form
that shares the destiny of all forms. impermanence and ultimately decay. Equating the physical sense. perceived body that is destined to grow old,
wither, and die with I always leads to suf fering sooner or later. T o refrain
from identifying with the body doesn't mean that you neglect, despise, or
no longer care for it. If it is strong, beautiful, or vigorous, you can enjoy
and appreciate those attributes while they last. Y ou can also improve the
body's condition through right nutrition and exercise. If you don't' equate
the body with who you are, when beauty fades, vigor diminishes, or the
body becomes incapacitated, this will not af fect your sense of worth or
identity in any way. In fact, as the body begins to weaken, the formless
dimension, the light of consciousness, can shine more easily through the
fading form. It is not just people with good or near. perfect bodies who are likely to
equate it with who they are. Y ou can just as easily identify with a
problematic body and make the body's imperfection, illness, or disability
in to your identity. Y ou may then think and speak of yourself as a
suf ferer of this or that chronic illness or disability. Y ou receive a great
deal of attention from doctors and others who constantly confirm to you
your conceptual identity as a suf ferer or a patient. Y ou then
unconsciously cling to the illness because it has become the most
important part of who you perceive yourself to be. It has become another
thought form with which the ego can identify. Once the ego has found an
identity, it does not want to let go. Amazingly but not infrequently, the
ego in search of a stronger identity and can and does create illnesses in
order to strengthen itself through them. A New Earth
F E E L I N G  T H E  I N N E R  B O D Y
Although body. identification is one of the most basic forms of ego, the
good news is that it is also the one that you can most easily go beyond. This is done not by trying to convince yourself that you are not your
body,
but by shifting your attention from the external form of your body and
from thoughts about your body beautiful, ugly, strong, weak, too fat, too
thin to the feeling of aliveness inside it. No matter what your body's
appearance is on the outer level, beyond the outer form it is an intensely
alive ener gy field. If you are not familiar with inner body awareness, close your eyes for a
moment and find out if there is life inside your hands. Don't ask your
mind. It will say, I can't feel anything. Probably it will also say, Give me
something more interesting to think about. So instead of asking your
mind, go to the hands directly. By this I mean become aware of the
subtle feeling of aliveness inside them. It is there. Y ou just have to go
there with your attention to notice it. you may get a slight tingling
sensation at first, then a feeling of ener gy or aliveness. If you hold your
attention in your hands for a while, the sense of aliveness will intensify. Some people won't even have to close their eyes. They will be able to
feel their inner hands at the same times as they read this. Then go to your
feet, keep your attention there for a minute or so, and begin to feel your
hands and feet at the same time. Then incorporate other parts of the body
legs, arms, abdomen, chest, and so on into that feeling until you are
aware of the inner body as a global sense of aliveness. What I call the inner body isn't really the body anymore but life ener gy,
the bridge between form and formlessness. Make it a habit to feel the
inner body as often as you can. After a while, you won't need to close
your eyes anymore to feel it. For example, see if you can feel the inner
body whenever you listen to someone. It almost seems like a paradox:
When you are in touch with the inner body, you are not identified withyour body anymore, nor are you identified with your mind. This is to say,
you are no longer identified with form but moving away from form. identification toward formlessness, which we may also call Being. It is
your essence identity. Body awareness not only anchors you in the
present moment, it is a doorway out of the prison that is the ego. It also
strengthens the immune system and the body's ability to heal itself. A New Earth
F O R G E T F U L N E S S  O F  B E I N G
Ego is always identification with form, seeking yourself and thereby
losing yourself in some form. Forms are not just material objects and
physical bodies. More fundamental than the external forms things and
bodies are the thought forms that continuously arise in the field of
consciousness. They are ener gy formations, finer and less dense than
physical matter, but they are forms nonetheless. What you may be aware
of as a voice in your head the at never stops speaking is the stream of
incessant and compulsive thinking. When every thought absorbs your
attention completely, when you are so identified with the voice in your
head and the motions that accompany it that you lose yourself in every
thought and every emotion, then you are totally identified with form and
therefore in the grip of ego. Ego is a conglomeration of recurring
thought forms and conditioned mental. emotional patterns that are
invested with a sense of I, a sense of self. Ego arises when your sense of
Beingness, of I Am, which is formless consciousness, gets mixed up with
form. This is the meaning of identification. This is for getfulness of
Being, the primary error, the illusion of absolute separateness that turns
reality into a nightmare. A New Earth
F R O M  D E S C A R T E S'S  E R R O R  T O
S A R T R E'S  I N S I G H T
The seventeenth. century philosopher Descartes, regarded as the founder
of modern philosophy, gave expression to this primary error with his
famous dictum (which he saw as primary truth): I think, therefore I am. This was the answer he found to the question Is there anything I can
know with absolute certainty. He realized that the fact that he was
always thinking was beyond doubt, and so he equated thinking with
Being, that is to say, identity I am with thinking. Instead of the ultimate
truth, he had found the root of the ego, but he didn't know that. It took almost three hundred years before another famous philosopher
saw something in that statement that Descartes, as well as everybody
else, had overlooked. His name was Jean. Paul Sartre. He looked at
Descartes's statement I think, therefore I am very deeply and suddenly
realized, in his own words, The consciousness that says 'I am' is not the
consciousness that thinks. What did he mean by that. When you are
aware that you are thinking, that awareness is not part of thinking. It is a
dif ferent dimension of consciousness. And it is that awareness that says I
am. If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn't even know
you are thinking. Y ou would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he is
dreaming. Y ou would be as
identified with every thought as the dreamer is with every image in the
dream. Many people still live like that, like sleepwalkers, trapped in old
dysfunctional mind. sets that continuously re. create the same
nightmarish reality. When you know you are dreaming, you are awake
within the dream. Another dimension of consciousness has come in. The implication of Sartre's insight is profound, but he himself was still
too identified with thinking to realize the full significance of what he had
discovered: an emer ging new dimension of consciousness. A New Earth
T H E  P E A C E  T H A T  P A S S E S  A L L
U N D E R S T A N D I N G
There are many accounts of people who experienced that emer ging new
dimension of consciousness as a result of tragic loss at some point in
their lives. Some lost all of their possessions, others their children or
spouse, their social position, reputation, or physical abilities. In some
cases, through disaster or war, they lost all of these simultaneously and
found themselves with nothing. W e may call this a limit. situation. Whatever they had identified with, whatever gave them their sense of
self, had been taken away. Then suddenly and inexplicably, the anguish
or intense fear they initially felt gave way to a scared sense of Presence,
a deep peace and serenity and complete freedom from fear. This
phenomenon must have been familiar to St. Paul, who used the
expression the peace of God which passeth all understanding. It is indeed
a peace that doesn't seem to make sense, and the people who experienced
it asked themselves: In the face of this, how can it be that I feel such
peace. The answer is simple, once you realize what the ego is and how it works. When forms that you had identified with, that gave you your sense of
self, collapse or are taken away, it can lead to a collapse of the ego, since
ego is identification with form. When there is nothing to identify with
anymore, who are you. When forms around you die or death approaches,
your sense of Beingness, of I Am, is freed from its entanglement with
form: Spirit is released from its imprisonment in matter. Y ou realize your
essential identity as formless, as an all. pervasive Presence, of Being
prior to all forms, all identifications. Y ou realize your true identity as
consciousness itself, rather than what consciousness had identified with. That's the peace of God. The ultimate truth of who you are is not in I am
this or I am that, but I Am. Not everybody who experiences great loss also experiences this
awakening, this disidentification from form. Some immediately create a
strong mental image or thought form in which they see themselves as avictim, whether it be of circumstances, other people, an unjust fate, or
God. This thought form and the emotions it creates, such as anger,
resentment, self. pity, and so on, they strongly identify with, and it
immediately takes the place of all the other identifications that have
collapsed through the loss. In other words, the ego quickly finds a new
form. The fact that this new form is a deeply unhappy one doesn't
concern the ego too much, as long as it has an identity, good or bad. In
fact, this new ego will be more contracted, more rigid and impenetrable
than the old one. Whenever tragic loss occurs, you either resist or you yield. Some people
become bitter or deeply resentful; others become compassionate, wise,
and loving. Y ielding means inner acceptance of what is. Y ou are open to
life. Resistance is an inner contraction, a hardening of the shell of the
ego. Y ou are closed. Whatever action you take in a state of inner
resistance (which we could also call negativity) will create more outer
resistance, and the universe will not be on your side; life will not be
helpful. If the shutters are closed, the sunlight cannot come in. When you
yield internally, when you surrender, a new dimension of consciousness
opens up. If action is possible or necessary, your action will be in
alignment with the whole and supported by creative intelligence, the
unconditioned consciousness which in a state of inner openness you
become one with. Circumstances and people then become helpful,
cooperative. Coincidences happen. If no action is possible, you rest in
the peace and inner stillness that come with surrender. Y ou rest in God. C H A P T E R  T H R E E  T H E  C O R E  O F  E G O
Most people are so completely identified with the voice in the head the
incessant stream of involuntary and compulsive thinking and the
emotions that accompany it that we may describe them as being
possessed by their mind. As long as you are completely unaware of this
you take the thinker to be who you are. This is the egoic mind. W e call it
egoic because there is a sense of self, of I (ego), in every thought every
memory, every interpretation, opinion, viewpoint, reaction, emotion. This is unconsciousness, spiritually speaking. Y our thinking, the content
of your mind, is of course conditioned by the past: your upbringing,
culture, family background, and so on. The central core of all your mind
activity consists of certain repetitive and persistent thoughts, emotions,
and reactive patterns that you identify with most strongly. This entity is
the ego itself. In most cases, when you say I, it is the ego speaking, not you, as we have
seen. It consists of thought and emotion, of a bundle of memories you
identify with as me and my story, of habitual roles you play without
knowing it, of collective identifications such as nationality, religion,
race, social class, or political allegiance. It also contains personal
identifications, not only with possessions, but also with opinions,
external appearance, long. standing resentments, or concepts of yourself
as better than or not as good as others, as a success or failure. The content of the ego varies from person to person, bu in every ego the
same structure operates. In other words: Egos only dif fer on the surface. Deep down they are all the same. In what way are they the same. They
live on identification and separation. When you live through the mind. made self comprised of thought and emotion that is the ego, the basis for
your identity is precarious because thought and emotion are by their very
nature ephemeral, fleeting. So every ego is continuously struggling for
survival, trying to protect and enlar ge itself. T o uphold the I. thought, it
needs the opposite thought of the other. The conceptual I cannot survive
without the conceptual other. The others are most other when I see them
as my enemies. At one end of this scale of this unconscious egoic pattern
lies the egoic compulsive habit of faultfinding and complaining about
others. Jesus referred to it when he said, Why to do you see the speck
that is in yourbrother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye. At the
other end of the scale, there is physical violence between individuals and
warfare between nations. In the Bible, Jesus' question remains
unanswered, but the answer is, of course: Because when I criticize or
condemn another, it makes me feel bigger, superior. A New Earth
C O M P L A I N I N G  A N D  R E S E N T M E N T
Complaining is one of the ego's favorite strategies for strengthening
itself. Every complaint is a little story the mind makes up that you
completely believe in. Whether you complain aloud or only in thought
makes no dif ference. Some egos that perhaps don't have much else to
identify with easily survive on complaining alone. When you are in the
grip of such and ego, complaining, especially about other people, is
habitual and, of course, unconscious, which means you don't know what
you are doing. Applying negative mental labels to people, either to their
face or more commonly when you speak about them to others or even
just think about them, is often part of this pattern. Name. calling is the
crudest form of such labeling and of the ego's need to be right and
triumph over others: jerk, bastard, bitch. all definitive pronouncements
that you can't ar gue with. On the next level down on the scale of
unconsciousness, you have shouting and screaming, and not much below
that, physical violence. Resentment is the emotion that goes with complaining and the mental
labeling of people and adds even more ener gy to the ego. Resentment
means to feel bitter, indignant, aggrieved, or of fended. Y ou resent other
people's greed, their dishonesty, their lack of integrity, what they are
doing what they did in the past, what they said what they failed to do,
what they should for shouldn't have done. The ego loves it. Instead of
overlooking unconsciousness in others, you make it in to their identity. Who is doing that. The unconsciousness in you, the ego. Sometimes the
fault that you perceive in another isn't even there. It is a total
misinterpretation, a projection by a mind conditioned to see enemies and
to make itself right or superior. At other times, the fault may be theirs,
but by focusing on it, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, you
amplify it. And what you react to in another, you strengthen in yourself. Non. reaction to the ego in others is one of the most ef fective ways not
only of going beyond ego in yourself but also of dissolving the collective
human ego. But you can only be in a state of nonreaction if you canrecognize someone's behavior as coming from the ego, as being an
expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it's not
personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were. By not
reacting to the ego, you will often be able to bring out the sanity in
others, which is the unconditioned consciousness as opposed to the
conditioned. At times you may have to take practical steps to protect
yourself from deeply unconscious people. This you can do without
making them into enemies. Y our greatest protection, however, is being
conscious. Somebody becomes an enemy if you personalize the
unconsciousness that is the ego. Non reaction is not weakness but
strength. Another word for nonreaction is for giveness. T o for give is to
overlook, or rather to look through. Y ou look through the ego to the
sanity that is in every human being as his or her essence. The ego loves to complain and feel resentful not only abut other people
but also about situations. What you can do to a person, you can also do
to a situation: make it into an enemy. The implication is always: This
should not be happening; I don't want to be here; I don't want to be doing
this; I'm being treated unfairly. And the egos greatest enemy of all is, of
course, the present moment, which is to say, life itself. Complaining is not to be confused with informing someone of a mistake
or deficiency so that it can be put right. And to refrain from complaining
doesn't necessarily mean putting up with bad quality or behavior. There
is no ego in telling the waiter that your soup is cold and needs to be
heated up if you stick to the facts, which are always neutral. How dare
you serve me cold soup. That's complaining. There is a me here that
loves to feel personally of fended by the cold soup and is going to make
the most of it, a me that enjoys making someone wrong. The
complaining we are talking about is in the service of the ego, not of
change. Sometimes it becomes obvious that the ego doesn't really want
change so that it can go on complaining. See if you can catch, that is to say, notice, the voice in the head, perhaps
in the very moment it complains about something, and recognize it for
what it is: the voice of the ego, no more than a conditioned mind. pattern,
a thought. Whenever you notice that voice, you will also realize that you
are not the voice, but the one who is aware of it. In fact, you are the
awareness that is aware of the voice. In the background, there is theawareness. In the foreground, there is the voice, the thinker. In this way
you are becoming free of the ego, free of the unobserved mind. The
moment you become aware of the ego in you, it is strictly speaking no
longer the ego, but just an old, conditioned mind. pattern. Ego implies
unawareness. A wareness and ego cannot coexist. The old mind. pattern
or mental habit may still survive and reoccur for a while because it has
the momentum of thousands of years of collective human
unconsciousness behind it, but every time it is recognized, it is
weakened. A New Earth
R E A C T I V I T Y  A N D  G R I E V A N C E S
Whereas resentment is often the emotion that goes with complaining, it
may also be accompanied by a stronger emotion such as anger or some
other form of upset. In this way, it becomes more highly char ged
ener getically. Complaining then turns into reactivity, another of the ego's
ways of strengthening itself. There are many people who are always
waiting for the next thing to react against, to feel annoyed or disturbed
about and it never takes long before they find it. This is an outrage, they
say. How dare you. I resent this. They are addicted to upset and anger
as others are to a drug. Through reacting against this or that they assert
and strengthen their feeling of self. A long. standing resentment is called a grievance. T o carry a grievance is
to be in a permanent state of against, and that is why grievances
constitute a significant part of many people's ego. Collective grievances
can survive for centuries in the psyche of a nation or tribe and fuel a
never. ending cycle of violence. A grievance is a strong negative emotion connected to an event in the
sometimes distant past that is being kept alive by compulsive thinking,
by retelling the story in the head or out loud of what someone did to me
or what someone did to us. A grievance will also contaminate other areas
of your life. For example, while you think about and feel your grievance,
its negative emotional ener gy can distort your perception of an event that
is happening in the present or influence the way in which you speak or
behave
to ward someone in the present. One strong grievance is enough to
contaminate lar ge areas of your life and keep you in the grip of the ego. It requires honesty to see whether you still harbor grievances, whether
there is someone in your life you have not completely for given, an
enemy. If you do, become aware of the grievance both on the level of
thought as well as emotion, that is to say, be ware of the thoughts that
keep it alive, and feel the emotion that is the body's response to thosethoughts. Don't try to let go of the grievance. T rying to let go, to for give,
does not work. For giveness happens naturally when you see that it has
no purpose other than to strengthen a false sense of self, to keep the ego
in place. The seeing is freeing. Jesus' teaching to For give your enemies is
essentially about the undoing of one of the main egoic structures in the
human mind. The past has no power to stop you from being present now. Only your
grievance about the past can do that. And what is a grievance. The
baggage of old thought and emotion. A New Earth
B E I N G  R I G H T,  M A K I N G  W R O N G
Complaining as well as faultfinding and reactivity strengthen the ego's
sense of boundary and separateness on which tis survival depends. But
they also strengthen the ego in another way by giving it a feeling of
superiority on which it thrives. It may not be immediately apparent how
complaining, say, about a traf fic jam, about politicians, about the greedy
wealthy or the lazy unemployed, or your colleagues or ex. spouse, men
or women, can give you a sense of superiority. Here is why. When you
complain, by implication you are right and the person or situation you
complain about or react against is wrong. There is nothing that strengthens the ego more than being right. Being
right is identification with a mental position a perspective, an opinion, a
judgment, a story. For you to be right, of course, you need someone else
to be wrong, and so the ego loves to make wrong in order to be right. In
other words: you need to make others wrong in order to get a stronger
sense of who you are. Not only a person, but also a situation can be made
wrong through complaining and reactivity, which always implies that
this should not be happening. Being right places you in a position of
imagined moral
superiority in relation to the person or situation that is being judged and
found wanting. It is that sense of superiority the ego craves and through
which it enhances itself. A New Earth
I N  D E F E N C E  O F  A N  I L L U S I O N
Facts undoubtedly exist. If you say: Light travels faster than sound, and
someone else says the opposite is the case, you are obviously right, and
he is wrong. The simple observation that lightning precedes thunder
could confirm this. So not only are you right, but you know you are
right. Is there any ego involved in this. Possibly, but not necessarily. If
you are simply stating what you know to be true, the ego is not involved
at all, because there is no identification. Identification with what. W ith
mind and a mental position. Such identification, however, can easily
creep in. If you find yourself saying, Believe me, I know or Why do you
never believe me. then the ego has already crept in. It is hiding in the
little word me. A simple statement: Light is faster than sound, although
true, is now in service of illusion, of ego. It has become contaminated
with a false sense of I; it has become personalized, turned into a mental
position. The I feels diminished or of fended because somebody doesn't
believe what I said. Ego takes everything personally. Emotion arises, defensiveness, perhaps
even aggression. Are you defending the truth. No, the truth, in any case,
needs no defense. The light or sound does not care about what you or
anybody else thinks. Y ou are defending yourself, or rather the illusion of
yourself, the mind. made substitute. It would be even more accurate to
say that the illusion is defending itself. If even the simple and
straightforward realm of facts can lend itself to egoic distortion and
illusion, how much more so the less tangible realm of opinions,
viewpoints, and judgments, all of them thought forms that can easily
become infused with a sense of I. Every ego confuses opinions and viewpoints with facts. Furthermore, it
cannot tell the dif ferences between an event and its reaction to that event. Every ego is a master of selective perception and distorted interpretation. Only through awareness not through thinking can you dif ferentiate
between fact and opinion. Only through awareness are you able to see:
There is the situation and here is the anger I feel about it, and then realizethere are other ways of approaching the situation, other ways of seeing it
and dealing
with it. Only through awareness can you see th totality of the situation or
person instead of adopting one limited perspective. A New Earth
T R U T H :  R E L A T I V E  O R  A B S O L U T E. Beyond the realm of simple and verifiable facts, the certainty that I am
right and you are wrong is a dangerous thing in personal relationships as
well as in interactions between nations, tribes, religions, and so on. But if the belief I am right; you are wrong is one of the ways in which
the ego strengthens itself, if making yourself right and others wrong is a
mental dysfunction that perpetuates separation and conflict between
human beings, does that mean there is no such thing as right or wrong
behavior, action, or belief. And wouldn't that be the moral relativism that
some contemporary Christian teachings see as the great evil of our
times. The history of Christianity is, of course, a prime example of how the
belief that you are in sole possession of the truth, that is to say, right, can
corrupt your actions and behavior to the point of insanity. For centuries,
torturing and burning people alive if their opinion diver ged even in the
slightest from Church doctrine or narrow interpretations of scripture (the
T ruth) was considered right because the victims were wrong. They were
so wrong that they needed to be killed. The T ruth was considered more
important than human life. And what was the T ruth. A story you had to
believe in; which means, a bundle of thoughts. The one million people that mad dictator Pol Pot of Cambodia ordered
killed included everybody who wore glasses. Why. T o him, the Marxist
interpretation of history was the absolute truth, and according to his
version of it, those who wore glasses belonged to the educated glass, the
bour geoisie, the exploiters of the peasants. They needed to be eliminated
to make room for a new social order. His truth also was a bundle of
thoughts. The Catholic and other churches are actually correct when they identify
relativism, the belief that there is no absolute truth to guide human
behavior, as one of the evils of our times; but you won't find absolute
truth if you look for it where it cannot be found: in doctrines, ideologies,sets of rules, or stories. What do all of these have in common. They are
made up of thought. Thought can at best point to the truth, but it never is
the truth. That's why Buddhists say The finger pointing to the moon is
not the moon. All
religions are equally false and equally true, depending on how you use
them. Y ou can use them in the service of the ego, or you can use them in
the service of the T ruth. If you believe only your religion is the T ruth,
you are using it in the service of the ego. used in such a way, religion
becomes ideology and creates an illusory sense of superiority as well as
division and conflict between people. In the service of the T ruth,
religious teachings represent signposts or maps left behind by awakened
humans to assist you in spiritual awakening, that is to say, in becoming
free of identification with form. There is only one absolute T ruth, and all other truths emanate from it. When you find that T ruth, your actions will be in alignment with it. Human action can reflect the T ruth, or it can reflect illusion. Can the
T ruth be put into words. Y es, but the words are, of course, not it. They
only point to it. The T ruth is inseparable from who you are. Y es, you are the truth. If you
look for it elsewhere, you will be deceived every time. The very Being
that you are is T ruth. Jesus tried to convey that when he said, I am the
way and the truth and the life. These words uttered by Jesus are one of
the most powerful and direct pointers to the T ruth, if understood
correctly. If misinterpreted, however, they become a great obstacle. Jesus
speaks of the innermost I Am, the essence identity of every man and
woman, every life. form, in fact. He speaks of the life that you are. Some
Christian mystics have called it the Christ within; Buddhists call it your
Buddha nature; for Hindus, it is Atman, the indwelling God. When you
are in touch with that dimension within yourself and being in touch with
it is your natural state, not some miraculous achievement all your actions
and relationships will reflect the oneness with all life that you sense deep
within. This is love. Laws, commandments, rules, and regulations are
necessary for those who are cut of f from who they are, the T ruth within. They prevent the worst excesses of the ego, and often they don't even do
that. Love and do what you will, said St. Augustine. W ords cannot get
much closer to the T ruth than that. A New Earth
T H E  E G O  I S  N O T  P E R S O N A L
On a collective level, the mind. set W e are right and they are wrong is
particularly deeply entrenched in those parts of the world where conflict
between two nations, races, tribes, religions, or ideologies is long. standing, extreme, and endemic. Both sides of the conflict are equally
identified with
their own perspective, their own story, that is to say, identified with
thought. Both are equally incapable of seeing that another perspective,
another story, may exist and also be valid. Israeli writer Y. Halevi speaks
of the possibility of accommodating a competing narrative, but in many
parts of the world, people are not yet able or willing to do that. Both
sides believe themselves to be in possession of the truth. Both regard
themselves as victims and the other as evil, and because they have
conceptualized and thereby dehumanized the other as the enemy, they
can kill and inflict all kinds of violence on the other, even on children,
without feeling their humanity and suf fering. They become trapped in an
insane spiral of perpetration and retribution, action and reaction. Here it becomes obvious that the human ego in its collective aspect as us
against them is even more insane that n the me, the individual ego,
although the mechanism is the same. By far the greater part of violence
that humans have inflicted on each other is not the work of criminals or
the mentally derange, but of normal, respectable citizens in the service of
the collective ego. One can go far as to say that on this planet normal
equals insane. What is it that lies at the root of this insanity. Complete
identification with thought and emotion, that is to say, ego. Greed, selfishness, exploitation, cruelty, and violence are still all. pervasive on this planet. When you don't recognize them as individual
and collective manifestations of an underlying dysfunction or mental
illness, you fall into the error of personalizing them. Y ou construct a
conceptual identity for an individual or group, and you say: This is who
he is. This is who they are. When you confuse the ego that you perceivein others with their identity, it is the work of your own ego that uses this
misperception to strengthen itself through being right and therefore
superior, and through reacting with condemnation, indignation, and often
anger against the perceived enemy. All this is enormously satisfying to
the ego. It strengthens the sense of separation between yourself and the
other, whose otherness has become magnified to such an extent that you
can no longer feel your common humanity, nor the rootedness in the one
Life that you share with each human being, your common divinity. The particular egoic patterns that you react to most strongly in others and
misperceive as their identity tend to be the same patterns that are also in
you, but that you are unable or unwilling to detect within yourself. In
that
sense, you have much to learn from your enemies. What is it in them that
you find most upsetting, most disturbing. Their selfishness. Their
greed. Their need for power and control. Their insincerity, dishonesty,
propensity to violence, or whatever it may be. Anything that you resent
and strongly react to in another is also in you. But it is no more than a
form of ego, and as such, it is completely impersonal. It has nothing to
do with who that person is, nor has it anything to do with who you are. Only if you mistake it for who you are can observing it within you be
threatening to your sense of self. A New Earth
W A R  I S  A  M I N D. S E T
In certain cases, you may need to protect yourself or someone else from
being harmed by another, but beware of making it your mission to
eradicate evil, as you are likely to turn into the very thing you are
fighting against. Fighting unconsciousness will draw you into
unconsciousness yourself. Unconsciousness, dysfunctional egoic
behavior, can never be defeated by attacking it. Even if you defeat your
opponent, the unconsciousness will simply have moved into you, or the
opponent reappears in a new disguise. Whatever you fight, you
strengthen, and what you resist, persists. These days you frequently hear the expression the war against this or
that, and whenever I hear it, I know that it is condemned to failure. There
is the war against drugs, the war against crime, the war against terrorism,
the war against cancer, the war against poverty, and so on. For example,
despite the war against crime and drugs, there has been a dramatic
increase in crime and drug. related of fenses in the past twenty. five years. The prison population of the United States has gone up from just under
300,000 in 1980 to a staggering 2. 1 million in 2004. The war against
disease has given us, amongst other things, antibiotics. At first, they
were spectacularly successful, seemingly enabling us to win the war
against infectious diseases. Now many experts agree that the widespread
and indiscriminate use of antibiotics has created a time bomb and that
antibiotic. resistant strains of bacteria, so. called super bugs, will in all
likelihood bring about a reemer gence of those diseases and possibly
epidemics. According to the Journal of the American Medical
Association, medical treatment is the third. leading cause of death after
heart disease and cancer in the United States. Homeopathy and Chinese
medicine are two examples of possible alternative approaches to disease
that do not treat the illness as an enemy and therefore do not create new
diseases. W ar is a mind. set, and all action that comes out of such a mind. set will
either strengthen the enemy, the perceived evil, or, if the war is won, willcreate a new enemy, a new evil equal to and often worse than the one
that was defeated. There is a deep interrelatedness between your state of
consciousness and external reality. When you are in the grip of a mind. set such as war, your perceptions become extremely selective as well as
distorted. In other words, you will see only what you want to see and
then misinterpret it. Y ou can imagine what kind of action comes out of
such a delusional system. Or instead of imagining it, watch the news on
TV tonight. Recognize the ego for what it is: a collective dysfunction, the insanity of
the human mind. When you recognize it for what it is, you no longer
misperceive it as somebody's identity. Once you see the ego for what it
is, it becomes much easier to remain nonreactive toward it. you don't
take it personally anymore. there is no complaining, blaming, accusing,
or making wrong. Nobody is wrong. It is the ego in someone, that's all. Compassion arises when you recognize that all are suf fering from the
same sickness of the mind, some more acutely than others. Y ou do not
fuel the drama anymore that is part of all egoic relationships. What is its
fuel. Reactivity. The ego thrives on it. A New Earth
D O  Y O U  W A N T  P E A C E  O R  D R A M A. Y ou want peace. There is no one who does not want peace. Y et there is
something else in you that wants the drama, wants the conflict. Y ou may
not be able to feel it at this moment. Y ou may have to wait for a situation
or even just a thought that triggers a reaction in you: someone accusing
you of this or that, not acknowledging you, encroaching on your
territory, questioning the way you do things, an ar gument about money. Can you then feel the enormous sur ge of force moving through you, the
fear, perhaps being masked by anger or hostility. Can you hear your own
voice becoming harsh or shrill, or louder and a few octaves lower. Can
you be aware of your mind racing to defend its position, justify, attack,
blame. In other words, can you awaken at that moment of
unconsciousness. Can you feel that there is something in you that is at
war, something that feels threatened and wants to survive at all cost, that
needs the drama in order to assert its identity as the victorious character
within that theatrical production. Can you feel there is something in you
that would rather be right than at peace. A New Earth
B E Y O N D  E G O :  Y O U R  T R U E  I D E N T I T Y
When the ego is at war, know that it is no more than an illusion that is
fighting to survive. That illusion thinks it is you. It is not easy at first to
be there as the witnessing Presence, especially when the ego is in
survival mode or some emotional pattern from the past has become
activated, but once you have had a taste of it, you will grow in Presence
power, and the ego will lose its grip on you. And so a power comes into
your life that is far greater than the ego, greater than the mind. All that is
required to become free of the ego is to be aware of it, since awareness
and ego are incompatible. A wareness is the power that is concealed
within the present moment. This is why we may also call it Presence. The ultimate purpose of human existence, which is to say, your purpose
is to bring that power into this world. And this is also why becoming free
of the ego cannot be made into a goal to be attained at some point in the
future. Only Presence can free you of the ego, and you can only be
present Now, not yesterday or tomorrow. only Presence can undo the
past in you and thus transform your state of consciousness. What is spiritual realization. The belief that you are spirit. No, that's a
thought. A little closer to the truth than the thought that believes you are
who your birth certificate says you are, but still a thought. Spiritual
realization is to see clearly that what I perceive, experience, think, or feel
is ultimately not who I am, that I cannot find myself in all those things
that continuously pass away. The Buddha was probably the first human
being to see this clearly, and so anata (no self) became one of the central
points of his teaching. And when Jesus said, Deny thyself, what he
meant was : Negate (and thus undo) the illusion of self. If the self ego
were truly who I am, it would be absurd to deny it. What remains is the light of consciousness in which perceptions,
experiences, thoughts, and feelings come and go. That is Being, that is
the deeper, true I. When I know myself as that, whatever happens in my
life is no longer of absolute but only of relative importance. I honor it,
but it loses its absolute seriousness, its heaviness. The only thing thatultimately matters is this: Can I sense my essential Beingness, the I Am,
in the background of my life at all times. T o be more accurate, can I
sense the I Am that I Am at this moment. Can I sense my essential
identity as consciousness itself. Or am I losing myself in what happens,
losing myself in the mind, in the world. A New Earth
A L L  S T R U C T U R E S  A R E  U N S T A B L E
Whatever form it takes, the unconscious drive behind ego is to
strengthen the image of who I think I am, the phantom self that came
into existence when thought a great blessing as well as a great curse
began to take over and obscured the simple yet profound joy of
connectedness with Being, the Source, God. Whatever behavior the ego
manifests, the hidden motivating force is always the same: the need to
stand out, be special, be in control; the need for power, for attention, for
more. And, of course, the need to feel a sense of separation, that is to say,
the need for opposition, enemies. The ego always wants something from other people or situations. There
is always a hidden agenda, always a sense of not enough yet, of
insuf ficiency and lack that needs to be filled. It uses people and
situations to get what it wants, and even when it succeeds, it is never
satisfied for long. Often it is thwarted in its aims, and for the most part
the gap between I want and what is becomes a constant source of upset
and anguish. the famous and now classic pop song, (I Can't Get No)
Satisfaction, is the song of the ego. The underlying emotion that governs
all the activity of the ego is fear. The fear of being nobody, the fear of
nonexistence, the fear of death. All its activities are ultimately designed
to eliminate this fear, but the most the ego can ever do is to cover it up
temporarily with an intimate relationship, a new possession, or winning
at this or that. Illusion will never satisfy you. Only the truth of who you
are, if realized, will set you free. Why fear. Because the ego arises by identification with form, and deep
down it knows that no forms are permanent, that they are all fleeting. So
there is always a sense of insecurity around the ego even if on the outside
it appears confident. As I was walking with a friend through a beautiful nature reserve near
Malibu in California, we came upon the ruins of what had been once a
country house, destroyed by a fire several decades ago. As weapproached the property, long over grown with trees and all kinds of
magnificent plants, there was a sign by the side of the trail put there by
the park authorities. It read: DANGER. ALL STRUCTURES ARE
UNST ABLE. I said to my friend, That's a profound sutra [sacred
scripture]. And we stood there in awe. Once you realize and accept that
all structures (forms ) are unstable, even the seemingly solid material
ones, peace arises within you. This is
because the recognition of the impermanence of all forms awakens you
to the dimension of the formless within yourself, that which is beyond
death. Jesus called it eternal life. A New Earth
T H E  E G O'S  N E E D  T O  F E E L  S U P E R I O R
There are many subtle but easily overlooked forms of ego that you may
observe in other people and, more important, in yourself. Remember:
The moment you become aware of the go in yourself, that emer ging
awareness is who you are beyond ego, the deeper I. The recognition of
the false is already the arising of the real. For example, you are about to tell someone the news of what happened. Guess what. Y ou don't know yet. Let me tell you. If you are alert
enough, present enough, you may be able to detect a momentary sense of
satisfaction within yourself just before imparting the news, even if it is
bad news. It is due to the fact that for a brief moment there is, in the eyes
of the ego, an imbalance in your favor between you and the other person. For that brief moment, you know more than the other. The satisfaction
that you feel is of the ego, and it is derived from feeling a stronger sense
of self relative to the other person. Even if he or she is the president or
the pope, you feel superior in that moment because you know more. Many people are addicted to gossiping partly for this reason. In addition,
gossiping often carries an element of malicious criticism and judgment
of others, and so it also strengthens the ego through the implied but
imagined moral superiority that is there whenever you apply a negative
judgment to anyone. If someone has more, knows more, or can do more than I, the ego feels
threatened because the feeling of less diminishes its imagined sense of
self relative to the other. It may then try to restore itself by somehow
diminishing, criticizing, or belittling the value of the other person's
possessions, knowledge, or abilities. Or the ego may shift its strategy,
and instead of competing with the other person, it will enhance itself by
association with that person, if he or she is important in the eyes of
others. A New Earth
E G O  A N D  F A M E
The well. known phenomenon of name dropping, the casual mention of
who you know, is part of the ego's strategy of gaining a superior identity
in the eyes of others and therefore in its own eyes through association
with
someone important. The bane of being famous in this world is that who
you are becomes totally obscured by a collective mental image. Most
people you meet want to enhance their identity the mental image of who
they are through association with you. They themselves may not know
that they are not interested in you at all but only in strengthening their
ultimately fictitious sense of self. They believe that through you they can
be more. They are looking to complete themselves through you, or rather
through the mental image they have of you as a famous person, a lar ger. than. life collective conceptual identity. The absurd over. valuation of fame is just one of the many
manifestations of egoic madness in our world. Some famous people fall
into the same error and identify with the collective fiction, the image
people and the media have created of them, and they begin to actually
see themselves as superior to ordinary mortals. As a result, they become
more and more alienated from themselves and others, more and more
unhappy, more and more dependent on their continuing popularity. Surrounded only by people who feed their inflated self. image, they
become incapable of genuine relationships. Albert Einstein, who was admired as almost superhuman and whose fate
it was to become one of the most famous people on the planet, never
identified with the image the collective mind had created of him. He
remained humble, egoless. In fact, he spoke of a grotesque contradiction
between what people consider to be my achievements and abilities and
the reality of who I am and what I am capable of. This is why it is hard for a famous person to be in a genuine relationship
with others. A genuine relationship is one that is not dominated by theego with its image. making and self. seeking. In a genuine relationship,
there is an outward flow of open, alert attention toward the other person
in which there is no wanting whatsoever. That alert attention is Presence. It is the prerequisite of any authentic relationship. The ego always either
wants something, or if it believes there is nothing to get from the other, it
is in a state of utter indif ference: It doesn't care about you. And so, the
three predominant states of egoic relationship are: wanting, thwarted
wanting (anger, resentment, blaming, complaining), and indif ference. C H A P T E R  F O U R  R O L E. P L A Y I N G :  T H E
M A N Y  F A C E S  O F  T H E  E G O
An ego that wants something from another and what ego doesn't will
usually play some kind of role to get its needs met, be they material gain,
a sense of power, superiority, or specialness, or some kind of
gratification, be it physical or psychological. Usually people are
completely unaware of the roles they play. They are those roles. Some
roles are subtle; others are blatantly obvious, except to the person
playing it. Some roles are designed simply to get attention from others. The ego thrives on others' attention, which is after all a form of psychic
ener gy. The ego doesn't know that the source of all ener gy is within you,
so it seeks it outside. It is not the formless attention which is Presence
that the ego seeks, but attention in some form, such as recognition,
praise, admiration, or just to be noticed in some way, to have its
existence acknowledged. A shy person who is afraid of the attention of others is not free of ego,
but has an ambivalent ego that both wants and fears attention from
others. The fear is that the attention may take the form of disapproval or
criticism, that is to say, something that diminishes the sense of self rather
than enhances it. So the shy person's fear of attention is greater than his
or her need of attention. Shyness often goes with a self. concept that is
predominantly negative, the belief of being inadequate. Any conceptual
sense of self seeing myself as this or that. is ego, whether
predominantly positive (I am the greatest) or negative (I am no good). Behind every positive self. concept is the hidden fear of not being good
enough. Behind every negative self. concept its the hidden desire of
being the greatest or better than others. Behind the confident ego's
feeling of and continuing need for superiority is the unconscious fear of
inferiority. Conversely, the shy, inadequate ego that feels inferior has a
strong hidden desire for superiority. Many people fluctuate between
feelings of inferiority and superiority, depending on situations or the
people they come into contact with. All you
need to know and observe in yourself is this: whenever you feel superior
or inferior to anyone, that's the ego in you. A New Earth
V I L L A I N,  V I C T I M,  L O V E R
Some egos, if they cannot get praise or admiration, will settle for other
forms of attention and play roles to elicit them. If they cannot get
positive attention, they may seek negative attention instead, for example,
by provoking a negative reaction in someone else. Some children already
do that too. They misbehave to get attention. The playing of negative
roles becomes particularly pronounced whenever the ego is magnified by
an active pain. body, that is to say, emotional pain from the past that
wants to renew itself through experiencing more pain. Some egos
perpetrate crimes in their search for fame. They seek attention through
notoriety and other people's condemnation. Please tell me that I exist,
that I am not insignificant, they seem to say. Such pathological forms of
ego are only more extreme versions of normal egos. A very common role is the one of victim, and the form of attention it
seeks is sympathy or pity or others' interest in my problems, me and my
story. Seeing oneself as a victim is an element in many egoic patterns,
such as complaining, being of fended, outraged, and so on. Of course,
once I am identified with a story in which I assigned myself the role of
victim, I don't want it to end, and so, as every therapist knows, the ego
does not want an end to its problems because they are part of its identity. If no one will listen to my sad story, I can tell it to myself in my head,
over and over, and feel sorry for myself, sand so have an identity as
someone who is being treated unfairly by life or other people, fate or
God. It gives definition to my self. image, makes me into someone, and
that is all that matters to the ego. In the early stages of many so. called romantic relationships, role. playing is quite common in order to attract and keep whoever is
perceived by the ego as the one who is going to make me happy, make
me feel special, and fulfill all my needs. I'll play who you want me to be,
and you'll play who I want you to be. That's the unspoken and
unconscious agreement. However, role. playing is hard work, and so
those roles cannot be sustainedindefinitely, especially once you start living together. When those roles
slip, what do you see. Unfortunately, in most cases, not yet the true
essence of that being, but that which overs up the true essence: the raw
ego divested of its roles, with its pain. body, and its thwarted wanting
which now turns into anger, most likely directed at the spouse or partner
for having failed to remove the underlying fear and sense of lack that is
an intrinsic part of the egoic sense of self. What is commonly called falling in love is in most cases and
intensification of egoic wanting and needing. Y ou become addicted to
another person, or rather to your image of that person. It has nothing to
do with true love, which contains no wanting whatsoever. The Spanish
language is the most honest in regard to conventional notions of love: T e
quiero means I want you as well as I love you. The other expression for I
love you, te amo, which does not have this ambiguity, is rarely used
perhaps because true love is just as rare. A New Earth
L E T T I N G  G O  O F  S E L F. D E F I N I T I O N S
As tribal cultures developed into the ancient civilizations, certain
functions began to be allotted to certain people: ruler, priest or priestess,
warrior, farmer, merchant, craftsman, laborer, and so on. A class system
developed. Y our function, which in most cases you were born into,
determined your identity, determined who you were in the eyes of others,
as well as in your own eyes. Y our function became a role, but it wasn't
recognized as a role: It was who you were, or thought you were. Only
rare beings at the time, such as the Buddha or Jesus, saw the ultimate
irrelevance of caste or social class, recognized it as identification with
form and saw that such identification with the conditioned and the
temporal obscured the light of the unconditioned and eternal that shines
in each human being. In our contemporary world, the social structures are less rigid, less
clearly defined than they used to be. Although most people are, of
course, still conditioned by their environment, they are no longer
automatically assigned a function and with it an identity. in fact, in the
modern world, more and more people are confused as to where they fit
in, what their purpose is, and even who they are. I usually congratulate people when they tell me, I don't know who I am
anymore. Then they look perplexed and ask, Are you saying it is a good
thing to be confused. I ask them to investigate. What does it mean to be
confused. I don't know is not confusion. Confusion is: I don't know, but I
should know or I don't know, but I need to know. is it possible to let go
of the belief that you should or need to know who you are. In other
words, can you cease looking to conceptual definitions to give you a
sense of self. Can you cease looking to thought for an identity. When
you let go of the belief that you should or need to know who you are,
what happens to confusion. Suddenly it is gone. When you fully accept
that you don't know, you actually enter a state of peace and clarity that is
closer to who you truly are than thought could ever be. Defining yourself
through thought is limiting yourself. A New Earth
P R E. E S T A B L I S H E D  R O L E S
Of course dif ferent people fulfill dif ferent functions in this world. It
cannot be otherwise. As far as intellectual or physical abilities are
concerned knowledge, skills, talents, and ener gy levels human beings
dif fer widely. What really matters is not what function you fulfill in this
world, but whether you identify with your function to such an extent that
it takes you over and becomes a role that you play. When you play roles,
you are unconscious. When you catch yourself playing a role, that
recognition creates a space between you and the role. It is the beginning
of freedom from the role. When you are completely identified with a
role, you confuse a pattern of behavior with who you are, and you take
yourself very seriously. Y ou also automatically assign roles to others that
corresponding to yours. For example, when you visit doctors who are
totally identified with their role, to them you will not be a human being
but a patient or a case history. Although the social structures in the contemporary world are less rigid
than in ancient cultures, there are still many pre. established functions or
roles that people readily identify with and which thus become part of the
ego. This causes human interactions to become inauthentic,
dehumanized, alienating. Those pre. established roles may give you a
somewhat comforting sense of identity, but ultimately, you lose yourself
in them. The functions people have in hierarchical or ganizations, such as
the military, the church, a government institution, or lar ge corporation,
easily lend themselves to
becoming role identities. Authentic human interactions become
impossible when you lose yourself in a role. Some pre. established roles we could call social archetypes. T o mention
just a few: the middle. class housewife (not as prevalent as it used to be,
but still widespread); the tough macho male; the female seductress; the
nonconformist artist or performer; a person of culture (a role quite
common in Europe) who displays a knowledge of literature, fine art, andmusic in the same way as others might display an expensive dress or car. And then there the universal role of adult. When you play that role, you
take yourself and life very seriously. Spontaneity, lightheartedness, and
joy are not part of that role. The hippie movement that originated on the W est Coast of the United
States in the 1960's and then spread throughout the W estern world came
out of many young people's rejection of social archetypes, of roles, of
pre. established patterns of behavior as well as egoically based social
and economic structures. They refused to play the roles their parents and
society wanted to impose on them. Significantly, it coincided with the
horrors of the V ietnam W ar, in which more than 57,000 young
Americans and 3 million V ietnamese died and through which the
insanity of the system and the underlying mind. set was exposed for all to
see. Whereas in the 1950s, most Americans were still extremely
conformist in thought and behavior, in the 1960s, millions of people
began to withdraw their identification with a collective conceptual
identity because the insanity of the collective was so obvious. The hippie
movement represented a loosening of the hitherto rigid egoic structures
in the psyche of humanity. The movement itself degenerated and came to
an end, but it left behind an opening, and not just in those who were part
of the movement. This made it possible for ancient Eastern wisdom and
spirituality to move west and play an essential part in the awakening of
global consciousness. A New Earth
T E M P O R A R Y  R O L E S
If you are awake enough, aware enough, to be able to observe how you
interact with other people, you may detect subtle changes in your speech,
attitude, and behavior depending on the person you are interacting with. At first, it may be easier to observe this in others, then you may also
detect it in yourself. The way in which you speak to the chairman of the
company may
be dif ferent in subtle ways from how you speak to the janitor. How you
speak to a child may be dif ferent form how you speak to an adult. Why is
that. Y ou are playing roles. Y ou are not yourself, neither with the
chairman nor with the janitor or the child. When you walk into a store to
buy something, when you go to a restaurant, the bank, the post of fice,
you may find yourself slipping into pre. established social roles. Y ou
become a customer and speak and act as such. And you may be treated
by the salesperson or waiter, who is also playing a role, as a customer. A
range of conditioned patterns of behavior come into ef fect between two
human beings that determine the nature of the interaction. Instead of
human beings, conceptual mental images are interacting with each other. the more identified people are with their respective roles, the more
inauthentic the relationships become. Y ou have a mental image not only of who the other person is, but also of
who you are, especially in relation to the person you are interacting with. So you are not relating with that person oat all, but who you think you
are is relating to who you think the other person is and vice versa. Section summary: 

This chapter explores various dimensions related to "Identification" - specifically,

- Developing teenage minds;
    *   Negative dissatisfaction/negativity

* Identifying/associative tendencies. It describes societal pressures shaping behaviors & conditioning habits;. (remaining sections)

Isolate key points summarised succinctly:


**Key Points Summary**

• **Body ID**: You're mistaken. Your Self-Worth stems NOT FROM YOUR PHYSICAL BODY. Realize Inner Aliveness. Identify w/differentiation –> Feel Hands → Intense Feeling/Energy


Feel Feet/Globular Awareness→ Expand Hand&Feet Connection →

Inner-body connection = Bridge Formless Conscious State



**Thought Patterns**
• Mind-made statements ("Me/I")= False Sense Identity. Realize Voice-in-the-head ≠ True SELF. Recognize Mental Images≈Unconditional Conscience. ## Key Takeaways:



These summaries help readers grasp crucial insights efficiently. References:  
[Your book title]: Eckhart Tolle. Title unknown/NewEarth(Author). ```
Here’s a summarized version maintaining specificity, avoiding repetition, highlighting critical elements :

Summary :
Regarding teenagers’ development (`summon`):
	+ Society influences choices/believes ‘negative /unsatisfactory’
	for self-image formation

Now regarding `New Age spirituality`, discussing:

Identi-fi-cati-on | Be-ing |
ID| BEING

Relevant portions focus discussion includes…

– Physical vs Internal Energy Field|
Internal Focus -> Greater Perception/
External Disconnection |

Aware-of-think-not-I-but-BEiNg|

Non-reactivity towards complaints/fault-finding/react-ion)|

Genuine connections ||


Note:- Identify your limitations; transcend boundaries. - Change perspectives,- Explore internal energies,- Strenghtten Immunity-Forgivene s|- Empower Relationships;- Trust Universal Power-Awarenes-s-. Be Present-moment-conscious-a-wake-aware-i-tio-n. ''
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The imbalance is caused by the "insane and rapacious need for more" driven by the ego.
According to the text, what is the primary source of imbalance in the world?
The author suggests shifting attention from the external form of the body to the feeling of aliveness within the body.
What is the author suggesting as an alternative to identifying with the body?
Complaining is a way for the ego to strengthen itself and maintain its sense of self.
What is the relationship between complaining and the ego?
The author is warning against making someone else's behavior or situation your enemy, as this perpetuates the ego's need for separation and conflict.
What is the author warning against in the context of relationships?
The author suggests recognizing and accepting the ego's influence, and then shifting your attention to the present moment and your true essence, which is beyond egoic thinking.
What is the author suggesting as a way to break free from the ego's influence?