Did The Universe Make A Mistake With The Ego? with Eckhart Tolle

Hello.

So my question has to do with the ego. And so much of what is discussed and what you discuss is about the ego. And oftentimes it's some feels like it's characterized as the, the enemy or someone that we are fighting against or some type of connotation like that. And yet it seems like the intelligence of the universe probably didn't make a mistake with the ego. So just trying to reconcile those ideas.

Yes. Although from a certain perspective, the ego may look quite insane, from a higher perspective, it is no more than part of the evolutionary process of the species. It's a stage in the evolution. And as we are approaching the next stage in the evolution, we are beginning to see that the ego has completely outlived its usefulness. But it had its usefulness. And we are only now beginning to see that it is insane because we are approaching the next stage in human evolution. Before, nobody could see that the ego was insane, although, except the very rare, the great masters. The Buddha already said it's an illusion. Jesus said, deny thyself, which means recognize the unreality of the ego. But not many people understood what they said. They were kind of precursors of the next step. They were pointing to it before it actually became a true awakening on the planet. So from our present perspective, because we are at the end of one evolutionary stage, the ego looks totally absurd once you see what it is and how much havoc it has created. But from a higher perspective, it's part of the evolution of humanity without. There could be no enlightenment or awakening without it ultimately. So it's fine in your own life, you can see it, how you had to go through the ignorance in your own life. I mean, not ignorance in the sense of lack of education, but spiritual ignorance. Not knowing who you essentially are and making so many mistakes on the basis of the illusory ego identity. And you can see it now, and you had to go through it. There was once, most likely humanity once had not an ego yet. And that perhaps is captured in the myth which you find in many different cultures that didn't even have contact with each other. The myth of the Golden Age, when humans lived in harmony with each other and in harmony with nature and life was easy. And that myth points to probably to the fact that a long, long time ago, humans lived in one at one ment, in a sense of oneness with nature and the surroundings. And the ego hadn't developed yet. And that perhaps became later survived the memory of it survived as the myth of the golden age, which of course is expressed in The Old Testament as paradise. It's just one aspect of the myth of the golden age, when life was easy. And then something happened, the fall, whatever you want to call it, it happened. And then the ugliness came in. And that, of course, was the beginning of human ability to think, which at first was a miraculous thing. Thinking suddenly happened. Some anthropologists are telling us that, and I believe they're right. When thinking first began to happen in humans, humans were very surprised. And they thought that some God was talking to them in their head. And so because thoughts suddenly came, of course, part of that was like the development of language. And so language started to happen in people's heads. Who's talking? And then often. And they acted on it often when a thought came. And then they did kill this man, the enemy, the other tribe. They are the enemy. They're not human. That's what the voice is telling me. So the voice in the head, language internalized. That was a miracle. But it also made many things possible that would not have been possible without it. Knowledge arising, you can transmit knowledge. And so how? Civilization as we know it wouldn't happen without that. There's all kinds of transmission of knowledge, architecture, and then philosophy starts and whatever, all these things, conceptual knowledge arising, a miraculous thing, a strange thing. And then over the millennia, the voice became so all pervasive that it took over people's sense of identity. Whereas before, for a long time, probably after the arising of thinking, humans still had a sense of rootedness in being, the natural sense of rootedness in the depths of their being. And gradually over the millennia, they got drawn more and more into the thinking head mode. And then their whole sense of identity was no longer rooted in the depths of their being, but in the voice in the head. But it made many things possible. And now the next step in the evolution is a return to the pre egoic state with the added dimension of consciously knowing your connectedness with the one. Whereas before they were connected with the one without even knowing it. It was a natural state of connectedness. But as we return to the ego, go beyond ego, we now knowingly, we return to the one consciously. And that's the next stage. So it's not a regressive step. In some sense, we go back to the golden age, one could almost say, but knowing. And that's expressed, of course, in the ancient parable of what in the Bible is called the prodigal son. The son leaves his father's home, gives to the father, give me your inheritance, and the son goes abroad to a distant country, squanders all his wealth and becomes destitute. And then the message comes from the father. The father sends a messenger, come back home. Come back to me. And then the son begins to remember who he is. And then he comes back to the father's home, and, as the parable says, is loved more deeply than before. There's a deeper, there's an added once. First, you lose it, and you never really lose it completely. You can't. Otherwise you wouldn't even exist. But you lose it, and then you return. When you return to it, there is an added. There's a depth to it of knowing. And that's where we are destined to go. And so once we realize that, we are actually grateful to the ego, because it has been. It was part of the journey. Yeah.

Thank you very much.