Eckhart TolleNYT Bestselling author of the Power of Now

The Hidden Unease Behind the Ego | Eckhart Tolle

18 Sept 2026 · 1 min

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In this teaching excerpt, Eckhart Tolle explains that the ego emerges from a mental split—a sense of a separate self that the mind creates. He describes this egoic self as never truly at ease, maintaining a constant background feeling of unease that most people are unaware of because it is always present. Tolle uses the analogy of a humming refrigerator: when a noise persists for a long time, we stop noticing it, and only when it stops do we realize how constant it was. This illustrates why individuals often fail to recognize their own long‑standing mental states, including the subtle, ongoing discomfort generated by the ego.

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If you say, I don't like myself, the way I look, or how— what I behave, or what I do, or whatever, there's a split that has happened, which is like a dysfunction in your mind, and that's the ego arises. It's just— the Buddhists just call it the self, a sense of separate self that is an image in your mind, and it's, it's never at ease for very long. There's always a sense of unease in the background, and many humans don't even know that because the sense of unease is always there. And if something is always there, you don't know it's there. It's like you have a humming noise at home and your— let's say your fridge is making a noise and this goes on for an hour and suddenly it stops. And suddenly, wow, this humming noise was there for a long time. I didn't really know it anymore. So people cannot recognize their own states easily, especially if the state has been with you for very long.