Why Your Ego Needs An Enemy | Eckhart Tolle

Everybody is longing to be free of the self, but they don't know that consciously. They want that freedom, but they seeking it where it ultimately cannot be found. The ego needs to be. It needs its enemies. The ego needs opposition. The ego needs the other. The ego is the false self. The ego is the surface self. When you are completely identified with it, when you are not completely identified with it, the surface self, the personality, all the things that make up the personality. When you are not completely, completely identified with. I wouldn't call it the ego anymore. Then it's simply another word we could use. It's your form identity as opposed to your essence identity, two more terms meaning the same thing. So there's the ego. That is your form identity when you're completely identified with it. In other words, every thought that comes into your mind, you're in. It takes you over. Every emotion takes you over. You are the emotion, you are the thought. Complete unconsciousness, spiritually speaking, even though you might look extremely alive in your madness, but spiritually speaking, unconscious. And so when you become conscious of your surface identity, the personality, then there's also. There's a presence behind it. So you're not lost in it anymore. So that's the. That's the difference. It no longer. It loses also the worst, initially the worst aspects of its insanity, of its need to create problems where there really aren't any, such as worrying, which is the need, the tendency, the pull into overthinking and useless thinking and destructive thinking. In the middle of the night, when you can't sleep, worry arises, what we call worry, and you're completely lost in it. That's the unconscious state. But the ego loves that. It doesn't want an end to it because it is that and the ego isn't. Actually, we talk about the ego as if it were something. And in a way it is. But really it's just a form of an unconscious mind pattern. But it appears like an entity when it's right there. And so as you become conscious of your personality, all the things, all your reactive patterns, then they don't take you over anymore. You can still feel them to some extent. They might still happen. Let's say you have a political discussion at lunch table or dinner table here, somebody did not vote for the same guy that you voted for. Oh my God. And then they start talking. And then do you notice your reaction, your mental, emotional. And are you going to get taken over by your reaction and explain the truth? Or you. Or perhaps you say, let's not talk about it. Being there As a witness of your inner states of reactions, reactive patterns in a discussion. The need to be right is very strong in the ego. The ego needs to be right. The. The need of the ego to have some kind of enemy. Because without the enemy it cannot sustain its ultimately fictitious sense of identity. So it needs the other in order to peel itself more strongly. So you can easily. The more you criticize other people, complain about other people, then you can make them more other, that the ego loves that. And then gradually it turns out that you're the only person who is right in this world. Or you have a little group of people, you belong to this group. And then it becomes a collective ego that we are that in group, the group that is in possession of the truth. All the others are not. They are the outsiders, the enemy. They are out there. And of course, in religious, sometimes it's a religious thing. It could be a political thing, it could be a cultural thing, it could be a racial thing, could be all kinds of things. And in religious terms, it usually means that your group is the only one that's going to be saved. Only us. Nobody else is going to be saved. That's very satisfying to the ego. Wow. The ego feels really. It's like a drug. It gives you an enormous high. I mean, imagine if this were actually true. You are the only ones to be saved the entire planet. Or it can go even further. We are the only ones that represent the good. All the millions of others are evil. But the same is done in certain political movements like communism, Marxism, pronouncing an entire huge group of the population is ultimately bad, evil, and then you go ahead, kill them, and that's what they did. So these are the ego in its individual aspect and the ego in its collective aspects. The same characteristics. But if the ego, the individual ego, is crazy, the collective ego is even more crazy, infinitely more crazy and more dangerous than the individual ego. So the ego needs to have enemies. And often it's. So it could be. The enemies can be people, but the enemies of the ego can also be situations. Often it's human, other human being, that's a normal thing, but also situations that you dislike, you dislike. And there are many people who basically are in almost continuous state of dissatisfaction and not feeling that they're doing something. They don't really want to be where they are, they don't want to be doing what they're doing, but they're doing it anyway. And that's where they are. And they dislike where they are. They talk about how dreadful is the surroundings. Are, yes, and the people too. So you complain about where you are, what you're doing. That also is enemies. A place can be an enemy to the ego, a situation, circumstances. Whenever you are opposing internally the present moment, you have an argument, you're arguing with what is, that's the ego. In other words, it's transforming basically and ultimately is transforming the present moment into an enemy. And so if you go down to the basics, the ego habitually transforms the present moment into an enemy. It wants to be. I don't want to be here, I want to be there. So it cannot acknowledge the present moment, it cannot feel at one with what is, it's against it. And. So many people carry a deep seated mental emotional pattern that is, we could call it universal grievance. A universal grievance means you have a mind pattern that you carry a very heavy grievance mind pattern. And the next thing the ego does, it looks for reasons to feel, to explain. You are a walking grievance looking for a cause. And you find them very easily. And these days it's even easier than it used to be because you can find, just look at your computer screen, connect with all these platforms and then you can find, can really feel you're fighting a battle. Armchair warrior, you're sitting there and fighting your battles on the. I will tell him. You have no idea who you're talking to. It's just totally, totally abstract. You're sending out these abstractions. But the ego, it feeds the ego. If that's not insanity, I don't know what is. And do you change the world by attacking all these people that you don't know you're attacking? Nothing. You just contribute to the insanity. So the devices that we have invented in themselves, perhaps they are neutral, they tend to amplify the craziness. Also, although there are other aspects to the devices that could be very helpful. For example, you could go on YouTube and listen to a talk by Eckhart. So there are good things, many other good things too. You have the tool, but at the moment it looks like the negative aspect is stronger than the positive as far as the devices are concerned. So vigilance is important. Once there is a basic level of awareness in you, then you are able to access this vigilance that is part of the awareness. That vigilance means you know what's going on inside you. You're aware of your inner states. When the emotion arises, you're aware that there's an emotion. It might still make you say something, but it will not overpower you completely. You will still be there as a witness in the background. And you may find that certain situations make it harder for you to sustain presence when they arise. Certain types of drugs, for example, alcohol, if you indulge excessively, it will lower your state of consciousness. I'm not an absolutist. That's a word. So if you die, occasional glass of wine or a cool beer in hot weather, I do that occasionally. But to indulge in consumption of alcohol, you will notice that it lowers your degree of presence and then makes it impossible, while you're under the influence, to be really present. And then it can do either two things, basically, in its initial stages. In its initial stages, alcohol can reduce the amount of thinking that you do. So it gives you a taste of liberation from your mind temporarily. And so if that's the case, then it can make you feel better. And that's why people drink, because after a few drinks, they feel kind of liberated. And then they do silly things. They do things that might later, when a bit more consciousness has come back, they say, oh my, I did that. But you feel people. Some people start singing and feeling, and they laugh much more than they would otherwise do. And they feel. And other drugs too, can temper, right? Give you a taste of being free of the self, which otherwise. Otherwise you carry as a burden around with you. The personal self, completely identified with it, continuously tortured by your own mind. And then you take a few drinks. So I call that you fall below thinking. So it frees you from thinking, but you do not rise above thinking, which is where we are going. You fall below thinking, but it can give you a taste of. Everybody is longing to be free of the self, but they don't know that consciously. They want that freedom, but they are seeking it where it ultimately cannot be found. Now, another effect of drinking, indulging alcohol can be the opposite effect, which is also often the case. It can activate your pain body, and drinking activates your pain body. That means after a few drinks, you become very unpleasant, to put it mildly. You become aggressive. You still start looking for fights. Why? Because it has lowered your consciousness, which even in normal times was probably not that great. It has lowered the relatively little consciousness that you had that kept you going. And so you lose even that. And then the pain body, which most of you know, we haven't spoken about it yet, but most of you know what the pain body is. It's an accumulation of old emotion, of going back to childhood that still lives in you. Pain, often caused by pain suffered in childhood and perhaps Going back to past lifetimes if you want to. If you don't believe in past lifetimes, that's fine, you don't have to. So it's accumulated negative emotion from the past. It could be a lot of anger, fear, heaviness. It's like an entity. I talked yesterday about the thought. You could consider thought to be every thought, to be a little being, little energetic entity, and very much so. Also emotion. It's an energy form. And so negative emotions if they are not recognized. And a child needs to suppress negative emotion. That's the only way a child can deal with needs to keep it down. An adult could deal with it, but the child has to keep it down. But many people never develop into true adulthood. That's another story. Might go there some other time. So you have the child, all the old emotion of the child living in you. The pain body is an entity, so to speak, that needs to feed on more, the experience of more pain. And usually it comes through other people. If you can provoke a person to give you an emotional reaction of a negative kind, if you can make them angry, if you can start arguing with them, that's the pain body loves. The pain body partakes of the intelligence of your mind. So it has a kind of intelligence. It knows how to create a situation that will feed it, especially in relationships. It does that feeding each other's pain body. And so when you drink, then it lowers your consciousness. And then the pain body knows it can now do whatever it wants. It can take over your mind completely and you're in the grip of the deeply negative emotion. And often acts of violence are perpetrated when people are intoxicated and they are taken over by their pain body. So if you know that, if you say, well, I'm going to have just one glass of wine with my meal, that might be okay. But if you know from experience that after you have drunk one glass of wine already, that has lowered your consciousness a little so much that you will say, okay, why not one more, another one? And then, and then you, okay, well, and then your mind talks to you and says, you deserve. This is the only pleasure you have left. Go on.