The Silver Thread

July 27, 2024

Whenever you feel superior or inferior to anyone, that’s the ego in you. ~ Eckhart Tolle

The more I understand what the ego is, the harder it is to keep from treating it as an enemy, something I want no part of. But trying to vanquish ego is a quixotic battle, since getting angry and fighting it is just what the ego wants. Negative states strengthen it, so being angry at having an ego would cause its grimy little hands to rub with glee, like a troll anticipating unwary travelers approaching its bridge. 

It’s a paradox, one that I can begin to untangle only by noticing the ego and its dance of belligerence, and electing to sit out that waltz.

*****

Eckart Tolle in A New Earth states, “The ego itself is pathological.” The root of the word pathological is in the Greek pathos, which means suffering. Tolle continues:

“The ego in its blindness is incapable of seeing the suffering it inflicts on itself and on others. Unhappiness is an ego-created mental-emotional disease that has reached epidemic proportions…Negative states such as anger, anxiety, hatred, resentment, discontent, envy, jealousy, and so on, are not recognized as negative but as totally justified and are further misperceived not as self-created but as caused by someone else or some external factor…suffering or negativity is often misperceived by the ego as pleasure because up to a point the ego strengthens itself through it.”

We needn’t be helpless victims of our own ego state, however. Tolle notes, “So, whenever there is negativity in you, if you can be aware at that moment that there is something in you that takes pleasure in it or believes it has a useful purpose, you are becoming aware of the ego directly. The moment this happens, your identity has shifted from ego to awareness. This means the ego is shrinking and awareness is growing.”

*****

Perhaps a significant aspect of the Great Awakening is the homely act of self-observation. The grand feelings and exhilaration we imagine in 5D could owe their existence to the ability of humans to remind ourselves, minute by minute if need be: that ego is not my identity. I don’t need to act from that unconscious state of being. Defusing the power of the ego to negatively direct our behavior would surely be balm upon the world’s wounds.

String enough of those self-aware moments of clarity together, and our future selves begin to emerge, like a photograph in the developer tray. Ultimately, a razor-sharp sense of True Self is born.

I’m going to work diligently with my string of moments, threading each pearly grain of awareness onto the silvery thread that weaves through the tapestry of my soul.