"DID THE UNIVERSE MAKE A MISTAKE WITH THE EGO?"

Eckhart Tolle, the German-born Canadian spiritual teacher, tells in the following video, “Did the Universe Make a Mistake with the Ego?” that no, it is part of the human evolutionary process in discovering who we are, and through that knowledge, achieving inner peace:


Tolle tells about the evolution of the ego, how without it we once lived in harmony with nature, and when we began to think, speak, and through knowledge accomplish the things of civilization, we became dominated by the ego.

His video may best be explained in his telling of the Prodigal Son passage of the Bible in which the rich man’s son squandered his inheritance but then Jesus told him to “deny himself” and return to the father. In denying ourselves (understanding and managing our ego), we can return to the Father (God). The universe did not make a mistake with the ego, the ego is part of the journey to achieving inner peace.

This can be a very elusive concept about the ego, and it could help to know this background about Tolle:

He suffered suicidal depression for much of his life until he underwent, at age 29, an "inner transformation" in 1977. He describes what happened to him while living in London:

“I couldn’t live with myself any longer. And in this a question arose without an answer: who is the ‘I’ that cannot live with the self? What is the self? I felt drawn into a void! I didn’t know at the time that what really happened was the mind-made self, with its heaviness, its problems, that lives between the unsatisfying past and the fearful future, collapsed. It dissolved. The next morning I woke up and everything was so peaceful. The peace was there because there was no self. Just a sense of presence or ‘beingness,’ just observing and watching.”

Tolle recalls going out for a walk in London the next morning, and finding that “everything was miraculous, deeply peaceful. Even the traffic." The feeling continued, and he began to feel a strong underlying sense of peace in any situation. Tolle stopped studying for his doctorate, and for a period of about two years after this he spent much of his time sitting, “in a state of deep bliss," on park benches in Central London, "watching the world go by.” He stayed with friends, in a Buddhist monastery or otherwise slept outdoors in parks or meadows. His family thought him “irresponsible, even insane."

He then spent several years wandering and unemployed "in a state of deep bliss" before becoming a spiritual teacher. Later, he moved to North America where he began writing his first book, The Power of Now, which was published in 1999 which since then has been read by millions of people. The book is a guide to achieving spiritual enlightenment by living in the present moment.

In 2011 he was listed by the Watkins Review as being the most spiritually influencial person in the world, although he is of no religious denomination.

More free audios by Tolle are to be found on You Tube.