Few weeks ago I started reading the book of Eckhart Tolle “A New Earth”. It is about the Ego and the present moment, the Now. What I like about Eckhart is that he uses very simple and suitable words for explanation. For example he uses the word Being for God, awakening, enlightenment, salvation, liberation and so on, because the word Being explains nothing and thus it is an open concept. It is impossible to form a mental image of it and nobody can claim exclusive possession of Being. Further he uses the words form and formless to describe the physical and the spiritual.

At the beginning of the book he describes the Ego. The Ego is a false sense of Self based on mental concepts. False sense of Self means that you are identifying yourself with something that is not you and the mental concepts are the way you make this identification - through thoughts. When you identify one thing with another, you are making them almost the same. Thus when you identify yourself with something, you blend your sense of Self with this thing and it becomes part of yourself.

So what? What is wrong with identification? If you identify yourself with something and you lose it, then you will suffer. For example if you identify yourself as a good looking person and at some point of time you are not that charming and your skin is getting older, you will suffer, because what you thought of yourself in the past as a good looking person, now does not seem to be true.

The Ego has content and structure. The content of the Ego is whatever you identify yourself and the structure is how the identification exists. For example you may identify yourself with things (my house, my ring, …), with your body (beautiful or ugly person), with your characteristics (great or shy person), with some roles (student, parent, teacher). The identification can happen through thoughts containing “me”, “mine”, “more than”, “I want”, “I need”, “not enough” and so on. Such thoughts are the structure of the Ego and they keep the identification alive. The content is interchangeable and no content can be satisfiable as long as the egoic structure remains.

In the book there are many good examples showing the suffering from different identifications: identification of a growing kid with his toys, of consumers with products by the advertising industry, of a woman with her ring, and more.

How can we become free of such identifications? Eckhart says that the first step is to be aware of the identification. When you are aware you should not try to resist it, because resistance means that you do not accept what is happening right now and you are against the life itself. But if you are aware and just feel the identification as it is, acknowledge it and do nothing and let it be for this moment, you are watching this identification and thus you are separating yourself from it. By creating this space between you and the content of the identification, it’s structure loses its power, you become less identified with the content and with time the identification will just drop away.

Eckhart Tolle and Oprah are doing a 10-week webinar/class on “A New Earth” starting on 3rd of March and ending on 5th of Mai. Every week they discuss one chapter from the book. You can watch it live every Monday night or download the webcast archives. The second week there were 800,000 users watching it live and 1,600,000 people have downloaded the first episode.

This is actually how I picked up the book. I was sceptical at first, because there were so many people talking about it in internet, but I decided to take a fast look at the book and decide for myself. The first chapter was ok, but the second chapter hit me with its description of the Ego. Then I watched the first episode of the webinar and I liked it. It was interesting to watch how Eckhart and Oprah communicate with one another. Oprah was giving many normal and important questions and Eckhart explained them good. Also there were people who joined the webinar live through Skype or were giving questions from their computers. There was even a thirteen-year-old girl who spoke with Eckhart and it is amazing that so young people are interested in such topics.

I’m happy about this book, because it gave me some good knowledge about the ego and the present moment and would recommend it to people, who want to learn more about them. Also the webinar would be a great guide to reading the book.

Here is one quote from the book:

How spiritual you are has nothing to do with what you believe, but everything to do with your state of consciousness.