Beware, the ego is constantly at work

VITHAL C NADKARNI

WITH 500,000 copies sold over three years, Eckhart Tolle’s New Earth wasn’t scorching the bestseller charts the way his earlier Power of Now had. Then came Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement which created a publishing history of sorts: 3.5 million copies printed and shipped in just four weeks to feed the blistering demand for a book that exhorts readers to give up ‘ego-consciousness’ and live in the present. In his first new book in eight years, Tolle concedes that awakening to your life’s purpose may not be an easy endeavour at the best of times. But it helps when you travel light, when you “chuck de” all that inner baggage and identification with things, along with mental concepts, or addictions, says the German-born mystic. Again, this is easy to say, almost impossible to accomplish without the help of insightful action: for the wily ego is constantly at work, finding new ways to ensnare our mind in new yarns and escapades away from the ever-present now. Tolle’s book also delineates a new, universal demonology for the 21st century: accordingly, ‘hearing voices in the head’ is not only the prerogative of the possessed, and those damned with the label of being psychotic. Listen carefully and you’ll find a voice (or even a cacophony) whispering in the caverns of your mind. What is more distressing “most people are so completely identified with it — the incessant stream of involuntary and compulsive thinking and the emotions that accompany it — that we may describe these people as being possessed by their mind. As long as you are completely unaware of this, you take the thinker to be who you are,” Tolle explains. The ego thrives on comparisons, on combat, and on being right, not to forget judging others. But one can go beyond it by getting into the witness mode, what the Indian tradition calls sakshi bhava. One can then take appropriate action as the Zen teacher Kasan did. The monk had to preside over a funeral of a local dignitary. As he stood waiting for the VIPs to arrive, Kasan found he had sweaty palms. He stepped down on the next day, pleading inability to see the sameness of being in every human. He became the pupil of another master and returned eight years later, enlightened. Tolle ends with a paean to the spiritual practice of enthusiasm, which is not dependent on winlose mindsets. Instead, enthusiasm rides the wave of the present moment to “give out its own abundance.”