THE EGO IS NOT PERSONAL - REFLECTION/OPEN DISCUSSION FOR THE GROUP
"When you confuse the ego that you perceive in others with their identity, it is the work of your own ego that uses this misperception to strengthen itself through by being right and therefore superior, and through reacting with condemnation, indignation, and often anger against the perceived enemy. All this is enormously satisfying to the ego. It strengthens the sense of separation between yourself and the other, whose "otherness" has become magnified to such an extent that you can no longer feel your common humanity, nor the rootedness in the one life that you share with each human being - your common divinity. The particular egoic patterns that you react to most strongly in others and misperceive as their identity, tend to be the same patterns that are also in you but that you are unable or unwilling to detect within yourself. In that sense, you have much to learn from your enemies. What is it in them that you find most upsetting, most disturbing? Their selfishness? Their greed? Their need for power and control? Their insincerity? Dishonesty? Propensity to violence? Or whatever it may be. Anything that you strongly resent and react to in another is also in you. But it is no more than a form of ego, and as such, it is completely impersonal. It has nothing to do with who that person is nor does it have anything to do with who you are. Only if you mistake it for who you are, can observing it within you be threatening to your sense of self." I eluded to this passage from "The Ego Is Not Personal" chapter from Eckhardt Tolle's "A New Earth" during today's Zoom call and wanted to create an open discussion here with the whole community squad, as I'm still processing these ideas - so above is verbatim the words from the book, so we can get a cleaner understanding without any distortion from interpretation. I fully understand the first part of this teaching—that what triggers us often reflects our own unhealed shadows. For example, feeling jealousy toward someone's lavish vacation posts might reveal our own abundance wounds, for a somewhat silly but honestly realistic example for many. Or a woman posting videos of creative and provocative dance may initially draw out comments from your mind like "what a slut", when really you're possibly just jealous that she is expressing herself so freely and authentically, and really you have a deep desire to do the same, but because of trauma or conditioning, you don't (I've personally experienced this with unraveling my own internal misogyny and un-conditioning myself over the past few years - an experience many women undergo).