Ego and Being One

I have been reading and listening to a lot of New Age philosophy and thought over the last few years. I have explored many different sources. More recently, I have been listening to Eckhart Tolle, the author of several books: The Power of Now and A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. Currently, he and Oprah Winfrey are doing an unprecedented, online, worldwide study of his second book. In his books, there is much discussion about human ego and awakening to who we really are. Some of it can get deep and I struggle at times, but I am slowly gaining an understanding of his message.

Two basic concepts are at odds with each other when it comes to understanding who we really are and why we are here. Spiritually there is a concept that we are all ONE, coming from the One Source, The Great Creator, Universal Consciousness...God. If you can get your mind around that one, move on to the other concept of ego. Ego is who we think we are, who we perceive ourselves to be. Our ego tells us that we are separate and unique from every other human being. We are who we are, who we see ourselves to be. Some egos see themselves as better than or inferior to others, but the overriding concept is that we are separate and not part of any whole.

If you think about it, our egos explain a lot about human behavior and history. If we all see ourselves as unconnected, unique beings, then what we do or do not do to each other is often without consequence, especially if our egos have convinced us that we are better than some other person or group of people. Our egos can tell us that some beings are not really human at all and that to kill or torture them is acceptable. That helps me to understand things like the Jewish Holocaust in World War II, the Killing Fields of Cambodia and even the Spanish Inquisition in which thousands of human beings were tortured and killed by other human beings.

Killing out of self-defense and killing out of a sense that we are somehow better than, more enlightened than, more patriotic than, more moral than, or simply more powerful than others is quite a leap. The acceptability of killing out of a sense of superiority is one of the biggest lies of the human ego. What we cannot see because of ego is that we are all connected. We are all one body of spiritual consciousness. Again, that is a big concept to accept, but stay with me.

Picture your body with its millions of individual cells. Groups of specialized cells make up different parts of our body. Your body has a head with eyes and ears and a brain. Your trunk has a heart and other organs. You have two arms and two legs. Somehow, you sense your body as a whole being, not just a bunch of individual cells loosely connected, independent from one another. If you stub your toe, your whole body feels the pain. If you cut your finger, your body bleeds.

Assuming we love and respect our bodies, would we consider chopping off our fingers, our arms or our head? How could one part of our body feel superior, more valuable or more expendable than other parts of the body as a whole? Every part, every cell is important to the health, function and well-being of the body. The death of any cell diminishes the whole body.

Are we any more valuable than, more important than, less expendable than other human beings?

FOOD for THOUGHT...