The Expansion & Contraction Of Our Lives

For the last 10 weeks I have been reading the book A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle, one chapter a week whilst watching the accompanying webcasts that he did with Oprah. I can’t begin to explain the concepts of the book in a single blog post but I want to discuss just one of the messages in his teachings which is about our egos and desires.

The Ego Always Wants More

We all have an ego and according to Eckhart, our egos really don’t do us any favours. He says that one of the consistent traits of the ego is to continually want more - more money, more stuff, more success, more experiences etc. He then goes on to suggest that when we pin our happiness on some external factor, that we are never satisfied and never happy because no matter how much we get, our ego will ensure that we always want more.

one point that I touched on when discussing knowing what’s right for you in a recent post is that reading about the relationship between ego and wanting gave me the impression that it is somehow wrong to have any desires at all. On a similar theme Eckhart also says that our ego becomes attached to the stuff that it wants, and that includes our physical bodies, our health and even our lives. He points out an obvious fact that all life forms will eventually whither and die and explains that fear of our failing bodies or old age will also lead to suffering.

Attachment To The Wants Of The Ego

The problem I have with this is that I can sense the attachment within me. I am currently quite young (36), I’m in perfect health, I live in a western society (UK) with all the creature comforts and conveniences that brings and I LOVE all that stuff! I am grateful every single day that I have such good health and get to live in my current circumstances!

So as I went through the book I found myself in a lot of conflict. On the one hand I believe that gratitude is very important and so I will often spend 10 minutes or so thinking about all the wonderful aspects of my life that I’m grateful for. On the other hand I started to feel like that perhaps my gratitude was just my ego and that every time I expressed gratitude for these things that I was just strengthening the ego within me!

Testing My Attachment

One of the things I did to try and resolve this inner conflict was to mentally test myself to see how attached I was. I tried to imagine some worst case scenarios such as losing my sight, becoming disfigured (I can’t handle that one at all), being falsely imprisoned and so on. I tried to immerse myself completely in the idea and really tap into how it would feel to be in that situation.

Now of course nobody can really know how they would feel unless something like that actually happened to them but it was interesting to me to learn which ones I thought I might be able to accept and which ones I couldn’t.

However, what I started to realise was that this was a fairly futile exercise. Trying to imagine myself blind or in prison simply did not make me feel good in any way! One of my philosophies is that it is not worth worrying about something until it actually happens and this exercise was causing me to feel the emotional pain associated with a situation that would quite likely never manifest in my life time. Besides, there are plenty of good resources out there for coping with loss should I ever need them in the future.

Expansion & Contraction

Throughout the 10 weeks I continually felt this nagging conflict within me because as I said in my post last week, I LIKE to want stuff! I get excited thinking about what life still has to offer me.

However, I finally found some relief in the last chapter. Eckhart explained that life follows natural patterns of expansion and contraction and that this happens in many ways. For example in physical terms with our breathing and the beating of our hearts, and in a more general sense of the direction in which our lives follow as we age. As a child matures into adulthood and throughout most of our adult lives we are expanding - we are learning new things, accumulating possessions, experiences and so on but as we get to a certain age we start to contract. We tend to stop learning, stop doing, and Eckhart said that many people resist this aging process.

What I got from this is that I am in the expansion phase, and probably will be for another 20 years or so. Phew! See for the last few years I feel like as though I have totally neglected some parts of my life and simply ignored all that life has to offer. I got my wake-up call at the end of 2007 (I’ll go into details in my story over the next few weeks) and so since then I’ve been dreaming about the things I want to do, be and have in ways that I never have before.

This isn’t wrong - it’s natural! Now it could be that some of my desires are rooted in ego and it’s difficult for me to know the difference. However, when I think about all the things I want such as having a successful business, my own home, a loving relationship, the opportunity to travel and do fun stuff like cool sports etc, I am not attached to any of those things. I am not waiting for any of those things to manifest in order to feel happy.

That attachment is where you want something so badly that you feel like you can’t do without it, you can’t be happy without it - if you feel like that about some of your desires then that might ring an alarm bell. If you can feel peace with where you are right now and yet feel an excited anticipation about the future without having a desperate need, then you’re in the right mindset.

Stumble it!