My ego and I

Life as I know it has been going smoothly, or so it seems to me.

Had a really long talk with ex about lots of things about 4 nights ago. Ordinarily we don't talk beyond being cordial to each other but this night he actually asked me how the book was going. Yes another book to help me 'fix myself'. The book is "A new earth" by Eckhart Tolle. Oprah has been raving about him for months and so I thought I'd better read this little gem. She thought it was such an important book that she held web classes about it, which I have yet to catch up on.

The book is interesting. It explores the mind and the ego and the impact it has on our lives. Basically he is saying that we only know ourselves as our egos - that part of your mind that interacts with and reacts to, the people and situations that happen to you. In his view, there is a deeper part of our psyche that he refers to as the real you - the part that is just you - without the ego being present. When in this mode, we are not affected by our past, we don't make judgements on situations, we just ARE!

I don't articulate it very well yet, so I'm not even going to try right now until I've dissected the book to bits. When I first started reading it, I thought the whole thing was going to go over my head, but then, bit by bit, it started to make sense. We can choose to live life via our ego - where everything is good or bad and we experience and buy into extreme emotions like anger, jealousy, hatred etc. Wars are started by egos - who's right or wrong - we are damn it, take that 'BOOM' - divorce happens because 2 egos cannot agree - one must be right. It's all very interesting, but I couldn't get my head around what it would be like to live life without going through the ego first - would you just sit there and say nothing? Would you ever feel again? Would you have things that you like to do?

So there I was contemplating the whole thing and getting really confused in the process when I walked in on ex watching a movie called The Edge, starring Anthony Hopkins. Now, on the surface, two young blokes and Hopkins' character, a billionaire are trapped in the woods thanks to a plane crash. The movie portrays the saga of them getting out. In the meantime, they get attacked and stalked by a 'man killer' bear (what a fucking big bear it was too, huge!), which they end up killing and have various other things happen to them. What struck me on a deeper level with this movie was that the hopkins character lived true to himself - not via his ego. Every time he was berated by the younger guys, he'd never bite. He didn't panic about the situation (though he did run from the bear) and he was always thinking on his toes. He was aware, he knew how the other two thought and how those thoughts would influence their decisions. He didn't let his emotions get in the way of his decision making and in the end, he was the only one who survived. The bear got one guy and the other guy died from injuries sustained by falling into a bear trap, which he brought upon himself because he was going to shoot the hopkins character so that he could have his wife (elle macpherson). He backed into the bear trap instead and the billionaire still rescued him. In the end, after he was rescued, he said of the two guys he was with - "They died saving my life" - still no ego, even after all he went through, he made them out to be heroes.

It was a good illustration for me (I'm not very deep) about how someone can live without their ego getting in the way - a sign from the Universe? Perhaps, but maybe it's just a silly coincidence.

Cheers