Wrangling the Ego While Watching the Thinker
Paying attention to how we speak to ourselves.
On any given day, millions of thoughts come careening through our minds. If we were to monitor each of them, we would be astounded by the content and context. Judgmental, negative, and self-defeating thoughts permeate our psyches continuously with very little effort on our part. These thoughts have become so automatic that we are completely unaware of the consequences and effects they have on our emotional and mental health. The sheer quantity of no, can’t, won’t, never, always, but that trickles through each thought and into each action is truly astounding, creating a permanent leak in our energy systems.
As sentient beings, we are the creators of our own realities, our own illusions, and our own sense of importance based on our thoughts. Famous French philosopher and scientist, René Descartes’ utterance “I think therefore I am,” sums up the human condition perfectly, illustrating how we build lives predominantly based on thought, giving scant attention to the body and very little to the spirit.
Each negative thought robs us of precious energy and personal power, creating an emptiness within that we inevitably turn to others to fill. The book Virus of the Mind by Richard Brodie questions why we would want to entertain thoughts that prevent us from achieving our goals, over thoughts that empower us to move towards our own personal utopia.
The words we use and the manner in which we arrange them in our heads are incredibly important, for the way that we speak to ourselves is the basis for the way we speak to others. Every word carries with it a unique power to help or hinder, and as such, words should be chosen very carefully. Unfortunately, we are frequently careless with our remarks, often followed by instant regret. The impact of reckless words is like a stab in the belly, a warning from our second chakra that we have committed a sin against another, and in fact, dishonoured the naval chakra truth of “Honour one another”, causing guilt, shame, or embarrassment within.
Watching the Thinker
Ego, in the context that it is referred to in this article, encompasses everything that originates in the earth-bound mind, our thoughts, emotions, intellect, judgment, personality; in other words, everything that stems from interacting with society and the world around us. Identification with our ego causes us to label our lives as either easy or difficult, either filled with pleasure or with pain.
In his groundbreaking book, The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle talks about “watching the thinker”. According to Tolle, the thinker is the ego, our identification with our mind and the avenue through which we resist life as it is by a habitual pattern of self-defeating thoughts. Watching the thinker is to be a witness to the thoughts that make their way into our minds without judging them, to be impartial in the witnessing of the repetitive patterns we have and how we use our words. In this way, we bring a new level of consciousness to the way we identify with the mind by questioning the validity of the chatter, and even perhaps smiling at it, like a child trying to get its own way.
Our soul, the knower, is always behind the thinker; the knower is the holder of spiritual truth. Trust the knower – the part of us that says, “I know this to be true”. Tolle mentions that we are enslaved to excess thinking, which comes between us and everything as we strengthen the divide of separateness. It is truly an illusion that we are all separate. Stemming from the Advaita Vedanta, a Hindu school of philosophy, the phrase, All is One, has become a fundamental truth in most spiritual belief systems. After all, what is in one, is in the whole.
Tolle also contends that thinking has become a disease, and I couldn’t agree more.
We think ourselves into pain, into fear, into humiliation, into anger. Why not use this power to think ourselves into happiness, into joy, into freedom, or into love? One of the greatest obstacles to freedom of the mind is our incessant need to be right. We create strong identifications with stories we adopt as truth, subsequently believing them to be truths for all. These stories are merely opinions, illusions of the mind we identify with so fiercely that we feel the need to defend them.
The practice of paying attention to how often we become defensive, either verbally or mentally, is one of the best skills we can develop. When defensiveness arises, we can ask ourselves, “What am I defending?” As Tolle states, “there is a vast range of intelligence beyond thought,” and yet we cling to our reasons and our need to be right until we die.
In reality, the perpetual need to be right merely sabotages our journeys, our ability to transform, and our chance to heal. The moment someone else tries to explain themselves, people often shut their minds down instead of opening them up to another’s point of view. Learning how to view the world from another’s perspective changes the game of life.
Don’t believe me? Try it with a loved one, someone you feel comfortable being vulnerable with. Ask them to explain something exactly as they see it. Insert yourself fully into their reasoning and try to completely absorb their experience.
When we feel our ego creeping into a conversation, the ideal scenario is to stop the conversation and send the ego away. Then resume after a pause. This technique makes interacting with others much easier, more pleasant, and far more transformational as our need to be right pales in comparison to the liberation of compassion that filters through our minds. Once we begin to break the boundaries of mind-identified ignorance and delusion, we begin to experience freedom from conditioning and limitation.
When we feel eternally bound to a thoughtform, an ideology, a mind-identified story, asking ourselves why can elicit the answers we seek. When we think I can’t, think why?, when our immediate reaction is no, think why?, when we think won’t, think “why?”. Driving our ego crazy with the incessant response of why forces it to search for the reason buried deep within our psyches. There is probably no sense in the answer, just a cultural or familial tradition, belief, or story passed down, which we have willingly accepted as truth.
Being a child and asking simple questions allows us to watch the thinker as it responds to being threatened and challenged. After eliciting the responses, we can then re-evaluate them through the mind of the knower.
Questioning the thinker is very threatening to the ego, and it will respond in fear and anger, making up all kinds of illusions and delusions in order to bring us back under its control. Actively taking part in our lives and beginning to deconstruct the ego, getting to know how it works better than we ever have before, will allow us to de-identify with it. Being aware of its tricks, traits, and patterns allows us to bring it into line more easily and efficiently.
Spending more time as the knower, as the watcher, brings with it freedom from the societal conditioning of the earth-bound mind.
“The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the thinker.”
- Eckhart Tolle.
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