The misperception is some part of the whole self usually hijacks the self and takes over the identification. This is ego piracy. This hijacked or commandeered self is represented by a “voice in the head” that speaks for the whole self. Tolle’s call to humanity is to resist identifying with the content of the mind. He wants us to become aware of the whole—or to become enlightened.
Tolle at one point placed his faith in the ability of the intellect to solve humanity’s problems. Then a brilliant professor he respected and admired committed suicide. This made him question his faith in the intellect. He also experienced a woman on the subway who kept talking to herself out loud, as if talking to a third person. She was thinking and her thoughts were being spoken out loud with anger. Tolle writes, “For a moment, I was able to stand back from my own mind and see it from a deeper perspective, as it were.” (p. 33) This revealed a shift in him from thinking to awareness.
He found himself thinking his thoughts out loud like the “crazy lady” and found himself alone in the men’s room looking at himself in the mirror. He began to laugh at himself out loud. He describes it as the laugh of the big-bellied Buddha. “Life isn’t as serious as my mind makes it out to be”. (p.33) If we seek our identity in things we trap ourselves in an inauthentic selfhood. Why? Because the true self is much more than what we own or what owns us. Jesus taught that life consists of more than what we possess. He taught, “What good does it do to gain the whole world and lose your soul. Or what can you give in exchange for a soul.”
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