Original Air Date: May 5, 2008

I
have always wrestled with issues of ego. Kids who are raised in broken homes
and rattled childhoods like mine lack the inner security that can lead to the
abnegation of the ego. On the contrary, they become attention seekers. They often
suck all the oxygen out of the room. It has to be about them. That’s why ‘A New
Earth’ is not only a profound book for our times, but actually enriches
parenting arguably more than any other facet of life.

When
I read the book I was struck by the central message of ego being that which
most frustrates our potential and undermines our goodness.

In
Jewish mysticism, ‘bittul hayesh,’ abnegation of ego, a central feature. Same
is true in almost every other religions and spiritual systems. Central feature of
human greatness is the ability to subordinate one’s ego to a cause higher than
oneself.

There
are some amazing lessons on parenting in Eckhart Tolle’s book, A New
Earth.  Today we are lucky enough
to have Elizabeth Lesser - host of Oprah & Friends “A New Earth Aftershow”
which is wrapping up tonight on this channel.

“A New Earth” also talks so much about
the EGO, and how the ego leads us to believe that “we are who we are” because
of our past.  It says on page 59: “Your thinking, the content of your mind,
is of course conditioned by the past: your upbringing, culture, family
background, and so on. The central core of all your mind activity consists of
certain repetitive and persistent thoughts, emotions, and reactive patterns
that you identify with most strongly. This entity is the ego itself.”

Let’s discuss what we mean by ego. In some
religions it is the ‘evil inclination.’ In others, it’s the natural impulse.
Some might even call it the survival instinct. In any event, it is that which
pulls us back into our own experience and sees everything through the prism of
the self.

“A New Earth” says this of people who see themselves as parents first, and people second, and describes what it does to their kids. Eckhart writes on page 97:

“When being a parent becomes an identity,
however, when your sense of self is entirely or largely derived from it, the
function easily becomes overemphasized, exaggerated, and takes you over. Giving
children what they need becomes excessive and turns into spoiling; preventing
them from getting into danger becomes overprotectiveness and interferes with their
need to explore the world and try things out for themselves. Telling children
what to do or not to do becomes controlling, overbearing.”

On
our show, we often speak of how parents must not lose their other identities or
allow their relationships to atrophy in favor of their kids.

The book speaks
of “conscious parenting.” Eckhart writes
on page 103, that “In fact, doing is never enough if you neglect Being.”

This is a very
important point. Doing means sculpting our kids, always fashioning them in
‘our’ image. But being means allowing their natural potential to be manifest.
Rejection of helicopter parent. Parents should not sculpt and mould but
inspire.

“The longing for love that is in every
child is the longing to be recognized, not on the level of form, but on the level
of Being.”

Brilliant
statement. Child wants to be loved for their being, and not their doing. We
foster insecurity in the child when we love them for their good grades or
athletic prowess. They become performers who are convinced that love has to be earned.

Eckhart says how negative emotions really
effect kids.  He writes on page 141:
“Children in particular find strong negative emotions too overwhelming to cope
with and tend to try not to feel them. In the absence of a fully conscious
adult who guides them with love and compassionate understanding into facing the
emotion directly, choosing not to feel it is indeed the only option for the
child at that time. Unfortunately, that early defense mechanism usually remains
when the child becomes an adult.”

Pain-body loves drama.  He writes on Page 148:

“Many relationships go through violent and destructive
pain-body episodes at regular intervals. It is almost unbearably painful for a
young child to have to witness the emotional violence of their parents’ pain-bodies,
and yet that is the fate of millions of children all over the world, the
nightmare of their daily existence. That is also one of the main ways in which
the human pain-body is passed on from generation to generation.”

Family
dysfunction becomes the child’s heirloom. They’ve only ever seen fighting and
arguing. So that when they later go into relationships, they recreate the same
drama without which the relationship and life become boring. They cannot live
life in the calm valleys. They create artificial peaks.

It is also interesting to explore how we heal from the pain-body. For example, dealing with rejection. Eckhart writes on page 178 - “Someone who in childhood was neglected or abandoned by one or both
parents will likely develop a pain-body that becomes triggered in any situation
that resonates even remotely with their primordial pain of abandonment. A
friend arriving a few minutes late to pick them up at the airport or a spouse
coming home late can trigger a major pain-body attack. If their partner or
spouse leaves them or dies, the emotional pain they experience goes far beyond
the pain that is natural in such a situation. It may be intense anguish,
long-lasting, incapacitating depression, or obsessive anger.”

This is why
people can’t deal with rejection. They pre-empt it. It explains the passive and
active commitment-phobia we see in society today.

“A woman who
in child was physically abused by her father may find that her pain-body
becomes easily activated in any close relationship with a man. Alternatively,
the emotion that makes up her pain-body may draw her to a man whose pain-body
is similar to that of her father. Her pain-body may feel a magnetic pull to
someone who it senses will give it more of the same pain. That pain is
sometimes misinterpreted as falling in love.”

This explains why women love bad boys are often drawn to dysfunctional relationships.

Chapter 6  deals so well with what happens
after someone has a painful childhood. 
Here’s a quote from page 179 - “A man who had been an unwanted child and
was given no love and a minimum of care and attention by his mother developed a
heavy ambivalent pain-body that consisted of unfulfilled intense longing for
his mother’s love and attention and at the same time intense hatred toward her
for withholding what he so desperately need. When he became an adult, almost
every woman would trigger his pain-body’s neediness - a form of emotional pain
- and this would manifest as an addictive compulsion to ‘conquer and seduce’
almost every woman he met and in this way get the female love and attention
that the pain-body craved. He became quite an expert on seduction, but as soon
as a relationship turned intimate or his advances were rejected, the
pain-body’s anger toward his mother would come up and sabotage the
relationship.”

This is a
phenomenon I wrote about in “The Broken American Male”, the mates we attract,
the dynamics of a relationship, why women date “bad boys”, falling in love,
father/daughter relationships, mother/son relationships. Explains why men
become womanizers, why they don’t respect women.


Today’s Shmuleyism: America is a country
built the idea of freedom. But liberty is not only the liberation from
political oppression or the emancipation from economic degradation. The
greatest freedom of all is to be liberated from the incarceration and tyranny
of the human ego.