A New Earth

Eckhart Tolle

Chapter three the core of ego, page 120

“Most people are so completely identified with the voice in the head  the incessant stream of involuntary and compulsive thinking and the emotions that accompany it  that we may describe them as being possessed by their mind. As long as you are completely unaware of this you take the thinker to be who you are. This is the egoic mind. We call it egoic because there is a sense of self, of I (ego), in every thought  every memory, every interpretation, opinion, viewpoint, reaction, emotion. This is unconsciousness, spiritually speaking. 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.”

“In most cases, when you say I, it is the ego speaking, not you, as we have seen. It consists of thought and emotion, of a bundle of memories you identify with as me and my story, of habitual roles you play without knowing it, of collective identifications such as nationality, religion, race, social class, or political allegiance. It also contains personal identifications, not only with possessions, but also with opinions, external appearance, standing resentments, or concepts of yourself as better than or not as good as others, as a success or failure.”