The "Fictitious Self" or Ego

The greatest insight in human history, according to spiritual teacher and best-selling author, Eckhart Tolle, may have been when the Buddha recognized that the "self" is an illusion. Calling this egoic sense of 'me' and 'mine' the "fictitious self," Tolle illustrates how this seeming separation of one from another is a form of "collective insanity" and the source, as the Buddha recognized, of all suffering.

"But there is a level within yourself," Tolle notes, "where you are already a full expression of the one life. You are already complete on the level of the timeless, the essence of your own being."

"It is quite a relief," he observes, "to realize that the world cannot make me happy. To demand that situations, people, places or attainments should complete me or make me happy is bound to be frustrating, whether I attain or I do not attain."

"(Life) loses its frustration," he notes, "when you do not look to the world anymore for your satisfaction or for your 'self.' When you give up demanding that people, places, (and) situations should make you happy and fulfill you - when you don't demand it anymore - then suddenly the ability arises to allow the forms of this moment to be as they are."

  "Because life at this moment," Tolle points out, "already always is as it is."

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