Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks

Eckhart Tolle asks whether we experience frequent, repetitive drama in our close relationships.

The simple fact is, he says, in many of our lives “relatively insignificant disagreements often trigger violent arguments and emotional pain.”

What’s really going on when disagreements escalate into arguments and people end up getting their feelings hurt?

Eckhart explains:

At the root of such experiences lie the basic egoic patterns: the need to be right and, of course, for someone else to be wrong, that is to say, identification with mental positions.

Why do so many of us have such a need to be right over minor issues that ultimately matter not a hill of beans?

It comes from our insecurity.

When our identity is that of our ego, instead of grounded in our essential being, we feel we have to “prove” something in order to feel okay about ourselves. And so we take up positions and argue our point.

Do you sometimes catch yourself taking a position over something you know deep down you really don’t know for sure, insisting you are correct when you suspect you might not be right at all?

Or perhaps you assert something to be true when you don’t actually believe it yourself? But you said it, and now you’re sticking to it.

Eckhart continues:

There is also the ego’s need to be periodically in conflict with something or someone in order to strengthen its sense of separation between “me” and the “other” without which it cannot survive.

The ego is tricky, luring us into debate, argument, disagreement, even to the point of fighting or falling out.

When we are centered in our essence, we have no need of an identity, in fact no need of the ego at all. We have nothing to prove to either ourselves or anyone else. We flow in life, without thinking about "who I am" and trying to be that person.

*Editor's note: The Compassionate Eye appears Monday through Friday. Eckhart Tolle's second book, Stillness Speaks, which followed The Power of Now and preceded A New Earth, is available in hardback and also on CD. To go more deeply into living in the present moment in an ongoing state of consciousness, especially as it relates to being true to ourselves in our relationships with others, join us in the daily blog Consciousness Rising.