Separating Ourselves from the Ego

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1:00When you are pioneering anything or introducing new ideas to the culture, You get criticized. You do? Yeah. Did you hear about that? I didn't find the one. I found someone I respected and we made it the one. In a sort of longing kind of view of love, people understand each other as if by magic. Nothing in itself is addictive on the one hand. On the other hand, everything could be addictive if there's an emptiness in that person that needs to be filled. I now know that nobody changes until they change their energy. And when you change your energy, you change your life. I'm Gwyneth Paltrow. This is the Goop Podcast, bringing together thought leaders, culture changers, creatives, founders, and CEOs, scientists, doctors, healers, and seekers, here to start conversations, because simply asking questions and listening has the power to change the way we see the world.

1:55Here we go. Hey, it's Kiki Korshets, the VP of Content here at Goop. Today, we're sharing a special conversation from our archives. In January of 2020, Gwyneth sat down with a renowned spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, the best-selling author of The Power of Now and A New Earth. They dove deep, starting with the profound transformation that Eckhart had in his 20s that changed the course of his life. Then they explored why identity and self are so important, and he shared a few tools for how to break free from our own ego, bring awareness to the emotions that we tend to sublimate, and ways to apply these teachings to parenting.

2:36Okay, let's cut to GP and Eckhart.

2:42It's so funny. I remember, you know, the first time that I read you, I actually listened to you and And I bought like a CD of the book, like a book on, I had it in like a Walkman or something. So that's how long ago I came across your work. And it was like a book, like you read it and it was like a, and there was a workbook. And so I was an early adopter, I think. Oh, that's wonderful. Yeah. Yeah, Power of Now came out 21 years ago. I always think that there's a moment or a series of circumstances that happen that put somebody on a journey, and there's no way that you could be as wise and integrated and this level of teacher unless you had traversed through something, unless you had a hero's journey of your own, right?

3:43So can you tell me a little bit about what that might have been? Yes, so it's the power of now contains kind of the, and later the new earth also, the essence of what I realized through, and basically my teacher was my own suffering. and I spent most of my 20s in states of anxiety and depression. And as I described in the power of now at the beginning in the introduction, when I was 29, I experienced a sudden shift just because I couldn't stand myself anymore. And in fact, as I say in the introduction to the power of now, the sentence that came into my head that triggered the shift was, I can't live with myself any longer.

4:36And then I looked at that sentence that came into my head. It repeated itself in my head in the night, in the middle of the night. I was thinking, you can't stand this anymore. I can't live with myself. And then I became aware of this, the strangeness of that phrase, because there must be two of me. If I cannot live with myself, who am I? And who is the self that I cannot live with? and that brought about a disidentification. I didn't understand it at that time. I wouldn't have been able to explain it in the way I explain it now but it brought about a disidentification in my consciousness between the stream of thinking and what I could describe as the dimension of presence or awareness, consciousness in its pure non-conditioned form whereas all thinking is of course also consciousness but it's the conditioned consciousness conditioned through environmental influences your culture, your personal experiences so there was a whole there was an incessant and compulsive most people have it an incessant and compulsive stream of thinking in my mind always up to that point and I was completely identified with it so I derived my sense of identity my sense of self, my sense of I, from an unhappy narrative in my mind that was always concerned about regretted things from the past.

6:07It was continuously projecting itself forward into the future. And, of course, the future is always uncertain. Am I going to make it? And so on. So anxiety arises the more you are focused on future in your thinking. I'm not talking about practical future, but the psychological future. And so I was in these continuous states of anxiety because I was completely identified with the, one could say, the narrative of me in my head. And so this is what I derived my unhappy sense of self from. There was a lot of unhappy self-talk about many people have that. Now this has become part of my teaching, but I had to go through it myself, otherwise I could not teach it.

6:57So to realize that ultimately, and this is a universal truth, ultimately the greater part of one's unhappiness is not derived from one's circumstances, But the root cause of the greater part of one's unhappiness is derived from an unhappy narrative in one's mind, a story that one is completely identified with. So there's no awareness from where you would be able to witness what your mind is doing. In the absence of the witness, in the absence of awareness, you're completely trapped in the conditioned voice in the head, I sometimes call it. And there are millions of people still on the planet whose life is made miserable on a daily basis by a very destructive voice in their heads.

7:56but they cannot tell the difference between what their voice says about the external world and their life circumstances and the actual situation of the external world. So I sometimes tell people, next time you become irritated or angry in a minor situation, for example, I give the example of you're at the airport waiting to check in but the line is not moving, there's a delay, and you get more and more agitated and angry. And at that moment, conduct an experiment and ask yourself, how would I experience this situation if I did not add any baggage of thought to it? Without adding any, what I call, unnecessary thought baggage to this situation, how would I experience this moment if I let go of those thoughts that judge this moment?

8:54And people actually sometimes practice that. They experiment with it. Wow, suddenly there's a complete shift. This moment is actually fine. I'm standing here. I'm breathing. I'm looking around. There are people, interesting life forms. Every human is an interesting life form. And it's fine, actually, unless I tell myself that it's not. So it's a disidentification from thinking and the arising of what one could call a new dimension of consciousness, which I call presence or sometimes call it awareness. And that happened to me that night. So I woke up the next morning in a state of wonderful peace, although nothing had changed in my external circumstances.

9:38I still had very little money and lived in one little room with a little corner for the stove, and I had to share the bathroom with 10 people. So that hadn't changed, and yet I was suddenly at peace, but I didn't know why. And later I realized why, and that is because the compulsive and incessant thinking that I call the voice in the head had to a large extent subsided. And so this continuous movement, thinking is a wonderful thing. I'm talking about the useless, destructive self-talk that had subsided. And I was actually spending long periods of time in a state of pure presence, which is just perceiving things, just looking around.

10:29The background was no longer labeling everything mentally or judging or condemning. But there was just an aware presence in the background. Is that the differentiation between ego and soul? So is that narrative? Yes. Ego, the way I define it, is complete identification with a narrative. Then it turns into ego. The narrative itself, if there's some awareness there, it doesn't have to turn into ego. because then increasingly you realize that you are not your thoughts. That's a wonderful liberation. You realize who are you if you are not your thoughts? If you're not your thoughts, you're that alert, still presence behind your thoughts.

11:19Then that's spiritual awakening. For many people, or quite a few people, spiritual awakening happens. the first beginning of spiritual awakening when they realize that there is a voice in their head. Because many people are so identified, there's no separation. They are the voice. And so then every thought that comes into your head, you believe in it completely. You are at the mercy of your conditioned thinking. And that's the unawakened state. I call it unconscious, which is spiritually speaking unconscious. to be unconscious spiritually speaking, is to be in the grip of ego, as you say, which means you're completely identified with that stream of thinking.

12:07And so the ego seems to be incredibly strong and seems to be almost working, working so that we don't have that epiphany that we're actually, that it's only a narrative and it's not our soul and it's not who we are. Do you think in kind of a big picture way, if there is spiritual intelligence in the universe, if there is a God, what is the purpose of ego? You probably have to go back many thousands of years to when the ego first started. It is linked with the use of language. Humans began to use language. Language became conceptual thinking. And that was fine. It was a miraculous thing that ego was part of the evolution of consciousness.

13:00And so the whole of culture that humans could produce, civilizations and cultures, are due to the fact that thinking grew in them. The ability to think developed and grew. and then came writing and so on, all wonderful developments. So it was part of the evolution. There was only one downside to it that gradually emerged over centuries and millennia. And the downside of thinking, because everything in this world has polarities, there's always a price to pay. You have an enormous gain on one side, but you have the price to pay on the other side. So what gradually happened as thinking became more evolved and complex, humans lost their innate ability to be rooted in their being.

14:00They lost that rootedness in being that animals still have, and everything in nature still has. It's rooted. The dog, for example, is not anxious, doesn't have a self-image yet, because the dog doesn't think, doesn't construct a mental image of who he or she is. So humans gradually became more and more identified with thinking. So this self-identity, which is the development of a mental image of who they are rather than being who they are, they began to have a relationship with themselves. A strange thing. Animals don't have a relationship with themselves because they are just themselves. At Goop, we believe the spaces we spend time in shape how we feel and how we connect.

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15:34This promotion is valid for all new clients on select spaces booked and actualized prior to December 30th, 2025 and subject to availability. Convene, for the moments that move your business. Do you think materiality is what causes somebody to have, or materialism is what causes a human being to have a relationship with themselves? Only to the extent that humans derive part of their sense of identity from material things, then it becomes part of your ego, which of course is very common. The first thing you derive your identity from, of course, is probably your own body. One tends to say, that's me.

16:15And then perhaps the thing that you put on your body is your clothes, give you your sense of identity. The next thing is things. Even a little child learns that already, my toy. So there's a link. The thing is not just a thing that you like. There's nothing wrong with that. There's more to it. There comes an identification with the thing, so it adds something to your sense of who you are. Ultimately, it's unreal and it's a fiction, but every child has to go through that. You cannot tell a child, well, this isn't your toy really because that's just ego, so just don't say it's my toy. The child has to go through that.

16:58And the child experiences the first time the suffering that the ego produces when somebody takes away the toy, even if just for one minute, the child gets very unhappy and starts crying. and although it'll probably lose interest in the toy 10 minutes later but at that moment something, the child's developing sense of self has become injured, has lost a part of itself and that's already the developing ego and then it grows and grows. But ultimately ego is really thought forms because even possessions, material possessions, yes, one could say, yes, if you have a nice car, you identify with the car.

17:47Your car perhaps makes you feel superior to others whose car is not so nice. But ultimately, you're not really identified with the external possession. You're identified with the thought of my car. So it's the thought form of my car that gives you your sense of self. So ultimately all identification and ego is identification with thought forms. So you look for an identity in your thoughts, in your thought forms. And ego is always looking for, not only looking for a sense of reassurance that I exist. Please give me attention. Please tell me that I exist. It always seeks some kind of superiority.

18:32It always compares, the egoic identity always compares itself to others. How do I rate in relation to this person and that person? And it either feels inferior or superior to others. It's quite normal when one is in ego. And it makes life very unpleasant. You can't ever really relax into your own self, into your deeper self. I mean, that seems to be just a recipe for suffering, you know, to be constantly judging yourself against other people. Yes, and if you can't be better than others in either good looks or strengths or material possessions or knowledge or certain abilities, if you have none of these, you can still feel superior, for example, by seeing yourself as a victim of other people, which is also a very strong self-image.

19:28and a victim identity is as strong an ego as an identity of somebody who feels superior to most people. And sometimes it seems like that is two sides of one coin. That's right, exactly. And so a victim is still superior to most people because the victim immediately has in their mind moral superiority. They have righteousness around them. But it's an unconscious process, so they don't know that they're doing this. But identity is so important for human beings, and this cannot be denied. I would say after food and shelter, the next thing that people are concerned with is their sense of self. How am I perceived?

20:14Yes. How do I perceive myself? How do I perceive myself? And so all this is unconscious living, which is still unfortunately normal. but there is a possibility which all the ancient teachings have pointed to of spiritual awakening out of that unconsciousness so that there's a shift in your sense of who you are so you're no longer looking for yourself in the movement of thought and the emotions that go with thoughts because you realize there's a deeper being there that is aware that can be aware of thoughts and that happens in a moment when there's a cessation in the stream of thinking. Sometimes you need to shock to for a moment stop thinking.

21:01Some people engage in dangerous activities like mountain climbing because it stops your mind. You can't be thinking. You have to be absolutely present. And so in meditation, of course, what people strive to achieve is the state of inner stillness to still the mind. So that has its place too. Is that what you do? Do you meditate to practice? I don't have very much of an elaborate meditation practice. I don't practice myself because daily life is a practice. It's just being present with what you do. But I sometimes teach body awareness, which is directing your attention into the inner energy field of your body.

21:51Some people don't know what I'm talking about, so if they don't know what I'm talking about, I say, hold your hand up and close your eyes. Don't touch anything. Don't move your hand. And then ask yourself the question, how can I know whether my hand is still there? Don't look at it and don't say, well, it's still there because I remember it. I saw it a minute, a second ago. No. How can you know without touching that the hand is still there? And that question directs your attention into your hand, and suddenly you can feel perhaps a slight tingling there. You realize it's alive. Oh, I'm doing it right now, I feel.

22:36Right. That's the beginning of body awareness. That's a very interesting tact, actually, because I try to meditate. I can't say I do it every day because sometimes kids or life or whatever gets in the way. But I've practiced a bunch of different kinds of meditations over the time. And I think the ones that enlist breathing, which is sort of what you're talking about, I mean, that's body awareness, right? Yes, yes. Breathing also is somehow connected to body awareness, too. because with the breath meditation, which is one of the oldest forms of meditation, probably taught by the Buddha, when you focus attention on your breath, you focus the attention as the air moves into the body.

23:21You breathe in through your nose. The important part is your attention. The attention follows the breath into the body. I sometimes say the breath goes into the chest, but imagine that the air goes into the belly. That's even better if your tension moves into your abdomen. And then it's there for a second, and then you breathe out again. So you follow the breath going through your nostrils, into your chest, and then into the abdomen. Hold it there for one or two seconds, and then breathe out again. And during this time, you will notice you cannot think and be aware of your breathing at the same time.

24:04And that is why this meditation is so useful. Because you can't be aware of your breath and think at the same time. That is true, actually. And if you do think, you're not aware of your breath anymore. Right. And this is why the Buddha highly recommended it. And it's still practiced in Anapanasati Yoga, the meditation of breath awareness. And I often recommend, if you don't, not everybody is good at meditation as such. I recommend mini meditations during a day. This sounds good. It's so easy. A mini meditation does not have to be more than one conscious breath, which is I want in and out. And one conscious breath might take about, depending on how deeply you breathe, maybe six, seven to ten seconds.

25:00Say it's ten seconds. so you stop and you go. And I recommend that you do whenever you're waiting for something at the elevator or in the elevator or you're waiting to talk to someone or whatever it is instead of getting out your phone and looking at it for no reason whatsoever you become aware of your breath take a mini meditation and take one or perhaps even two conscious breaths. If you do that many times during the day that is probably more powerful and more useful than setting aside 10 minutes or 15 minutes for meditation. Because if you set aside that, it creates a compartment in your life.

25:42And you're pulling yourself out of your life, right? Whereas your life really needs to be interspersed with that presence so that it can flow even into your activities. And then to realize that it is actually possible for you to be conscious and not thinking is an amazing thing. I don't think I've ever done that before. You probably have, but without knowing it, without fully realizing what was going on. I don't know. If you can do a conscious breath, then you would realize that during that time you're not thinking. Another thing I recommend is sometimes to be acutely aware of sense perceptions, whether it's visual or auditory or tactile, whatever it is.

26:33When you look at something, to really look and stay with something just for half a minute or minute, whether it's an object or even better, a natural thing like a plant or a tree or the sky. give something your complete attention, take it all in, let go of any kind of mental labeling so you don't call it anything. So when you look at a tree, you're just there as an alert presence and you're perceiving the tree against the background of an alert presence. You're very still, but you're not going towards sleep. Sometimes people, often people associate at stopping thinking with going to sleep. Of course, I call that falling below thinking.

27:20But this, when you stop thinking in this way, you rise above thinking, and that is the spiritual awakening. And as you realize that is possible for you, that is the rising of a new dimension of consciousness in you, that is spiritual awakening, and that then becomes your sense of identity becomes that silent presence, which is consciousness itself, and then you become free of ego. Of course, you still remember your past. You remember all those things that make up your person, your personality. That's fine. But you're not completely identified with that anymore. You don't need it for your sense of self.

28:08So, for example, you can appreciate a beautiful object. Why not? If you have a beautiful object in your home, or it might not even be yours, you appreciate it, you honor it, and it's fine. But you no longer derive your sense of self from it, because you don't need it for your sense of self anymore, because your sense of self is now derived from consciousness. And this changes the way in which you relate to other humans, because when you look at another human being, you see first of all their physical body and the outer appearance and then you see that you become aware of their personality which is the conditioned self.

28:50Everybody has a personality. I say has, not is. But if you are able to be still while you are looking at someone or listening to someone, so you're not creating a conceptual self or the other person. And then you can kind of sense a deeper dimension in the other human being where they are also, they are in essence consciousness just like you. Their essence is consciousness just as your essence is consciousness. There's a conditioned entity and then there's the unconditioned being. And then you begin to relate in other humans more to their being than to their conditioned entity. This means there's an outflow of love and goodwill towards the other.

29:40You feel a connectedness that you didn't feel before. That's where real love comes from. I define love as the recognition of the other as ultimately yourself. And you can't do that if you're holding on to your ego, right? But it's difficult. I mean, it's really, I think the ego seems to have a great deal of vigor in convincing us that it's the real story and causes us a lot of suffering. I once heard this quote, I think it was from a physicist who said something like, you know, our ego will do everything to convince you that it is real, including having you jump out of a window. Yes, yes, very true.

30:33In some cases, suicide is the last triumph of the ego to make the world wrong. And myself, right. And also, there's not only the personal ego, there's also the collective ego, or the collective ego of nations or tribes or religions. And if the personal ego is the source of suffering and dysfunctional in many ways, the collective ego is even more insane than the personal ego. I remember reading once you talked about the collective, I think, ego of a country or an office building. Sometimes you walk in and you feel a certain heaviness. Yes, yes. If you're sensitive, you can feel, even if you arrive in another country, you can sometimes immediately feel the energy field of that country, which is the collective.

31:28The pain body is what I call pain body is an accumulation of old emotion in a human being from childhood, perhaps even before childhood or past lifetimes. But if you don't want to go there, that's fine. Childhood is enough. This is goop. We can talk about anything. Childhood. Every child suffers, some to a greater or lesser degree. Being a child in this world is not easy. And so then emotional suffering leaves behind residues. And we don't teach our children how to metabolize and get emotion out of the body. The most important things that they should teach at school is to be aware of your emotions and how to deal with your own emotions instead of being your emotion.