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What Eckhart Tolle’s 1977 Awakening Teaches Us About the Two Selves

His mind-blowing epiphany carries a lesson for us all.

David Gerken
Change Your Mind Change Your Life
4 min readJul 7, 2021

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Photo by Hennadii Hryshyn on Unsplash

The two selves. Conscious and egoic. That concept, expressed variously, forms the foundation for a boatload of spiritual traditions. Understanding it is vital to making progress on the spiritual path.

I’ve written about it several times before, but here’s another summation. The egoic self is essentially the mind. It’s the entity that creates all those unsolicited thoughts like “I’m not good enough, thin enough, smart enough…” “I’ll never get married because I’m not worthy.” Or even “I’m too good for anybody.”

The egoic mind

All of these egoic thoughts arise from the stored experiences of our formative years and after. So if your dad always told you that you were dumb, it won’t matter that you went on to Harvard and became a Fortune 500 CEO. You’ll always consider yourself dumb. That’s the power of the egoic self.

The conscious self is the real you. It’s what exists in the present moment when your egoic mind is not in the driver’s seat. It’s where real wisdom and intelligence arises.

The key to awakening spiritually is to 1. Recognize this dynamic of the two selves; then 2. Do the daily spiritual work, the chopping…

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Change Your Mind Change Your Life
Change Your Mind Change Your Life

Published in Change Your Mind Change Your Life

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David Gerken
David Gerken

Written by David Gerken

Meditation and Mindfulness teacher. Dad of three precious kids. Former writer for THE WEST WING. Follow me at davidgerken.net.

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