[Patricia]

Originally Posted by Rockchick26

I just clicked that link and read it...but i must have missed something because I don't see where Steve gives any reasons why we need the ego. He talked about using it to help the greater good of humanity,but why can't you do that without an ego? I would think it would work BETTER actually.

Yes, I think you might have missed the point in the article. Steve talks about why we need the ego or, better yet, why it's useful to us, all throughout the article. Just to give a couple of examples:

All human beings are individual cells in the larger body of humanity. For humanity to survive and thrive (either as physical or spiritual beings), we as individuals must align ourselves with the greatest good of all, but we must also tend to our individual needs. We need to function well at both levels of awareness.

If you think about it, this is really the only sustainable approach in the long run. When you behave selfishly at the expense of others, you create resistance and lose a lot of help and support. If you sacrifice your own needs to help others, eventually you have to stop helping people in order to handle the personal problems that have accumulated due to neglect.

Are you sure that what you are referring to as "ego" is the same concept we are talking about here?

Don't get me wrong, I think that Tolle's book is full of incredible insights and I extracted a lot of value from it, but to me it just doesn't make any sense to kill the ego. Not identifying with the ego makes sense to the extent that you perceive yourself as part of a larger consciousness or consciousness itself, but killing the ego robs us of our individual human perspective. (To quote Tolle from the book: "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."). And without our individual perspectives and thoughts and ideas, how do we even contribute to the greater good when those perspectives, thoughts and ideas are part of the ego? Even wanting to make a difference in the world, in itself, is egoic. Realizing that you are not the thoughts and ideas that move you is dis-identification with ego and that's fine by me, but killing the ego is destroying the individual perspective that we experience as human beings. We can recognize ourselves as part of a larger consciousness or consciousness itself while at the same time keeping our individual perspectives as human beings, without which the physical experience loses purpose.

But anyway, killing the ego is one of the contradictions between what the Power of Now and the Law of Attraction teach. That was the point I was trying to make, based on the original purpose of the thread. I don't even mean to defend one or the other, like I said in a previous post, each person needs to find out for themselves what makes sense to them and what doesn't, but the point remains that there are contradictions between the two.