Eckhart Tolle

Eventually, they (children) will make mistakes, and they will experience some form of suffering, as all humans do. In fact, they may be mistakes only from your perspective. What to you is a mistake may be exactly what your children need to do or experience.

Parents then cannot let go of being a parent even when the child grows into an adult. They can't let go of the need to be needed by their child. Even when the adult child is forty years old, parents can't let go of the notion I know what's best for you.” The role of parent is still being played compulsively, and so there is no authentic relationship. p.61

The playing of negative roles becomes particularly pronounced whenever the ego is magnified by an active painbody, that is to say, emotional pain from the past that wants to renew itself through experiencing more pain.

In the early stages of many so called romantic relationships, roleplaying is quite common in order to attract and keep whoever is perceived by the ego as the one who is going to “make me happy, make me feel special, and fulfill all my needs.” ....those roles cannot be sustained indefinitely, especially once you start living together.

Ego arises when your sense of Beingness, of “I Am,” which is formless consciousness, gets mixed up with form. This is the meaning of identification. This is forgetfulness of Being, the primary error, the illusion of absolute separateness that turns reality into a nightmare.

The ego says, “I shouldn't have to suffer,” and that thought makes you suffer so much more... The truth is that you need to say yes to suffering before you can transcend it.

If I and life are two, if I am separate from life, then I am separate form all things, all beings, all people. But how could I be separate from life? What “I” could be there apart from life, apart from Being? It is utterly impossible. So there is no such thing as “my life,” and I don't have a life. I am life. I and life are one. It cannot be otherwise. So how could I lose my life? How can I lose something that I don't have in the first place? How can I lose something that I Am? It is impossible. p. 79

A very common role is the one of victim, and the form of attention it seeks is sympathy or pity or others' interest in my problems, “me and my story.” Seeing oneself as a victim is an element in many egoic patterns, such as complaining, being offended, outraged, and so on.

In the West, it is the physical appearance of the body that contributes greatly to the sense of who you think you are: its strength or weakness, its perceived beauty or ugliness relative to others. For many people, their sense of self worth is intimately bound up with their physical strength, good looks, fitness, and external appearance.

If you are in the grip of the ego, you believe that by doing more and more you will eventually accumulate enough “doings” to make yourself feel complete at some point in the future. You won't. You will only lose yourself in doing. The entire civilization is losing itself in doing that is not rooted in Being and thus becomes futile. p. 64

...the fault may be theirs, but by focusing on it, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, you amplify it. And what you react to in another, you strengthen in yourself.

Beyond the realm of simple and verifiable facts, the certainty that “I am right and you are wrong” is a dangerous thing in personal relationships as well as in interactions between nations, tribes, religions, and so on. But if the belief “I am right; you are wrong” is one of the ways in which the ego strengthens itself, if making yourself right and others wrong is a mental dysfunction that perpetuates separation and conflict between human beings...