Maringa wrote:
Webwanderer you say that egos don't incarnate, but if someone looses his or her ego then they will probably not lose what is left?
If illumination and transfiguration is the last steps of enlightenment, then an enlightened person should be able to ascend or shift into any form?
Eckhart Tolle no longer live in the nonlinear realm, and if his ego is truly lost he will not die but just simply leave his body fully
awake and in that sense his consciousness will not be lost, because there is nothing that can be lost. "The secret to life is to
die before you die"
Maringa,
You can't lose your ego while still experiencing in a human body. That's impossible. This is the danger of taking any phrase or teaching too literally as it only leads to more concepts and definitions and labels. Your ego is that, which allows this conversation to take place. My perspective conversing with yours. No matter how wide or narrow your lens of perspective are, there will always be an ego in this physical realm, hence your preferences for certain things in life versus my preferences for other things instead.
Ego is a term that can be taken in multiple contexts. How large your ego is, in my opinion, is determined by who/what you perceive yourself as in any given experience. If you merely perceive yourself to be the one body/mind that you are, then your ego likely will be stronger, because you will likely need to defend a position more so and that will be your experience. Yet, if you widen your perspective and see yourself as more than
just a body/mind, then there's a better chance that you will have to less to defend and your experience might bring less suffering.
Eckhart Tolle is of course most certainly still living in the same realm that you and I are living in, hence, he still has a physical body. It's just that his perspective has widened so much, that he is likely more aligned vibrationally with his nature of Love, than perhaps some other people.
The stage of enlightenment chart that Jen posted a while back can vary. It's not meant to be a static thing in my opinion. For most people, I would say that we vary from level to level at different times. It's part of the roller coaster of humanness.
The expression "die before you die" is not meant to be taken literally, in the sense that the ego can actually 'die' prior to death of the body. It's a metaphor for awakening to the realization that 'I am not
merely just my ego'. So the 'dying part' doesn't mean the ego actually 'dies', it means you might see through the illusion of separation, in that beyond thought, nothing is actually separate. The ego will still exist, but will no longer be as believable as it once was perhaps.
Consider instead that regardless of how strong your ego is, meaning, whether you are Eckhart Tolle or whether you are a sociopathic serial killer, your body still dies, yet YOU live on because you are not your body nor your mind. You already are Awareness. You are
Being, expressing itself through/as this human body/mind known as Maringa. No matter what you do or don't do in this life, you are going back to the exact same place as Eckhart Tolle and that is not really a place, it is merely the awakening from the dream of being human. When your body dies, you take off the costume of humanness and remember who you truly are. There is no enlightenment to attain in this lifetime in order to make sure you as the Soul live on. There is not right/wrong that you can possibly do or don't do in this life. Your perspective is equally valuable to the whole as Adolf Hitler's perspective. Consider the Source Awareness perspective that expressed itself as Adolf Hitler awakened to the exact same after life realm that the Source Awareness perspective known as Eckhart Tolle will when he too dies.
Consider the purpose of human life is merely for the experience of relating with something that is perceived as other than us. We already are whole. Therefore, physical life allows for the expression of reflection and life/death. Relationships are all around us as they reflect to us where we need growth and evolution. The expansion of Love and bringing these experiences back home after our journey here in humanness is over is main purpose. To be the highest versions of ourselves as possible while here in humanness which includes honesty to ourselves and to others. But if you forget and get completely lost in ego, that too is perfectly ok in the long run.
That's just my experience and I know you didn't ask for my opinion, but felt like sharing. WW will provide his own perspective.