Tolle, ego, presence, and self esteem.

The way I see it, self esteem is not simply "lack of ego." There is much more to it than that. I find that Tolle is extremely useful for getting rid of bad emotions and disidentifying with negative thought processes. He teaches you to stop striving, stop thinking that getting more will help you to be more. But I tried to disidentify with good feelings, positive experiences, and realized after a while that there was NO POINT to doing this. Sure, your successes do not define you, but if thinking about them makes you feel good then fucking do it. The nature of a chronological existence is that you learn from the past and project into the future, and it is hard to reconcile these facts with absolute presence at all times. Self esteem is a mental process, and takes time, but when you cultivate it your level of presence will increase because you will not have to worry about negativity pulling you away from the present moment. Presence is allowing yourself to be.

Living in a society with other people, with REAL things you have to deal with, means that you can't always just immerse yourself in the moment and expect life to take care of itself. You gotta handle your shit too. And to put it bluntly, it's a lot easier to feel good when you have tangible things to feel good about. Self trust makes you feel good. Confidence makes you feel good. These things don't just come from being present, and furthermore they make it easier to allow yourself to be present, because when you handle your shit and trust that anything that comes your way, you can handle it, then you have nothing to worry about, and you can relax and enter the moment. In my honest opinion, self esteem leads to presence and NOT the other way around.

Self esteem CAN BE a default state, but it isn't automatic. If you have reasons why you don't think you are deserving of self esteem, then you can't ignore those reasons and then assume that self esteem will just sort of appear. Sorry, it doesn't work like that. Presence will not allow you to escape from the work you know you have to do on yourself, and the growth you know you have to make. Your experiences shape you, you can't deny it and you can't avoid it. I know Tolle has some great intentions, and his lessons should be heard, but he also has the power to create some really fucked up people (absolutely nothing personal to the original poster, just in general).

The difference between self esteem and ego in my mind is that self esteem is having reasons why you are awesome, why you deserve what you want and will get what you want because you are willing and able to put in the work. Ego is having reasons why you are better than the people around you and deserve more than them. Put in the work to be better than you were before, not to be better than the other guy.