What Eckhart Tolle said about the ego is true. The ego will use anything it can to seperate me from you and me from any help I need.
For example, when I was new I had a little "if only" story going on. It went like this:
But you don't understand, if only I hadn't came from a broken home. If only my dad had been around more. If only we had more love in our home. If only we had more money, If only we hadn't moved so many times, If only we hadn't lived in that s**t hole of a town and I hadn't went to that high school, If only I had went to college, yada yada yada, maybe I wouldn't be an alcoholic and maybe I wouldn't have turned out the way I turned out.
One day I was sitting in an AA meeting listening to this guy talk about coming from a home where everything was in place, if that means that coming from a home where the family was intact and there was love and money and stability means not being alcoholic and not turning out the way you turn out. This guy was an attorney and wearing a suit that cost as much as I made in a month. At the time I was a logger. And this guy was just as much an alkie as I was and even more screwed up than me.
And that little lie got smashed.
Jim