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The AP has reported for years on a Minnesota farmer who has vowed he won't shave until the Vikings win the Super Bowl. 97-year-old Emmet Pearson's beard remains in place and 36-years long. He made the vow in 1974, the last time the Vikings made it to the big game.
While Mr. Pearson's stick-to-it-iveness is laudable--people these days don't keep vows like they used to--and funny, it points up the sort of identification with groups like sports teams that Eckhart Tolle in his seminal book on spirituality A New Earth says is one from the ego's playbook.
"One of the ways in which the ego attempts to escape the unsatisfactoriness of personal selfhood," Tolle writes, "is to enlarge and strengthen its sense of self by identifying with a group--a nation, political party, corporation, institution, sect, club, gang, football team."
Bingo! Isn't that Farmer Pearson in a nutshell? This list takes in a lot of us.
What sports teams accomplish or fail to accomplish really has nothing whatsoever to do with us. And yet we behave as if it does.
Here are ten signs you may be over-identifying with your team this Super Bowl:
Ok, I'll go first. My drama has been to allow my pain-body to take over my thinking in the context of a love relationship. No...