In this article, I want to share some ideas around the concept of ego. As you journey through life, you will probably come across people who have a healthy opinion of themselves.
You may even have had the misfortune of interacting with people with narcissistic tendencies. In our modern world, it is inevitable that you will have met people with low self esteem.
Each of the types of people I have just described to you, all have a different sense of their identity and their separateness from others and the world around them.
Your self-image has developed through the influences of your upbringing and the experiences you have gone through up to the present. You act in accordance with your beliefs about the world, about yourself and others. Your world becomes what you believe it to be.
How you perceive the world determines your level of happiness and achievement. However, you all have in common the fact that when you were born your minds are virtually a clean slate.
In a more spiritual context, the ego has often been characterised as an enemy you have to overcome and destroy in order for you to attain the giddy heights of enlightenment, and a neutral karmic footprint.
What Is Ego Anyway?
If you research the word “ego”, you would find there are two main fields that refer to it and define it: Psychology and Spirituality.
Psychology tells you that the ego is the part of you that gives you your sense of self and your ability to interact with the world around you.
In Spirituality, your ego is defined as the structure that frames your worldview.
As you can see, these two ideas are not that different. But maybe we should expand on these ideas.
When discussing ideas around ego perhaps you might think about these questions:
– Who created your ego?
– What is your ego’s purpose?
– What happens to your ego when you die?
Let’s look at each of these:
Who created your ego?
Your ego is part of your mind. You created your ego as part of the vehicle you use to negotiate your life. Your ego gives you the illusion of separation from the oneness of all that is.
The oneness is not aware of your ego; it didn’t create your ego, you did. The oneness created you and you in turn created your ego. Neither is your ego directly aware of the oneness.
However, your ego is aware that something exists that is greater than it can ever be. Your ego takes this as a threat to its ability to control you and so it tries to manipulate your emotions through fear and guilt to establish itself as your dominant source of thought. The only change and growth that comes to ego is in your perception of life and the judgements that shape your ego’s beliefs about who you are. The only source of reference that your ego has is your past.
Many of these beliefs derived from ego perception can be false and not serve you well. The ego does not have consciousness; it perceives, judges and reacts.
What is your ego’s purpose?
When you created your ego, you gave it a purpose. That purpose is to love you, to protect you and to guide you towards your purpose.
The love that the ego has for you is not the eternal love of the oneness, but rather an emotional love that the ego requires you to reciprocate in order that it feels validated and considers itself worthy. Your ego feigns love to manipulates you and limits your awareness to its own domain. It shows love because it needs you to listen and validate it; but if your relationship with your ego is not healthy, your ego comes to despise you as not being enough.
Your ego protects you by measuring people and situations against your beliefs and previous experience and bringing your attention to the emotions generated by your experiences. In this way, it seeks to control your behaviour.
What happens to your ego when you die?
Oneness cannot experience, it knows and is love. In order to experience, oneness must create the illusion of separation. This illusion of separation consists of opposites: dark and light, love and fear, hot and cold. It is only through experiencing opposites that we can understand, choose and learn.
The ego lets you experience opposites in separation to the oneness. You use perception and judgement to form your beliefs about yourself and others. Unfortunately, because of the illusion of being separate you establish many beliefs from the point of view of inadequacy and fear due to the impermanence of life.
When you die, you return to a state of knowing and therefore have no further need of evaluation by way of perception and judgement. As a result, your ego fades with your body when you die.
What Are Your Ego’s Priorities?
Your ego will always try to exploit any situation in an attempt to win your praise and confidence, so that it can overcome its own doubts. Your ego wishes to exert control over your life so that it can fulfil the three pronged purpose discussed earlier in this article. Your ego is your mind’s belief that you exist separately and on your own.
Because of this, its relationship with other egos is on the basis of only giving in order to get something in return. In this way, your ego evaluates itself in relation to other egos by measuring what it has; the aim is to accumulate the most it can. Your ego perceives other egos as real in an attempt to convince itself that it is real.
Your ego perceives the body as its home and therefore uses the body and emotions to satisfy itself. Your ego’s continuing to exist depends entirely on convincing you to believe in separation.
If you identify with your ego, you end up in a state where you do not love what you made and what you made does not love you. This is because the ego tells you that nothing is ever enough.
This is a contradiction when you understand that you created your ego out of love and one of its purposes is to love you.
This situation causes tremendous stress in your life at a subconscious level. The result of all of this is that your ego seeks to control you in order to fulfil its version and understanding of its purpose.
Bringing The Ego Relationship Into Balance
In order to bring balance to your relationship with your ego, it is important that you understand that you are not your ego. You have an ego, which you created as part of your life to support the illusion of separation, experience duality and live a life of learning and growth.
When you learn and grow, so does the oneness, sometimes referred to as the universal mind.
Up to this point you have really only looked at one of the parts of this relationship for life – the ego. But a relationship is an interaction of one thing with at least one other entity. It this relationship of yours with your ego we need to understand the role of both parties.
So what is your role in this dynamic?
As a localised manifestation of the oneness, you are the creation of oneness. You were created under the illusion of separation. If separation is an illusion then you are still oneness.
You might say, (out of humility), that you are only a part of oneness. “The Father is all of Me, but I am not all of the Father, not yet”. However, this is incorrect, oneness is all that is, not divided, not separated, only oneness.
As oneness, you are the co-creator of your life. To facilitate your journey through this life you created your body, and your purpose. You also created your ego to enhance the experiences and emotions of life and to perceive and judge the experiences you choose to undergo.
As a manifestation of your creative process, you ego is your servant. Your ego can only react to people and situations based on its perception and judgement which is coloured by the beliefs you have accumulated within life.
As part of the oneness, you are, (at your essence), pure conscious awareness and knowingness. You are beingness.
At the level of your ego, to be is to have. As oneness, being and having are the same. As oneness, why would you limit yourself by allowing your ego to determine your quality of experience and deny your true state of being as love?
When you ego tries to influence a course of action, based on experience, or fear. It does so based on emotion and the limitation of its beliefs.
As oneness and knowingness, you can simply choose to “be” differently and allow people and situations to turn up differently in your life; rather than repeating the same cycles repeatedly. This means that you don’t react to life. Instead, you pause, reflect and rely on your awareness to decide how you are going to experience being.
In time, with enough practice, your ego will calm down and the level of emotion around your perception and judgement will decrease. Stay persistent and don’t worry if you have relapses into your old ways. This is natural and the fact that you notice any lapses means the new way of being is taking charge.
Last Thoughts
So, in conclusion you should look at the answer to the question asked in the title of this article. In reality, your ego is neither your friend nor your foe. Your ego is your creation. You made it, for you to experience the illusion of separation that is life. It is your responsibility to set boundaries for how your ego is to serve you. Your ego is neither friend nor foe, but it can be either or both, if you allow it to be so.
In the state of oneness or source that you come from, you know only love. However when you manifested in the physical, the love that you are was able to separate into its light and shadow forms – love and fear both are states of being but opposite and manifest quite differently.
Love manifests peace, joy, oneness, awareness and gratitude, borne out of knowing. Love is your true self, your conscious awareness.
Fear manifests as shame, guilt, anger, separation and judgement borne out of perception.Ego is your shadow you have the choice of following love or fear.
As you return to knowing you overcome the attempts of ego to control you through its fear.
If your ego is your creation that would imply your ego is under your conscious control. Unfortunately, if you do not take conscious control and you allow your ego to do as it will, thinking that ego is all you are, rather than a part of you; then your ego will most likely behave somewhat similar to if you leave your car unattended on a slope with the engine running and no handbrake applied.
The only reference ego has is the past, if you follow its emotional reactions you will go through endless unpleasant cycles without realising that you can choose differently. The past will just keep repeating and you will continue to drag the past into the present.
If you remember, at your essence, you are pure love and knowing awareness you can pause, observe the situation and decide consciously to allow the emotion and the situation pass – let it go. Otherwise, if you suppress the reaction, it will remain in your system as blocked energy and intensify your egoic reaction more and more with each challenging experience.
In closing, I would like to acknowledge my guide, Ptah, for explaining the ego dynamic in this way and giving me a different understanding of the way forward. It is my hope that in sharing these ideas, you will find comfort and some measure of peace as you go forward.
Please feel free to comment below. If you want to get it touch, you can contact me through the website. Please note that the ideas in this article are my own thoughts and personal research. My words are for your entertainment and do not constitute and form professional advice. If you want a more personalised service, you can contact me privately.
With love as always
Richard H Morris.
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Richard Morris is an award winning author, an advanced hypnosis practitioner (non-medical), a clairvoyant and an otherwise simple soul, who is here to serve you as best he can. He does not want to be identified as a guru, merely as a fellow traveller. He would rather be known as the researcher for your search. He has many interests in life and aspires to become a polymath at some stage in his journey.
Richard has journeyed through the world of the mind, spiritualism and hypnosis helping people to cope with and find meaning in life for the last 20 years. He has also worked in sports performance with athletes and sportsmen and sportswomen from beginner to international level and with several South African national teams.
Richard is lovingly supported by his guides as part of the 12th ray and shares their guidance and wisdom.
When working with clients in any field of support whether practical or emotional you know you are loved, heard and supported when he tells you “Go on, I am here with you”.
You can find my award winning book here – https://www.amazon.com/HIT-REFRESH-NOW-Overcoming-Limiting/dp/B08DPR6LVF
You can contact me via the website – https://hitrefreshnow.com/
Or if you would rather e-mail me – [email protected]
Author: Spirit Connection
Spirit Connection is an online platform to facilitate connecting light workers with people seeking their help.
