How The Unchecked Ego is Our Undoing

To arrive at this awareness of our true nature, it helps to look more closely at this ego, this “self” you’ve taken yourself to be.

     

The first thing to know about the ego is that it underpins your self-image, your self-identity, your self-concept and, as such, is tied in with your self-worth or self-esteem, how you think about and judge this “self” that you imagine yourself to be. The ego accumulates knowledge, facts, ersatz “truths” and all the memories of past hurts, traumas, as well as successes, to pack around itself and convince itself that it is real.

     

In order to survive as a separate identity/belief, it then needs to always feel in control of its domain—of you, in other words. Your ego needs to know it is right. It needs to be right, to justify its actions, however misguided. And in order to be right, it needs to make other egos wrong, or at least judge them in some way—better than, less than, or superior or inferior to—in order to maintain its comfortable status quo.

     

It does this, in the most extreme cases, through comparing, criticizing, blaming, castigating, condemning, denouncing, disparaging, reprimanding, and generally finding fault with anything or anyone that does not measure up to its standards. On the other hand, when it finds an ego that it is in agreement with, or wants to be like, to emulate, it causes you to act in a way that seeks approval or—in more extreme cases—become flattering, fawning, sweet-talking, and doing whatever it takes to curry favor.

     

The ego projects its viewpoint out onto the world, in other words, and measures everything by its projection, as in: “Is this person acting or behaving the way I think they should be?”

     

So, whenever you find yourself caught in one of these behaviors—comparing yourself as better than or less than another human being in some way—you are caught in your ego. Becoming aware of being caught is the key to shifting your behavior, and moving into a place of greater freedom and presence.

           

And you become aware by realizing that your ego is essentially just a thought, the “I” or “me” thought, and its importance in your life has been that you have built your whole identity around it—your entire personality—since about age two. And this is why it takes time to undo, to get free of, your ego.