IT'S YOUR EGO – SAY “HELLO”

What is an Ego?

We’ve all got one.(Those who claim to have no ego are being spoken for by their ego). But what is it?

As far as I know, no surgeon or forensic pathologist has ever opened up a human body, nor has any MRI jockey ever scanned a patient and exclaimed “Ah! There’s his ego!” Now since the human body has been pretty thoroughly explored from end to end, I’m fairly confident in concluding that, with something so large and powerful, there is no particular thing we can identify as The Ego. Ego is a no-thing: Nothing pretending to be Something. No-one pretending to be Someone.

Yet there is an ego. We readily identify egos strutting their stuff all around us every day and we sure as hell identify with it, so what is it?

Well since it doesn't exist, the best I can do is dance around it, pointing to it whenever I see evidence of its presence in the moment. For instance, it's here right now. I couldn't write this stuff without my ego to give me language and style and the communicating skills it's learned. And your ego is listening very intently to you reading this, and commenting to you all along. What's it saying? Become aware. Don't buy into an argument with it – just be aware of what your “voice-over” is saying.

Ego is the “I” in “I am”. It began before you had the language to define it, or sense of self to feel into your self. You looked at faces that swam into your field of vision and, whatever they expressed to you, you accepted whatever they reflected as “Me” – watch any baby when a new face heaves into view – the baby will gaze at it intently, then maybe even copy it, just to see what it feels like. This sense of “feeling like” creates the beginnings of a personal identity. This is what I am, then this, then this, then this.... and so on ad infinitum. It got confusing, though, when we first saw “ourself” in a mirror. Around us, familiar dudes were prompting “That's you!” Oh dear, they meant well!

But to us, at first, it was yet another dude, looking at us like all the other dudes. But then that mirror-dude said or did something that connected in a strange way with something “I” did, at exactly the same time. Our parents looked at our shock and confusion, and laughed. Well, even though they grew up, they're still as confused as “I” is right now. “I” and “Me separated in that moment.

Not one of us ever really got the chance to find out who we really are because those around us were feeding us with their ideas of who and what we are, by their words, their body language, their tone of voice, and their actions. Bam! A Claytons identity took hold. We never had a chance. Separated from ourself, and no say in it.

The word “ego” is the Latin word for “I” – ego sum: “I am”. It could be said, then, that your ego is anything you add after “I am……..”

Ego is an appearance: a bunch of ideas about everything, including -

• who you think you are,
• what you think you ought to be
• who you think other people are
• the way you think other people ought to be
• what you think your life is about
• what you think you look and sound like to others
• what you think you ought to look and sound like to others
• the way you think the world is
• the way you think the world ought to be …….
• ……. And so on ad infinitum.

You may have gathered by now that your Ego is a chaotic bunch of very limited and often contradictory ideas about reality, but it is not reality itself. Nor can it connect you with reality. If you like, it's the difference between me actually visiting Victoria Falls (reality); and watching someone else's jerky home movies of the Falls on Facebook (ego). Ego is a bunch of concepts, beliefs and opinions about yourself, your world, and your place in it, but it is not the direct experience of those things, any more than a book explaining the rules and warning about the dangers of flying is the actual experience of flying. Every time you live in and come from ego, you isolate yourself from reality, unable to see anything as it actually is, with one eye closed, one ear stopped up, one hand tied behind your back, and one leg tied to a concrete pillar, all the while so certain how right you are, and looking for any other egos with whom you can either find agreement (Us), or engage in a a lethal war of Right/Wrong (Them).

Ego arises from Fear and Refusal – Fear of risk, change, failure and death; Refusal to think for ourselves, refusal to let go of the past, refusal to be response-able, refusal to see experience through (ego takes the easy way out), refusal to love and forgive, and refusal to be all that we are. Yet we lurch through life convinced that our ego, and our perceptions viewed from that very limited place are the only real truth in town.

For a moment, look at Ego as an operating system, a Governing Principle that shapes our perceptions of reality and preconditions our responses. It has two interfaces : “I” and “Me”. And “I” thinks “That's me!”

Now think of Ego as a superstition – a hallucination, and a very dangerous one because it comes from an originating notion, entertained as “truth”, that “I” is the centre of consciousness, energy and responsibility, and that this “I” stands separate and sometimes in opposition to anything it deems to be “Not-Me”, special and distinct from everything else which revolves around it once every 24 hours.

Ego is a bunch of thoughts, but they're all adopted. Not a single thought that occurs to you is either yours or original, so Ego cannot creatively think for itself. It can only react to stimuli in accordance with its own limited, restricting, change-resistant and ultimately destructive programming.

One final word before we head off on this journey – I have avoided using the words”right” or “wrong” in talking about ego. And I hope I don't lead you to fall into the trap of thinking in terms of “right” or “wrong” about your Ego. It's something we have, and we could not be human without it. I suggest that our egos are essential to create and programme the difficulties that we've come to this life to experience and overcome. It's our ego that largely determines the type of adventure ride we've come to suffer/enjoy.

What's important to me now is whether how I'm managing and using my ego works. My guess is that part of this game is – not to get rid of ego – but to transcend it and re-write its job description. We can do that. Our ego is something WE constructed; and anything we build, we can modify, re-novate, or re-build.

When I look more closely, though, at egos around me, I notice different kinds of ego. Here are some of the more popular flavours:-

• The Bloated Ego (actually a sub-class of Deluded Ego, but “important” enough to get “special” treatment)
• The Petty Ego
• The Deluded Ego
• The Disgusted Ego
• ….there are others, but these will be enough to get you started on the reformation of “You Inc.”

When I look more closely at these egos, however, I recognise them. I know them! They're reflections of my own ego when it's wearing different costumes and reading from well-worn scripts (mostly melodramas).

Welcome to my world and my To-Do List to reform whatever “I” adds after “I am.....”

THE BLOATED EGO

A bloated ego is a state of being in which one’s sense of self is greater than the self truly is. It is a particular refinement of a Deluded Ego.

Bloated ego is a state of a person who is excessively prideful, pompous, or on a power stroke. A bloated ego is one that, in the absence of experiences of genuine self-worth, become infected by an unwarranted self-importance, a feeling of being somehow “special” and, therefore, in some way privileged or entitled. Bloated ego is easily recognised in people of all ages who feel “entitled”, and in people who fancy themselves as leaders – they tend to be either very rude, pushy, belligerent and even violent, or nauseatingly “nice”, polite, ppolitically correct and manipulative. Treating psychiatrists in publicly funded mental health facilities are masters at it (that, by the way, is my Disgusted Ego showing).

Ego is not who or what you are. Ego is pretty much a sense of self, not the Self itself. In the sentence “I am me”, ego is the “I” that puts itself before “am”, and the “Me” that claims pride of place after “am-ness”. Both faces of ego skid over the real site of Self (am), and mis-takenly assert themselves and anything they identify with, to be what we are. Ego usurps simply “being” with a “position” that has to be fed, maintained and defended at any costs. Once we believe in “I” and “me”, we lose our true self and replace it with an I-dentity. Suffering is born of Identity, and in turn gives us identity. But Identity isn't real, so suffering is as much an illusion as a bad dream. The question is, “When will I wake up?” The answer doesn't come easily, because when you do wake up, “I” and “Me” disappear. The prospect of that sets the bats flying in every belfry.

If you are deluded enough to have a 'bloated ego' it means that you have an overdeveloped sense of self, ie - you think that you are more important or special than you actually are. Alternately, the delusion of a 'small' or 'low' ego would be the opposite, a depressed sense of self; ie - you lack confidence and think of yourself as insignificant. And “significance” is the food of all Ego. 

Given that, at least for the time being, I'm stuck with an ego but do have some influence over the nature of this ego, a 'balanced' ego would, I think, make me easier to live with. I feel more comfortable when I'm confident without being arrogant, humble without being self-effacing. These balance points are difficult to achieve to be sure, and the balance point is different for each person, and differs moment to moment as the weather changes, both outside and inside. But I find it's well worth the effort because when I'm in a state of a balanced ego, I can achieve most anything. And my observations tell me that the same is true for you, too.

THE PETTY EGO

Question: How can I have the inner balance required so that I don't have petty ego reactions (like cynicism, judgment, sarcasm and criticism) to the little imperfections and irritations of everyday life?

Response: Ego reactions are unconscious responses rooted in ignorance. They add defensiveness to the situation – never a good sign for a creative outcome. The solution to such Pettiness reactions is a self-awareness that frees you from old mental habits. Consciousness of your true self, that develops through a constant meditation practice, gives you a secure sense of being that does not feel compelled to protect itself with attacks of judgment, sarcasm and criticism.

For many years after discovering that I actually had an ego and that it wasn't what I am, I assumed that my ego is some kind of villain, plaguing my life and being responsible for all my current woes. To be fair to myself, I also allowed that it was first invented for very good reasons, and accepted that I can't function as a human being without it. But it was still, in my eyes, the bogeyman. Nowadays, thankfully,my grudging acceptance of having an Ego is turning more into a mildly reluctant, bemused tolerance, and perhaps even a little gratitude for its limited uses. It's the joke of being human, and the joke is on me. Having an Ego may be akin to having an untrained dog of very dubious pedigree that has a penchant for getting off the leash, but also barks very loudly when danger lurks.

Guruji wrote once - “Ego is nothing more than the individuality that every soul incarnating in physical form needs for identifying itself.” That suggests to me that ego itself may not be the problem as much as our need for identity -- some thing to identify our self with. We can't just “be”; we have this need to be something, or someone. We need and ID to flash when we meet others and, as it were, swap “business cards”, reinforcing our separateness in the guise of “getting together”.

My Identity Card (ego) causes problems, for me and others, when it goes feral – it “gets above its station” and assumes an importance, a volume and frequency that sets dogs howling “Go away!” When the right buttons are pressed I go vain, arrogant, bitter and twisted, tyrannical, loud, opinionated, haughty, superior, tetchy – “I” and “Me” become right arseholes.

We strut around with our bloated egos as if we know everything about everything. What we fail to understand is that we know virtually nothing other than a few basic perceptions, most further tainted by assumptions, beliefs and attitudes that were downloaded by our parents very soon after we arrived on this plane, before we even knew what was happening, let alone select which ones to adopt and which to reject.

Many of us have a very sensitive emotional body that makes us cringe, cry or go to war if anyone dare to oppose our point of view. We have superficial, unexamined bits of data on millions of inputs that sit there in our sub-conscious minds ready to spring to life when activated. This gives us a false sense of readiness and superiority. What we don’t know is that our knowledge depth barely puts a hairswidth layer on the surface of any subject matter.

Our ignorance of life is hardly helped by our schooling. Our so-called “education” system makes it virtually impossible to fail. That is why we have huge numbers of students that finish school hardly able to read or write their name, and totally unable to get when they're being “had”. After 11 years in the primary and secondary school system, I emerged knowing less about how to get on in life than when I went in. I couldn't wait to get out of school so that my education could begin. And I look around me and weep at the realisation that I'm far from being alone. Look at how we appoint individuals in serious leadership positions that are unqualified and know virtually nothing about leadership or accountability. We do that because we don't know those skills either and can't distinguish a leader from a “greaser”.

The petty ego can be more subtle than, say, the bloated ego It can be so subtle that I didn't recognise I had it until my mate, Colin Hayes, called me on it just last week. That's what friends are for, right?

Some who don't know about petty ego actually boast about what it does to them and even recommend it as a way of living! I'm talking about the over-sensitive, touchy, walk-on-eggshells dominant victims, the emotionally fragile who wield their dysfunctions like medallions worthy of worship. They hurt at something as mild as a look or an inflection of voice, or another driver cutting into “their” lane in traffic because they suffer from a ground-being of persecution – “They're out to get me.” Do not fall into the trap of mistaking this for sensitivity and insight into the feelings and intentions of others. It is simply self-centred hyper-touchiness. If you, as I do, have this “I hurt too easily” attitude, I think it's time to find some “give”, some flexibility, resilience and elasticity before we mollycoddle our egos into a very brittle, fragile state where we can be easily broken. The longer we allow our hurt to continue, the harder it is to let it go, and we end up being isolated and bitter because no-one else is affected by our fragility – not the way we intended anyway.

Hey, there's never a shortage of people who'll be nasty to your face, and even more who'll bitch about you behind your back. And you can't go around silencing everyone who talks about you – not even in North Korea. Yes, you can hit back, physically, verbally, tactically, legally, emotionally, psychologically and socially, but it's not usually an effective option – not in the medium- or long-term because our feelings of injured superiority stem from a Certainty of Inferiority that just won't go away. In the end, we still suffer—in silence. Whether or not we win the Payback play, we lose the Game.

I'm far from being a good example on this, but I have found what works for me is to be serious about everything, except my self. I do not (except sometimes) take myself any more seriously than I take someone else's precocious child. And the “except” times always leave me wearing facial omelet. I've learned to grow a little thickness of skin, and to be selectively deaf or blind to infractions that are likely to be forgotten tomorrow. That leaves me free to engage with any serious overstepping of boundaries, and others' stupidity with possible long-term consequences with clarity and overt purpose.

THE DELUDED EGO

Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they are.”

At the time, I think Rousseau was mainly referring to human society as a whole. But what he wrote is equally valid for every aspect of our “person-al” life. Ego itself is a delusion – a mistaken idea of “This is who I am.”. Then the delusion spends every waking moment collecting more delusions about itself and false proofs of its reality. No wonder we haven't the vaguest notion of who we are, why we're here, or where we're going!

It's my hope that each and every one of us can upgrade itself and live in a golden age by returning to nature and living a balanced life at peace with ourselves, our environment, and each other.

Now, here's where the whole Ego thing gets very serious...... as a result of the ego (something that isn’t even fundamentally real), we can come to a point in our timeline where there is a probable possibility of species self-annihilation, whether by accident or by collaboration between the focused intention of the the most macho of minds, aided and abetted by the tacit permission of the majority – supine, acquiescent minds within our human collective. This is a very dangerous way to live and leaves in serious doubt the certainty of a bright future, if a future at all. Crocodiles and cockroaches declared the winners.

It’s time to finally come to terms with how big of a role the human ego plays in all the social and political issues we see all around us and that affect our daily lives. Putting band-aids on the symptoms and wrapping the causes in lies, spin and sheer bloody ignorance will not cure the very deep causes of a future we refuse to confront.

Thanks to some wonderful luminaries of humanity, we can upgrade our understanding of what ego is from the rather simplistic Freudian view to a model that allows for more complexity. After all, the universe/multiverse , even as we understand it presently, is infinite in nature. Within this infinite reality time is irrelevant. Reality allows us to create illusion, the infinite allows us to live as-if in limitation.

Rather than being an actual entity, the ego is a structure-process imposed upon pure awareness that not only generates its own illusions, but creates ideas, concepts, opinions and beliefs through which it can reinforce (ie. be right about) anything it claims itself to Be. And while there are gullible humans around for ego to feed off, the illusions also have a life of their own. The ideas, concepts, and beliefs that we are so sure are “ours”, are not ours at all, but they use us to survive themselves.

It works a bit like a hologram – a beam of pure light (pure awareness) is “interfered with” by impure perceptions (stuff) that creates an illusory reality that seems real, but that doesn't actually exist.

Having a grasp of what the ego is in this expanded view can help us understand that whenever the ego is in play, we exist in a state of confused perception and faulty reasoning, thanks to the generated illusions that ego creates. This is why activities such as thought-awareness, observing and contemplating are helpful in catching the ego doing its thing, recognising that we're being had, and thus minimising the ego’s dominating influence over our lives.

Understanding the Illusion

The powerful emotions of anger, fear, envy, and others can be seen as if they were mechanically following tiny signals…as if there is a switch that is pressed inside a Stimulus/Response robot that triggers pre-existing patterns of thinking and feeling, amplifies them, and then reacts. We see examples of it in dashcam footage every day on Facebook and Youtube.

The illusion we're prone to is that we are seeing something that is an actual experience within an objective reality. However, the fact is that it is mostly a replay of a matrix of memories – the flaky, warped memories of a past experience that is conveniently modified a little to fit present circumstances. This present replay and re-enactment is recorded again in order to add to the previous memory, which ingrains things even deeper, leading us to have a greater conviction in its real-ness.

What is even more absurd is that this same process applies to anything that we believe may have happened in the past. Every time we believe that such-and-such happened, or that it happened in a certain way, our ego later responds as-if it actually did go down that way. And the conclusions that we drew from that event – real or unreal, fresh or revised – are also held to be true in perpetuity. Mind will not allow ego to doubt itself. Doubt is regarded by Ego mind as a threat to its survival. And the sole purpose of the Ego is Survival – the survival – not of you – but of itself, and all of its ideas, concepts, beliefs and conclusions. Mind is Right!

The more we experience in this way, the deeper we get stuck in the illusion. This entire time, we stay in a state of certainty where we think that we are basing our actions on experience itself. The delusional ego has made us prisoners of something that isn’t even real.

And we would rather go on being right about our delusions than be free, or be happy, or even be healthy and alive. The result of this chronic refusal to deal with the world as it is is eventual breakdown and profound confusion, hopelessness, helpless rage. Dementia.

Take a look at how prevalent this is in older individuals. The older a person gets, the more ‘experienced’ he or she is in this illusion that has essentially entrained us to think a certain way. The older a person is, the more sure he or she is that they “know” what they’re doing, making it very difficult for them to change, think differently or deviate from the path the illusion has trained them to go down. The essence of all of our lives after around age seven is made up of a series of illusions that gather unto themselves more illusions that “fit in with what exists already”. That process is called “Understanding”. During that process, anything that does not fit is mentally and emotionally isolated, rejected, and treated like a fart in a funeral service. How we treat everything – from cancer to refugees and anything else classed as “alien” -- is a good mirror of how we treat anything foreign to our made-up minds, bodies, emotions, families, tribes and nations. We even have an innocuous word for it – “immunity”.

Would you like to be free?

In the light of what I've just said, what is something you will have to give up in order to be free? Would you like to be in control of your own life and not have it controlled by something that isn’t even intrinsically real in the first place?

You can and you will…if you can overcome the great obstacle of fear. This primitive and incredibly powerful tool of the Deluded Ego is a reflex that is triggered when something that’s identified by our ego as “very necessary” is felt to be under threat. It doesn't matter what is seemingly “threatened”. It might be the status quo, or a belief that fluorescent light causes cancer, or the immediate whereabouts of your mobile phone, or your dread that those who wear headscarves are about to take over the world, or that “I can't live without you”.....

The automatic, kneejerk reflex of fear causes a person to find every possible way of protecting what is felt as being necessary for survival, or in failing this, to create illusions of escape from the perceived approaching danger. In the strong words of physicist David Bohm, “fear confuses, corrodes, and corrupts the deluded mind.”

THE DISGUSTED EGO

First, it's important to understand that disgust in humans can be good. Simple survival dictates that maybe we should recoil from the truly gross things that can harm us—things like festering wounds, rancid or flyblown meat and faeces, to name a few examples, are dangerous incubators of infection and possible harm. Yes?

Well not necessarily. In centuries gone by medicos used maggots to clean infected tissue. Natural, but revolting to our developing sensibilities. So someone invented anti-biotics. Problem solved. Oh, no. Now we have a bigger problem. That cure has become the cause of a much more serious threat to survival. So now medicine is going back to breeding maggots as agents for cure. But even though we can see the benefits, part of us still goes “Yerrrrk!”

Disgust is also the feeling I got as a child when Mum gave me a cup of tea with a skin on it and bits of clotted cream floating on top. It didn't look good, it looked dangerous. Forget the fact that it was actually cream (which I like, by the way), it reminded me of something else, and that revolted me. This is what the mind does. Colin Hayes described it as “the absurd logic of the mind”; (a) is just like (b) is just like (c) which is the same as (d)... and so on …. except sometimes. Maybe the cream floating on the top of my cuppa reminded me of what I could see in the toilet pan (no sewerage for us in those days)! I don't know. The point is that my mind made a connection, I gagged, my mother got upset, my father got angry and forced me to drink it. I still can't drink tea or coffee with grooblies floating on the top. Unreasonable? Of course it is. Insane? Perhaps. But our minds make emotional connections that utterly defy logic sometimes, and those connections are l-a-w LAW to the person who has them. I'm talking now about very well-educated politicians whose faces tighten and lips curl when they talk about “gays” and “our dispossessed first-citizens” and “illegal immigrants” – their euphemisms for aboriginals and refugees.

And, because the visceral connections that lead to some form of disgust were not reasoned into in the first place, we cannot be reasoned out of them. That won't work. I gagged then, and I gag now, just a little more politely, that's all. That's how an untrained ego works – stimulus/reaction – before any possibility of consideration can kick in. Then it covers up, like a dingo scratching earth over its do-doos. Eric Abetz tailed off one of his pontifications one day recently with “...but they are all God's children.”

I nearly threw up on the spot. Isn't that interesting?

If we are ever to get over our disgust reflexes, especially in social areas like homosexuality, racialism and religious intolerance, “education” programmes are not going to be very effective unless they cut in before the age of around seven, and they involve some experiential role-playing – one of the elements the conservatives want to cut out of remedial programmes. If we leave re-education (and I use that word very advisedly – look up its Latin roots) much more serious personal evolution and reprogramming is called for to interrupt and disrupt the tick-tock predictability of the mechanically disgusted human ego.

"Disgust is a part of what is referred to as the behavioural immune system, which protects us from dealing with items and individuals that might make us sick, that might kill us," says Patrick Stewart, a political scientist at the University of Arkansas (not of X-Men, Star Trek fame).

Furthermore, without disgust, where would delightful entertainments like satire and stand-up comedy be? Barry Humphries would be an art critic and most press cartoonists would be doing pavement drawings in the Mall for small change.

Let's go back to a wider view of how this came about in our lives. In our personal fall from our mint-new state of Integrity, we plunged, usually in our juvenile years, into a condition of pretended opposition to just about everything. This is where the Disgust reflex comes into its own as a very effective means of alienating and separating ourselves in a juvenile effort to become “independent”. Unfortunately what starts as a staged performance of “that's disgusting!”, has to be ramped up energetically in order to increase its effect. The actor forgets it's just an act, and the act becomes “for real”. We forget that we don't really hate our parents and everything they stand for, and we really convince ourselves that “this is not who I am, or ever will be”. Unfortunately, when I went through this period of chronic opposition, I had not discovered the Ruthless Rule of Reality that “You will become what you resist” That blinding flash of the bloody obvious didn't strike me for another 4 decades. Some people never get it.

While Ego rules, we're divided, powerlessly separated from our true being, and too self-deluded to see it. Moreover, there's no way anyone is going to convince “me” that “I” is divided, powerless and deluded. “Not me. I'm surrounded by divided, powerless and deluded idiots, but not me.”

One of the many targets of our disgust is anyone who isn't “like Me” or doesn't see things the way “I” does. Most people don't grow out of it, and broadside into adult life – disgusted. The disgust may be hidden – after all we do have to get a career, and have to form and get along with groups of friends and colleagues. Hidden or not, though, it's neither healthy nor adaptive when types or groups of people, or ideas that may be foreign to our limited and limiting past experience are reacted to in the exact same way as if they were pathogens or clots of floating scum.