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.
