a saucerful of echoes.

thecalminside:

ashramof1:

thecalminside:

lazyyogi:

ashramof1:

Great teachers, past and present, have said that the ego is a fiction, a ghost, that it does not exist. For a non-existent entity, the ego has left a long trail of blood and tears across the pages of our history. As someone once famously said, if the entire history of humankind was condensed into the life of one human being, you would have to say that he or she was a deeply disturbed psychopath with occasional moments of lucidity.

What is the ego? The ego is who we think we are. It is who we become as our conditioning soaks in. It places the “I” at the centre of the universe. It layers another world on top of the one in which there are birds and rivers and mountains. Today, we mostly live in the world the ego has built and occasionally visit the one in which there are birds and rivers and mountains. It was the ego George Harrison was writing about when he sang: I-me-me-mine.

The ego, this hungry ghost, thrives on four types of ‘food’:

Time
Narrative
Resistance
Judgment

Time

The ego needs a context. It needs the past to unearth its raw material. It needs a future to project its fantasies. The ego has no interest in the present: this-here-now makes it restless and fidgety. Memory provides the fodder from the past, and imagination paints pictures of the future, for the ego to recoil from or to embrace.

Narrative

The human species worships at the altar of the story. Quite literally. From the creation myths of the past to the stories about our messiahs and prophets  to today’s Big Bang theory, we love a good story.  We are made of stories. It is an essential part of who we are. The ego hijacks this deep seated love. And places itself in the middle of the story. Either as a victim, the one who has been wronged or as the victor, the one who can’t wait to deal out come-uppances and take its rightful place at the top of the hill.  Stories are the ego’s staple diet. Stories are also the bait the ego uses to grab your attention.

Judgement

The ego is the master of judgement. It is always on call to make a quick check. Am I doing better than him? Is she prettier than me ? Is he making more money than me ? And is she more spiritual than me ? Is he enlightened and why I am not? Even ( or especially ) in matters of the spirit, the ego is out there with its scales, checking exactly where you stand on the Ladder of Enlightened Beings.

Resistance

Resistance to What Is is dessert for the ego.  If it sniffs the aroma of resistance, it will swivel and come at you invigorated and resolute. It is a glutton when resistance is served.

Once we see the feeding habits of the ego we can easily see how different teachers are inspired to leverage each of these habits to help free ourselves from the grip of the beast:

Eckhart Tolle tackles time and focuses on the Now.

Byron Katie dismantles the power of narrative by questioning its foundations.

Jeff Foster, Rupert Spira and others focus on acceptance to overcome resistance.

The Christian mystics, the Sufis, the Bhakti sages all recommend surrender to the Divine to defang the ego.

The Advaita masters - from Ramana Maharshi and Nisrgadatta Maharaja, and Papaji to Mooji - use the process of self-enquiry to dethrone the ego and reveal it for the fraud that it is.

The Dzogchen School of Tibetan Buddhism encourages you to see and rest as the Pristine Mind - that is unborn and eternal, which you truly are and always have been - out of which arise the forms that we call our inner and outer worlds. This includes the primary illusion of the ego.

There are vast tracts of literature on the ego - in religious, spiritual, mythological, as well as scientific traditions. All reveal the size of the monster we have been battling.

And you have to admit: it is pretty scary for something that does not exist.

Reading this made my day.

Thank you, my friend.

I feel it’s wrong to call ego bad or a beast to fight. This only keeps it in place and firmly atop our lives. Ego is a suit of armor we put on without knowing it. It is our only protection against a cold and harsh non-loving, non-caring world. We put the ego on to protect our innocence from rejection and hurt, pain. It is fear of pain, hurt and rejection that keeps the ego in place. Fear of not getting what we truly need: Love. We never got the love we needed from our parents or from others and when we fear we won’t get it, we put on this armor, this false self: the ego to get glimpses of that love we crave and need. The ego is not bad, it is just bad at its job. It cannot get us the love we crave. It cannot give us unconditional love that we truly need. That love comes from within us. That is the source. This is where we have to get it. It is beyond and behind the fear the ego uses and we go into the fear and that’s when we find the love the ego seeks.

Time is an illusion but has nothing to do with the ego, it is not real and that is true but it is our memory and our projection of memory that keeps it alive. The ego has nothing to do with time and if you remove time from you, you won’t remove ego, you’ll meet reality not non-ego. You can remove resistance and you can still have ego. You can remove judgement and you can still have ego. These are all aspects of the mind and not the false self. These are all tools. This is simply how the mind operates. Judgement is a survival tool that has evolved to keep us alive, judgement of plants and animals has helped us survive as a species. Time is another aspect of the mind that has evolved to give us an advantage over other predatory animals. We realized feeding habits and times of day and used those to our advantage, time was needed for us to simply survive. You can also remove the story of “you” and still have ego. The story is a useful tool as well and is part of how we get by in life.

I will say this: you can remove all of these and life, your personal life, will get harder, if you remove ego, life will get easier. If you truly remove your story and time and try and have a conversation with someone and they ask, how old are you? You would say, “I don’t have a story or time anymore and so I don’t have an age”, but that wouldn’t make sense, the other person would give you a funny look and walk away. If you truly remove judgement and go to eat, who cares what you eat, all is the same, there is no judgement. Judgement is needed for choices. Choices are needed for self-love. You have to see one as good and another as bad to choice and for self-love. You cannot truly drop all of these things and have a comfortable life in the real world. And this is what a journey is about, comfort and peace, nirvana.

If you see ego, it is dropped, you won’t need it. If you truly see in your life all that you are doing, saying or the way you act to get attention, validation and love and you find those in yourself, the ego is dropped, this doesn’t take a long time. It didn’t take you long to put the armor on and it doesn’t take long to cast off. When the seeking is over the ego is over. When you find what the ego seeks, it is naturally dropped and life is easier and flows naturally. To do this you go inward. Inward towards your heart and towards Love. This is the only teaching: go inward, find, don’t seek.

My thoughts on this oft misunderstood part of the spiritual journey.

~greg

Thank you for your thoughts, Greg. Just like your blog, your words are simple and powerful. 

However, here are a couple of quick clarifications for those who read and liked the original post:

Obviously, to live the ‘everyday’ life - putting food on the table, paying your taxes, putting a child through school - we need to engage with time, judgement, narrative and even resistance. This is not the problem. As you say, the ego and mind have evolved to deal with things like this. The issues ( and suffering ) arise when the ego feeds on these four aspects for its own agenda.

The ego’s need for love or validation also cannot be debated. But while I appreciate that vilifying the ego perpetuates its power, we must be clear-eyed about what happens when the ego appropriates ‘love’ for its own ends.

It is no coincidence that dictators - from Hitler and Stalin all the way up to the 21st century - have all proclaimed their love for people, and more importantly, proclaimed how much they are loved by people in return. This perversion of love is very much part of the ego’s playbook. 

It is also no coincidence that the some of the greatest atrocities in the history of this planet were committed by men who were deeply religious and ‘loved’ God. This continues to this day. 

Finally, in my experience, the ego does not always pack its bags and leave even after you see through its ways. In fact, things may get a little rough after seeing through the ego.

In many traditions, the Christian and the Buddhist to name just two, the experience of enlightenment / liberation /  seeing through the ego, is followed by extremely testing times. Old habits ( or to use an Advaita Vedanta term - vasanas, deep rooted karma-driven, karma-driving tendencies ) do die hard. 

The ego is a ghost in the mind-machine. We have to see the nature of our minds, or to borrow a well-known Buddhist phrase, to see clearly ‘this very mind’. The nature of ‘this very mind’ is marked by constant movement. This is self evident. Whichever ‘path’ we are on, this fact needs to be seen and accepted. To try and hold onto something - a particular experience, a particular state, anything in the mind that by its very nature is ephemeral - will be frustrating.

But, wondrously, this frustration and inability to abide in any particular state conceals a priceless lesson for those who are spiritually inclined: 

That there is no one, particular state to abide in. And, that there is no one, particular person to abide in any state. 

For me, this clear seeing allows Love - that much-used, much-abused word - to reveal its true nature. 

Once again, thank you for your comments. 

Ashramof1, think where we differ is in the definition of ego. What I’m calling ego is the protection mechanism that we adopt to avoid feeling pain, hurt, emptiness, loneliness, all the painful aspects of our practical reality and you are seemingly lumping all mind activity together and calling that the ego. So it is interesting and fun to talk and share thoughts, debate if you will, as it is not often done in my daily life, most people I interact with either don’t care or don’t have any experience or knowledge of this.

I think it is good to inspect the ego and not just talk about how it effects life. So we have to get down to it and become aware when we are seeking attention and acceptance: unconditional love. When we do see it and shed it, it shakes our life up and gives us new perspective and new ways of acting and engaging with others. It is in our interaction with others that the ego shows up so if I haven’t interacted or witnessed and interaction with someone I can’t speak as to if their ego is running the show for them. So, all of the tyrants throughIt history may have had a huge ego or they may have been mentally ill, acting out their immense pain or simply have a deeply held false belief, like a group of people are bad and so self justify killing them. A belief isn’t necessarily ego, it is just a false belief that is deeply held and never challenged. It is part of us and it is a part of how the mind operates, but as I’m describing ego, it isn’t ego. A belief can come from how the egoic action. For example if I seek acceptance from someone, say a girl I like and want to date, but she turns me down, my ego doesn’t get me my needed feeling of acceptance and respect, so from that I can develop the belief that I’m not good enough for respect and that will cause me sadness. This is how ego turns into a false belief and enough of those or a very deep one and that could cause a lot of hurt for a lot of people.

I’ll give an example of how my ego has been experienced, seen and shed partially in my life. My brother was never that nice to me and he was kind of a bully and he disrespected me and just simply didn’t treat me right. I, out of fear and of not getting attention and respect from my family acted friendly and nice to him. I was scared of challenging my brother and asserting myself so out of protection I’d do and say things to them that were nice, safe and I’d lead them on and lead them to think I liked him and wanted to be close to him. I never spoke from my heart and never truly let him know how I felt. Well, one day I was sick of it and I was just DONE, I simply couldn’t do it anymore, I was not being myself and it was costing me my mental health, I have depersonalized, depression and anxiety from all the suppression of my true self and my true feelings. So my ego caused me a lot of hardship that was unnecessary and I was so sick of it and just so done with my false self that I told my brother that I didn’t appreciate the way he treated me and that I didn’t want to be around him anymore. I spoke my heart to him honestly. I couldn’t be fake anymore and so I became real and spoke the truth of how I felt and I left it out there. Now after, 30 some odd years this was scary, but it had to be done, the false me had to drop away. I didn’t care anymore about the attention that I got from my brother. And with that protection gone, I was raw, vulnerable and innocent, all the things the ego was protecting in me. I faced the fear of being my true self and found peace and lightness in life.

The spiritual journey is about simplifying, pulling things off of you to get to what is real. Enlightenment is to be the true and real you, it is to know yourself as the simplest of existence, awareness. It doesn’t get anymore simply and all teachings are too complex to teach or describe it because it is so simple. It is so simple you are it. And it is all there is. The ego too is simple no need for fanciness, or fancy teaching of it. It is simply the false you, when you feel fake, that is ego, it’s that simple. When yo feel real, you are real, it is that simple. I see there is mind structures, mind momentum, habits and conditioning and then I see there is ego, they are not the same. The ego is the mask you put on so people will accept you and give you a tiny touch of unconditional love. It is fake and you know it is fake because you feel fake when it is acting, you dinky don’t feel good, you suffer. But being fake and that suffering is better than being scared to death of not getting any love at all, not even a scrap. It is if we’d rather eat out of the garbage can than get no food at all, when in truth there is a banquet inside. This is how the ego disappears you find what it seeks inside us.

More of my thoughts.

~greg