On Ego
“Two people have been living in you all your life. One is the ego, garrulous, demanding, hysterical, and calculating; the other is the hidden spiritual being, whose still voice of wisdom you have only rarely heard or attended to.”
The Ego is Bad
The ego is our false self. It’s an illusion that we carry. It’s invisible, formless, and boundaryless—an idea of who we think we are. This idea of self has been developed rigorously over our developmental years between childhood and adulthood.
It’s characterised by masks, labels, images, and judgments handed down to us by parents, teachers, media, friends, and society. When we don’t scrutinise them, all those paradigms calcify into limiting and self-defeating beliefs.
And so we create the masks that we will wear throughout our lives.
Because we are unaware of this false self, this mask, we become comfortable in it. We build our entire lives around it. The ego then creates ways and means to remain relevant, dominant, and fully nourished, as it needs constant validation and identification with a form.
However, its growth directly opposes any inner peace and harmony. We might feel because it actively conceals our truths. Manipulative, it often creates a false and fickle self-worth.
The ego represents the sum of all our fears, worries, and negative thoughts; it provides the incessant inner voice of doubts, holding us back from any opportunity for wonder, intuition, or awe that might come our way.
If we wish to step into our unique power and authenticity, we must transcend the ego and find where our truths reside. We can do so by becoming aware of the false masks we wear that lead to our egoic behaviour.
The Ego is NOT SO BAD
However, ego is a necessary tool along our self-discovery journeys. How can we be authentic when we have no basis for comparison? How can we be good if we can’t measure against bad? How can we shed light when we have no practical understanding of darkness?
The ego is the yang to authenticity’s yin. It allows us to compare. It defines our sense of self, clarifies our boundaries, and develops our personalities. It pushes us to do, be, and see.
It protects us from being used or abused by stronger, darker egos and shields us from harm caused by our social environments.
Do we need to eliminate ego totally?
Here’s a better question: “How can we learn to tame the ego and begin our journeys to authenticity?” We should accept and honour the ego as a gift; it pushes us to go out and play, explore, experience, and test our limits. It leads us to mistakes, failure, and pain, but that’s where the greatest lessons lie. We need to be in darkness before we can recognise and shed light.
I came out alone on my way to my tryst. But who is this that follows me in the silent dark? I move aside to avoid his presence but I escape him not. He makes the dust rise from the earth with his swagger; he adds his loud voice to every word that I utter. He is my own little self, my lord, he knows no shame; but I am ashamed to come to thy door in his company. ―Rabindranath Tagore