Love Your Ego And See What Happens
It’s easy if you are on any kind of spiritual or self-development path to begin to despise the ego for the pain it can bring. It can bring an uncontrollably noisy mind, intense regrets, fears, worries, doubts, insecurities, self-sabotage, unbelievable layers of complexity…the list could go on.
We start to taste moments of clarity, moments of stillness, moments of awakening. Sometimes it’s called “satori” - a flash of enlightenment, a sense of being free from yourself, free from your limitations, free from the feeling of being locked into a timeline of your life where you are always looking forward or back.
We start to learn about this thing called an ego - this aspect of our self which isn’t really who we are at all, this deceiving, limited energy that makes us feel as if we are trapped inside our own heads, limited to less than a hundred years and then gone forever, or even worse - trapped somewhere else after death that we can’t escape from.
Are You Anti-Ego?
It’s so easy to begin to set up a subtle mainframe in our minds that is very much “anti-ego”. You might find yourself analysing how much ego you have, analysing how much ego other people have, and then comparing your apparent lack of ego to their astonishingly large ones.
Of course, ego takes over again. How enlightened I am becomes a new measure of myself, a way to gauge myself in some way, any way, so that I don’t fall into what I’m most afraid of…I might not be anything at all.
Fighting An Illusion
Ego, at the end of the day, is still just an idea. We will say in this article that ego is our limited sense of self – a “little me” that lives and speaks in the head, a self based on conditioning, based on name, gender, personality traits, the past and who the world said it was.
It’s that dense energy inside of you that makes you feel tight and constricted, under threat even during conversations – a structure inside that we call “me” that can grow and feel big and great sometimes, and at other times shrink and feel protective and terrible.
Whatever it is for you, notice how far you get in your liberation if you begin to dislike it. If you are gunning for “no ego” or “eradication of the self”, you will quickly find yourself locked into another ego mentality of fighting against something which is functioning within you. Ultimately it is an illusion, but if you are fighting against it, you make it seem real.
The whole point of enlightenment or spiritual liberation is seeing that the ego isn’t a real thing. And yet, there are thousands, maybe millions of people currently thinking that the ego is a real thing that they have to master, take control of or diminish through their own efforts or strategies.
Instead, try a different approach, just to see how well it works...
Yielding To The Illusion
When you feel any uncomfortable sense of ego operating within you, see what happens if you say “yes” to it. See what happens if you love it and let it be exactly what it is, rather than calling it “ego” or assuming it’s a mistake that shouldn’t be there.
Take the ego as part of nature’s functioning for a moment, take it as an energy of the universe which has its own validity.
Can you feel a difference? What was before a dense energy that you were locked in a battle with suddenly becomes softer and more transparent. It becomes less harsh. It becomes less dominating. You might feel a sense of peace in the background, and even a space of being which is constant and still, whether “ego” is making a noise or not.
This is not in defence of having an ego. This is about your relationship to it, if that is even an accurate way of wording it. Eventually the idea of the relationship between "you" and "the ego" also begins to dissolve, but to reach that point, the reaching and fighting has to exhaust itself.
Bring It Back Home
Ego is usually an energy that feels separate, unloved, afraid and threatened. If you start to embrace it, start to say “yes” to it exactly as it is, then you begin to allow it to feel less separate, to merge back with its source, and of course you begin to withdraw the main food that the ego lives on: resistance.
Reaching for another experience might make you feel stretched and fragmented. Only wanting this experience leads to liberation.
Hope this can help.
Adam
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