Ego: Bad or Misunderstood?
As I am considering writing a book on fear and after my latest Blog which tried to define Fear – I feel the need to clarify fear and its relationship to Ego especially since many ‘spiritual’ teachers out there believe we need to get rid of our Ego because it is what holds us back from Becoming Enlightened. I work with a different opinion – at least under our current evolution – we are NOT in a place where we can just get rid of our Ego. We have a lot of growing up to do and we have too much fear as a society that our Ego is the only way for most of us to Grow at all.
So let’s approach this from a logical perspective. As a whole we are still living in a third dimensional world which breaks down through a process we call ‘entropy’ and becomes less … orderly. And what causes the break down in this three dimensional world? Fear. Fear is the opposite of Love and it is Love and its related kindness, compassion, acceptance that builds our world. And in this world that we live in we each have an Ego – an Ego that mostly runs our lives. Our Ego also is what pushes us to Grow Up because it is our Ego that is triggered when we focus on ‘us’ instead of ‘we’ or ‘you’. And when we sense ‘fear’ in our lives we focus on ourselves – and if we forget Love – we then experience pain and suffering. So in the midst of this pain there is a positive side effect related to the Ego and the value of having the Ego in place: If we didn’t experience the pain and suffering that our Ego alerts us to we might never have the desire to grow towards love.
In this world where people are so focused on themselves – triggered by the fear of maybe not having enough – there is pain and suffering and people try to take what they can because there may be less to take in the future. So our world is the way it is because we have egomaniacs that run our governments, our financial institutions, our churches, our school systems, and our media (among others). Egomaniacs know how fear works and build that fear in others so the egomaniacs can gain from that fear. Our world revolves around greedy, controlling, power hungry people who manipulate our lives consciously and unconsciously. Our lives are manipulated by people who bring us ‘fear’. What an interesting world!”
It is through our emotions that we can understand our fears. How our Ego interprets our fears are through our different experiences – which determine how we will respond to each of these experiences. Our Ego determines our feelings and the emotional response we have to each experience. Our Egos allow us to ‘feel’ anger, sadness and all the negative emotions and allows us to BE more conscious of the negative emotions that define our fears. Example is: we would never even know a fear of abandonment if we couldn’t feel the anger or betrayal that abandonment often triggers. Our Ego allows us to feel these triggers and therefore is an excellent tool to identify our fears. What we do with this is what helps us Grow.
The only way we can even begin to understand – and Evolve – our Ego is to accept what our Ego does and why it does it.
Our Ego also tries to help us by narrowing all of our experiences into just a few boxes. Our ‘abandonment’ box holds every experience from the first time we felt abandoned to anything that triggers feelings of abandonment, betrayal or even anger – so that we don’t have to have many different boxes. However, that also limits our range of happiness because we can go off the rails due to someone triggering abandonment even when all they did was hang up on us or not text us their plans. Since it is in the same box often our perceptions of what we felt happened is not what actually happened but rather how we anticipated it would happen.
I wrote a couple of thoughts in my last blog about ‘fear’ that I believe is related to the role of our Ego:
- That Ego believes it is helping us with our fears through emotions that trigger reactions to distract us from the pain our fears create. This is part of what I was contemplating because we often don’t recognize our own fears. And the pain/suffering that our fears create within us we often distract ourselves with an addiction so that we don’t feel this overwhelming pain every time we are triggered. However, we can recognize it and we can either choose to respond consciously by identifying the cause and growing from it or allow the addiction that distracts us of the emotion the fear produces and zone out.
- Our Ego is often protecting us. Often trying to understand the protection mechanisms of our Ego is a puzzle that will assist us to Evolve. To do that we need to recognize the addictions we use as distractions; the emotions hiding our core fear and recognize the behaviors we use as distractions to keep from feeling uncomfortable.
And the only way we can even begin to understand – and Evolve – our Ego is to accept what our Ego does and why it does it. Our Ego needs to justify itself. Our Ego is part of our consciousness in this third dimension. We associate it with our mind that expresses what we want. It often tells us what we want by our desires to have something (or show us what we don’t want) – whether it is something necessary or because someone else has it – it is often trying to manipulate situations to help us or show us when we aren’t happy by what will make us happy. It isn’t rational; it isn’t even conscious most of the time – but helping us unconsciously make choices from those boxes it has arranged to assist us to not feel uncomfortable. These are the boxes that distract ourselves from our fears. Our Ego is the voice that shouts when we have a perceived infraction to our ‘self-worth’; when we feel the need to justify an action we took; or when we want to judge others by making ourselves better than another. Our Ego is based on third dimensional reality, however, it can help us Grow Up as long as we understand its intricacies. Our Ego may even be instrumental in assisting us to evolve past the third dimension as long as we get rid our fears – the fourth dimension is awakening from material to Universal Understanding of Higher Wisdom & Knowledge (as long as our Ego could adapt to its Higher functioning) and the fifth dimension is Opening our Hearts to Unity Consciousness (where our Ego would naturally defer to our Higher Consciousness – but remains as a guide for our emotional state by reminding us if we slipped back to the 3rd dimension as our fears can’t be in alignment with the 5th dimension).
With maybe a bit of a better understanding of what our Ego does – can you answer whether our Ego is bad or just misunderstood? I honestly believe that our Ego can help us as long as we are conscious of the games it plays and if we are willing to appreciate its abilities. I also believe 100% that our Ego can Evolve its Consciousness as we Evolve towards Love. We need our Ego to help us while we are in a very physical reality, helping to push us forward. However, we also need to be responsible for the actions of our Ego and take responsibility for our choices. As long as we are in a physical dimension we probably have our Egos intact so let’s find a way to use them for our own Evolution towards a more Kind, Compassionate and Loving World! Let’s do it together!