Now that you know your soul, it’s time to find out what ego is. When your soul incarnates on a physical plane, you are born in a human body, your parents give you a name that is the seed of your identity, it means your ego. They begin to educate you in a specific environment, show specific social norms, the principles by which you should live, they begin to educate you. They also tell you more or less consciously their own beliefs that are beginning to shape you. This whole process is called programming. And it means that everyone around you is trying to adapt your perfect soul to live in a physical world.
In this article you will learn:
- What the ego is.
- What the differences between the three types of human consciousness: id, ego, and superego are.
- How the ego works.
You grow up and your ego with you. As time passes, you begin to live more with the identity you created. You think it is you: Karen, Ruth, Sarah. You identify with this self-image so much that you can defend it at all costs whenever the need arises. If you feel that your image of the world or yourself is threatened – you fight because you think that this illusion is you. You will use all available excuses to continue this existence. In the end, you come to the point that you completely forget that you are the soul. And sometimes you completely deny the existence of the soul.
You forget about your mission, life plan, and purpose.
You forget who you are.
Meanwhile, the ego is only an expression of your mental energy, it is the work of your mind, your brain. It is not you. It is a product of your mind. Only a human product. You need it to think, reason, plan, organize, remember, etc. It relays on everything it has learned in the past, loves control, and feeds on fears. And its manifestation is emotions. But it is not the real You, only an illusion.
What is Ego? Let’s see.
The word ego comes from Latin and means “I”. The term ego was created by Sigmund Freud. He divided the human psyche into three separate levels of consciousness: id, ego, and superego.
Id is the deepest-rooted aspect of the human psyche or animal instinct. It’s deep in your subconscious. Its goal is to avoid pain by immediately seeking satisfaction by following pleasure.
Ego is the executive function of your personality, a rational part of your personality. Your false identity, i.e. the image of yourself. The concept of yourself. It is something that you consider yourself. One hundred percent truth about you, a picture that is you. Something that you think is the most important thing because it is you.
According to Freud, it has not been present since the beginning of life. It develops only after some time after birth, remaining dependent on genetic factors and interaction with the environment. Its role is to reconcile conflicts of tasks on the part of instincts, conscience, and the external environment. Integrating the external and internal world. It prevents you from acting in accordance with your basic drives. It also works to achieve balance with moral and idealistic standards.
What does it mean? For example, if you drive a car and someone unexpectedly jumps out onto the road, your ego stops you from getting out of the car and giving it to the head of the person for exposing you to such stress.
Ego acts both consciously and unconsciously, as Carl Jung emphasized.
Superego, on the other hand, is your conscience, and an idea of what you should be to be in harmony with social and parental values. Picture of the perfect self.
See how Willy William sings about Ego in his video posted on youtube. This video is a very good illustration of our ego and our everyday struggle with it. It shows how sometimes we get the impression that we are only a puppet of our own ego.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOxzG3jjFkY
Why is the Ego an illusion?
Imagine the universe as a great ocean of consciousness. Each of us, you too, is at the deepest level of the psyche a part of this ocean or a drop of water. The ego creates the illusion of you – a droplet as an individual, separated from the ocean, a separate consciousness that you call the Self. This prevents you from seeing reality – the ocean. You would have to go outside the ocean to see the ocean. Ego deceives you that you only exist materially. It makes you believe that what makes you is the mind pressed into the matter of the body, blood, and bones. This illusion is created in the process of education.
The fundamental feature of the ego is duality, manifesting itself in the division of the world between you and the rest of the world. You and other people, you and animals, you and the environment, you and things. No connection with others. The consequence of this is believing that you are better, more important, more important than the rest, that your life is more valuable than the lives of others. And also exist only in the past or in the future. There are no binding elements of fear in the present to create a true identity.
How does the ego work?
- Controls you by adding importance and superiority to you by criticizing others.
- Exaggerated, it uses exaggeration to give you even more recognition.
- Controls you using control and fear.
- Uses the word must or conditional to prove anxiety.
- Identifies with “have” and do.
- Is proud of everything that is material.
- Constantly looking for applause, compliments, and recognition.
- It can not listen.
- Always justifies itself and defends itself, always sees the problem in others and looks for the guilty one.
- It can’t be at the moment, that’s why it keeps up your trauma.
- Feeds on the concept of good and evil.
- It uses self-pitying.
- Responds to the experience of pain and pleasure.
- It uses gossip to destroy the reputation of others.
- Compares you with others.
- It is jealous and envy.
- It builds happiness on someone’s misfortune.
- Believes that it is able to make others happy.
- It creates its world.
On the spiritual path, the ego can be an obstacle to enlightenment.
As you already know, the ego cannot see itself and cannot understand what is really going on. Spiritual development is that you observe your own desires, aspirations, and mechanisms and choose only those that you really want to realize. You start to reject the harmful habits, beliefs, and behaviors you have identified with so far. You observe yourself to know when ego appears.
Remember that you are not it. You are a perfect being using the material body with its physical, emotional, and mental dimensions.
It is not you who suffer during quarantine, only your ego. It hates uncertainty. And it can’t stand the current state. To ease the pain, it is trying to make you think that this is all a nightmare that you will eventually wake up from. It uses a sense of unrealness as an anesthetic to relieve your pain. Only this remedy will soon cease to work and the pain may become unbearable. And then what?
The same ego made you believe that you will live forever, that you are protected against all threats, unpredictable events, and that no one in your family will get sick or die. Meanwhile, epidemics exist, pain and suffering also. This is all part of our reality that we have forgotten, deluded by the ego illusion.
We’ve lost ourselves in the material perception of the world.
We have forgotten that all things are transient, including our ego. Nothing is permanent and nothing is really real. Even the atoms that join together into the matter are in constant flow.
The only salvation is to understand that you are a soul. Not that you have a soul, but that you are a soul. You are the soul that has the body. It is your real self. Conscious, initiating energy that exists outside of the physical body. Light and love.
Understand that you have so far identified with your physical body and thus imposed all physical limitations on yourself. It’s like the car you drive to work thinks it’s you. And yet it is only a means of transport that you, the driver, use.
You are the soul and you have a body that you use to navigate this world. See your soul and feel its infinity.
Source:
Lise Bourbeau “Ego: The Greatest Obstacle to Healing the 5 Wounds” („Ego największa przeszkoda w leczeniu 5 ran”, Wydawnictwo KOS, Katowice, 2012).
Anon I Mus “What is the Ego?“, egoawarnessmovemebt.org http://egoawarenessmovement.org/world-ego-awareness-day/
