The Ego

(6-minute read) – The ego is responsible for all our emotional discomfort and our mental anguish.

Emotional discomfort includes anger, pride, narcissistic injuries and hatred. These feelings arise when our egos are hurt.

Mental anguish includes doubts and fears about our lives, our relationships, our projects. They are the thoughts that taunt us about our worth. They arise from the ego feeling that it is not being rewarded or praised enough or not being made important enough.

The ego in me

I have learnt the nature of the ego over and over again in my life. I start a project with good intentions, but soon selfish and egotistical motivations sneak in. It subtly becomes about me and my desires.

I start out excited to be of service to my clients. I start out indifferent to what people think of me and without any intention to achieve any personal status. And I start out feeling the mental and emotional freedom of love and generosity of spirit.

But two things start to happen. One, people like what I offer and praised me. And two, other people don’t appreciate what I bring and criticise my work or me.

My ego becomes inflamed in response to the praise. My intentions to be of service are quickly shadowed by illusions of grandeur seeping like rancid cooking oil into my consciousness. I quickly feed off the praise instead of remaining unaffected by it.

My inflamed ego is susceptible to the effects of criticism. And criticism invariably comes. The slightest prick of criticism and my ego deflates with a traumatic clap. My pride is hurt and anger peers into the windows of my soul, just waiting to break in and steal whatever peace is left.  Narcissistic injuries beat me down and doubts cloud my thoughts. Illusions of worthlessness replace illusions of grandeur.

Seeing it clearly

In silence, early one morning, this turmoil of my ego became crystal clear to me. I saw in stark contrast how quickly I regress from a spirit of generosity to one of neurotic narcissism.

The ego is the aspect of self that develops from day one of life (and maybe even before) and attaches to the world. Our egos are the masks we wear, the personas we project, and they are who we think we are in total. Our inflamed or injured egos bind our emotions and our thoughts.

We struggle to see another dimension of who we are. A dimension beyond ego that is dignified and constant.

The silence of meditation is a good way to break free of the bonds of the ego. In meditation, or simply put, silence of the emotions and thoughts, we can lift away from the illusion that we are only our egos. We can see the forest from the trees.

In my case, that morning I saw my ego and its turmoil so clearly it was as if it wasn’t me. Praise and criticism suddenly had no effect on my emotions or my thoughts. I sank into the original energy source at my centre – an energy of constant mystical union.

The ego feeds off others

The ego’s effect can become unbearable for those who are constantly in the public eye. Take Elvis Presley or Whitney Houston, for example.

Both Presley and Houston started out singing gospel music. They started out giving of their talents freely as a service to their religious communities. Who knows what was in their hearts in their younger days. But somewhere right in the beginning, they must have been more free than the way they ended up.

Praise and criticism started to mount on them, until millions of other frail egos looked to them and hoped to find their own release.

Elvis Presley is estimated to have sold more than six hundred million albums. For a long time he was the biggest star in the world. He must have struggled with his fame. He even told the world, singing “Fame and fortune, how empty they can be.”

What people in the public eye (and that includes all of us to an extent) go through is an extraction from true self. It is a binding to the ego and its whims as dictated by the fans (or simply friends and family).

After years of ego-assault, Elvis turned to alcohol and drugs to numb his existential angst. He died of heart failure brought on by the abuse of prescription drugs.

Whitney Houston had similar major fame. She had to endure years of ego inflammation and narcissistic injury – assault after assault on her emotions and her mind. She turned to numbing drugs to survive the pain. And like Presley, her heart failed. The coroner’s report said hardening of her arteries from years of cocaine abuse caused her heart attack.

The ego destroys innocence of true self

The ego ruined both of these talented people. Two pure young hearts were transformed into battered, failed organs. Two innocent young artists who started out giving with no requirement for fame or fortune, were reduced to self-destructive vessels.

As I contemplated that morning, I realised that our egos are truly destructive, to ourselves and to our communities and societies. The ego’s hopes and desires always taint our relationships.

There is no escaping our egos and the egos around us. This is the nature of the world. As soon as we go out into it, we are in the illusion that we are our egos.

The only elixir is to moderate our exposure to the world. This moderation is best achieved by making sure we spend enough time away from the world and people. We have to make sure we spend enough time every day alone and in the quiet of our own centres. This is time to practice seeing the forest from the trees – seeing ourselves from above where we are removed from our egos and their boosts and injuries.

Then, for a while, when we return from the beautiful respite of the silence of our hearts, we are able to freely be who we are. We are able to offer our gifts and talents indifferently and in a spirit of generosity. And through that indifferent offering our souls sore and the ego loses its power.