Great teachers, past and present, have said that the ego is a fiction, a ghost, that it does not exist. For a non-existent entity, the ego has left a long trail of blood and tears across the pages of our history. As someone once famously said, if the entire history of humankind was condensed into the life of one human being, you would have to say that he or she was a deeply disturbed psychopath with occasional moments of lucidity.
What is the ego? The ego is who we think we are. It is who we become as our conditioning soaks in. It places the “I” at the centre of the universe. It layers another world on top of the one in which there are birds and rivers and mountains. Today, we mostly live in the world the ego has built and occasionally visit the one in which there are birds and rivers and mountains. It was the ego George Harrison was writing about when he sang: I-me-me-mine.
The ego, this hungry ghost, thrives on four types of ‘food’:
Time
Narrative
Resistance
Judgment
The ego needs a context. It needs the past to unearth its raw material. It needs a future to project its fantasies. The ego has no interest in the present: this-here-now makes it restless and fidgety. Memory provides the fodder from the past, and imagination paints pictures of the future, for the ego to recoil from or to embrace.
The human species worships at the altar of the story. Quite literally. From the creation myths of the past to the stories about our messiahs and prophets to today’s Big Bang theory, we love a good story. We are made of stories. It is an essential part of who we are. The ego hijacks this deep seated love. And places itself in the middle of the story. Either as a victim, the one who has been wronged or as the victor, the one who can’t wait to deal out come-uppances and take its rightful place at the top of the hill. Stories are the ego’s staple diet. Stories are also the bait the ego uses to grab your attention.
The ego is the master of judgement. It is always on call to make a quick check. Am I doing better than him? Is she prettier than me ? Is he making more money than me ? And is she more spiritual than me ? Is he enlightened and why I am not? Even ( or especially ) in matters of the spirit, the ego is out there with its scales, checking exactly where you stand on the Ladder of Enlightened Beings.
Resistance to What Is is dessert for the ego. If it sniffs the aroma of resistance, it will swivel and come at you invigorated and resolute. It is a glutton when resistance is served.
Once we see the feeding habits of the ego we can easily see how different teachers are inspired to leverage each of these habits to help free ourselves from the grip of the beast:
Eckhart Tolle tackles time and focuses on the Now.
Byron Katie dismantles the power of narrative by questioning its foundations.
Jeff Foster, Rupert Spira and others focus on acceptance to overcome resistance.
The Christian mystics, the Sufis, the Bhakti sages all recommend surrender to the Divine to defang the ego.
The Advaita masters - from Ramana Maharshi and Nisrgadatta Maharaja, and Papaji to Mooji - use the process of self-enquiry to dethrone the ego and reveal it for the fraud that it is.
The Dzogchen School of Tibetan Buddhism encourages you to see and rest as the Pristine Mind - that is unborn and eternal, which you truly are and always have been - out of which arise the forms that we call our inner and outer worlds. This includes the primary illusion of the ego.
There are vast tracts of literature on the ego - in religious, spiritual, mythological, as well as scientific traditions. All reveal the size of the monster we have been battling.
And you have to admit: it is pretty scary for something that does not exist.
gummygunk
jimmyeatworldofficial
blakekathryn
pixelskylines
