How does the ego get such a grip on you? Without understanding it, you really can’t shake its grip. Once you understand something, it loses its hold on you. The intersection of Divinity with matter is life. Life is incapable of being destroyed. The ego loves hate. It loves injustice, suffering, loss, grief. The ego experiences addictive, pleasurable juice, like a dose of heroin. The energy behind the ego is primitive survival, because it doesn’t have spiritual energy. It has to survive on wantingness, going from one craving to the next. The more you want, the more you want. A need is something different; you can need a new watch because your old one is broken. A want is, I have to have a Rolex or I can’t go to the party. The big ego energy in relationships is being right. People will give up anything in order to be right. You think you’re stuck with whatever – my mother-in-law, money, etc. – but that’s only the linear content. It’s the energy behind it that you’re addicted to. You really have only one problem; people think they’ve got this problem and that problem that they’ve got to solve, but really it’s just one: you’re hooked on the juice of being right, of loss and sadness. The alcoholic isn’t addicted to beer or whiskey; he’s addicted to inebriation. Sensory phenomena of pleasure: people get hooked on it. The ego is so tenacious because if it doesn’t get what it wants, it feels it will die. I want it, I need it, if I don’t get it, I’ll get frenetic, I’ll die. And the ego is right; if it doesn’t get what it wants, it really will die. There are people out there who are guiltmongers, controlling people with guilt and shame. The ego gets a great deal of juice out of controlling. There’s a drivenness, a frantic must-have energy. The ego is willing to sell out its soul, or yours if it can get you to go along, for the sake of being right. #drdavidhawkins
