Here I will tell you about EGO - what it is in simple words. You will learn how EGO manifests itself and how to deal with it. Making up half of the word EGOIST, how much does it fill EGOIST with meaning?
Everyone has an EGO - those who are ashamed of it and deny it, and those who are proud of it and stick it out. Let's figure out whether this is being pushed out, or whether it is being denied, or maybe someone is confusing something.
Ego and real self
When pronouncing this word, many people immediately have bad associations associated with pride, selfishness and other negative human qualities. All of them can be combined and called in one word egoism. Therefore, an identity sign is usually placed between the words ego and egoism. But when I talk about ego, I mean not only egoism, but something fundamentally more.
The ego is the lowest part of human consciousness. Thanks to this consciousness, we oppose ourselves to the outside world and interact with the surrounding reality.
The ego includes the entire human psyche, his mind, memory, subconscious. That is, we can say that the ego is us, our personal self. And most people live their lives like this, identifying with the lower part of consciousness, not suspecting that not everything in life is so simple, and that there is something else, something mysterious and great.
It turns out that we have two selves. You have probably heard such concepts as the false self and the true self. So, the ego is the false self, not the real one. Why this is so, now I will explain everything to you.
Look at the picture:
We have a basic point of self-awareness that a person always has. Thanks to it we can say “I am”, “I exist”, “I am aware”. And as soon as we began to perceive this world, this point of self-awareness appeared in us. She is the real Self. But look what happens next. To interact with people and with the entire world around us, awareness alone is not enough for a person. We need one more thing. We not only need to be aware of and observe the world, we need to communicate with people, analyze the situation, calculate events in advance, remember a lot of information and do other complex things.
This is how the psyche and mind appeared. A person cannot live without them; he really needs them. But the trouble is that once, having acquired these important tools for interacting with the environment, we, firstly, lost our real self, and secondly, began to look at the world with a certain distortion. A person began to be identified with the psyche and mind, and what were once tools turned into a personality, into another Self.
We have become the psyche and the mind, forgetting that we are actually something more, and the mind and psyche are only a part of ourselves, but not ourselves.
Let's look at this situation from the other side, and you will immediately understand what I'm talking about.
Here is a person who is angry with someone and, in a fit of anger, commits a rash act, which he later regrets. Where his real self was. It was absorbed in emotion, one might say, asleep. I was lulled by anger, anger controlled it, which means that the point of self-awareness was in the lower Self, in the ego.
Many crimes are committed in a state of passion, when lower animal instincts completely take over a person, and then he does not even understand what he is doing. Later, when the anger disappears, at some point, for a split second, real awareness awakens in the person and he realizes that he has “messed up the woods.” But then the analytical mind turns on and the person begins to either justify his action or look for ways out of the current situation.
Here the mind takes power over people and it sometimes gives rise to such mental constructs that with the help of logic you can justify any bad deed and even any crime. By the way, this is how military conflicts arise. Man again has no control over himself; he is controlled by the mind, with its various thoughts. And many people have very perverted and wretched thoughts. After some point, a person changes his point of view, his thoughts have changed, he learned something good about his offender, now instead of anger he is overcome by a positive feeling towards his former enemy.
I think you get my point. Inside us, thoughts, feelings and emotions are constantly changing, but we do not disappear, we exist, we exist. The real Self is immutable, it does not change. Over the course of life, our personality, our character changes, but it’s all of us, not someone else. Real awareness is permanent. So the psyche, mind, personality, character are all ego, but inside there is an unchanging Self, real awareness, or they also say the soul. Look again at the diagram above.
Remember yourself. How many times in your life have you changed your view of things, how many times have you changed your attitude towards a person. Either you love your husband or wife, then you are ready to divorce him or her. How many times have you done things that you later regretted? How many times have you made mistakes in life? And a person constantly lives such a life when it is not he himself who controls it, but he is controlled by the ego. Tools that would seem to be useful to us have taken over us. We can safely say that a person is constantly sleeping, his real self is in a sleepy state, and the moments when real awareness awakens are very short, and many do not have them at all. And this is no joke. Everything is much more serious.
I remember a story I read in a book about a man who spent his whole life absorbed in one idea that stuck in his head. He believed in her, fought for her, gave her almost all his years, and what in the end. When he grew old, his eyes were opened to the true state of things, to the fact that his idea turned out to be a fiction. He reconsidered his views on life, and he had a terrible insight. True awareness awoke in him, and he realized that he had fought for his worldview all his life in vain. He just had a heart attack. If his awareness had awakened in him in his younger years, he would have lived his life much more productively. That is, a certain program was lodged inside his head that controlled him all his life. Strong, knowledgeable people and authorities know how to program those who cannot awaken their real awareness, and make obedient puppets out of them.
Who do you want to be? A puppet or a free man.
Also, people often become fans of some idea and it is this idea that controls their actions.
Fanaticism is a very terrible manifestation of the ego.
It happens that a person holds a grudge against someone all his life and cannot forgive. This anger is deeply embedded in the subconscious, and it is very difficult to get rid of it. A person looks at the world distortedly, now people who are similar to the offender seem bad to him. Or, for example, a child was bitten by a dog in childhood, severe stress occurred and a program of fear of dogs stuck in his head. That's it, now this program will manage him for the rest of his life. There is an obvious distortion of the world, dogs are not as scary as he makes them out to be and not all of them are dangerous.
Or let’s say a woman’s first husband was an alcoholic and beat her. Now she hates alcoholics, for her they are all dangerous and all men are “goats”.
Often, already close to death, when real awareness awakens for many, people reconsider their views, forgive their offenders, and they have an insight. That is why, before, dying people constantly called priests for themselves in order to cleanse their souls of the layers of ego. And mostly they did it sincerely, with understanding, with true awareness.
People, basically, do not live a real life, but are in hibernation. Their true self is asleep, absorbed in various programs, distorted views, thoughts and emotions. They are controlled by the ego. And when they wake up, it’s usually too late, life has passed, time has passed.
Examples when the balance of the three began to be disturbed
Pedant
If the field of the “Adult” is littered with the rubbish of the instructions of the “Parent”, and the “Child” is blocked, without the opportunity to influence the “Adult” - we have before us a classic pedant, a person deprived of the ability and desire to play. A biscuit that resembles a walking mechanical circuit. And then a chronic lack of bright positive emotions can provoke an explosion of immoral behavior, for which the strict inner “Parent” will punish up to psychosomatic disorders.
Shameless hypocrite
Let’s imagine a situation where the field of the “Adult” is buried in immoderate children’s desires, and the “Parent” is blocked, without the ability to limit them. The actions of such a person in society are determined by the goal: to fully satisfy the needs of his “Child,” while the “Parent” tries to strictly control the environment.
We are dealing with a hypocrite - a person without conscience. Having received power, such a person easily transforms into a sadist, trying to satisfy needs at the expense of the interests of his environment. Over time, conflict at the social level is projected onto the inner world with tragic consequences for mental and physical health.
Ungovernable
If the field of the “Adult” is under the constant control of the “Parent”, and at the same time is burdened by the fears of the “Child”, we are dealing with a person who is deprived of the ability to control. His position: “I understand that I am doing wrong, but I can’t do anything.”
Depending on which component of the ego takes over at the moment, a person who does not control himself can either show himself to be a saint or a complete debauchee. This internal alignment is an ideal breeding ground for neurosis and psychosis.
The ego takes away our health
Everything would be fine, but the fact is that the uncontrolled work of the ego takes away our health. I have already touched on this topic in the article “The Main Cause of Human Diseases.” The fact is that the ego requires a lot of energy to function. And the more this work, the more vital energy is spent for the needs of the lower consciousness. Instead of nourishing the body and giving it health, energy goes to the psyche, mind and other ego structures.
I'm not saying it's bad. Of course, we need the ego, which means we have to give at least some of the energy. But as you already understood, if the ego was simply subordinate to the main I, and did not work at full capacity, then everyone would have enough energy, and the body would not suffer from a lack of strength. But the ego got out of control, subjugated the basic awareness and took away most of the internal energy of the body. Negative thoughts and emotions: anger, rage, fear, despondency and others, are the cause of most diseases. They also say that all diseases are from nerves, but to be more precise, all diseases are from uncontrolled and incorrect functioning of the ego, which we, in principle, do not need. Not only is it not needed, but without it a person would be much happier.
One day a teacher of spiritual practice was asked: “Tell me the secret of how you, at your age (and he was already an elderly man), can do a lot of physical work and not get tired, how do you feel young and healthy?” He answered something like this: “I’m just not angry with anyone, I don’t envy anyone, I don’t worry about trifles, I live and enjoy every moment of my life.” And indeed it is. His ego does not take much energy, which means most of the energy goes to the body, which is reflected in excellent health.
By the way, you can feel this fact for yourself. When you rest lying down, closing your eyes, and leave all current problems, thereby suspending the ego, you always feel that you feel good, your strength returns to you, your brain and body are restored, peace and happiness come. All these are signs of increasing energy in the body. And when you learn to completely stop the ego (how to do this, a little later), you will even be able to feel how your body is filled with strength and energy. And after such high-quality sessions, you are again ready to move mountains and work tirelessly. By the way, this is why in the middle of the working day it is useful to have a good rest or even sleep a little.
The ego distorts your view of reality
The ego not only takes away our strength, but also prevents us from looking at the surrounding reality correctly. We look at the world through the prism of our thoughts, feelings and emotions. For example, if a person suffers from depression, everything around him will seem gloomy; if he is afraid of everything, then the world will seem hostile.
If a person treats everyone with warmth and love, then he will come across good people more often. The more perverted the ego, the worse the surrounding reality will be.
I have already talked about this in this article and will also touch on this topic a little lower. Now, to fully understand the topic, let's look at the structure of the ego.
Types of alternate personality
Alter ego can be of any type and any orientation. We will look at three commonly encountered alter egos: female, male and teenage.
Women's
"You're acting like a woman." Such words can be heard by a man when his female alter ego awakens in him. Indeed, some men sometimes display traits that are more often attributed to women: capriciousness, excessive vulnerability, hysteria, emotionality.
In some cases, the female self also finds a way out on the physical level. For example, transgender people, realizing that they belong to the male sex and feel like men, dress up as women. Usually this happens in a club setting on stage. This does not mean non-traditional sexual orientation. Not all transgender people are interested in people of the same gender, so they decide to have sex reassignment surgery.
Another example came to mind. Surely you have heard something about the artist Verka Serduchka. This is the female alter ego and stage image of actor A.M. Danilko. According to publications in various sources, Andrei is the opposite of his heroine. He is quiet and modest, loves privacy. I believe that the image was invented in order to overcome the tightness on stage. After all, it turns out that the viewer interacts not with Andrei, but with Verka. This means that Andrey has nothing to fear. And Verka is only “for” everything that is happening.
What does the ego consist of?
The ego is a very complex structure, consisting of many mental elements. As I already said, it includes the analytical mind, internal dialogue, memory, the entire psyche and subconscious. This is our personality, character, all the programs laid down by our parents, society, government, and surrounding information. But from all this diversity I would like to highlight three very powerful psychic formations. You could say these are three huge elephants, on which the rest of the ego lies heavily, or in other words, the main formations of the ego, which set the direction for other components.
This is a sense of self-importance, fear of death and a feeling of self-pity. These are not even feelings, but a conglomerate of mental formations that give rise to certain thoughts, feelings and emotions that are unique to them.
The fear of death arose from the instinct of self-preservation, and gives rise to all the fears that a person has.
A sense of self-importance emerged as a result of separating oneself from the world, opposing it, placing oneself at the center of the universe. It is this that gives rise to such feelings as pride, selfishness, selfishness. It also gives rise to many other mental manifestations associated with egoism. Look here:
- I am cool;
- I am the best;
- I need to look good in front of other people;
- excessive self-confidence;
- shyness, uncertainty (also a manifestation of a sense of importance, but in a negative way);
- vindictiveness;
- noticing the shortcomings of others;
- lack of understanding of other views;
- excessive stubbornness in one's opinion.
And other feelings, emotions, mental manifestations, in fact there are a lot of them.
If someone encroaches on our sense of self-importance, we feel self-pity.
- I'm unhappy;
- what kind of world is not fair;
- I deserve more;
- I feel sorry for myself and stuff like that.
I will write separate articles about the feeling of self-importance, fear of death and self-pity, where I will tell you in more detail about these feelings and what needs to be done with them.
As you have already noticed, when speaking about the importance of oneself, I did not simply write that, say, a person has self-confidence, but excessive self-confidence. By this I once again wanted to emphasize that there is no need to get rid of the ego. Confidence, firmness of one’s views and other qualities of healthy egoism will always be needed by a person, without them he will not be able to interact normally with people and turn into a vegetable. We do not need to get rid of the ego, but simply bring the lower consciousness under control, get out of it. Climb to a bird's eye view, from where you can see your entire psyche. By putting our sense of self-importance under control, we will be able to have a strong opinion, but we will also be able to better understand the other person, we will be able to put ourselves in his place. This means that we will be able to interact better with people, and not be stubborn like a “ram”, not understanding other people’s opinions.
We will be able to separate ourselves from the world, but also understand that the world and we are one whole, we are also children of nature and we need to be friends with nature, and not destroy it.
Having put our fears under control, we will not stop fearing threats from the outside; the instinct of self-preservation will remain with us. But we will not shake with fear, losing our heads, which means we will be able to make sober decisions in difficult situations.
By putting self-pity under control, we will not complain about life and cry over our failures. But we can, for example, when we are very tired, feel a little sorry for ourselves and, leaving everything, go to rest, thereby maintaining our health.
That is, a person who has gone beyond the ego improves his life many times over and becomes a happy and healthy person.
Main Anchors
The two most important anchors are not even emotions - they are the inner dark areas of our human part: fear and pain. This is where external manipulation of our consciousness of other people occurs. And we also have to work with these anchors all our lives, because they come, they go, when we work with them, they come again - it’s as if we are in a space where there are bacteria and viruses that cling to us and, If the immune system is strong, we don’t get sick.
In the same way, if our Will and Spirit are strong, then “fear” and “pain” do not interfere with the quality of our life, do not interfere with the people who are around us. So through fear and pain we put pressure and hurt others. We can simply transform fear and pain - I taught you this at my seminars and in my articles - this is a tool (you can call it a program) that you can download into yourself “transforming negative into positive” - it will work in certain cases. And such tools. For example. like a hammer. You should have a lot of screwdrivers and pliers, because each informational-emotional “virus” and “bacteria” must have its own approach, its own tool: somewhere a general remedy will work, somewhere a special one is targeted.
I specially collected such meditation tools in my primary course “Basics of Mindful Meditation” - ==> here is the link <== to purchase such a course, it costs a little money, but its value is much greater ==>
Matrix reloaded
Why do many spiritual teachings say that the whole world is an illusion.
Now I think you understand these words.
We look at the world with a certain distortion, through the prism of the ego. There is no escape from this.
But we can reduce this distortion and look at the world with a more or less undistorted, sober view.
Let's make this analogy.
A depressed person or a person with perverted thoughts looks at the world through dirty and cloudy windows. What can he see through such glass? The world will seem cloudy, gloomy, dark and depressing. If a person suffers from any mental illness or constantly experiences stress or constantly drinks alcohol, then the glass of his windows will be crooked and he, as in the kingdom of crooked mirrors, sees everything ugly and distorted. The cleaner and more transparent the glasses through which we look at the world, the more believable and similar the world is to itself. Of course, the glass will still produce distortions, but you will agree that it is better to look through dirty windows or clean ones.
If real awareness is poorly developed in us and it is smeared with the dirt of the ego, we do not see the world, but only an ugly parody of it, which means we react incorrectly to events and constantly make mistakes.
The ego is just a program, which means it is an illusion. There is no ego in reality, we came up with it all in our heads, this is just the work of our psyche. This means that what we see is not the world, but only an interpretation of it. The map is not the territory. This is why they say that the world we observe is an illusion.
There is a computer, and there are programs that actually do not exist.
All of you have probably seen the famous film “The Matrix”. It touches on a very deep philosophical problem that a person does not live a real life, but is in a prison of programs flashed in his head. He does not live, but is only in virtual reality. He's really asleep.
But few people know that we all also live in the virtual reality of our ego, and the real Self is in a sleepy state. And in order to wake up, you need to eat a magic pill, like in the movie “The Matrix,” which will open our eyes and awaken our real self. But there is no magic pill in our life. To wake up, you need to make some effort and do some hard work on yourself. And not everyone knows how to do this.
Of course, most people are happy with life in virtual reality. If the ego works more or less correctly, a person does not even think that there is something else in this life. Much better and more beautiful. He's feeling good as it is. A person wants to break out of the ego prison only in certain cases. If he suffers from physical illnesses, has mental problems, or has messed up his life, he begins to look for the reasons that led to this state of affairs. And sooner or later he realizes that he made his life like this only with his thoughts, emotions and actions. Only he himself, and not the circumstances of his life, are to blame for his troubles. But it also happens that a person can no longer live like everyone else. Go to work, wait for the weekend, get drunk and go back to work on Monday. "Groundhog Day" He begins to feel sick of this life. He feels that there is something more in life, more important than ordinary life, and he also finds this magic pill and wakes up.
You simply cannot imagine how much your life would improve if you went beyond the ego and awakened your real Self. Your health would improve, many physical and mental illnesses would go away. You would stop making mistakes in life. Relationships with other people and with yourself would improve. Your sensual life would be filled with new colors, and you would look at the world with a sober, unclouded look. And this list can be continued endlessly. In a word, you would become healthy and happy.
How to awaken real awareness, how to bring the ego under control, how to find the magic pill?
What is needed for this?
First, you need to change your worldview. This is done so that some ego elements, such as the sense of self-importance, decrease within us. We need to understand that we are, in fact, not such an important person as we seem to ourselves. We are not the center of the universe, but on the contrary, the universe is big and great, and we are only a tiny part of it. That our opinion is not always correct and it will sometimes be wiser to listen to another person. That if we occupy a high position in society, this does not mean that other people are worse than us. Many examples can be given.
It is important to understand the main thing. You must curb in yourself all those negative qualities that have always been called human sin - pride, selfishness, greed, anger and others. They are all basically manifestations of a sense of self-importance.
Secondly, you need to learn to be conscious in life. We will talk about mindfulness in a separate article. This is when we can control the manifestations of the ego in any situation, always and everywhere.
Thirdly, you need to be able to listen to the world, not be afraid to sometimes be alone with yourself, take more rest from the hustle and bustle of the day, from noisy companies. That is, strive for silence of the mind.
But also the most important thing. You just need to be alone, sit with your eyes closed and finally stop the ego and awaken real awareness. This is called meditation. This is the magic pill that will wake you up, return you from the virtual reality of the ego to real reality. There will be a “matrix reboot”, and we will finally wake up and return to a real, happy life.
I have already written a lot about meditation on the blog pages, so I refer you to the articles: “The benefits of meditation”, “How to meditate correctly”, “How to learn to meditate”.
Meditate and only then will you wake up and get into real life.
How to deal with fast thoughts
What is the ego in terms of “speed of thought”? In a stressful situation, it is sometimes very difficult to gather yourself and react correctly to the situation. Probably, each of us has noticed what a series of thoughts come into our heads during critical periods. Someone says something, we are forced to respond quickly, merging phrases into a stream, although we could answer more calmly, thinking about every word. It is at such moments that it is important that you express those thoughts that are close to you, and not imposed by someone. Remember the famous phrase: everything you say can be used against you? Often we become hostages of other people's ideas, someone else's ego, and ours simply turns into a false ego.
