"Ego specialness prevents you from authentic feelings of sacredness by creating an inner experience of fear."
Dr. Wayne Dyer
Egomaniac. Egocentric. Egotistical…not nice things to call someone, right? But just what the heck is your ego? The simple translation of the word ego from its Latin origin is “I.” That’s all, just “I.” What can be so nasty about that?
Despite the simple ordinariness of it, I have learned this one particular lesson the hard way: Whenever I start a statement with “I,” there’s a much greater chance that I’ll regret it than if I start it some other way. So I ask myself, why do I have to be so careful about my ego? How does ego get such a bad rap? Why do “I” have to ask “myself?”
It’s because generally speaking, there are two different kinds of “me” in here – two aspects or types of my ego that are always competing to define the world for me, and make me behave the way I do:
The first (and ideally more prominent) type is that healthy ego that allows my true, grounded self to interact with material life in an easy, less-demanding way (hello, angel on my shoulder). Things can come and go in life without seeming so terribly important. I find that “me” rarely gets offended, because tolerance and acceptance just come naturally.
This is my healthy, beneficial ego because it provides a reasonable, balanced foundation to my life, and plays a relatively small active role in my experience of things. It demands less judgement and comparison, and much less control of everything I clearly can’t really control. So listening to the inner voice of my healthy ego makes it easier to "stay out of my own way," and allows me to experience a more balanced exchange of Life energy that lets me share, express, and grow. I become more tolerant and teachable. It’s not all about “me,” and so I can live much more easily with “my self.” Simply put, this ego is grounded in Love.
My other ego is more or less the opposite – unhealthily self-absorbed; over-important and over-complicated (hello, devil). It’s the voice of what I think of as my “False Self,” because it’s rarely (if ever) who I want to be. Unfortunately, this self-important ego often acts as my instant default interface with Life, pressing unfair and unnecessary demands and comparisons on all the people and situations I encounter. It's easily offended, lacking in tolerance and acceptance, and foolishly wants to control the uncontrollable. It’s a kind of shadow “me” that stifles the expression of my natural, easy-going self with unnecessary defensiveness and negativity. It obstructs that beautiful, balanced exchange of Life energy – which is Love. In this way, I can unconsciously become my own worst enemy. Simply put, this is the ego that’s grounded in Fear – it’s what gives ego a bad rap.
This double nature is expressed in the beautiful mythic metaphor of The Garden of Eden. The unhealthy ego knows everything and always needs to be right. It wrongly makes a constant diet of "the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil" – judgment and comparison, and so insists on “playing God.” Then, when it serves as the sole interface to Life, our grounded natural self is “banished from the garden.” Simply being what we really are is never enough, so we must become something other than our authentic, natural self, based on what the unhealthy ego demands us to be – on how it compares us to “what others expect from us.” We get locked out, separated, from the beauty of the natural world.
On a larger scale, this unhealthy ego process is the mass default for commercial culture. The rapid expansion of this dangerously delusional unhealthy mass ego – driven by unconscious, top-heavy corporate media – is the reason for our gravely unbalanced world. It’s why we find the very survival of all species – the very ability of our planet to sustain life as we know it, suddenly in such precarious circumstances. This mass ego lives to control and exploit the Earth in order to meet endless voracious needs that can never be met. It lives by creating its own "map" of reality, and only functioning by focusing on that delusional map, instead of paying attention to the actual geography and conditions of the world around us.
As soon as we escape this useless, destructive mass ego and live in the simple underlying truth, becoming honest with ourselves and the rest of humanity, the sooner we'll see that no matter how big the problem there’s always a solution. With this simple realization, we will become spiritual beings, and the inevitable spiritual evolution of our species will become a real and workable thing.
Evidence of this spiritual evolution of humankind is all around us. Our extreme circumstances serve to inspire more people all the time to say:
"Wait a minute! This is insane – we can't do this anymore!"
That's your window of opportunity. Climb through it, and from that moment on, your healthy ego (your intuition) will be activated and will direct you to behave in a whole, newly responsible way that will lead to your connectedness with all life (Love & happiness); to the healing of our mass psyche, and – most importantly – to the healing our planet.
"When Man ate of the fruit of the Tree, he discovered himself in the field of duality instead of the field of unity. As a result, he finds himself out, in exile."
Joseph Campbell
Read about this and much more in: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor from Llewellyn Worldwide available direct on this page, or online. The first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for it it at your local bookstore!
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