Let Go of My Ego!

Going through my notes (I have reams of them) from past readings, writings, and thoughts, I came across these scribblings about the Ego. They are quite insightful and will hopefully give you pause and jumpstart your thoughts about yourself. Life is about self-discovery. The more we know ourselves, the more equiped we are to find peace, to succeed, and to realize our own special purpose in this life.

I hope you enjoy these notes and I pray that they put you in a different place than you were before you mistakenly stumbled upon this posting. If not, see the Complaint Department (that's my wife). She'll get right back to you. Promise.

EGO

We have an unconscious compulsion to enhance our identity through association with an object. It is built into the very structure of our egoic mind.

"I try to find myself in things by association but never quite make it and end up losing myself in them." That is the fate of the ego. It doesn't work.

The ego always wants more. The unchecked striving for more, for endless growth, is a dysfunction and a disease.

There is such strong emotion with losing an item or having it taken from you (I felt violated because my house was robbed). You are not less of a person without the item.

Many people don't realize until they're on their death bed and everything external falls away that NO THING ever had anything to do with who they are. This whole concept of "ownership" is revealed as meaningless.

If you take away one kind of identification, the ego will quickly find another. The ego lives through comparison. How you are seen by others turns into how you see yourself.

If we cannot look through this collective delusion, we will be condemned to chasing after things for the rest of our lives in the vain hope of finding our worth and completion of our sense of self there.

Large corporations are egoic entities that compete with each other for more. Their only blind aim is profit. They pursue that aim with absolute ruthlessness. Nature, animals, people, even their own employees, are no more than digits on a balance sheet, lifeless objects to be used then discarded.

Your identity to suffering is egoic (ex.-being a minority). You may then think and speak of yourself as a "sufferer" of this or that chronis illness or disability. You receive a great deal of attention from doctors and others who constantly confirm to you your conceptual identity as a sufferer or a patient. You then unconsciously cling to the illness because it has become the most important part of who you perceive yourself to be.

Complaining is one of the ego's favorite strategies for strengthening itself. Every complaint is a little story the mind makes up that you completely believe in.

There is a "me" that loves to feel personally offended by the cold soup or the inattention of store employees and is going to make the most of it. A "me" that enjoys making someone wrong. Sometimes it becomes obvious that the ego doesn't really want to change, so that it can go on complaining.

There is nothing that strengthens the ego more than being right. For you to be right, of course, you need someone else to be wrong. In other words, you need to make others wrong in order to get a stronger sense of who you are.

Here it becomes obvious that the human ego in it's collective aspect as "us" against "them" is even more insane than the individual ego, although the mechanism is the same. By far the greater part of violence that humans have inflicted on each other is done by normal, respectable citizens in the service of the collective ego.

The particular egoic patterns that you react to most strongly in others and misperceive as their indentity tend to be the same patterns that are also in you.

In certain cases you may need to protect yourself, but beware of making it your mission to "eradicate evil" as you are likely to turn into the very thing you are fighting against.

When the ego (or collective egos) is at war, know that it is no more than an illusion that is fighting to survive. That illusion thinks it's you.

If/when you learn to deny ego, what remains is the light of consciousness in which perceptions, experiences, thoughts and feelings come and go. That is Being, that is the deeper, true I. Once you accept that, whatever happens is only of relative importance. I honor it, but it loses it's seriousness, it's heaviness.

The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking.

Life is the dancer, and you are the dance.

The extent of the ego's inability to recognize itself and see what it's doing is staggering and unbelievable. It will do exactly what it condemns others for and not see it. When it is pointed out, it will use angry denial, clever arguments, and self-justifications to distort the facts.

Zen - don't seek the truth. Just cease to cherish opinions.

Although the body is very intelligent, it cannot tell the difference between an actual situation and a thought. It reacts to every thought as if it were a reality.

If small things have the power to disturb you, then who you think you are is exactly that - small.

To the human 'Pain-Body', pain is pleasure. It is not so much that you cannot stop your train of negative thoughts, but that you don't want to.

'Pain-Bodies' love intimate relationships and families because that is where they get most of their food. The pain-body attempts to provoke - push their buttons, as the expression goes, so it can feed on the ensuing drama.

You are like an apparently poor person who does not know he has a bank account with $100 million in it and so his wealth remains an unexpressed potential.

If the thought of lack - money, recognition, or love - has become part of who you think you are, you will always experience lack. All you see is lack.

**Whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world. You are withholding it because deep down you think you are small and that you have nothing to give.

"Give and it will be given unto you"

When you smile at a stranger, there is already a minute outflow of energy. You become a giver.

Abundance comes only to those who already have it. "For the one who has, more will be given, and from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away." Mark 4:25

**AS LONG AS EGO RUNS YOUR LIFE, THERE ARE 2 WAYS OF BEING UNHAPPY. NOT GETTING WHAT YOU WANT IS ONE. GETTING WHAT YOU WANT IS THE OTHER.

**Whether the other person is right or wrong is irrelevant to the ego. It is much more interested in self preservation than in the truth.

JOY CANNOT COME TO YOU. IT EMANATES FROM WITHIN YOU.

"For everyone who exhalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exhalted." Luke 14:10+11

If you are content with being nobody in particular, content not to stand out, you align yourself with the power of the universe.

If you don't become speechless when looking out into space on a clear night, you are not really looking.

You are precious and at the same time insignificant.

When instead of reacting against a situation (failure, getting fired), you merge with it, the solution arises out of the situation itself.

Breathing isn't really something that you do but something that you witness as it happens. The Intelligence within the body is doing it.

Light from the galaxy closest to our own, the Andromeda Galaxy, takes 2.4 million years to reach us. In that context, do you really think you're that important? Relax.

Stillness is that language God speaks, and everything else is a bad translation.

The sun rises and sets, true or false? Both. From outer space - false. From your front yard - true. There is little black and white. There just is.

Intelligence in the service of madness. Splitting the atom requires great intelligence. Using that intelligence for building and stockpiling atomic bombs is insane or at best extremely unintelligent.

Stupidity is relatively harmless, but intelligent stupidity is highly dangerous. Intelligent stupidity comes from Ego.

There is a vast difference between stress and intensity.

You can lose something you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.

The three modalities of awakened doing are Acceptance, Enjoyment, and Enthusiasm. Each one represents a certain vibrational frequency of consciousness.

"I am a hole in a flute that the Christ's breath moves through. Listen to this music." Hafiz - 14th century poet

The ego's wanting always tries to take from something or someone; enthusiasm gives out of it's own abundance.

You cannot manifest what you want, you can only manifest what you already have.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. The meek are the egoless.

I hope that you have enjoyed these tidbits of wisdom. I pray that some of them struck a chord and sunk in. If you want to read more, ALL OF THESE NOTES came from the book entitled "A New Earth", by Eckhart Tolle. It is a great read and goes into much more detail that what you've just read. The Ego is a very complex being, but has evolved into a very evil weapon. One that we must control within ourselves. I did not have the time to put these notes into stories, so I have typed them as they appear in one of my notepads. My apologies for that. I still hope I was able to give you something, or pass the wisdom along.