We are living in a society in which we point at anything or anyone to blame for the state the world is in, and just as many think that humanity can upgrade itself and live in a golden age by returning to nature and living a balanced life at peace with ourselves and each other or by the help of some advanced civilisation. It’s almost hard to believe that as a result of the ego (something that isn’t even fundamentally real), we can come to a point in our timeline where there is a probable possibility of species self-annihilation, whether by accident or by focused intention by the most megalomaniacal of minds within our human collective. It is a very dangerous way to live and leaves the uncertainty of a bright future, if a future at all, at unsettling heights.
It’s time to finally come to terms with how big of a role the human ego plays in all the social and political issues we see all around us and that affect our daily lives. Putting Band-Aids on the symptoms will not cure the very deep causes of those symptoms.
Thanks to luminaries of humanity, we can upgrade our understanding of what ego is from the rather simplistic Freudian view to a model that allows for more complexity. Understanding as above so below, from spiritual to material, in its nature reflective. Mirroring, where by the smallest grain of impurity judges what it sees by itself, when it looks/listens, it cannot see outside itself.
Someone lived on the streets for many years until he was given a place and a blanket. It was like a w-holy piece of cloth, and he became protective about it, took ages to fold it, order, then every corner perfectly folded. It gave him security, but then it moved on to his cloths, the kitchen and the pots and pans, the pots were not in line so the pots were placed in line, it ended up to where he spends 16 hours a day cleaning his house. He knows where it came from, but is unable to change it, because he does not see nor experience how ego strengthens and builds upon impurity. It is like a house being built on sand.
Yes, rather than being an actual entity, the ego is a structure-process that has an illusion-generating nature…something that has been backed by not only thousands of years of personal and direct experiences & eastern philosophies, but also by the study of the nature of Reality and its various aspects through quantum physics and other forward-thinking sciences. Having the understanding of what the ego is in this expanded view can help us understand that whenever the ego exists, we exist in a state of confused perception thanks to the generated illusions it creates. This is why activities such as meditation are helpful in the minimisation of the ego’s influence over our lives.
Understanding the Illusion
The powerful emotions of anger, fear, envy, and others can be seen as if they were mechanically following tiny signals…as if there was a switch that was pressed. The illusion is that we are seeing something that is an actual experience within an objective reality. However, the fact is that it is mostly a replay of past experience that is modified a little to fit present circumstances. This replay is recorded again in order to add to the previous memory, which ingrains things even deeper, leading us to have a greater conviction in its real-ness.
The more we experience in this way, the deeper we get stuck in the illusion. This entire time, we stay in a state of confusion where we think that we are basing our actions on experience itself. The delusional ego has made us prisoners of something that isn’t even real.
Take a look at how prevalent this is in older individuals. The older a person gets, the more ‘experienced’ he or she is in this illusion that has essentially entrained the brain to think a certain way. The older a person is, the more sure he or she is that they “know” what they’re doing, making it very difficult for them to think differently or delineate from the path the illusion has trained them to go down. The essence of such a person’s life is now made up of a series of illusions.
Wouldn’t you like to be free?
Wouldn’t you like to be in control of your own life and not have it controlled by something that isn’t even intrinsically real in the first place? You can and you will…if you can overcome the great obstacle of fear. This incredibly powerful tool of the ego is a reflex that is set in movement when something that is identified as very necessary is seen as being threatened. This reflex of fear causes a person to find every possible way of protecting what is felt as being necessary, or it failing this, to create illusions of escape from the approaching danger. In the strong words of physicist David Bohm, “fear confuses, corrodes, and corrupts the mind”.
While the so called rabbit hole is much deeper than this, only those who place truth before the need to breath, those willing to give up all their personalised ideas about truth, those who know by its nature, truth cannot be found by ego/personality, those are ready to be led into the sanctuary.
Truth-revelations is like the sea, where we cast out our nets and catch those ready for the transition.
3-11-2013
Moshiya van den Broek