Don’t let your ego kill you. You might not be the best. You are probably attempting to become the best. That’s about as far as your current disposition/mentality can carry your ego. Your ego possesses the potential to make you lie to your Self. This is dangerous because it blocks possible improvement of character and Self. Worse, it can drag you into alternate pathways of living under of illusion of being the best. And considering the fact that everybody dies at a point, we don’t have infinite time to live. What one needs to realize is that ego is something separate from one’s entity or one’s Self. It is something that forces your Self to involuntarily involve in action that is harmful.Wouldn’t you hate it if when you were eating a good meal at the end of your day, someone came up to you and just told you as a matter of fact that you couldn’t eat anymore since he had more authority over your food than you did….even though you had done nothing to deserve being under such authority? Ego is similar to this sort of authority. There is little difference between ego and the man trying take away your food. In the latter case, you actually realize that something unjust is being done to you and feel humiliated. Thus your Self triggers a response to get justice. You deny or fight to keep what you deserve. And chances are, if you rightly deserve the food, no one will be able to take it away from you. With ego, your Self doesn’t really get this privilege. Your ego tells your Self that it is not supposed to think of improving itself since it is just as good as the opponent. Now, your Self can fight it by claiming that its not the best. But this is where the fight ends. Even though your Self rightly deserves justice to that claim, it's not guaranteed justice by default. When ego strikes, your Self cannot do anything but give it a little resistance and hope to get a result while that resistance is still effective.
To actually improve yourself to become the best, it takes a lot of time, patience and effort. Ego has a better chance at this fight against your resistance because of these immense resources that your resistance requires. Ego does not need these resources. It uses illusion to tell your Self to give up its resistance. Illusions don’t need anything concrete to prove them right. Illusions just use the weakness of the eyes they are fooling. Ego uses such illusion. It shows you alternate results that are not resource draining but will never get you to your original goals. This is what is popularly known as a compromise. And once you compromise with an alternate result, ego is nourished. This results in ego further fooling your Self into believing that this alternate result is much more desirable that your original goal.
Why give so much importance to your original goals? Some goals are very difficult while others are easy. Every goal is achievable. Make one goal. There is a certain amount of difficulty involved in achieving this goal. If you find yourself thinking about something that is just as good but is much more easier to do than this goal, MORE OFTEN than more often than not, this is ego fooling your Self. Try to give your Self a better reason to give up your current goal for the alternate than just telling your Self that the alternate has just about the same result without using as much effort. When you originally made the goal, there was a reason behind it. There was a passion attached with it. There was a sense of self worth attached to it. These are the factors that your Self is made of. The alternate does not have these factors. It just has the quality of being easier than your current goal. And just because it is easier, will you completely disrespect your Self by voiding it of all the passion and rationale that it possessed initially?
Don’t measure your life by the end result. End results seldom accurately justify the means. And as far as I am concerned end results are useless. Death is the end. Birth is the beginning. Life is the means of achieving this unpleasant end. This doesn’t mean every person born should just die since death is the end result anyway. This would be the fastest, easiest and most efficient way to achieve the end result of death, wouldn’t it?
Your Self wants you to do something worthwhile before it ceases to exist. The Self is voluntarily putting itself through effort for a fated end for some reason. The reason is not clear. Society? Culture? The purpose of life? Happiness? We don’t know. But we do know that living is an innate necessity of the Self. I will continue on this later since we are now going into a different direction.
