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.
4 comments:
I agree with you that I think it is important for humans to always strive to better themselves. The best we can do is related to our desire to improve while maintaining our humility. If we don't strive to better ourselves or settle for much less than what we are capable of then we are doing a great disservice to ourselves and to those around us.
I also agree with you that the desire to learn, grow, and improve ourselves is an ongoing process which starts from birth and continues all the way through our natural lives. It does take a lot of time, patience, and effort-- most things worthwhile in life usually do.
Your blog vilifies the ego and describes it as being independent from the rest of the components that make up the self. I disagree with this view. I think it is important to embrace all the components that make up the self and see that they all work in unison interdependently. Having every component in balance and harmony with every other component is how one progresses forward. To use an analogy, think of it like a car. In order for a car to make great distances forward it needs to have all its parts in working order.
I could be wrong, but what I think you were really trying to discuss in your blog is fear. Fear is what holds us down. Fear is what tells our minds we can’t when our hearts say we can. Fear of uncertainty is what drives us to make compromises and settle for less when deep down inside we want to achieve more. Fear is what distorts our perception of reality. Fear is what holds us back from achieving our true potential and goals in life.
Now is fear a good thing? I would say yes and no. There are always going to be things in our lives we are going to be afraid of-- this is normal and is to be expected. The trick is to recognize and acknowledge our fears and do our best to move past them. Overcoming our fears is what makes us stronger and allows us to improve ourselves. Overcoming our fears teaches us to replace those negative voices and thought processes in our head with positive ones. Only when we give fear authority in our lives is when problems emerge.
I agree with your sentiment that when it comes to the self, the journey is definitely more important than the destination.
I remember you had an image of a dragon on your cell phone screen. I think the dragon is a powerful image. The dragon has strength, tenacity, confidence-- it doesn't let fear stand in its way. I think this is a good image to reflect on from time to time, especially when things start to get turbulent in life.
Nice pointers DTC,
I understand your position on attempting to maintain balance between the different aspects of life. In most, if not all cases, when we are attempting to balance different aspects, some of them have negativity associated with them. However, even on a minute scale, ALL of these aspects have something positive attached to them. Balance is required to maximize this positivity and leave the negativity out of these aspects.
Now if ego had any minute positivity attached to it, I would incorporate it into my Self as something that needs positivity juiced out for the Self (in other words, balanced with other aspects of the Self.) But my point here is ego has absolutely NO positivity attached to it. Hence, it becomes utterly useless to try and balance it with the other aspects of the Self.
Fear is a completely different issue. When you are afraid of something, your Self is aware that it is giving that something up. But fear has a social stigma attached to it. The Self accepts this stigma and thus has contempt for fear. So whenever it gets a chance, the Self will try to fight fear. Fear has no act of its own. Fear will not be able to brainwash you against your will.
Ego makes you believe that you are too good for something or someone. There is no stigma attached to being too good. Thus, your Self willingly rejects that thing. It is very difficult and a tad too late in life, if not impossible for some, to realize they have been duped by their ego. This is why ego is dangerous. It takes control of the Self. Fear is something laden on the Self that the Self can just brush away.
Hey Leggie,
In my view, "Your Self is on its own. Get a load of this." is probably one of the best blog that you have written in terms of self assessment.
To live life by knowing, understanding, and differentiating between your ego and Self is extremely difficult. If one can do that then one will be able to gain control over himself/herself and only then can that individual truly act on his/her self.
I believe that "ego" is one of the side effects of living in a society. If an individual is alone in a place and has no interaction with a living soul then there will is no way for that individual to give birth to ego and feed it. Now since we live in the society other individuals will knowingly or not knowingly sow a seed of ego in your brain. But only through having the understanding that there is something greater than the individual exists, can one try to get rid of ego or not give birth to it. Now "something greater" could be anything. It may be God, living, non-living, or anything else.
Leggie, I can give you one of the examples from your life. We all know that you are a good cricket player. Lots of people have told you that you are a good cricket player or you have potential of becoming a very good player. Now these types of compliments has the potential of giving birth to your ego or feeding your ego. But as far as I know you have neither given birth to your ego nor have you feed your ego in this matter. I suppose this is because either you have higher standards/goals set for yourself or you believe that are many other players that are better than you or you believe that the game of cricket is greater than any individual. Thus believing in something higher could stop ego. Remember one time we were sitting at "In-N-Out" on Friday night and we started talking about you and cricket. That night we talked about cricket and self-assessment. You can relate our talk with the example I gave.
I would like to comment on something else besides this topic. The cartoon profile picture of "Decrypt The Code" looks exactly like Sammy. Damn Sammy, how are we supposed to decrypt that code??
True. Thats a good point. Realizing that there's something higher than what you are good at is one of the ways to keep your ego in check. It could be a simple yet a not so obvious means of controlling ego for a person who is already intoxicated with ego. But its good that anonymous brings it up. Its good to know and apply.
lol @ sammy comment "how the hell are we supposed to decrypt the code" --- lmao
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