What is the ego? It is the conscious part of your personality the one you have chosen to pt forth for the world to see. The ego is comprised of the amalgamation of the best and most desirable parts in you, the beliefs that you adopted from other people, the ideas, and belief systems and also behaviours that you took on from other people or the ones that your parents encouraged you to show. Basically the ego is the cultivated and fine tuned and groomed aspect in you. The more cultivated the ego, the more shadows one has to hide. So what are shadows? The aspects on you that you hide in your subconscious. The splits that are deemed undesirable and unacceptable by society, the pain, the vulnerable parts, making you ineligible to be a worthy member of society if you exhibit them. So in an attempt to be accepted and welcome, you have no choice as a child but to push them away.
To fix yourself
The ego is attached to the idea of being good and is convinced that the world is right in and so you have to adjust and mold to what is asked of you for the outside. So it is out to fix you.
To fix yourself is a great illusion because there is nothing to be fixed about you. You have never been broken, you have never been less than or not enough. Your brokenness ceases to exist the second you stop denying your pain. You see there is nothing undone, insufficient about you when you finally see your pain. So being convinced that there is something broken inside you is what keeps your ego striving to making you be good enough person to be worthy of acceptance by society.
Illnesses have to be dealt with from the outside in, not the other way
Ego believes that power lies without and anything that is proven correct and right and is being supported & validated by the collective is what you are supposed to follow. So if the medicine says that you can only heal by taking pills, hence outsource your inner power to do that, and if this belief is reinforced by authority figures, your ego will have a hard time realizing that it is the other way around:that illnesses are physical manifestations of unprocessed emotions that took a toll on you. The ego is adamant that healing the body is a matter of being at the mercy and at the hands of the outside world.
Ego is fundamentally afraid to confront ingrained norms because that is threatening to your comfort and safety.
Superiority & inferiority and comparison
Any scenario and role that make the ego come out as the good guy is going to be taken on. Your ego loves to be seen as the hero, the saviour, the fixer. Ego inflates & thrives on being praised.
However it also can take on the role of the victim and wallow in it. Why? Because victimhood attracts affection, attention and because the victim is situated on the opposing side from the villain.
It also needs to food on feeling superior to anyone. Whenever it sees an opportunity to set itself on a higher position to someone.
It loves to compare so as to find diffemeces in others, that it decides are flaws so it can feed off of them. It also never says no to feeling inferior so long as that comes with an emotional pay off of being seen, as ego's nr 1 desire is to be seen.
Being less than or not good enough
We are raised in a society that values competition and adores champions and fame. You learn from school that you fade into the background as long as you dont keep up with the "achievers" in your class. Your parents compare you to them and in order to motivate you to be better and for fear you will end up lazy, they'll say stuff like :"Why does your colleague get such good grades and you don't?"
This actually prepares you to become a workaholic, absorbed and consumed by the forever insatiable thirst to be better than. So in order to make you strive and push, your ego - that is the internalized voices of your parents comparing you to others -
It will trick you into believing you are less than so you never stop to force yourself as ego desperately needs to be ahead. It will turn into an emotionally abusive aspect inn you that will whip you with painful words.
Separation
There is nothing more threatening to the ego than the possibility of dying by dissolving into otherness. Ego is absolutely terrified of being the same as the people around, so it will do anything to be labeled as special. Hence ego will choose separation everytime.
Being special is first and foremost wanting to be separate. Individualism is like a religion to the ego that relishes in standing apart from everyone. However what the soul wants is being connected with the others in a genuine relation. The soul yearns oneness because the soul knows there is no other.
Right and wrong
Exclusion -if something is wrong then its opposite must be right
One of the traits of the ego is that it has to divide the world into good and bad, right and wrong. It needs morality. It needs laws and punishment. It need rewards and awards and pats on the back. Our chosen self cannot comprehend that right and wrong don't exist in the universe, it is almost impossible for us to understand life other than by dividing it into what is good and what is bad. There is no possibility for the ego to embrace duality because it has no point of reference anymore. It is validated and its existence is validated by adhering to that which is moral and good, and so if it finds out that wrong does not exist in and of itself, the ego feels threatened and will do anything in its power to deny and thwart the realization that all is one and none is different. To the ego, if something is accepted as good, then it only makes sense that the opposite is wrong and therefore undesirable. The ego cannot hold space for both extremes at the same time. It cannot conceive of that. That is why death of the ego is so painful, because when the ego is faced with the indisputable discovery of the unity of polarity, it dissolves. Basically ego death is the dissolution of the chosen, false self and of all the ideas and belief systems that you adopted.
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