The biggest confusion for people who get into spirituality is with regards to their “Ego”.
It’s common for spiritual people to consider Ego as negative; but in truth, it’s not Ego that’s negative but thoughts based in fear that are negative.
Ego is Ego; it’s not negative or positive. What you “think” determines whether you are aligning with negative or positive.
The way I define Ego is that it’s the structure in your brain that gives a “person” identity. It serves a very practical purpose for physical interaction of humans.
Bashing your Ego is just a movement of “negativity” in you, it’s not spiritual or “pure”. It’s just a negative pattern, and if you sense it you will know that it’s just “violence” within you. When you truly become rooted in the truth of your being, you will not find any problem with your Ego and you will allow it to play the “practical” part that it’s supposed to play in the movement of physicality.
What is needed is that you stop identifying yourself as the Ego, and know yourself to be the “wholeness” or pure consciousness and then allow the Ego to do its part in the play of physicality.
Get rid of negativity, not the Ego
The root of suffering is identification with negativity/fear based thoughts. If you think low of yourself, it’s negativity, if you think low of others, it’s still negativity. Is it Ego that is thinking low of others? No, it’s just a negative thought pattern. Don’t confuse a negative thought pattern with Ego. The Ego is simply a structure of identity in the brain, and even the most enlightened person has this identity or he/she would stop responding when their name is called.
So stop talking about the Ego, and focus on letting go of negativity rather, because it’s the negative thoughts that create suffering for you and create negative realities in your life. A person who is rooted in positive outlook can be considered to have a “positive Ego” and a person who is rooted in negativity can be considered to have a “negative Ego”. So if anything, you might want to move towards having a positive Ego so that you are more in alignment with life.
The Ego’s unique preferences have a huge value
You are unique as an expression of universal consciousness and your uniqueness is reflected in the preferences or desire that your physical being comes up with – your brain/mind/heart comes up with the desires based on its unique natural conditioning/external conditioning (the structure of personal Ego). Each of your desire has a huge value because it causes expansion in life and you act as a co-creator of new realities. So your Ego has a very important part to play in the game of co-creation. The Ego desires new realities through its preferences and the universal consciousness brings forth the manifestation of these realities and keeps them in place.
So give up on the negative loop of trying to quell your ego, and allow yourself the freedom to express your uniqueness through your desires/preferences. Life is not here to condemn you for your desires, it’s here to embrace all of it and bring it to manifestation. You are totally loved by life just the way you are, it has no conditions for you, it’s is totally appreciative of the value you provide through your uniqueness – it’s important that you realize how valuable your presence here is.
I get angry very fast and very often.the worst thing is that this anger is becoming a cause of great rift between me and my husband. I guess i am too controlling and want everything to move as per my method. I feel dissatisfied with my life often. Your articles have been of immense help in helping me to gain some perspective but I tend to slip into depression and anger even though I know it’s not good for me. I really want to control my anger. Please help me.
Whenever you get angry, you can be sure that there is some “fear” underlying it. Anger is just the way the mind “defends” its fears. So next time you get angry, ask yourself – “what’s the fear I am feeling right now, that is causing me to get angry?”
The fear could be as simple as not wanting to “be wrong” or it can be some form of insecurity. Once you see the “fear”, in you, that is causing the anger you need to find out the reason you have this fear – it’s a process of simple investigation through awareness.
If you are totally honest with yourself, you will be able to clearly see the reasons for having the fear. Once the reasons are evident it boils down to looking for the “truth” in it, because every fear is created out of a “false” notion/belief/thought/perception. Once you align your perception towards the truth/reality, then the fear has no basis to stand on.
If you want, you can let me know (through comment/contact form) what you discover, what exactly are the fears in you that manifest as anger (what are you trying to defend).
Wow, I really needed this article. This whole time in releasing I have been looking at ego as a threat, something that needs to be contained through its negative thoughts. Now I realize that the negative thoughts are seperate from the ego, at least I think this is what this means. Ego is already in wholeness…neither negative nor positive. So in order to get to see this wholeness is to let go of the negative thoughts that is creating this thick fog. Forget about the ego, it is not about the ego doing this to us. It is what we are doing to the ego that is stopping it from doing the job , being an important integral part of us that we must have, accept, and love.