House of lies

In my last post I said that the ego is a liar. A couple of people felt I'd gone overboard with this observation. But I was serious about it. The ego really is a liar, and you don't have to take my word for it. You can find out for yourself.

Here's a simple test. Just take any ego-driven statement and assess its truth.

To do this, you first have to distinguish ego-driven statements from all the other kinds. A straightforward factual statement like "It's ten o'clock in the morning" is not ego-driven. For the most part, ego-driven statements are those relating to yourself, usually in relation to other people or to the world in general. And even then, they aren't statements of fact ("I'm taller than Joe") but statements requiring a subjective evaluation. The ego likes to compare itself to other people -- usually to its own advantage. For the ego, everything is competition, a zero sum game, and tallying winners and losers is all-important. Moreover, everything is highly dramatic, a life-and-death situation. The combination of these two factors produces grandiosity -- an outsized sense of self, and a feeling that the world revolves around you.

Here are a few examples:

"I'm much more successful than _____" (Insert name of rival.)

Don't you think _____ is saying the same thing about you? You can't both be right, can you?

"I always treat other people right."

Are you sure? What would they say?

"It's the other guy's fault."

Isn't it always?

"If I don't get this promotion, I'll die."

Will you really?

"I may not be perfect but I know I'm better than those _____." (Insert name of group you dislike: liberals, conservatives, atheists, Christians, skeptics, woo-woos, etc.)

That one speaks for itself.

By the way, though the ego will say, "I may not be perfect," it actually believes it is perfect. That's another lie. And pretending to be modest about it is yet another lie.

The ego doesn't always lie to puff you up. Sometimes it lies to make you feel bad about yourself -- as bad as possible. This may seem paradoxical, but the fact is, the ego doesn't care if you're happy or sad, as long as you are feeding its needs. And like an unruly child or a spoiled pet, the ego needs attention. The more obsessively you think about yourself, the more attention the ego gets. It doesn't matter whether you're thinking how terrific you are or how miserable you are. Once the ego has you thinking about me, me, me, it's got you in its grip.

"I've never succeeded at anything ... I'm a pathetic loser ... I'm the unluckiest person in the world ... Nobody knows the trouble I've seen ..."

More drama, more self-absorption, and more lies. That's why simply putting yourself down in order to counterbalance the ego's grandiosity doesn't work. You just substitute one ego trip (or ego trap) for another.

The real solution is to stop making these evaluations and comparisons in the first place. Don't concern yourself with how you stack up against other people. Be satisfied with who you are, on your own terms. It's hard to do. But it's the only way to shake free of the ego's control.

If you don't believe me, try listening to your ego and then assessing the truth of what it tells you. I'm betting you'll find, as I have, that the edifice built by the ego is a house of lies.

Comments

[Arthur]

Once the ego has you thinking about me, me, me, it's got you in its grip. - MP
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Every one of those statements is about separation, which has everything to do with "why we are here." Almost everything in this life is about experiencing separation and it doesn't always have to be physical separation, it can also be about emotional separation. It may be impossible to "become" or learn what it means to be a separate individual in heaven due to the overwhelming feelings of oneness and connectedness. i.e. the holographic nature of the spiritual universe. - Art

[william]

House of lies or house of protection? You may want to check out the course in miracles. It is very much into the ego and its deception. Here is the interesting part. It appeared to me that the longer one was in the Course the more ego driven they became.

When our group broke up when the facilitator retired and moved to southern Arizona in a place called Cochise a couple of years later I attended a course in miracles study group. The egos were alive and well in that group. The facilitator loved to hear themselves’ talk quite opposite what they needed to do as a facilator.

One would think with all those teachings in the Course about the deception of the ego the folks would have been able to see their need to satisfy their own egos was rampant. Even in our group I noticed a need for everyone including myself to state something profound to try to get I suspect the admiration from the others.

I suspect one cannot eliminate the ego. When my own jumps up and says or thinks something for attention, which is often I try to just smile and think to myself got to love that ego it never lets up. I think we have to learn first to recognize it and then to love it and comfort it. It is a necessary component for our evolutionary process. We are gods in the making but first we have to pay our dues as a perceived self-identity absorbed in self.

What l think is interesting there are a number of these people on this elimination of the ego journey and they do not hesitate to tell you that a statement you made was from your ego without realizing of course that by stating that to you it was their ego needing to feel superior to you and by doing this they have just shown their own feelings of incompleteness.

The journey continues. We feel separated from our source or oneness and this leaves us with a feeling of incompleteness so we try a variety of ways to compensate for those feelings. Such as wealth, power, sex, fame, prestige, stardom, religion, guru, etc.

In a capitalistic individualistic competitive society like ours one has to wonder how ego driven these traits are and how much negative impact these traits have on a society. We appear to be more of a “me, me” society than a “we are in this together society”.

On the other hand trying to create a utopian society based on satisfying humans needs without a spiritual meaning to life that did not seem to go so well for the Russians. Maybe the moderate way like the Buddha suggested. Also the "master mind" in the book the open door suggested the moderate path. Balance, balance, balance.

[Kevin]

This is a more widespread problem than most people realize, particularly here in the U.S., where the now-ubiquitous monster that is consumerism first twitched on the operating room table while Victor Frankenstein cackled with triumphant glee ("It's ALIVE, it's ALIVE"). Sorry about that last part, but the manner in which consumerism and its Igor-like attendant, advertising, have appealed to the ego to generate so much wealth has been an interesting, if depressing, spectacle for too many decades. Michael is too right about the ego. That monster needs to be put in its place and held there by force, if necessary. I remember the relief I experienced when I decided (agreed?) to follow my subconscious and paint the involuntry images which I now create, regardless of "fame and fortune" (two things in which I place no value). Despite the economic difficulties, I have no anxiety about ego and no insecurities trouble me. After seeing all the thrashing-about which people do for attention and self-gratification (THERE'S an all-too-obvious concept), I decided that the unofficial motto of most Americans is:"What About ME?!"

[william]

"That monster needs to be put in its place and held there by force"

It is called karma and it is not a monster but love in action and it works to perfection but not always on our time frame.

It is not punishment but "it brings us to what is essential for our development". (Brunton) For lack of a better explanation our lessons in life. Karma guides us to higher levels of consciousness whether we want to go along for the ride or not. It is the perfect part of the perfectly imperfect.

For anyone that wants to read about such things as karma and ego Paul Brunton is a good read. He spent his entire adult life traveling the world seeking into the mysteries of life and was able to achieve a very high level of peace (enlightenment?) in his own life.

Here is a little jewel from Brunton’s book what is karma? “People will moan about their unhappy past and ache because they cannot undo it; but they forget to undo the unhappy future which they are now busy making”.

If you read Brunton be careful because many of his books were published after he died from his notes over his lifetime and he made one crucial mistake. He did not date these notes so if one reads him very carefully one will see that he did change his mind about some of his statements. Karma is one of those changes. He calls karma punishment in this book but in another he has a more liberal view of karma not as punishment but lessons in life.

[Linda]

I pretty much agree with William's first comment. Dysfunctional egotism in today's society has arisen due to our Western culture's belief that we are separate from All That Is. As a result, we are left feeling abandoned and insecure in a dog-eat-dog world; feeling powerless, the ego must then try to adapt by constantly focusing on survival and protection of the self, sometimes at any cost. Our egotistical behavior reflects a defense mechanism borne out of fear--fear for one's own wellbeing in a perceived lacking society.

The way to return the ego to its natural state--which is an unconscious, continuous process of tuning into one's environment through the senses and feeding important information back to the waking awareness to efficiently create a more harmonious life based on our beliefs and intentions--is to grasp the realization that our existence is naturally part of a flowing matrix of consciousness that interconnects everything as one. This way of being allows us to experience the intelligently balanced forces of nature which always provides freedom from insecurity and scarcity.

The scientifically-bent mind cannot accept the concept of a higher, group-mind type of consciousness because it cannot be scientifically measured or proven to exist.

This state of imbalance is also driving the "wealth-building" or "creating abundance" craze that we are currently seeing playing out in Western society, again derived from feeling insecure and deprived.