Stop Judging Your Ego
Watch it instead, forgive.
Dear Friend,
Chiara called from Budapest last night and our conversation gave me the title for today’s letter. I thought it could be interesting to experiment with writing from a title, that came from the past, and see what comes through now.
There’s plenty of talk going round about ego and you hear about letting go of the ego or allowing it to die. But what does that actually involve? Why would you want to let your ego dissolve? Like the wicked witch of the east, so all that’s left is a crumpled pile of clothing on the floor?
Maybe.
Not such an attractive proposition though.
We each have an ego. We have no choice but to form one as we grow.
As Wendy says in Peter Pan “It’s all down hill from the age of two.”
We must develop a conceptual self, made of images we hold in our mind and we must identify with those images. We use the images to define ourselves. We say “I am…” then you fill in everything you believe yourself to be. As a rule of thumb, if we can use language to talk about it, it’s conceptual, mind made stuff, so we know it relates to our ego.
Ego is made of the ideas we have in our minds, about who we are and how we should be and how the world is and should be. If the ‘experience reporting’ of our senses does not match up with our internal images of how things ought to be, we suffer.
Not everyone is aware they have an ego, and some people will live and die without a meaningful realisation of this. That’s the way of evolution. It’s slow and happens over unimaginable swathes of time.
It’s a fortunate thing to become ego aware as the ego comes with its own undoing built in.
The suffering it causes brings us eventually to the realisation that we want to be free of it or to do things differently.
Everyone on the planet comes to this realisation eventually.
That might not be in this lifetime.
So we have plenty of opportunities to become aware of our own egos, because we have to get along with people who have no clue they are ruled by their own.
All of this is to say, not to judge your ego, because you have to have one.
A useful practice is to accept “I have an ego.”
The “I” that has the ego, is not the ego.
I can watch my ego reactions and I can feel the effects in my body.
This watching is sometimes called witness consciousness.
You are watching how you react to people and situations and slowly it dawns on you that you are the consciousness doing the watching.
For example. The ego can be into quick easy solutions. It will make absolutist statements. Never. Always.
“I’ll never speak to them again.”
“I never want to see you again.”
“You always do this.”
The ego aim is disrupt connection and seed more images in the mind and body of separation, hurt and judgement.
A practical approach is to accept that you and I both made egos. We had no choice in it and up until now we’ve believed in what we made. We’re not aware exactly how we made all of these images. We’re just acknowledging that we did.
In this sense the ego is not good and it is not bad, but inevitable.
We can look at it.
The act of watching causes it to change and morph and reveal different sides of itself.
Imagine.
Everyone has this going on inside of them!
Can we forgive ourselves for something we had no choice in? Can we forgive people who as of yet have not a clue what they are dealing with?
It’s not to rid ourselves of ego, but to become aware.
Free.
Less reactive to thoughts arising and triggering responses in the body.
That takes time and effort and process.
Practice in other words.
We’re all in this together.
Stop judging your ego and watch it instead.
Forgive yourself for what could not be otherwise.
With Love.
Till tomorrow
Mikey