I want more. The ego

Ultimately the ego is a false sense of self. We develop this illusory misperception of who ‘I’ am at a very young age, as soon as we are old enough to identify. This is ‘my’ toy car, ‘I’ am John, this opinion is ‘mine’ and so on.

Have you ever seen a child lose their favourite football? Immense suffering and sadness prevails. The ball wasn’t just an inanimate object, to them it was a part of who they are. It was ‘mine’. It belonged to ‘me’. It made me feel good about ‘myself’. The ball had strengthened their perceived sense of self, the ego. This example carries greater weight when the child may have typically become bored and stopped playing with the ball soon enough anyway, but in that instance no suffering would be experienced. The ‘I’, ego, hasn’t been hurt or damaged, instead the child likely has a new bigger, better toy, which it now identifies with - the ego becomes more satisfied and manifests in the next object, superior to the previous, in this example.

See if you can observe your own ego. The ego demands superiority, even in subtle ways. You may make comparisons with other people or situations and come out favourably - this is a prerequisite of ego.

It is easy to see how possessed we are by ego and how our lives become conditioned by the unconscious need to appease it.

The car or watch that you buy. Why do you want the one which looks the best, endorsed by celebrities, or perhaps costs the most. Keep peeling back layers. You may find that the reason isn’t at all for its simple beauty. It may be fed my the urge to conform with this pseudo identity and the desire to be superior, which is of course, ego.

We can also see why giving up ‘my’ bad habits, behaviours, thinking patterns is so hard to do. After all, good or bad, they are ‘mine’. It causes immense conflict with the ego; if I give this up I am giving away a part of ‘myself’. The ego is reluctant to give up anything ‘I, ‘mine’, ‘myself’, almost in the same way a house would be reluctant to give up its foundation bricks.

“I am a depressed person. It is who I’ve always been and always will be”

I have had people say the exact line to me. The person is truly identified with that thought. Moreso the person is identified with their ego, the false sense of self. They believe the narrative, it belongs to them, it is ‘mine’. There can be great reluctance to part with that story, because no matter how destructive, it still represents ‘I’, albeit through the vail of ego.

There is room for less conflict when we seek our true identity from the things which define you as a person, core values. Things which aren’t changeable. Alongside this when we have deep awareness of our thoughts and actions, we move away from conditioned thinking and we can transcend our ego to a place of self esteem.

There is nothing wrong with possessing expensive materials, having vast knowledge or great abilities. But for that to contribute to esteem and not ego, it arrives with the knowledge that one isn’t deriving their sense of worth in being superior.