20. The human ego

NOTE: This is an excerpt from the book The Least You Should Know About Life.

Part One explained that the key to improving your life experience is to increase your understanding of life. A new understanding cannot be found within your current knowledge and beliefs, so you must be willing to look outside your mental box. Yet as history and common experience proves, people often become attached to their beliefs and are reluctant to think outside the box. If you are to be successful in taking command over your inner circumstances, it is absolutely necessary to recognize that there is a force in your own psyche that opposes your growth. This force is seeking to make you stay in your current mental box by getting you to reject any idea that can set you free from your current limitations. This force has traditionally been called the human ego.

The human ego is a term that has been used differently by various psychologists and spiritual teachers. In this book it is used specifically to refer to an “alien” being that exists in your psyche, meaning the lower part of your being. This being is somewhat self-aware and it has a survival instinct. For most people, their egos have attained a high degree of control over their lives. The spiritual path is a process of taking control away from the ego and thus attaining the freedom to be who you were created to be.

Yet the ego will not give up control voluntarily. It is therefore essential for you to understand how the ego was created. This is a somewhat complicated process, so the following is only a brief summary.
As explained above, the Conscious You is the center of your being and it is meant to be in control of your psyche. Yet in order to maintain this control, the conscious self must be willing to take full responsibility for your life and make the important decisions. In order to make balanced decisions, decisions that do not harm yourself or other parts of life, the conscious self must reach for a greater understanding of the laws that guide the universe. This understanding can be obtained from a spiritual teacher, as explained later.

The laws of God are designed to ensure harmony in the universe, meaning that one co-creator will not destroy or control other co-creators. If all people followed these laws, humankind would create an upward spiral that would eliminate all suffering on this planet. Because all co-creators have free will, it is possible for them to go against God’s laws and create the illusion that they are separate beings. This creates the illusion that you can raise up yourself in comparison to others and that you can harm others without hurting yourself. By giving co-creators free will, the consciousness of selfishness came into being as an option. In other words, co-creators have two options for building their sense of identity:

• You can base your identity on a state of mind in which you see yourself as one with your higher Being and one with all life. This creates harmony between your higher and lower being and makes sure your actions will raise up both yourself and everyone else. You will then fulfill your reason for being and bring the Earth closer to manifesting a higher form of life. The mind that is designed to ensure harmony and oneness in the universe is called the Christ mind. In reality, this is a universal term that transcends the Christian religion and its sectarian use of the word “Christ” (more on this later).

• You can base your identity on a state of mind in which you see yourself as separated from your higher Being and from all other parts of life. This inevitably leads to a division between your higher and lower self, and your lower self will not reflect your spiritual individuality. You will never feel fulfilled in this way and all your actions will ultimately lead to suffering for yourself and others. The mind of separation and selfishness is called the mind of anti-christ (explained in more detail later).

When you were created as a self-conscious being, you lived in a protected environment – a symbolic description is the story of the Garden of Eden – in which you were guided by a spiritual teacher. As you grew in self-awareness, you had to face the temptation to use the mind of anti-christ—symbolized by the serpent.

Most people on Earth gradually became blinded by the logic of the mind of anti-christ and started seeing themselves as separated from their own spiritual selves and from each other. This caused people to make decisions based on the illusion that they were human beings in competition with each other. People started acting as animals fighting for survival, which led to suffering. The conscious self started feeling that every decision it made had undesirable consequences. Thus, there came a point when the conscious self decided that it would no longer make decisions, it would no longer be in a position of responsibility.

At the moment you decided to abandon your responsibility to make decisions, your ego was born. This happened because your outer circumstances demanded that decisions be made, and since the conscious self would not make them, someone else had to. That someone else is the ego. You essentially decided to stop making conscious decisions, and the ego now started making decisions for you below the level of your conscious awareness.

To understand the creation of the ego, consider that your subconscious mind functions much like a computer. If you repeat a certain action enough times, you create a computer program in the subconscious mind that can now perform the action without your conscious mind being engaged in it. One example is riding a bicycle; once you have learned it, you never forget it. You might not ride a bike for ten years, but once you get on, the subconscious computer program takes over. The downside is that if you create a self-centered or self-destructive program, it will produce suffering and your conscious mind will seem powerless to stop it. An obvious example is an addiction.

Before the conscious self decided to abandon its responsibility, it had already created a number of such programs. When you refused to make decisions, these programs took over. Some science fiction stories describe a supercomputer becoming so powerful that it attains intelligence and wants to control the world. Well, after you abandoned control over your life, the subconscious computer became more powerful and the ego was formed. The ego has a limited form of self-awareness and intelligence, but it has a very strong survival instinct.

The ego does not actually care about you, it only cares about itself. It is seeking to control you so that it can use you as a tool for expanding its power in the world. It is like the mad dictator who can never get enough—be it pleasure, possessions or power. If you threaten the ego, it is willing to destroy you – destroy your self-esteem and sense of identity – in order to survive. The ego is generally not intelligent enough to reason that since it depends on you for its existence, destroying you means destroying itself.

You also need to understand that the ego knows it can maintain its control over you only by staying hidden. If the Conscious You discovers the ego and understands how it controls your life, you will not accept this and will take back control. The ego will do anything to avoid this, including changing its behavior and beliefs. Thus, when you find the spiritual path, your ego will not give up. It will seek to use your spiritual beliefs in order to maintain or even expand its control over you. It is quite possible that people can think they are very spiritual, yet they are still controlled by their egos. This is what Jesus addressed in the following statement, “Either how canst thou say to thy brother, Brother, let me pull out the mote that is in thine eye, when thou thyself beholdest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother's eye” (Luke 6:42). The ego cannot see its own shortcomings, and it blinds you to reality, which is the origin of all hypocrisy.

Because the ego will do anything to stay hidden, it will seek to get you to deny or ignore these teachings on the ego. Therefore, once you begin to understand the ego, you will see that overcoming it is the real key to winning your spiritual freedom. All true spiritual teachers have taught people how to overcome the ego. The Buddha talked about attaining enlightenment and overcoming suffering, which means you must overcome the ego. Jesus talked about the kingdom of God, namely a state of consciousness in which you are no longer controlled by the ego.

21. The subconscious computer

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Copyright © 2008 by Kim Michaels