According to Eckhart Tolle in his book New Earth, the ego is the mental disease of our time and a lot of people are suffering from it. The ego generates the false self-perception of oneself, which makes unhappy. We are destroying ourselves, others and the environment around us.
You can recognize it by means of hate, resentfulness, anger, inner disorder, unhappiness, impatience, bad temper, haste, uptightness, envy, avarice, jealousy, fear and every other emotion that makes us unhappy. The ego turns out to be in the moment we identify ourselves with something we are not. People with a false self-perception of themselves think that they are their wealth, reputation, bank account and social status.
THE EGO COMPARES AND JUDGES
If the ego dominates you, then everything you see is compared and judged. As a consequence, you create your own world, where things and people are either good or bad. A world where your supposed happiness depends on the possession of things or people, on the social position or on people’s actions. This is to say, everything that is outside of yourself. You can be happy only if you do something or something happens.
WHAT DOES ‘EGO’ MEAN?
Ego means “I”. When we say “I”, we mean actually a deceitful, false image of ourselves, which we have created through an illusion. We establish our unreal identity through experiences and things we are made up of, for example possessions, skills and knowledge. The ego supplies you with a feeling of self-worth. This deceptive feeling of identity and “I” is the Ego: “I am what I own, what I can, what I know and the people I know.”
SINK IN THE EGO EFFECTS
Ego makes you addicted. I can only be happy if I have something or if something happens. It interferes with your real “I”. you can be long-term happy if you stay by yourself without thinking constantly. Everything you need is consciousness. Be aware of your ego and of your thoughts. In the moment you are thinking about your thoughts, you will be aware that there is more than just your thoughts. Consciousness. As long as you can enjoy every single day of your life, you have no reason to question your thoughts.
Be aware of the ego of people around you. If they do something bad, it is not them, it is their ego. They don’t know what they’re doing because they lost the control on themselves and their awareness. The ego lives through sorrows from the past, that scoops the feeling of self-worth and, as a consequence, it identifies with the victim role.
KEEP AN EYE ON YOUR EGO AND BE AWARE OF YOURSELF
An absolute book suggestion is “A New Earth – Awakening to your life’s purpose” by Eckhart Tolle. Tolle describes the false self-perception in all its facets. It is really a book of enlightenment to me, because I didn’t have any idea of how involving, subtle and expansive the ego could be.
This book has helped me to recognize my ego and to handle with it. A lot of what we wouldn’t like to have in mind can be dissolved just by looking at our thoughts. Through this process we can find our real self and discard the false one. This is not easy, since our ego is as clever as we are. Though, a steady consciousness helps a lot.
