Ridding yourself from the ego – and why you will feel great about it

There are about a thousand ways to define and understand the word “ego” so let me just tell you what I consider it to be. The word “ego” quite directly translated means more or less the same as the word “I”. What is ego, is your idea of who you are, your idea of “self”, the person that you are. Not having an ego is not possible for self-aware entities, and therefore, ridding yourself from the ego cannot be done without undoing the process of becoming self-aware, and I don’t know how to do that, feel free to try if you like.

Whenever you hear guidance about ridding the ego, if there is any healthy self-respect in you, you will shudder at the sound of it, and you should. It is a process that is completely counterintuitive if you also want to live an authentic existence; being authentic and without ego cannot be done at the same time, because to rid yourself from an ego, you will allow everyone else to define you, and to life authentically, you will need to define yourself for yourself, so these two goals cannot co-exist. Pick one, and if you choose authenticity (like I recommend) read on, if you want someone to define you for you, I won’t be the guy doing it. (Believe me, there are people who would like me to do that for them.)

Now, an ego is a combination of things, essentially, how do you define yourself:

1. What you truly enjoy, what are your skills, ambitions, goals, obsessions. (A part of your authentic ego.)
2. What you think you should enjoy, be skilled at, ambitious about, what you think you should be obsessed about and what you think you SHOULD be aiming at. Should be, but are not. (These are all false goals.)
3. What you think others expect you to enjoy, be skilled at, ambitious about… etc. (External pressure and definitions; requirement to release your own idea of who you are and allow others to define you.)
4. What you lie to yourself about yourself; what you enjoy, are skilled at, ambitious about, oriented towards and obsess about. (Usually false virtues, such as “I don’t hate anybody” or “I am happy being just a housewife.” or “I really do want to be successful in business”, but also “I don’t need love”, “I do not find that person attractive”, “I do not care what my partner looks like.”)

Pretending to be a better person than who you are is not a way to ridding yourself from the ego, it is to put on more layers of false ego, because it takes guts to admit that “I am not as good of a person as people want me to be, I am just a human, and sometimes I want to punch people right in the nose because their face irritates me.”

Lying to yourself about your virtues will not make those virtues real, so you might as well cut the act, right?

Now, the good thing is, that the best part of you is gritty. What people love about you is usually ANYTHING but your virtues. Virtuous people are not well loved, especially those whose virtues are authentic. It takes a lot of a person to be truly virtuous person, and I can’t say that I’d recommend it. Every truly virtuous person has only ever suffered from it so far, so please do take my recommendation and just be whatever you are.

Now, let’s stop the hurting ego.

What hurts when someone insults you is the fact that someone is trying to access your real self when you wish they would just keep believing that you are the kind of a person you say you are and not contradict you. Political correctness is a system built to serve the false ego of individuals everywhere. Political correctness is based on the wish that people would stop seeing what they are seeing, and it can go as far as to demand people will become BLINDED to each other’s flaws, in other words; to control the thought patterns in another person’s mind: “You are not allowed to THINK that.” I am all for shutting up about stuff that are potentially insulting, but to demand someone to stop thinking about things is going too far into guilting others for simply observing the world around them, as we know nobody is happy with people just stopping saying it out loud, the real demand is to stop thinking it, too. But what if what we are thinking is true? Should there ever be a call for the truth to be hidden so far you are not even allowed to THINK truthfully?

All your emotional pain comes from the ego. EVERY LAST BIT OF IT. Even, to a large degree, physical pain comes from the ego, at least it makes it a lot worse. What happens, is that when you have an expectation and an idea of reality regarding yourself, and someone contradicts that reality, IT HURTS. If you believe that being married to someone will automatically stop them from cheating on you, and that if you do certain things they won’t, but they do it anyway, your ego will hurt because you realized that whatever it was that you believed would happen didn’t happen… Reality bites. EVERYTHING is about the difference between actual reality and your expectation of reality, and the people with the least amount of trouble dealing with reality are the people with the most realistic idea of who they are, what others are, what others think of them, how much is reasonable to expect from others and for what reason, and how likely it is that your own view of reality is not entirely accurate. One of the BEST WAYS to avoid being hurt by your ego even if you didn’t know everything and could not predict much, is to accept the fact that your worldview and sense of reality PROBABLY isn’t 100% accurate and that accidents and miss-assessments will occur, and that is OK. (When I say probably, you would have to be a spiritual and psychological master to reach an understanding of reality that would match it by 30%, so a 100% is virtually impossible for anyone who hasn’t made it their number one life goal to have a 100% realistic world view. You know you are getting close when you no longer feel insulted, and when you do, you can get over it in two seconds flat. Another great indication is that reading news about child abuse, rapes, murders and killings no longer anger, scare, or insult you but you understand what is going on, even if your first goal in life was to stop people from suffering.)

Anything to do with self-deception, blinding yourself from the truth, or avoiding looking at the truth will hurt your ego. Every time your sense of reality is threatened, your ego hurts: “I thought this couldn’t happen? This shouldn’t happen? I was mistaken? I hate this.” The better you understand yourself, others and this world, the less emotional hurt you will suffer – the downside of it is that people probably will think that you are a psychopath for being able to deal with all of it without flinching.

Create a self-image so authentic that nobody can point out something about yourself that you didn’t already know

To fully protect yourself from attacks to the ego, to cure your ego, to rid yourself from the ego, whichever way you want to put it, it  means that you will have to learn to know yourself so well, that NOBODY will be able to point out something about you that you didn’t already know, AND to boot; realize that whenever someone points out a truth about you, it is a gift. Once you truly love yourself so much, that every truth pointed out about you is either a compliment or an opportunity to make yourself even better, you will love people who point out flaws in your character rather than consider them your enemy or a danger, because now you can fix them. You can’t fix anything that you aren’t yet aware of, so if someone points out a flaw, you can just go… WOW. Cool. Will have to see what that’s about and solve it.

You will also find this: Once you realize that it is MUCH EASIER to fix yourself than it is to fix others, you will start working on yourself, not others, and once you have fixed yourself, you don’t have to fix others, because they no longer hold a power over you like they used to. The good news is, thus, that the more flaws you discover within yourself, the more power you have potential to gain in your own life. For as long as those flaws stay hidden, others are able to abuse them and take advantage of your blindness to your own flaws, because any flaw can be used against you, whether you are aware of them or not.

One good half-way there plan is to decide to NEVER lie to yourself about who you are, even if you still lied to others. Once you learn more about yourself and become more comfortable with it all, you will find it quite impossible to even tolerate the idea of having to pretend to be something you are not.

Ridding yourself from the ego check-list

Popular lies that people tell themselves, and lies that society (by and large) expects you to hold onto:

1. I am a good Christian. (God says it is incredible how many people truly believe that, or that they’d even want to be. And ads: “You don’t have to be, it’s the whole point; your sins have been forgiven!!! The freaking kids who keep chasing after virtues and life philosophy are crazy, don’t follow them folks, just let them do their thing and  enjoy your life!”)
2. “I’m not too old, yet. I feel fine.” (If you feel terrible, it’s OK to feel that way. You don’t have to pretend you love the way you look at your age or that you don’t wish you were 10, 20, 30 years younger if you do feel that way. Animals don’t seem to age the same way as people do, partly because they have NO SHAME about wanting to look gorgeous, or wanting to pack it in as soon as they feel ugly.)
3. “If I was him/her…” (Watch. Out. Before. Getting. Smug. On. People.)
4. “I know what to do.” (Usually hiding a severe insecurity/uncertainty of what to do or how to go about it; relying on the tried and tested, because that gives a sense of “knowing what to do” even when it is not appropriate in the exact situation to follow that specific guideline. Tendency to over-simplify things.) “I don’t know what to do or how to go about it.” Is a great way to start a new project. Options are limitless.
5. “I don’t want them/that/it.” The truth being “I fear I can’t have them/that/it.” or “I fear they will not love me if they knew me.”
6. “I am not sexually turned on by physically beautiful people, and I don’t know how to define “physical beauty”, because all people are beautiful in their own way.” (How much of that is true for you, exactly?)
7. “I am not jealous of the people who are more beautiful/successful/loved/admired/famous/rich than me.” (Popular lies, remember. Not necessarily lies that you tell yourself.)
8. “I do not believe in a higher power” / “I believe in a higher power.”
9. “I don’t need to find anyone special to love; My expectations are ‘realistic’. I won’t be disappointed if I will find that nobody will love me fully for who I am. I’m fine with that.”
10. “I would never commit a murder under any circumstances.”
11. “Of course, I want children and a family.” / “Of course I love being a parent.” (Nothing of course about it! To be fair, most people love their children even if they hated being a parent to them.)

Difference between lack of self-awareness and having a false ego

There are many ways that people who lack self-aware and people with a strong false ego resemble each other, and they are not the same thing. If you are completely unaware of who you are, how can you lie to yourself or others about who you are? Some people allow people who tell them who they are  and what they are like or what they SHOULD be like, and they soak it all in as if it was true because they cannot tell whether it is true or not. Therefore, them gleefully telling you they are GREAT at what they do when they have no idea of what they’re doing, for instance, is not about having a false ego, it is essentially the opposite, having very little idea of who they are and what they are good at. Sometimes when what they say about themselves turns out to be true is simply an accident, not really being truthful about it, or self-aware, they have simply attached a quality to themselves that happens to be true.

The thing is, MOST PEOPLE want to be polite in what they say to someone else about the them: “you are beautiful”, “you are talented”, “of course people love you”, and for a person who isn’t self-aware, these statements are as true as anything else you could tell them, even if they were simply polite phrases you don’t really mean. That builds up a type of a false ego, that the person themselves had nothing to do with, they simply accepted an image, an ego that had nothing to do with them. “You said it, therefore, it must be true.” As a person without an ego, they accept it all as it comes, they do not, for instance, hold a real suspicion for your motivations of telling them these things: “why would they tell me I’m beautiful if they don’t think that I am?” Why is it bad to think oneself beautiful if that is not really true? OTHERS CAN AND WILL let you know that is not true, and that will hurt much more than NOT having that expectation that others will think them beautiful to begin with, and, people rarely react positively to a person whose self-image is blatantly unrealistic, even though they feel like they should go along with it… “To respect the falsehood of their ego” even though our authentic way of reacting to it is to at least… Roll our eyes at it, but many people would feel forced to fortify that belief; “Yes of course you are!!” thinking that deep down this person MUST KNOW it is not true and they are simply trying to learn to be comfortable in their own skin.

Going further with that same example, and I am not saying anyone should actually do that, but talking in spiritual sense; when a person becomes aware of the difference between what is beautiful and how they look, they will be more able to build a body like that for themselves in the future incarnations. For as long as they are being kept in the dark about how they really look, they will have hard time creating a beautiful exterior, because their idea of beauty is very vague or perhaps changes all the time while in gestation. People who have a very definite idea of what they want to look like when they grow up will have an easy time creating an exterior that they want to have. Most people make that decision subconsciously; they start resembling the people they most love, because what we love we most connect with beauty; and if you truly think that you are beautiful, who is looking back at you in the mirror is your way of saying “I love you” to someone you might know; you are wearing their face. Or, perhaps you only love yourself and that’s truly just you. 😉

Ego is an illusion; we are all one. What?

Just to wrap up, spiritual people often tell you that the ego is just an illusion and that we are really all just expressions of one blob of entity called “a God”. Now, to some of you, that is a comforting thought, to some, it is an insult. It is really just a matter of who you are talking to which way people want to see it, and what is a comforting thought to one person is over emphasised by another to whom it is a scary, insulting notion. Both statements are true: We are entities of free will, and we are all “one”. It means that we are all “the same” in the sense of basic needs and desires and that our individuality is simply hiding the fact that we are all very similar “the same” in our core. It does not mean that we all need to reunite, become one blob again with no personality or with one joined personality, it means that we simply have to find a way to understand each other, and that we have to learn to get along.

Psychic channels are ever as good as their cognitive abilities are, and how they understand things, and also, their students are only human, misunderstandings happen all the time and this is one of them.

You are not supposed to be ridding yourself from the ego, unless you truly want to, you are supposed to build an authentic one and respect that right of others, too.

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