|
The question is asked, "[Given the ego and the power it can wield], can we call a truce with our egos? How can we learn to co-exist more peacefully?"
The ego's job is to protect the organism, the man, from the unknown. It is a self-perpetuating conglomeration of thoughts, beliefs and history, the sum of which serves to delineate the individual from the rest of the universe, which the ego insists on doing in order that it may escape death.
This is a vast generalization and a terribly condensed story of what forms the ego and why it does what it does, but a longer form discussion is needed to really dig into the source and the life of the ego. (I can recommend The Science of Enlightenment by Nitin Trasi.) However, this is enough information to make the point that, in fact, the ego, as such, is not real in the sense that the oneness of life, of the universe, is real.
The language part of the brain, the left hemisphere, takes all the disparate 'facts' of one's existence--experiences, history, perceptions, sensory signals--and from these forms a story about who 'I' am. The behavior then of our ego-identified selves, is based on this story.
If, for example, I am hit every day as a child, my ego makes sense of this experience via a story that paints me as someone who deserves being hit. I then carry this story into adulthood, to one degree or another, and along the way, any experience that would seem to indicate I am not that someone who deserves to be hit, because it is of the unknown, will be seen by the ego as dangerous to the survival of the individual, and hence will be discounted, denied, repressed or forgotten. One can see from this system that to change via the ego actually goes against the way the ego operates, actually goes agains the ego itself, in effect making change of any magnitude nearly impossible working with and through the ego.
So in answer to the question, "Can we call a truce with our egos?" we must see that the ego has only its own interests in mind, and that these interests are not at all (usually) mine. So in fact we must circumvent the ego, which is what we do in our meditation, twice each day dipping into the unboundedness that is our true identity. From this experience of unboundedness it becomes daily easier to remind ourselves that we are something other than this ego and all the opinions it seems to feel the need to spout.
Rather than calling a truce with our ego, we make an agreement with ourselves to believe nature's idea of what we are over the ego's idea of what we are: i.e. worthy of love, life and abundance vs. worthy of death, separation and suffering.
Today I will listen for the still, small voice of the universe that always is whispering to me there behind the shouting of the ego.
Rock on Racetrack, Death Valley
All material copyright Jeff Kober
|
