Ego Is the Enemy

The session begins with the thought experiment we left off with some years ago (MM 8/27/18 Get Over Thyself):

It's a pre-dawn morning and you're lying quietly in bed. There's virtually no sensory input, no sound. The mind is clearer in that darkness than it ever is during the day as your thoughts survey your universe in the manner and scope of your choosing. 

Then the perspective changes. You are now on the outside looking in and realize that this survey of infinite vastness is nothing more than an illusion produced by three pounds of wetware. Is there any doubt you are, at that point, lord of your skull-sized kingdom?

That illusion, for purposes of our discussion, is labeled the Ego. You still remain lord of your kingdom -- overseeing this deep, unconscious, and literal self-centeredness -- even after you then awake and add sensory input. There is no judgment here. Buddhist scholars might weigh in saying the ego -- this “sense of a different self” -- is a mental construct with which we need to navigate the world (The Illusion Of Self).

The notion of ego as the “enemy” comes about when it rises to an unhealthy belief in one’s own importance. One sign is the constant need for attention, the subject of MM 10/25/21 Fame's Existential Trap, such that life becomes a kind of performance art. Only later might one come to the realization there is no “imaginary audience” out there -- constantly watching, thinking about, and judging you. 

It’s all a matter of what you choose to be the object of your attention, of what you worship. If it's money and things, you will never have enough. If it's body and beauty and sexual allure, you will die a million deaths as you age. If it's power, you will feel weak and afraid. If it's intellect, you will end up feeling a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

May we all demonstrate self-awareness as we share our own personal objects of worship. There’s no shame, we all have them. One might see our entire consumer society in terms of an egotistical display. Per the reckoning of that great philosopher Tyler Durden in Fight Club, “We buy (stuff) we don’t need, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t like.”