Your Ego

Why getting to know it might be the single most important thing you ever do

First, let’s demystify what it is — the ego.
I’ll save you ten years of spiritual searching and cut straight to it:

The ego is the mind you’ve practiced living in accordance with. It is the sum total of all the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs you’ve rehearsed throughout your adult life as part of the story you tell yourself every moment about who you are.

Okay, let me back up. Let’s start with a foundational truth:

You are consciousness.
You are the awareness that you are.

Your ego will try and tell you this is nonsense, but close your eyes. Have some thoughts. Then ask yourself: Who is it that is thinking these thoughts? You’ll answer: “Me, of course.”

And that “me” is simply awareness. Consciousness.

If you are new to this contemplation, your ego is probably still trying to tell you this is nonsense. That the thoughts you’ve identified with for so long can’t possibly not be you. It is threatened by the possibility you are more, let alone the notion I’m about to drop on you right now: you are a piece of God — a piece of infinite consciousness. We all are.

Because we are raised to forget this truth — instead identifying with a much smaller, limited sense of self for most of our lives.

When Jesus said, “Be ye like children to enter the kingdom of heaven,” He meant that as children, we don’t yet have an ego.
We live in a state of trust, love, and play — a state where fear, judgment, and doubt haven’t yet become energies we identify with. And so life is blissful. Heavenly. Even when it’s not, we don’t know the difference yet. We have yet to establish heaven and hell as preferences.

But — and this is where I believe the education system fails us all — we are raised to lose touch with our higher selves.

For example, I was taught to believe that God was some man in the sky with a beard, and that if I didn’t thoroughly repent for my sins every Yom Kippur, I wouldn’t be written into the Book of Life for the following year. This left me a panicked ten -year-old pounding on my chest in synagogue, praying that God would see me for the good kid I was and allow me to live!

Yeah… I took Judaism a little too literally. Nobody told me otherwise!

Why does any of this matter? Because, by the time you’re an adult, you’re likely tired of grappling with life‘s biggest questions – what’s it all for? What’s my purpose? Is suffering, inevitable? So you’ve either given up to accepting the game of life must be played the way you’ve been playing it from your ego character, or you have a faint sense that there’s something more and just don’t know how to tap into it.

That’s understandable. As an adult, the riverbeds of ego patterns are so deeply worn, if you want to experience the “kingdom of heaven,” as Jesus put it, you often have to die — die to your old self. You must die to the part of you that has become so identified with your ego and the stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so you can be reborn into remembering the truth of who you are without your ego patterns.

This spiritual death of the ego has been one of the most difficult and extraordinary experiences of my lifetime. Still ongoing. I’ll talk more about that in another post. For now, I hope you find empowerment and inspiration in one of my takeaways:

You are a wave in the Infinite ocean of consciousness. Along with every other human on this planet - all waves in the same vast ocean. That’s why any notion of separateness between us and others is nonsense. A way to satisfy our egos needs of comparing and being better than. The deeper reality is we are all one. Just start to get to know your ego and you will start to get to know this truth.

These are not my ideas. This is ancient wisdom passed on for thousands of years from Jesus and the Bible and its interpreters like Neville Goddard, to modern day teachers like Eckhart Tolle, and Sadhguru .

Facing ALS, I didn’t have a choice - die to my old self… or die. I wish I could’ve learned all of this without ALS. Maybe you can.