Chapter 6 - You Are Not “Your” Ego

In this chapter, I will set out to discuss the terms ego and presence and to impress upon you that when we are not present, there is someone (or something) else running our life.

What happens when we are not aware of how ego plays a role in our lives and behaviors? The inward journey and the work we do with our guides are directly impacted by these issues.

When we start our journeys inward, we have an opportunity to start to see, experience, become aware of, and work with our inner "machinery," so to speak. Here, the user manual is even more helpful, and luckily for us, all those who traversed this territory (albeit in their own inner experience) have left us breadcrumbs to follow.

Ego is the "territory" of our inward journey. When we turn our attention inward, into ourselves, what is it that we are experiencing? We have an entire mental world. This is the world of the mind. We have thoughts, feelings, and emotions. We make plans; we choose and decide. We find an incessant inner dialog of various inner voices that are constantly interpreting and chatting about what has happened, what is happening, and what may happen. There is a vast world there for us to explore.

Beyond the mind, we also have other inner dimensions, those of soul and spirit. This is what our guide is helping us traverse. If we have a map of ego, our journey will be much easier. Or at least, we can hope it will be.

A very common and practical example is dealing with physical pain. As I'm writing these words, I am experiencing back pain. The physical sensation is there. There is discomfort. When I turn inward, I can listen to my inner dialogue comment on my physical experience. After a week of back pain, my mind says, "I feel tired. I want to be healthy again." I hear the thoughts "How much longer before I can have my life back to normal?" and "What if this is the new normal?"

To deal with the physical aspect, I am taking care of my body to help it heal. But how do I take care of my inner realm? How do I avoid making this much worse with my own thoughts? This is but one example of what we are dealing with when we journey inward.

💡 I am deliberately using the non-specific term ego rather than "my ego" or "your ego." One of my main insights is that we do not have an ego. Ego is impersonal and an aspect of our psyche. Instead of having an ego, we can say that we manifest ego. We all manifest ego in our own unique ways.

Dealing with ego may sometimes feel quite overwhelming. We really do not have to do it all by ourselves. We can be guided. Our guide shows us the next steps from our current location.

There are many definitions of the terms ego and presence. I choose to present this one, based on the writings of Eckhart Tolle from his book The Power of Now.

In response to the question, "Why should we be addicted to thinking?" Eckhart explains that we are addicted to thinking because we are identified with it. In other words, we derive our sense of self from the content and activity of our minds. We are addicted to thinking because we believe that we would cease to be if we stopped thinking. As we grow up, we form a mental image of who we are based on our personal and cultural conditioning.

💡 Ego is what we call this phantom self. It consists of mind activity and can only be kept going through constant thinking. We also use the term ego to denote the false self that is created by unconscious identification with the mind.

That is a lot to unpack... but here we go.

In order to explain the concept of "being identified with my thoughts," let me share my own experience. Mind activity is happening all the time. Even as I write these words, I can hear thoughts like a voice talking inside my head. I can also speak inside my head. For example, stop reading now and say internally the word "hello." Now, shout the same word in your head.

The key is attention. What am I paying attention to at any given moment?

For example, I am typing these words on my laptop keyboard, and my fingers are touching the individual keys. I am aware of (I feel) the touch of my fingers on the keyboard keys. I feel the smoothness of the keys. I can also look at the keys while I am typing and appreciate their black color (and that this keyboard hasn't been cleaned for a while). In short, my attention was completely immersed in the look and feel of my keyboard keys while I was still hearing the voice in my head and actually typing this paragraph.

💡 We are identified with our thoughts when our entire attention is focused on these thoughts.

This is extremely important because of a simple reason. I can only focus my attention on a (small) subset of what is occurring now. I did not mention in the previous paragraph that I was also listening to my favorite writing album (Deuter's Garden of the Gods). My attention was not focused on the music. I could tell you that the album was playing in the background. How do I know my attention was not on it? Simple. I asked myself what track was playing, and I realized I had no idea.

Where were you in the last thirty seconds? Where was your attention focused? Obviously you were reading (or listening) to these words. But were you also present here, with me, in this book? Or perhaps your eyes were glancing through the words on the page while your mind was busy with something else. If I ask you now to summarize what I just said, will you have any idea?

This is how it feels when we are identified with our thoughts. We are simply and completely attentive to the thoughts that are coming and going through our minds. That usually means we are paying attention to very little else.

💡 This constant mind activity and our immersion in it is how ego is formed and sustained.

Why do we derive our sense of self from the content and constant activity of our mind?

To answer that, we may start by examining why this constant mind activity occurs. It simply has to do with control. Contrary to popular belief, we are not the center of the universe. Yet our minds strive to make it so in order to keep an illusion of control.

Our minds are constantly engaged in building a simplified model of the world so that we can feel a sense of control. Without this mechanism, we are faced with the utter reality that everything is beyond our control. Our basic instinct is to panic and do everything we can to hold it together. We will fight and struggle to keep our world from collapsing.

It works like this. Our mind breaks the world up into individual thought-objects. The mind then puts these discrete thoughts together in a defined relationship to one another. This is our "model" of the world, with everyone and everything in it.

We do this automatically. We are innately equipped with the mental capacity to build our models, and we get better with practice. Since our minds are constantly engaged in this activity, it feels like this is the only way to be. It feels "normal."

It is not. The simplest way to be convinced that we build and sustain this model in an attempt to feel an illusion of control is to see clearly our constant attempt to make the unknown known.

Sooner or later, something happens that shakes our model to the core. There are countless examples we encounter on a daily basis. Here is one. In this story, we'll meet a person completely identified with his handiwork. What happens when his handiwork is not appreciated?

A painter came to my house to paint the window panes of a new set of skylight windows we had installed. I was not in the house when he was working, so I could not examine the work when he was done. He left, sending me pictures of his handiwork. He was so proud of what he had done. He really wanted me to be happy with his work. I could not tell much from the pictures because they were taken in a very dim light, so I thanked him on the phone and told him I would see his handiwork a little later when I returned home.

When I got back home, I went straight up to take a look. The work was of medium quality and, in my opinion, needed to be redone. We talked again on the phone, and the painter was clearly in distress. He explained that he wanted all of his customers to be happy and that, if his work were not appreciated, he was worthless.

That is the key point. This good man was completely identified with his handiwork. According to his mental model of the world, when someone rejected his handiwork, they were personally rejecting him. This sense of rejection caused him to lose his own sense of worth and resulted in pain.

More serious examples can feel a lot more dramatic and terrifying, even if the underlying mechanism of protecting the model is just the same.

Perhaps you face mortal danger. Or you lose your job. A loved one dies. Or you are diagnosed with cancer. When this happens, your entire view of who you believe you are, including your relationship to everyone and everything around you, begins to fall apart. The natural reaction is to panic and try anything to hold your world together.

Should you choose to accept it, such a dramatic experience, as challenging as it may be, is a great gift in disguise. If you remain open to this learning experience, it will completely change your life. The change will come from the realization that you have built a model and it can completely fall apart. Now what?

When experiencing the tremendous fear that ensues from the utter discomfort and disorientation that accompany such a shift as well as the realization of your own desperation to right your mental model and return to your familiar mental environment, you are faced with the question of why you are doing this in the first place. You simply want to remain comfortable and safe.

You are constantly trying to stay within your comfort zone. You struggle to maintain events, objects, and people such that they do not disagree with your model. If they deviate, you get uncomfortable. Your mind then immediately kicks in to solve the problem and makes suggestions on how to correct things—or people—to the way it needs them to be. The moment something deviates from your plan or expectation, your mind starts making concrete suggestions on how to fix it. Eventually, what you do is irrelevant; it is all about getting back within your comfort zone.

💡 You identify with your mind simply because the alternative is terrifying.

I feel this terror just now. Perhaps terror is a bit of an exaggeration and, then again, perhaps not. I feel a sense of uncertainty. It feels like falling into a black hole without knowing what will save me from crashing down at the bottom. Actually, it feels like there is no bottom. It feels like the beginning of a panic attack. Tears come to my eyes (as I write, tears do come). I am watching all this while writing and asking myself, "What am I afraid of?"

This is where the specifics of my personal conditioning come into play. Yours may be different. Honestly, I am afraid to fail. I am afraid that if I do fail, I will disappoint my dad and feel the wrath of his anger searing me and cutting me in two. I am afraid to die. If my dad gets angry and stops loving me, I will die. It is that simple.

The basic belief of ego is this: "If I cease to exist, I will die."

Who is this "I" that holds this belief? What would happen if that "I" really ceased to exist?

💡 Let's summarize what we've discussed so far:

1️⃣ We are addicted to thinking because we believe that we would cease to be if we stopped thinking.

2️⃣ As we grow up, we form a comprehensive mental model of who we are based on our personal and cultural conditioning.

3️⃣ Ego is what we call this mind-made self.

4️⃣ Ego consists of constant mind activity and can only be sustained through constant thinking.

As long as we are identified with the mind, we have an externally derived sense of self. We derive the sense of who we are from things that ultimately have nothing to do with who we are: our social roles, possessions, external appearance, successes and failures, belief systems, and so on.

The key to ego's continuous survival is an unconscious identification with the mind. Let me now explain what I mean when I use the term "unconscious" in this context. To simplify, the important aspect to discuss is what it means to be conscious or unconscious of something.

💡 It has to do with being aware of what we are doing, saying, or thinking at the very same time we are doing, saying, or thinking it.

I will say it again. We are conscious of something when we are aware of it. So consciousness is intimately related to awareness.

Ego is related to constant thinking activity. What is the relationship between thinking and consciousness?

René Descartes searched for a philosophical statement that cannot be doubted. He found that he could not doubt that he himself existed as he was the one doing the doubting in the first place. His conclusion, therefore, was "Cogito, ergo sum," which is usually translated to English as "I think, therefore I am."

Descartes was onto something, but it would seem he got things in reverse. Many spiritual teachings state that who we are, in reality, is consciousness. Descartes was wrong because thinking is not synonymous with consciousness. In fact, thinking is only a small aspect of consciousness because thought cannot exist without consciousness, but consciousness does not need thought.

When I use the term "unconscious," I mean to be completely identified with some mental or emotional pattern. Let's consider an example.

I am driving on the highway, thinking my thoughts and listening to a relaxing piece of music. I am not in a hurry, and so far my day has been perfect. All of a sudden, I hear the high-pitched noise of an engine. It is approaching so fast that I don't even have time to breathe. A motorcyclist overtakes me from the right, and I don't even see it until it cuts violently to the left in front of me, so close to me that I instinctively hit the brakes not to hit it!

You can imagine what happens next as I see the motorcycle disappear in a roar in the distance. I am left with my thoughts, emotions, and reactions. Anger arrives. Perhaps it turns to rage. "I could have hit it and killed the guy. I could have swerved to avoid him and hit the car on my left. I could have...." It is very easy to be entirely consumed by this torrent of thoughts and the physical sensations of the anger slowly rising in me. That is how an unconscious identification feels--I am lost in this torrent, and until the storm subsides, I am completely drifting wherever this river of thoughts and emotions wants to take me.

💡 Unconscious identification implies a complete absence of awareness to this identification.

We now understand how ego is formed and sustained and why it exists.

How does ego work?

Ego feels vulnerable and insecure and is always seeking new things to identify with to give it a feeling that it exists. It uses pain, suffering, and time to survive.

There can be a great deal of unconscious ego investment in pain and suffering. For example, certain situations trigger a strong emotional reaction. Perhaps your self-image is threatened, or you face a challenge that triggers fear. Something triggers an emotional experience from the past. When we experience trauma, ego often incorporates that trauma into its identity. The traumatic experience becomes a part of the story that ego keeps telling. This can lead to a cycle of suffering as ego continually revisits and identifies with the trauma.

When a strong emotional response appears, the tendency is for you to become "unconscious." In other words, the reaction or emotion takes you over—you "become" it. You then act it out; you blame others, you defend yourself, you attack, etc. This is the mind in its habitual survival mode.

These are just a few of the habitual mind strategies that are part of ordinary unconsciousness. They are easy to overlook because they are so much a part of "normal" living: the background static of ego's constant struggle with life.

A challenging aspect of ordinary unconsciousness, complete identification with mental activity, is that it is considered the "normal" state for many of us. Until we start to become aware, we are simply going through life like zombies. In other words, we drift through life as if another force is animating us.

What happens when we are not aware of how ego plays a role in our lives and our behaviors is simply this: when we are not paying attention, it is as if someone else is running our lives. That someone else, ego, is not a foreign entity or another person. It is an intimate and familiar aspect of us. It sounds crazy. I know that if someone tried to explain this to me years ago, I would have rolled my eyes and dismissed it as new age mumbo jumbo. Then I simply got it. It felt like waking up from a dream. I understood that if I can talk about ego, watch ego, and describe a relationship to ego, I am not ego.

The inward journey involves waking up and paying attention to our inner mental activity. Being conscious, awake, or aware means being present. It means living in the present moment.

The more you practice actively paying attention to your inner mental-emotional state, the easier it will be to recognize when you are not in the here and now. When you go to the future or back to the past, you are unconscious. Ego lives and depends on time. It knows that the present moment means its own death and so feels very threatened by it. It will do anything to take you out of the here and now and keep you trapped in time.

Ego tends to project itself into the future because it seeks to ensure its continued survival and to enhance its sense of self. It creates expectations, worries, fears, and plans based on its perception of what the future should be. This is often driven by a desire for control, security, or validation. Ego believes that it will find fulfillment, happiness, or a sense of self in the future and tries to convince you of this.

💡 Remember, ego is the "territory" of our inward journey. In this chapter, we are building a map.

Describing the structure and content of ego is analogous to charting the geography and landmarks of that territory so that we can clearly identify what we are dealing with at any given moment. Ego manifestations in different people are alike in structure but differ in content.

One of the most basic mind structures through which ego exists and operates is identification. One the earliest meanings associated with the term identification is "treating of a thing as the same as another; act of making or proving to be the same." When I identify with something, I "make it the same." The same as what? The same as I am. I give the thing a sense of self, and so it becomes part of my "identity."

The unconscious compulsion to identify is structural. I try to find myself in things but never succeed and end up losing myself in them.

Then there is the content: the specific things I choose to lose myself into. These vary from person to person. They depend on our personal conditioning and are related to age, race, gender, religion, social status, etc.

That is the fate of ego—to identify.

Even so, ego is not "bad." There is nothing inherently wrong with ego. In fact, it is part of the evolutionary progress of humanity. Problems arise when we are completely unconscious of it and it takes over our lives. The solution, therefore, is for each of us to be aware of ego or, in other words, to be awake and present.

While ego itself is not bad, when ego goes unchecked, the result is the world of today. Ego naturally sees "other" manifestations of ego around it (other people). It sees these other manifestations as potential threats or possible targets for exploitation. Since ego feels a constant terror and sense of lack, its basic strategies are devised to counter this condition. Ego uses control, resistance, greed, power, attack, and defense. While some of ego's strategies are quite clever, they could never truly solve any of its problems simply because ego itself is the problem.

When ego is unchecked, it interacts with other manifestations of ego. The potential for "bad" things to happen is always present. Sooner or later a drama will ensue—or a conflict, power struggle, or even emotional or physical violence. At the extreme, we find all the atrocities and insanities humans have manifested on this planet: world wars, genocides, slavery, racism, the exploitation of nature and global warming, and the oppression of women by men.

Though ego can generate the atrocities mentioned above, there is nothing inherently wrong with you because you manifest ego. That is precisely the point. You manifest ego. You are not ego.

It is okay to plan a vacation, to want to master the piano, and to make money and use it. When we do all these things, what is our inner attitude? When we are completely identified with the action, we are operating from the level of ego. When we are aware of our actions while we are taking them, we are operating from the level of presence.

Ego likes to indulge in unhappiness and so strengthens its sense of separation from other people, the environment, and the present moment, the here and now. As such, separation is the basis for ego's sense of identity.

The inability to feel connected gives rise to the illusion of separation from yourself and from the world around you. You then perceive yourself, consciously or unconsciously, as an isolated fragment. Fear arises, and conflict within and without becomes the norm.

If you believe, on a deep level, in separation and the struggle for survival, you will see that belief reflected in your entire life. These are the rose- or dark-colored glasses we discussed in Chapter 2. Separation breeds fear. It causes all of your perceptions to be governed by fear. You end up co-creating and living in a world that is the result of this fear. Look around you and see it for what it is.

Because ego is strengthened by separation, it will tend to augment it. It also feeds on negativity. Have you ever asked yourself why we create and prolong negative situations?

Here is what I recently learned about anger. My last landlady knows how to trigger anger in me. She uses manipulation with a smile and a fake positive attitude to get her way. Three years ago, when we signed the contract for the rental unit, I felt compelled to sign a contract that I would normally never sign. I did what I always tell others not to do when they start a negotiation—be ready to say "no deal is also a deal" and walk away. I put myself in a situation where I felt I had no other choice but to sign the contract. Of course, that was not factually true. I just put myself in that position and thus felt helpless.

My landlady felt that. She pushed hard and got her way. And I've felt anger and resentment toward her and myself ever since. And now, three years later, I still indulge in this anger. My wife Sandra and I are ready to leave the rental, and my landlady continues to push my buttons with unreasonable demands.

The point is that I could have forgiven her three years ago. I did not. The simple and honest reason is that I wanted to keep, for a little while longer, the right to be right and the right to be angry.

Why am I keeping this negativity inside of me? Better said, who is keeping it alive? Someone must be getting something from this.

You guessed right. Ego loves negativity because it feeds on it and becomes stronger. Ego believes that through negativity it can manipulate reality and get what it wants. It believes that through negativity it can attract a desirable condition or dissolve an undesirable one. Ego believes (unconsciously) that unhappiness "buys" you what you want.

In his book In Search of the Miraculous, P.D. Ouspensky shares a description given to him by his teacher, George Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff describes the human being as a machine that is out of control. Things simply happen to the human—thoughts, imagination, emotions, and attention appear and disappear without their will. Their life is lived in a totally subjective world of things they say they want or do not, like or do not, and love or do not. In reality, these are things they think they want, like, and love or do not since they cannot see the real world, which is hidden behind the wall of their own imagination.

Gurdjieff sums it up by saying that a human lives in sleep. Humans are asleep. Gurdjieff does not mince words.

Ouspensky's book was published in 1949, seventy-two years before I am writing this sentence. As it is, the current state of affairs shows us that most of us are asleep most of the time.

We can recognize ego, which builds and maintains this "wall of imagination." Before we embark on the inward journey, the common state of awareness of most humans is "alive and asleep." When we are completely identified with ego, ego is running our lives. We are lost in the movie of our lives, so to speak.

During the inward journey, we learn to work with ego. Everything about this journey is experiential. We must experience everything personally. We must engage our own faculties in this journey. No one else can take this journey for us.

We start by learning that we manifest ego. Most people have heard the term and are familiar with the derivative nouns and adjectives: egoism, egotism, egotist.

It may be useful to externalize ego and make it a separate person that is (incessantly) talking to us. When we start to listen to the inner dialogue in our heads, we recognize the voice of ego talking, analyzing, criticizing, complaining, etc. It is like an incessant commentary of our lives in real time. It is fascinating to listen to and at the same time takes a deliberate effort to detach from and watch.

Many wise guides have suggested that we "remember ourselves" while we are conducting daily activities. That we keep a bit of our attention devoted to the awareness of what we are doing. This takes practice. Lots of it.

When we start practicing being aware, we quickly realize that the sensation can be prolonged as long as our attention is not diverted to any of the myriad places it can go (and habitually does). When our attention is diverted, we are totally immersed in whatever has drawn our attention, and we are asleep.

Try this. It is easiest to start with an activity that you do daily. Make a decision to keep part of your attention as the watcher while you are doing it. For example, consider eating or drinking consciously. Decide you will eat your next meal consciously. Make sure you are not in a hurry—take your time. First, eliminate all sources of distraction (phone, TV, etc). Next, direct your entire attention and senses to the act itself. Look at the food. Smell it. Taste it with your tongue. Feel the texture and flavor in your mouth. Chew slowly and deliberately and then swallow. Wait before the next bite. Feel how your entire body reacts to the ingestion of the food.

The key is to maintain attention on all aspects of the meal. When you catch your mind wandering, gently bring your attention back to the meal.

Working with ego is not working against it. Remember, ego is just a part of who you are. It is there for a purpose. At this point in your journey, it is not very beneficial to ask why you manifest ego. Suffice it to recognize that you do and invest your energies in learning how to live with it.

The guide is there to help you understand the various aspects of ego and surrender it.

What would your life be like if ego was not running it?

Remember that ego is formed and sustained because the alternative is terrifying. What comes after this terror is for you to discover.

Here is a story of how I felt when ego disappeared. Many years ago, I participated in a medicine ritual with a Peruvian shaman. In other words, I took hallucinogens. Until this day, I am not sure what the active ingredient was in those two little white pills I took (it was probably ecstasy). I can, however, tell you what happened after I did.

We were a group of about fifteen people in a large secluded villa near Haifa. The event was scheduled to last over the entire weekend, and later I understood why.

The shaman told us to relax and have no expectations. He said he and his disciples would be there to ensure we were safe.

Someone dimmed the lights. Soft music was playing. The shaman moved around the room and gave us all white pills he drew from the front pocket of his jeans. They looked like aspirin. I looked at my pill and looked at him, and with his eyes he nodded and told me to swallow it.

I did. I was kind of expecting to be knocked down by lightning, but nothing happened.

I was moving slowly to the rhythm of the music, feeling nothing. A few minutes later, the shaman appeared again and looked into my eyes. He asked how I was feeling. I said I felt nothing. He popped out another little white pill and smiled. "This will do it," he said.

I swallowed the second pill and waited.

Time slowed down and then disappeared altogether. I lost track of it. Suddenly, I felt I had to lie down, and someone helped me to find a mattress on the floor.

What followed next was totally unexpected.

I was lying down, and my eyes were closed. I was breathing slowly. Suddenly, I felt a strong physical sensation. It felt like I was sliding down a gigantic slide at a very steep angle—almost like free falling, but not quite. My body was being held from beneath by the slide, and I was ever so slightly touching it while I was falling. The sensation of terror was accompanied by the thought "will I hit the bottom?"

What came next was also totally unexpected. I stopped falling. I was being held by what felt like the very soft embrace of something so big and powerful that there was no possibility of harm ever coming to me. Just like a small baby being held very close to Mommy's chest. It was a wonderfully relaxing and assuring sensation that all was well. That all was always well and always would be. Peace.

There were people around me, and I felt only love toward everyone. It was a feeling of soft, calm bliss.

And in all of this, there was no ego.

Looking back on this experience, I would have done it differently. This particular shaman was a person I'd never met before. They did not know me or the particulars of my story. They were not available to consult me, nor did they care what happened to me after the journey. If I were to take another journey with medicine, I would make sure there was someone to guide me before, during, and after the experience and also that this person could address whatever came up as a result of the journey. I cannot overstate the importance of having a trusted guide in this case.

My journey lasted for almost two weeks. It was quite disconcerting to go back to the real world and have my heart so open. I remember waking up one morning and saying to myself that I was back to my old self. Lucky for me, it was all good. If you decide to take a journey, don't rely on luck—have a trusted guide to support you.

⚡ IMPORTANT NOTE: Using medicine is quite common on an inward journey. It is completely optional and up to you to decide what works best for you. If you do decide to try it, please do your own research and, above all, make sure you are guided before, during, and after the process. A guide will help you to prepare for the process and integrate it. Some journeys can be quite challenging, and a guide can help you through it.

Beyond the terror, there is something for you to discover. That is the point of the journey inward. When you cease to be completely identified with ego, you start to wake up from your "alive and asleep" mode and become aware of ego.

The process of awakening may be abrupt and final, or it may be gradual. Awareness comes and goes. You wake up and are present, and then you go back to being completely identified with ego. While this is not my own personal experience at the time I am writing this sentence, many others report that eventually the awareness becomes habitual until you are present, at all times, to what is happening in your life and what is going on in your mind.

When you start to wake up, you take back control of your life. Only then can you say, for the first time in your life, that you are truly you.

The following insights, when you have them as your personal experience, are major milestones in the inward journey:

• We all manifest ego

• We are not ego (we are what is left when all else is set aside—pure awareness)

• All ego manifestations in people are alike in structure but differ in content

When ego surrenders, we will get closer to our true nature and essence. Your guide is there to help you do just that.