Monday, October 4, 2010

clarifying ego

Ego is a collection of images you have which you don’t realise are just images.
Many of the images can be contradictory.
Much of the self-help industry is about helping people enhance the positive images and reduce or negate the negative.
When there is an insight into the nature of thought/image making, then the illusion of ego ends.
Many people get caught up in the idea of the ego dying, or killing the ego, or talk about the ego as if it is an entity – it’s not, it’s just an illusion.

Here's an analogy:
A woman returns home from work at night and goes to the kitchen to prepare supper.
She looks through the window into her dark back garden and see a man lurking in the shadows by the garden shed……. her heartbeat increases and she starts to sweat….. “oh my god” she says to herself, “I’m here all alone and I don’t know when my husband will be back”. She looks around the kitchen and wonders whether she prefers to hold a knife or whether she should hide them so they can’t be used against her. She wonders how fast the police will arrive if she can only remember where she left her mobile…. “Will the glass back door keep him out?”….. She jumps with a fright as she hears a sound behind her…. only to collapse sobbing into the arms of her bemused husband who has just arrived home. He cautiously unlocks the kitchen door and reaches for the outside light. Light suddenly floods the garden and the man lurking by the shed turns out to be a pile of old boxes and bags of rubbish.


The message is probably clear….. but just to clarify.
The lurking man never existed, but before the woman realised this she was acting and believing as if he did. “Will he hurt me? Can I defend myself? What does he want? Will he run if he hears the police coming?” etc. etc.
But when her husband returned home, he didn’t have to fight off, or scare or chase the lurking man because he never existed outside of the illusion that he existed.
It was simply an error of perception and all that was necessary to correct it was to bring light to it.
In the same way, the illusion of ego ends when it is investigated…… but it must be seen clearly by oneself….. the words of others in no way can illuminate….. this must be done by each one of us.
Most importantly, until the truth of this is realised, to say that the ego is an illusion, becomes just another concept to debate and be confused about.

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