The Internal Battle with Ego

Today I silence the noise in my mind, I stop listening to my ego and the influence of others. I become aware of what comes from my heart. I listen to my inner voice. I stop doubting myself and I develop confidence in my inner sense. My inner truth is the Divine Truth.

Mario Duguay

The Inner Sense

People often ask, if I had such a good childhood, why have I had such a painful adolescence and adulthood? The answer is that although you might have had a wonderful source of love within your family, you sought an even better happiness from outside sources.

Unwittingly, you were also repeating the painful moment that gave birth to your ego-self and the seeming separation from God. However, there was no possible way to leave the creator to investigate the possibility of greater happiness. So, it fell asleep and dreamed of a separate existence. The dream was extremely realistic and your ego soon forgot that it was a dream.

However, the ego retained a dim awareness of the presence of God and the true self. It knew that God and the true self were happier than it was and it figured, hey, those guys are snubbing me! They must think they’re better than I am. Well, fine. I don’t need them anyway. The ego then set out to prove its independence by gathering things to make it happy.

You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him learn it within himself.

Galileo

The ego would amass awards, applause, money, houses and prestige. These gifts were never enough to give ego the happiness it knew that God and the true self were presently enjoying. Ego began to feel jealous and resentful of their happy life and vowed to redouble its efforts at accumulating happiness. So, ego wandered farther and farther away from home, searching for the key to contentment.

When ego saw someone, who seemed happier than it was, it would feel the old jealous twinges. Then, it would indulge in whatever those people were doing to see if it could experience their happiness. Soon enough, it would get to know those people and would discover that they weren’t really as happy as they seemed.

Ego met people who blamed their unhappiness on various sources and for a while, it joined in this pastime. Ego occasionally wondered, what’s wrong with me that I can’t be happy?

Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.

Albert Einstein

The ego in all of us suffers from deep feelings of emptiness and undeservingness. It feels rejected by the true self, although in truth, the ego is actually the one who does the rejecting.

This leads the ego to continually believe that people are judging and rejecting it, which creates self-fulfilling prophecies. All along our true self-enjoys a peaceful parallel life within us that we can join with anytime we think a loving thought.

Through trial and error, we eventually understand that ego-based thoughts and actions always create pain. Happiness, we realise, requires centring our thoughts on God and our true self within.

At times though, this feels like a difficult balancing act. We often get pulled into our egos by outside sources such as news reports, complaining co-workers or unhappy family members etc.

However, with practice, we realise the ability to recognise our ego thoughts soon after they arise. We then consciously choose to change our minds about the situation to restore our higher self’s peaceful awareness.

Usually, this requires the willingness to relinquish judgements, unforgiveness and attachments to an outcome or material goods. When we have trouble relinquishing the ego, we learn to call for spiritual support from our friends in the visible and invisible universe.

When people have been abused verbally or physically as a child or young adult, they completely forget their true identity. They believe that they are a worthless and defective person. The whole human race has suffered from similar forms of abuse that has caused a mass amnesia about our God-given perfection.

If you are distressed by anything external,
the pain is not due to the thing itself
but to your estimate of it.
This you have the power to revoke.

Marcus Aurelius

The ego is afraid of the spirits joy because once you have experienced it you will withdraw all protection from the ego and become totally without investment in fear. Your investment is great now because fear is a witness to the separation and your ego rejoices when you witness to it.

Leave it behind! Do not listen to it and do not preserve it. Listen only to God, who is as incapable of deception as is the spirit he created. If you are searching for happiness look for it in your true self, not the illusional world the ego keeps offering you to keep you in ego.

You cannot believe the ego in any way at all, you cannot believe its memories or the constructions of your life because all of it is totally arbitrary.
It is images that you build your little self and then you choose to wear, but it really has so little to do with what you truly are.

So, what does it truly mean to release the dream of ego mind and all of the things that it has concocted about who and what you are?

All the memories and the images and the pictures that it chooses, create for you an image that you name yourself.

Yet, to see as Love sees you, as God sees you, it is to see pure Light and to feel the glorious movement of real pure Love.

The bundles of memories, images and feelings that you believe represent your past and your experiences, are already totally skewed to your egos point of view and truly are made up of little bits and pieces of feelings, thoughts, experiences as well as bodily sensations that are packaged together and stored as the file marked my identity.

Yet these things already contain the ego mind’s evaluations and judgements, its labels of good and bad and the resulting physical neuro-chemical sensations that accompany each of them.

In that moment when our desire to do and be the best we can grows stronger than our fear of failure — in that solitary moment — greatness rises up within us to take command and we may dare to do the impossible. It is in that moment that possibility is born.

Kate Nowak

As most of us know from experience, the moment you go through a repetition of anything even somewhat similar to the past, these very snippets of identity, of ego mind perception come right back up to be played again and of course, to be added to.

When you begin to work with yourself, gaining awareness, you discover that when these little tapes are running, they have nothing to do with what is happening and everything to do with the ego mind’s perception, a conglomeration of thoughts, feelings and evaluations that have become your point of view.

This in itself tells you that all those things that you believe in your memories are totally already wrapped up in duality perception of your ego mind’s point of view.

If your ego mind has chosen your identity as a victim, then everything that has happened to you is already skewed that way and goes in as the tape, (i,e,) the memory, with that evaluation already in place.

It was somebody else’s fault. Somebody hurt me. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t deserve this. etc. So when you look back on your life, what you are seeing is the ego mind’s manipulation of you to create the identity that it has chosen because it believes it will keep you believing in the ego mind.

So now is the time perhaps to become free of this whole illusory dance and open yourselves to the Real experience of life which is the Living Now Moment.

If our consciousness were the size of the Sahara Desert, the ego would be but a grain of sand in the vastness. Yet, we allow this tiny part of ourselves to run our lives and for the most part, we ignore our true self.

Ego keeps us in ego because it sees our true self as a threat to its survival. Our internal battle with ego is for us to learn how to control our thoughts and overcome negativity before becoming our true creative selves.

Two Wolves

One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people.

He said My son, the battle is between two wolves, inside us all.

One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride and superiority, it is ego.

The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith, it is Spirit.

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather,
which wolf wins?

The old Cherokee simply replied…… The one you feed.

Author Unknown 12th October 2008

There will come a day when you’ll finally decide that you’re ready
to live up to your full potential.

There will come a moment when you will no longer settle for less than you know you’re capable of achieving.

There will come a time when you’ll no longer be satisfied with making excuses and rationalizations.

There will come a time when your desire to move forward will outweigh your fear of the unknown.

One day you’ll realize that everything you do makes a difference, and you’ll put that incredible power to valuable use.

There is really no reason to put that golden day off any longer.

There is every reason to go ahead and make it happen for you.

You were born to do great things, to create much value, to make a real difference.
The longing and frustration you feel is a constant reminder, so listen to what it has to say.

Your life can be as full as you are ready to make it, now is the day to make it great.

Ralph Marston