A Personal Take on Ego
The ego can drive people to be successful materially, commit crimes, self pity, depress, think that the world is out to get them, etc. Ego wants to be the most extreme of everything, first, to yourself, before anyone else can do anything else to you.
“Fuck everyone Im going to get mine then no one can get to me”
It isn’t a spiritually harmonious angle to align ones self with. We’re all just one organism with slight angled slivers of difference in consciousness.
Ego is not part of that world however - It comes from some separation between people and weakly constructed identities/ foundational facades.
What it does do is consume the mind with words and thoughts, so much that we can’t differentiate between them and a higher consciousness.
This isn’t to say our childhoods aren’t good. But our egos come from then, in reaction to sensory overload of a few key moments and understandings as a child.
The ego is a part of us but not all of us, our physiology and psychology are in delicate balance based on how God has placed all of these parts within us.
The currency of love in my early childhood brain was wealth and certain elements of culture. Something I deciphered at a very young age, I looked around and defined a story in my subconscious (childhood foundation to a house)
When we’re a kid we have tons of sensory overload, and when we have needs that aren’t met or are mistreated by adults, its deeply traumatic because we don’t understand whats happening, why we’re upset, where adults are coming from, so the subconscious starts to put a few factors together that engineer a story around.
The story was like : the only way I can be loved and respectable in reality is to ultimately make a shit ton of money and exceed at X (school, sports, social dynamics, business, etc)
What layers on top of that was the ego, but this is where I value it(the ego) for its basic human survival instinct (carnal desires, safety, security, self preservation of identity) it developed coping mechanisms to literally keep me alive, and I thus appreciate it, but it stopped serving me in any serious capacity about 2.5 years ago.
As a 12 year old when someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up, I’d say “I want to be rich” as ridiculous as that may sound. Things can come from a place of ego, without us just being entirely egotistical. It’s survivalist behaviour. I had no choice in order to have a degree of autonomy and individual sovereignty which would one day allow me to unpack things in a constructive healthy way.
I am the eldest of 16 Grandchildren. I wasn’t really allowed to express a lot of feelings or be emotional. As we move towards a mission ego is the cheapest fuel source (albeit not the best for the engine or environment) - like Kerosene.
Drive is a part of me, it had/sometimes still has a tag along that fuels in a specific way for a long time and as that fuel source has shifted and diversified it’s been a weird phenomenon where I’m able to work/do things a lot more effortlessly and with love. It’s a transition that already began a while ago, but it’s gradual. You never erase the ego, you just don’t let it run amok.
“When I let go of who I am, I become who I might be.” - Lao Tzu
To be successful in life, business, in what we’re doing, is fucking hard. To truly succeed I can't let my trauma self drive everything, hopefully through that I can have a solid sincere impact in the world and take care of those that I love, so their generations can prosper beyond our lifetime.
The inner critic is in the same bucket as the ego, any internal voice that will persist from a place of insecurity.
Satan uses the ego as a conduit to our souls, add a little black magic from a few people, and play that out through patterns again and again in life, it isn’t pretty. Unless we separate our identity from the ego and heal from the underlying trauma that plays itself out through those inner critics that tell us we’ll never be good enough, puts others down, engages in fight or flight responses, we can never reach our true potential as written by our maker.
May we all heal and grow, Amen.
