What is Ego?  What is True Self?

What is Ego?

Firstly what do we mean by ego?  Synonyms include ‘self esteem, self importance, self worth, self respect, self conceit, self image, self confidence.’ With ‘self image’ I would add ‘self concept’. Who we think we are.
Some of these synonyms seem really innocent and good – we like self confidence and self worth don’t we? We value building self esteem in children and even a good and healthy self image don’t we? So perhaps ego is actually really good and necessary?
It definitely is – for a time! It is essential we reflect lovingly to a child their sense of self and that they are loved and have special gifts. As adults we love that too! Of course.
We want children to feel confident and self assured and encouraged in their individual growth. Yes.
But is this all there is to the story of ego? Building a sense of self worth and confidence?

Richard Rohr refers in his book ‘Falling Upward’ to the necessity of this ego building stage.  He says ‘ The task of the first half of life is to create a proper container for one’s life and answer the first essential questions. “What makes me significant?”, “How can I support myself?” and “Who will go with me?”  The task of the second half of life is quite simply to find the actual contents that this container was meant to hold and deliver.”

After the first half in which we are busy building ego and fulfilling our dreams and getting educated and employed and having a family to provide for – we reach a turning point, if we are wise. A time for a shift – ‘the second half of life’ as Richard Rohr calls it.

In my experience as maturity deepens we can start to really enjoy more of the fullness of life.  We can fulfill dreams and experience a rich satisfaction.  Also sometimes our dreams can start to crash, people can die that we love, perhaps even divorce or illness or hurt and disappointment come through various ways.  We can flourish of course and enjoy and be happy and enriched but rarely without at least some pain or loss.  But all this helps up to mature and grow.  This is a time of integration.  Richard Rohr describes this as the time for the “forgiveness of everything” in which real ‘“growth, maturity and holiness” can emerge (Falling Upward)

At this stage perhaps the ego we have so carefully constructed, nourished, loved and developed and polished can start to feel constricted and even claustrophobic. We start to think ‘is this really all that I am? Just these roles, just this story, only this personal identity, this self image with all its history of achievements, attachments, projections, mistakes, concepts, beliefs and memories?’
Are all these memories real or is a deeper identity in our true heart calling us to recognise and go beyond the egoic identity that we have cultivated and even worshipped all these years?

The thing is there is such an investment in who we have come to believe that we are from the moment a name and label and gender was imprinted in the consciousness that we actually are – that it is almost impossible to even begin to question this egoic identity.
It seems almost no one questions this personal identity – this ‘I me’ that we all talk about. The separate self supposedly living this life. Our mind and thinking has become so entrenched in the belief that we are this body, we are finite, we are this story only, I am like this and there is nothing I can do about it.

‘A leopard cannot change its spots!’  No it can’t – But all the time it has had these spots in the phenomenal realm it has also had a deeper existence that is spirit, beyond form, infinite, timeless and free.
You see perhaps we are like the leopard, we have measured and groomed and felt proud of our spots – or our unique characteristics, our achievements in the world and even of the cage in which we live, having forgotten that the Savanna even exists!
And all the time there is a deeper silent source, there is a realm that is eternally existing that is far more expansive than the egoic identity we have constructed in our minds.

This body is one form that the living presence of God is inhabiting for a while, in order to wake up to itself! To wake up to its own true nature and be released from the tight grip of the separate psychological self.

The Buddhist teachings describe this beautifully. The Buddha went so deep within, in his introspection, that he saw this deeper reality to existence itself and that all the elements move, flow, form and reform as shapes. All things come and go. All things are born, live and die in time. If we try to make the impermanent permanent then we suffer. Our desires and attachments and in-tensions can cause much suffering. Nature teaches us this impermanent nature of things.  As we see a snowdrop emerge, live and then start to fall recede and return from whence it came – from nowhere it seems.
‘According to Buddhism changeability is one of the perennial principles of nature. Everything changes in nature and nothing remains static. This concept is expressed by the Pali term anicca. Everything formed is in a constant process of change (sabbe sankhara anicca). The world is therefore defined as that which disintegrates (lujjati ti loko); the world is so called because it is dynamic and kinetic, it is constantly in a process of undergoing change. In nature there are no static and stable “things”; there are only ever-changing, ever-moving processes.’
(The Buddhist Attitude Towards Nature
by Lily de Silva © 2005)

So – All forms are temporary and unstable but there is a presence isn’t there that is unchanging? – Life itself?  ‘Unborn Awareness’ as Mooji calls it.
Can that come and go? Do you have a sense that you have witnessed all the different displays in your life simply come in front of your witnessing eyes and go?  Even your thoughts and feelings come and go like weather patterns. Even our bodies come and go but the silence and peace and no thing ness from whence it came – the source of life itself- can that come and go?

Mooji once said to me that my true position is not the changing weather patterns of feelings or roles in life, it is ‘like the sky’ ‘like space’ in which all those storms, clouds and rain appear and disappear.
Can space come and go?  A vastly intelligent alive spaciousness in which everything phenomenal comes and goes.
THIS is our true nature. ‘True’ meaning the only thing that is actually unchanging, reliable, ever present, omnipotent.

‘I am the truth’ said Jesus in John 14:6. What does this statement really mean?  Could it be that he saw his essential nature that is infinite and actually is one with this invisible and imperishable reality? The spirit of God? “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice” (John 18:37). As this reality or truth or ‘Self’ perhaps in essence we also are in harmony with this divine unity?  Not equal to it but one with it in our original position, in unity with the ‘light of the Universal Christ’, ‘Buddha nature’ or ‘the Dao’.  The divine source has many names yet permeates all life.  There are many paths up the mountain for an evolving humanity.  In some ways it seems there is an ‘Enlightened Spirituality’  However, paradoxically, there is also simultaneously this light of life itself, this ineffable unchanging, ever present, pure, stainless ‘isness’ beyond time and space.  This is already our essential nature whether or not we see and acknowledge it or not – this is good news!

‘Consciousness is the child of God’ says Mooji, and through consciousness we can wake up to our true nature. Unless of course we are convinced that we are simply only body/mind/ego which in comparison seems so restricted and tight. Then perhaps we believe this into existence as our sense of self.

Even though we are actually consciousness, sometimes it seems we have the ability or habit through conditioning to overlook that, we do not necessarily see or acknowledge it and so it appears like it doesn’t exist.

So – back to ego and the beauty of it and the gift of it but also the point at which it begins to feel it limits us.  It can begin, by grace actually to feel like a prison of our own making built of conditioning, memory and false identity, centred around the idea

‘I am this body’  on one level the body is here – of course.  This is not to be denied.  It is a beautiful gift actually.  But is the physical body actually only what we are essentially?

This restriction can feel limited but is actually a blessing if we have the eyes to see!  Why? Because the pain of feeling out of alignment with the truth of our deepest essential nature as consciousness, makes us search for relief and release.
In psychoanalysis ego is referred to as ‘the part of the Mind that mediates between the conscious and the unconscious and is responsible for reality testing and a sense of personal identity.

In philosophy (or metaphysics) it is referred to as a ‘conscious thinking subject’

(I just want to add that there are other definitions and contexts in which the ego is understood with a different perspective or emphasis – ie by Carl Jung or Rudolf Steiner.  But in Self realisation or awakening to our deeper nature and being – ego is taken to mean the small or false separate psychological self image – who we take ourselves to be, as described.)

All the descriptions we have explored so far of ego do seem to emphasise a sense of self or identity and also our THINKING mind and CONCEPTS about self. This is a key thing to note. The psychological ego is actually THOUGHT (ie not tangible).  It is bundles of thoughts centred around this body mind identity that become so convincing that they even seem to get believed into existence as reality!  Right here begins distortion and misunderstanding of what is actually true about who we fundamentally are, I would suggest. But don’t just ‘believe’ this without checking out your own experience!   Look within!  Who are you really?  Self enquiry is a very powerful tool!

So now having explored a deeper sense of what ego actually is and also our true nature.  I do want to say that everything springs from the source, the absolute.  This ego identity is from source, it is a form of consciousness playing the role of a separate psychological self.  It is necessary as a player in this awakening but it also can become a restriction, a very limited and delusory form of ‘self’.  I pray that this personal ‘I’ would be replaced by the true ‘I’ Lord.  Replace ‘me’ with ‘You.’

Mooji explains this beautifully here

‘We are very accustomed to relating to ourself from the status of a person, so now this sense of the person is saying:
‘Replace me with You who are my source.’
This Source is not outside of or apart from yourself.
‘Remove that which appears to be what I am,
but in reality I am not.
Replace this ego-identity with my true Self.
Let there be only You who are pure and complete Truth.’
—This prayer is generated by the pure consciousness
which has blessed this human form with the timing of its own Self-revelation.

The ‘You’ in that prayer also means ‘my true Self’,
because in reality there is no ‘you’ in the universe;
there is only ‘I’.
All beings know themselves as ‘I’.
When you feel that ‘I am this body’,
then another body is given the label ‘you’.
But when you pray to God and say ‘Replace me with You,’
it means replace the ego identity with pure consciousness,
because God means pure consciousness……

By transcending the ego-self in this way,
you will find that the usual troubles of the world,
such as those related to work, money, and relationships—
all the things that seem to become burdensome at times for the personal identity— will be lightened up and gradually thin away as one awakens to the true Self.’  Christmas blessing from Mooji 2015