The ego is one of the biggest topics in spirituality.
Every spiritual teacher has taught about it.
The ego, in summation,
is your self-concept.
It’s your singular identity that you call by your name.
But the ego is in fact an amalgamation of all the things you identify with.
The things you call "I", "Me" or "Mine".
Because we are born into a relationally dependent situation,
where our survival depends upon being approved of by others,
the only way for our self to survive
is if people think we are being good.
Keep in mind there is no clear distinction in the human mind
between doing good and being good,
doing bad and being bad.
The single most important thing to the human ego
is to see itself and have others see it as good.
This means that shame (seeing one’s self as bad)
or other people seeing you as bad,
is the single biggest enemy to the human ego.
For more about this watch my videos titled:
The #1 Relationship Obstacle (And How to Dissolve It)
and
How to Overcome Shame
Because the single biggest attachment that the ego has
is to seeing itself as good,
the single biggest blind spot that we have
is when we are being "bad".
Usually when we're hurting other people.
For the sake of this episode I need you to suspend judgment
about an objective idea of good or bad.
I also need you to suspend the temptation to debate
on the concept of good or bad in general,
and instead, simply consider human psychology
regarding good or bad,
in how it relates to a person’s ego.
Your sense of what good or bad is,
is gonna vary based on what family you grew up in
and what culture you grew up in.
so there is variability relative to what a human being defines
as good or bad.
For example:
one family may see sexuality as a virtue
and another might see sexuality as a sin.
One family or one social group,
may see self-centeredness and acting on one’s own best interest
as an absolutely necessary aspect of success
and what defines somebody as strong.
another family or society, might see self-centeredness
as literally something that is worthy of condemnation.
Worthy of complete ostracization.
So I want you to understand that your concept of good or bad,
has less to do with an objective morality,
than it does a subjective morality
that you have been programed with.
you will subconsciously spend your life
trying to avoid, get away from
exile from your being,
anything that fits into the category of what you believe to be bad.
You will simultaneously spend your life
subconsciously doing anything you can
to get closer to whatever you define as good.
when you do this your mind will actively avoid seeing these traits in yourself.
therefore they will become subconscious
in order to aviod shame you will cope by deflecting,
denial and reframing so you can believe yourself to be good.
And this is when things get scary.
we can spin anything to maintain our self-concept of goodness.
we can spin anything so that we’re the good guy.
for example:
a parent can whip the crap out of their child
and believe that they're an amazing parent
because they are raising such a self-disciplined child.
a serial killer can chop somebody into bits
and hide them in barrels in his apartment,
and convince himself he is so virtuous because he’s
the one keeping them safe.
A man can sleep with a prostitute and he can tell himself he’s
such a good guy for taking out his excess tension on this prostitute
because if he didn’t he’d go home and take it out on his wife.
A person can shoot a politician and convince themselves that
they’re the savior
because they’re protecting everyone else from his policies.
A terrorist can kill an entire group of people
and convince himself that he is a hero
based on the fact that those people that he just killed are the bad guys.
A fan can turn into a hater of some celebrity,
and believe themselves to be virtuous and good for doing so
because that celebrity is bad for X,Y or Z reason.
I need you to understand that every war that has ever been fought
has been fought on the premise
that we are ok in our killing of someone else
or torturing of them, or treating them in inhumane ways,
because its justified because we’re the good one and they’re the bad one.
the ultimate form of competition that takes place in an unaware ego
is the “ I can make myself good, by making you bad.”
as a result,
we don’t recognize or take responsibility for the things we are saying and doing
and the way we’re acting and the impact its having on other people.
As a result, we do not change.
We make repair in our relationships impossible.
We do not become aware enough to awaken and live accordingly.
We add to the suffering on earth without awareness that we’re even doing it.
When we add to the suffering on the planet but we’re unaware of it
we condemn the world to more suffering.
One of the most painful things that you can experience in this life
is a parallel reality.
That is that you can be in the same room with someone else physically,
but you’re occupying a completely different perception of reality.
I went into this in depth in the prior video.
But what we have to understand is that our need to see ourselves as good
creates a blind spot for self-awareness.
That is quite literally big enough to accommodate these parallel realities.
Now, this kind of parallel reality that is created by the absolute
attachment to the idea of seeing one’s self as good no matter what,
is the primary parallel reality that exists between parents and children.
A parent for example can live in a reality where they're such a good parent
because they are giving their children every opportunity.
They’re giving them anything they could ever want.
They’re sending them to the most exquisite
and exclusive boarding schools.
Now, a child’s reality can be that their parent is a freaken’ nightmare
their parent constantly rejected them, never spent time with them,
constantly held them up to standards that they’re completely not capable of meeting.
This child lives in an emotional vacuum.
These are two different realities
that the parent lives in and the child lives in.
but the parent can’t even see it. Why?
Because they’ve already decided that they’re good.
Ones person’s attachment to seeing themselves as good
and their complete denial of their own badness
makes it so they live in a totally different reality from another person.
For more information about this watch my video titled:
"The Most Dangerous Parallel Reality "
This dynamic makes an actual relationship impossible.
If one person is convinced that they’re good,
they therefore decided that there’s nothing to change about themselves.
Their thoughts words behaviors or actions.
They’ve already decided there’s nothing to remedy
and so the fault has to be entirely on the other side.
If they think, there’s nothing for them to remedy.
No resolve can actually ever take place.
It also means we will be perpetually gaslighting people
and/or we will be perpetually gaslighted by them.
If we wish to awaken there is no other option for us
than to learn to live with the ineffable discomfort
of seeing the badness within ourselves.
We have to see ourselves completely from other peoples perspective.
We have to see what is ours and what is theirs.
And take genuine responsibility for ours
so that we can create remedy around it.
We must live in a space of compassion
where we accommodate other people’s realities as part of our realities.
We must take other people as part of ourselves,
period. The end.
The safest person in the world and the person who is the most awakened
is the person who can see their own badness
and the person who can see their own shadow.
Now, a person who sees their own badness and sees their own shadow
is able to actually make conscious decisions in their life,
instead of being primarily operated by their subconscious mind.
The most dangerous person on the planet
is a person who is the least awakened.
Is a person who is capable of spinning anything they think say or do
to line up with the concept they’ve already decided upon,
which is that they are wonderfully good.
This is a person who can do, think, say anything
and spin it into the idea
that it’s because they’re good.
We’ve seen this in the past.
We see this with everyone.
Everybody makes themselves good for doing what they do in some way.
One of the most extreme examples of this is Hitler.
Now if you’d interviewed Hitler,
he would not tell you that he’s a bad guy.
There would be no conscious awareness that he’s a bad guy.
In fact, the reason he locked all these people away
and gassed them in chambers and did human experiments
and exiled them from the German population
is because he was saving Germany.
He’s a savior.
This is his self-concept.
This is what prevents his self-awareness.
Self-concept,
specifically the unwillingness to see badness in one’s self
and the complete attachment to the idea that one is good no matter what,
and the unwillingness to integrate shame,
is the absolute enemy of awakening and of self-awareness.
If you wish to be self-aware,
if you wish to awaken,
you have got to be willing to integrate your shame
and see your own badness so as to take compassionate care of it,
so as to guarantee that it does not affect negatively
your own life or the lives of those around you.
Have a good week.
Subtitles by: Tanya Duarte www.tanyaduarte.com