Nothing exposes the human ego
quite like being faced with other people
having what we wanna have, but don't currently have.
When it comes to human values we can pinpoint
some of these particular sore spots within the human race.
The most common tend to be money, or success.
Beauty, and fame.
But here's the thing to understand, beyond all of that,
What we want more than anything in this universe,
is to be seen and to see ourselves as good.
Fame + The Human Ego
It would be good for us to understand our reactions to anything
especially these main sore spots for humanity.
But today, we're gonna be talking about the ego
and its relationship to fame.
The good news is, this is something that I've been on both sides of.
Because we carnate into this physical time space reality
as an individual consciousness, we see ourselves through the lenses of I,
and other things in the world through the lense of them.
We perceive ourselves to be seperate.
Because we experience ourselves as a singularity
we have an idea of self. This is all the ego is.
It's a concept of being a separate self.
All beings have an ego.
How aware that ego is and how integrated it is,
is really what our life experience is all about.
Our ego is an amalgamation of all the things we identify with.
Anything we see I, me, my or mine to is something we identify with.
For example, Let's say that I say: "MY favorite animal is a horse."
I am now identified with horses.
Any time somebody talks about horses,
I'm going to immediately think it's something that pertains to me.
Another example is that if I say: "I am white."
As opposed to black or as opposed to brown,
or whatever other way I define my race,
I'm now identified with being white.
Now, if somebody says something about white people,
especially if it's derogatory,
if I'm identified with being white, I'm going to perceive it as a personal attack.
Some of the things we identify with we want to be identified with.
Others we don't want to identify with it, even though we do.
If people are constantly telling us that we're too angry,
we will woefully identify with that.
It will be a part of our ego, but we will resist that aspect of ourselves.
Because we all have self concept we all want that self concept to be good.
And being good is something that is very critical to the human race.
Why? Because we are completely relationally dependent.
I mean REALLY relationally dependent.
If I put a baby out on the street, it's gonna die.
And that goes for a lot of years actually.
So, our survival, even the way that our sense of survival
is encoded in our nervous system, is dependent upon
our closeness to the social group.
And what we have learned is that if we're good,
we get pulled closer to the social group.
And if we're bad we get pushed farther away,
which threatens our survival.
This means the ego's number one goal, is to keep us
seeing ourselves and keep other people seeing us as good.
This is where the human shadow reigns supreme.
The unaware ego will keep seeing ourselves as good
and others seeing us as good, regardless of the cost.
And regardless of whether the story it is telling
in order to preserve that perspective is actually true or not.
For more in depth information about this, watch my video titled:
Self Concept, The Enemy of Awakening (Accept the Badness Within Yourself)
Part of this vision of seeing one's self as good, is to see oneself as significant.
To be significant is to be sufficiently great, important or worthy of notice.
And this is the core reason why we desire fame.
The people who grew up in scenarios where they felt
as if the message they got from others was that
they were not important enough to be seen, heard, felt
and understood for who they are, and thus valued,
are the people who are the most attracted to fame.
Many of these people were also shamed
for wanting or needing attention from people.
Their needs were dismissed as not important in the grand scheme of things.
Most people walking the planet experienced
varying degrees of this wounding.
The person who desires to be famous believes
that if they can just prove that they are important enough,
to be seen, felt, heard and understood, then they would be safe.
Because by being felt, heard and understood, and seen,
then obviously their best interests are going to surface.
And people will not only meet their needs,
but have the desire to meet them.
And for this person, part of that deep wounding is that it is so freakin unfair
that other people seem to just have that significance for others.
And they didn't.
There is a hole that is created when a person is treated as
insignificant or undervalued, which is only savciated by becoming
or seeing oneself as important enough to be valued enough
that people give you attention and meet your needs.
That attention, essentially, says: "You matter."
"I see you, I feel you, I hear you and I value you
enough to pay attention to you and care about your needs."
One step away from this, is that people can get a little taste of significance
when someone else who is significant,
someone who has already proved that they're important,
treats them as if they're significant.
This is fame by proxy.
And fame by proxy is the main motivator
for people to want to be around famous people.
The most important thing to understand about ourselves,
when we're understanding the ego's relationship to fame,
is to understand that at all moments of the day,
we are telling stories about ourselves.
At all moments of the day we get to tell stories about ourselves.
Either it's a story that makes us feel good about ourselves,
or it's a story that makes us feel bad about ourselves.
But here's the thing, we're unlikely to tell a story
that makes us feel crappy about ourselves,
because it's too painful for us to bear.
And this is where we fall strait into shadow relative to fame.
If you wanna understand more about this,
all you have to do is watch my video titled:
Meaning (The Self Destruct Button)
Because the meaning that we're adding to experiences,
is essentially a story we're telling about ourselves.
But we're telling ourselves some meaning about our self all day long.
Basically what to understand is that we are likely
to tell a story that makes us feel good about ourselves.
regardless of the impact on other people, or ourselves.
I'm gonna give you some examples,
let's say that somebody is wealthy, we want wealth but we don't have it,
It makes us feel crappy to watch the other person have it
so we're gonna tell ourselves a story.
A story that makes us feel good about ourselves.
So, what we're gonna say is:
"Well that person only has money because their Daddy gave it to them."
"They didn't really have to earn it."
By telling that story we get to preserve our self concept.
We get to tell ourselves well, it doesn't matter that I don't have it right now,
because what I do have is strength of character.
Or let's say that some actors that we know got the roll
instead of us getting the roll that we wanted for a feature film.
We may have told ourselves, well the only reason
that she got that roll is because she had sex with the producer.
Now, because of that story we just told, we get to preserve our self concept.
Why? Because we're now on the moral high ground.
Because we didn't prostitute ourselves for a roll.
Or we may know someone who is really successful
but we tell ourselves the story that it doesn't matter
how successful they are at work, because they're so bad at relationships.
The bottom line is, when we are confronted
with someone else having something we want,
including fame, for the sake of our self concept,
we unconsciously come up with a story
that makes us feel better about ourselves, in the not having of it.
And the most common way of doing this,
is to make their having of it, invalid in some way.
Or not matter because they are so bad in some other way.
Slander works specifically because it feeds our self concept.
It allows us to temporarily escape from this pain of feeling less than.
What slander does for us is it allows us
to not feel so bad about feeling less pretty,
less successful, less famous, fill in the blank.
The multibillion dollar business of tabloids is maintained because of this.
If we perceive someone to be on a pedestal
because the world is reflecting to us that they
are more important than we are, and more worthy of notice,
it feels awesome to see them fall, it feels good to us to make them fall.
It feels good to tell a story that makes them seem to have less of what we want
Or to at least be less deserving of having what we want.
This is one reason why we buy so willingly
what the press says about famous people.
But I want you to just imagine this;
I want you to imagine your worst break up.
I mean the breakup where it ended terribly
and that's the person who believes that it's completely your fault.
Now imagine that that person is who the press is talking to.
As a reliable source of information.
As to what your character is actually like and the truth about you.
Does this scare you a little bit?
>From your perspective, would anything they're saying be actually true?
No. But it doesn't matter because they knew you personally
so they are a credible source.
The crap about this whole situation is slander really works.
I'll never forget this moment, it happened years ago,
this is before I ever got famous and realized
what this was like from the other side, of the story,
I had somebody who told me once
that they waited on an actress that I loved at the time.
And what this person said is that she's probably
the worst person that they had ever waited on.
What was interesting was that I had no way of corroborating
whether that story was actually accurate or not,
I didn't know anything about this scenario,
I didn't know her side of it.
I didn't know whether she was having a horrible day, nothing.
It changed the way I saw this actress forever.
I could never watch her in a film again, and feel the same way.
Slander works. Unfortunately.
Remember how I said that people gravitate towards fame by proxy?
Well, unfortunately it works in reverse as well.
When the human ego is involved.
If someone can't have their ego satiated,
by having their ego be treated as significant
by someone who is significant.
They have another strategy.
Become significant by being against someone who is significant.
This is the strategy in fact that school shooters are taking.
It's that, "Well if I can't be significant
by being loved by this person, I'm gonna become significant
by being the one that kills them.
We are so desperate for significance,
we are even willing to get it at someone else's demise.
This is why people clammer to throw famous people under the bus.
They can have their 15 minutes of fame
by tearing someone else off of the pedestal.
And telling themselves the story about why they're good
or virtuous for having done that.
They become worthy of notice not only from the person
who they felt less important than, but also by everyone else,
who thought the person they are tearing down, was worth of notice.
Now you've probably heard all over the place,
that fame just changes people.
But what's interesting about that is it's not being famous
in and of itself that changes people,
it's the way that other people react around the person that's famous,
that changes the way that person starts to behave.
Because of fame by proxy.
Famous people tend to be isolated
and for the most part distrusting individuals.
Because of this.
If a famous person ever slips up around someone near them
who is getting fame by proxy, that is significance through
being treated as significant by someone who has significance,
if they ever give them any indication intentionally or unintentionally
that they are not significant to them,
this person's only unconscious recourse for the pain of that experience
to their self concept, is to turn against the famous person.
Who they were experiencing fame by proxy with.
And this is so often why it is the people who are the very closest
to famous people, that tend to turn on them.
It's because they were never there for good reasons in the first place.
It's because they were there specifically for fame by proxy.
If a person is there for fame by proxy,
any time they feel any loss of it, they're only way to gain it back,
if they're unconscious, is to turn against the famous person.
Ego also tells a story about people who are famous
and that story is one that's always created
for someone's personal benefit, for whatever reason.
When it comes to famous people, everyone or a lot of people,
Recognizes them, and this gives people the impression
that they know them, when they don't.
What they have done, is to create an image of a character
in their own head, of that person.
If you don't know Angelina Jolie, all you have is an idea of who she is.
The idea is seperate from who she really is,
and what you're in a relationship with is the idea.
It's a projection, and more than that,
it's an overlay, and overlays are incredibly dangerous.
To understand more about this in depth,
Watch my video titled:
OVERLAY (What Prevents You >From Having a Real Relationship)
And this is where the desire for fame
gets people into serious amounts of trouble.
If we have this wound around not being important,
not being significant, to the point where
we weren't seen, felt, heard and understood,
we will chase fame, but we will chase fame as an avoidance strategy.
We will chase it to get away from our own insignificance.
But what do we know about this universe?
If we live in a universe, that is based on the law of attraction,
which we are, and anything we resist persists,
for this reason fame, instead of getting you to a space where
you feel significance, will take you deeper into insignificance,
then you ever dreamed of touching. You will become a magnifying glass.
Instead of fame being the antidote to the wound,
you will find yourself famous, surrounded by people
who do not see, feel, hear or understand you at all
because they're not in a relationship with you,
they are in an overlay, interacting with the character
they have in their head of you.
You will also find yourself surrounded
by people who do not care about you at all,
and in fact, only care about being near you
in order to get significance for themselves, and fame by proxy.
And thus, fame eventually makes you feel less significant
and more alone than you ever were before.
And this situation gets even worse,
if your fame is coming as a result of other people.
Meaning, you have done what they have said to do
in order to put yourself in this position of fame.
And in order to do that, you're fitting in
to some character they want you to play.
This is what happened with Marilyn Monroe.
What everybody wanted was the character
that they decided she would have.
Which was a dumb blond.
Which was not like anything like she was in real life.
So when she would have to play dumb
to please publicists and casting directors
and men who loved her for that character,
basically she got to a point where she took her life.
Many famous people take their lives for this tendency
of fame to create a magnification of the original wounding.
For this tendency for fame to be an even more isolating experience.
Where they are seen even less, heard even less,
felt even less, and cared about even less.
while people continue to try to use them
for their own sense of significance.
For us to become aware of our self concept or ego relative to fame,
what we have to see is that it's totally normal to want fame.
Why? Because all of us want significance.
And you've got to accept that there's nothing shameful about it.
Part of the reason that we fail to become conscious
of this aspect of our ego, is because
society makes it so wrong to want fame,
as if you're such a narcissistic dickhead if you do want it,
that you have to hide it.
So the secret all of us are hiding is,
most of us want fame.
But we have to be aware of the wounding of insignificance
that we have that is driving us towards fame and towards fame by proxy.
Instead of avoiding that wound,
we need to go deeply into the wounding.
For more information about how to do that,
you can watch my video titled:
How to Heal The Emotional Body.
And pick up a copy of my book,
The Completion Process.
Which details a process to use in order to heal this wounding.
You can also watch my video titled:
Fragmentation (The World Wide Disease)
In which I present a process that you can use
with the part of yourself that wants to be famous.
This way your quest for significance can be a conscious one.
Instead of an unconscious one fueled by avoidance.
This way you can care take the very real pain
of the condition of feeling insignificant.
And watching other people get that significance
that you needed so desperately.
We need to be aware of the stories that we are telling ourselves.
Especially those stories that preserve our self concept.
These stories about why someone is famous and why we aren't.
Why someone has money and why we don't.
Stories that satiate that incredible pain of unfairness.
We need to do this so that we can become aware,
so that we can admit to reality,
and so that we can be on top of these emotional spaces that we're in,
so that the words we're speaking and actions that we're taking,
don't really do the very real damage,
that these stories that we're telling often do.
Is it really worth it to damage ourselves and other people
in the process of trying to preserve our self concept?
Take a look at people who are famous,
especially the ones that you are really envious of,
what stories are you telling yourself?
What story are you telling about them or yourself
in order to escape the pain of feeling less important,
less worthy of attention, and less sufficient than them in some way?
And I want you to ask a question relative to each one of these stories.
It doesn't matter whether the story is true or not.
Is that story actually helping you to get you to what you want?
If you took your attention off of that story completely,
and put your attention instead, on the thoughts and words and actions
which could bring you closer to what you want,
what would those thoughts and words and actions actually be?
Have a good week.
Subtitles by: Tanya Duarte www.tanyaduarte.com