Focused on the past or future, never now, caring for appearance and image above all else – ego is based on the single belief that we are separate from everything and everyone … that we are not whole … that we are incomplete.
“A mind not to be changed by place or time
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, and hell of heaven.” – John Milton (Paradise Lost)
By definition: Ego is the conditioned personality which perceives itself as separate from the whole; (the separate self; the false identity)
“Ego is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are, together with its result: a doomed clutching on at all costs to a cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves, an inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keeps changing, and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence.” – Sogal Rinpoche (Tibetan Book of Living and Dying)
“The human spirit has its source in the divine fountain which must be permitted to flow freely through man. Anyone who flows as life flows has solved the enigma of human existence and needs no other power. Anything is evil that blocks the flow of creative action, and everything is healthy that flows with the universe.” – Lao-Tsu
It is ego that instills the notion that we are separate from God. It is ego that causes the teaching to be ignored. The teachings from Confucius that ‘heaven, earth and human are of one body’; from Islam that ‘those who know themselves know their God’; from Buddhism to ‘look within, you are the Buddha’; from the Bible that ‘ for behold, the kingdom of heaven is within’ and that ‘you will know that I am the father, and you are in me, and I am in you’; and from Hinduism that ‘God dwells within you as you’ and that ‘if you understand your own mind completely, you are not just a human being, you yourself are God’; and from Shintoism to ‘not search the skies for God. In man’s own heart is he found’.
“There is a sacred place within us where wisdom and clarity dwell. This is where God resides and has being. This is the simple truth we were born to discover.” – Susan L. Taylor (Lessons in Living)
While the ego offers a multitude of argument for ‘Edging God Out’, the many names that are used:- God, The self, Higher Self … also The Source, Light, All That Is, Energy, Essence, The Enlightened State, Nirvana, The Divine, Love, Omnipresence, Oneness, Spirit, The Superconscious, Yahweh, Goddess, Sunyata, Brahman, …. and so many more do not change the truth of the many teachings. Spiritual teaching that are now supported by science.
Scientists found that there is an invisible ‘unified’ field, where time and space does not exist, from which everything that appears physical comes. Only in our minds is there a split between matter and spirit. Mind is the ruler and creator of all form and all events occurring in form.
Ego is encouraged and supported in society with constant warnings of lack, competition, hoarding, fear, want, defend, support, need… shadowing spirit which offers no should, ought or musts – only gifts of abundance, sharing, peace, love, security, ….
“Mans main task in life is to give birth to himself.” – Enrich Fromm (German psychoanalyst)
‘Where God is the ego cannot be.’ wrote Deepak Choopra. One needs to step out in faith, knowing that there is a force supporting us at all times.
‘Come to the edge’, he said
‘We can’t. We are afraid.’
‘Come to the edge’, he said
‘We can’t. We are fall.’
‘Come to the edge’, he said
And they came.
And he pushed them.
And they flew. – Guillaume Apollinaire
