Saturday 1 June 2013

The Self and the Ego


If you think you’re immortal, think again. Before we can make that claim, we must define very, very clearly, what we mean by who or what we are. We must define how we identify ourselves.
We must differentiate between Self and Ego.
From the day we are born we begin to accumulate little quirks of character, which make us different from all other people we meet. Good or bad, no matter, but different. The more we drift away from the essence of our being, the stronger our ego becomes. Yet, we need ego for our survival in the physical reality. We must retain, indeed develop, sufficient egotism to maintain our transient, and to a great extend illusory body, while our consciousness spends an equally illusory time here, on Earth. Or in any material environment.
But we must never confuse our ego with our self.
Ego, like religions, is what sets us apart. Self, like faith, brings us together. Within the entity of self we accumulate and store forever the traits of character, which by definition are immortal. The components of our ego, which also by definition, we need for our survival in material reality, we discard together with our physical bodies when we vacate them. They are unnecessary or superfluous in the ‘real’ world; in the world in which we spend most of our existence. Just in case anyone is sorry to leave them behind, be assured that they consist of atoms which are 99.9999999999999% empty space.

Imagine running out of money in one of your dreams. There is no ‘my’ or ‘yours’ in the true reality. The higher we rise on the evolutionary scale the harder it is for us to differentiate between ‘you’ and ‘me’. Between “us and them”.
Hence, faith and religion.
We all believe in something. We all claim to have some sort of ethics and, until distorted by our egos, those ethics are very similar to each other.
When religions step in, people who can benefit materially from exacerbating differences between us, build up mountains of rules and regulations that serve to set us apart.
“If you prick us, do we not bleed?” asks Shylock, in the Merchant of Venice.
The same question can be asked of any member of any religion on earth and expect the same answer. Yet… religions continue to set us apart. Perhaps in this oncoming Age of Aquarius we shall derive knowledge from all great men of the past. And we shall concentrate on what joins us together. After all, once we get rid of our egos, we become essentially one, even if we regard this oneness from diverse points of view.

In my novel WALL—Love, Sex, and Immortality, I suggest that even in the process of quantum tunneling, our ego stays behind. Perhaps, one day, we shall learn to cleanse our consciousness in such a fashion. What do you think? 


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2 comments:

  1. I find this fascinating and at once, maddening. I read Eckhart Tolle frequently, to upset myself, just to remind myself, that I rarely can separate my self from my ego, unless I'm thinking about it, and then, I'm thinking about it, which is my ego, editing me on how I 'should' perceive what I'm regarding as self. Like I said. Maddening. Thanks for being another person to follow, in this effort to find myself before my ego does.

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    1. "I and my Father are One". We need ego to survive on Earth and experiment with Potential in phenomenal reality, never forgetting that phenomenal reality, hence our Ego, is transient, ephemeral.

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