Cleaning Up the Ocean of Ego
The Ocean of Ego
Last time, I made the following argument: that it’s helpful to consider that we human beings live in an ocean of Ego. Like the fish, we’re not aware of being immersed in that ocean, because we’ve spent our entire lives in it and so we have nothing to compare it to.
That viewpoint seems to me more workable than thinking that ego is a character defect or liability that each of us carries around and which needs to be punished or minimized or gotten rid of entirely.
The ocean in which each of us is submerged is our individual belief system. And our belief systems, though they differ in some respect from one another, are all based on some common fundamental misunderstandings that we’ve all inherited from the culture into which we were born. That commonality is what forms the ocean of Ego.
Let’s see if we can identify which aspects of our belief systems constitute misunderstandings, because if we can do that, we can allow our beliefs to be more fully consistent with what’s really going on, and that should make us more effective in addressing our problems.
In my previous post, What in the World is Going On, I suggested that Mr. Putin is demonstrating for us how the Ego blames, resists, and seeks revenge. It does so when it’s threatened with loss of power, prestige, and influence. It seethes, it plots revenge and restitution, it seeks to dominate others and avoid their domination, and it attempts to even some imagined score.
The question now is, what misunderstandings lie beneath all that?
Only something that believes it has power, prestige, and influence would plot revenge and restitution for losing those things. But the Ego, the ocean of belief we swim in, never had any of them to start with. The Ego is a construct, a conceptual entity that behaves as if it is a “being.” The Ego clearly considers itself to be something whose survival is threatened and that must survive at all costs. And that’s simply not the case.
Who created that construct, that conceptual entity? We did! As we were growing up, we felt the emotional pain of discovering that our lives were not under our control, if only because people bigger than we were making all the decisions. In order to protect ourselves from that pain, we developed strategies for minimizing it and for trying to regain some measure of power that we couldn’t seem to access. And then we relied on those strategies to do what we created them for.
Those strategies coalesced into our individual egos. And because our struggles were nearly universal in our culture, the strategies were common to most of us. That’s why the Ego behaves the same way, the world over.
So, here’s the first of our fundamental misunderstandings:
“We are our egos!”
We believe we are these invented selves, these constructs or conceptual entities, which we created in order to get along in life. And if recognizing that misunderstanding is difficult, if it makes us uncomfortable, or if we refuse to recognize it, that’s just the Ego trying to insure its own survival.
We are Being itself. We don’t need survival mechanisms. For Being, survival is a non-issue. All of the survival-based strategies… and all of the “bad behavior” we see out there is a survival-based strategy… are there to insure the survival of something we created! Clearing up just this one misunderstanding begins the process by which we (Being) will recover our power.
So, thanks are due to all those whom we have considered “bad actors” out in the world. They serve us by illuminating for us particular aspects of the global Ego, so that we can shed layers of misidentification with which we are all burdened. That is the way to true freedom and the recovery of true power, the power to live our lives in harmony with the Being that we are.
