The Ego and the Illusion of Control
Pete Linforth/Pixabay
It has been noted many times and in many places that separation, from each other and from the whole of the Universe, is the veil. Our separateness is what gives rise to fear and anxiety, to aggression and depression, and to our need for comforting ideologies and belief systems. The Ego, by painting a consistent picture of dangers and possible pitfalls, makes everything conform to this interpretation and thus keeps itself in business.
The antidote for aloneness and fear is assumed to be the ability to control our circumstances and predict the future based on the past. The Ego offers us the sense that we can understand the mechanisms which animate the world of our experience and the feeling that we can control those mechanisms with our cleverness and our adaptability.
The frustration we feel when our efforts to control our circumstances fall short is interpreted to indicate that we are in some way inadequate. The Ego always makes it about us.
But what if the Universe intends to bring each of us to the awareness that we are vastly more than the Ego would have us believe?
There is a story that was once told by a very smart person, about experiments with rats in a maze. He pointed out that if you allow a rat to learn where the cheese is, and you then move the cheese, the rat will eventually discover that the path he has been following no longer provides the reward he seeks and he will begin to investigate other paths. See, the rat has no Ego, no need to be “right” about his choices.
Human beings, on the other hand, because we have come to consider ourselves “right” about our paths, will choose those empty paths indefinitely. We will continue to work on our problems with cleverness and rationality, creating new problems in our wake. As Einstein is quoted as saying, “You cannot solve problems with the same thinking that created those problems in the first place.”
The control the Ego promises us over the circumstances of our lives seems so promising, so enticing.
What if the Universe, the Oneness that is obscured by the Ego’s commitment to separation, intends to show us the emptiness of the Ego’s promise? What if we consider climate change as a problem large enough to show us the utter inadequacy of our individual and collective ability to control our circumstances? Does anyone really feel that we are making headway in our “fight” against the changes in our climate that arguably create increasingly destructive fires, floods, heat waves, and the like?
And what of the virus that now dominates our news coverage? Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease researcher, is quoted in the New York Times as pointing out that “we’ve ascribed far too much human authority over the virus.” We don’t know why it spreads like wildfire in some times and places but seems to fizzle out in others. Many of us don’t understand why seemingly obvious strategies such as getting vaccinated and wearing masks aren’t universally understood to be rational and effective.
Maybe there is purpose to the virus, as well as to climate change. Perhaps those phenomena are not simply problems too large to control and solve. Maybe they are in our experience to guide us with increasing urgency to release our addiction to the Ego’s empty promises and remember our true nature as free, creative beings for whom control and prediction are simply not necessary for the living of full, satisfying lives.
If we can disabuse ourselves of the superstitions and misunderstandings that cloud our view of ourselves, of each other, and of the Universe, we can finally come to recognize what is real in our lives here on planet Earth.* We could then leave behind the Ego’s empty promises and inherit the blessings we came here to experience.
What do you think about that possibility?
* By the way, for more on the distinction between what’s real and what’s not, please listen to this podcast episode.
