Ego
The term ego means different things to different people, but when I use it here it means a false self, created by unconscious identification with the mind.
“Ego” is not something that you got because you did something well or because you became rich or beautiful or anything else. When you started kicking in your mother’s womb, the ego was born. The very first mistake of getting identified with your physical body means the ego was born. It is a defense mechanism. You got identified with this little body. This little organism has to survive in this vast existence of which you have no perception to even know where it begins and where it ends. Just to survive, you have to project yourself like a big man. So the ego is born. It is a false reality you created just for the sake of survival.
The moment you become aware of the ego in you, it is strictly speaking no longer the ego, but just an old, conditioned mind-pattern. Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist.
More the knowledge lesser the ego, lesser the knowledge more the ego.
Not all thinking and all emotion are of the ego. They turn into ego only when you identify with them and they take you over completely, that is to say, when they become “I”.
Part of the ego-dominator pathology is to demand closure out of everything. There is no closure. You have to learn to sit with the messiness of the mystery.
The more unconscious individuals, groups, or nations are, the more likely it is that egoic pathology will assume the form of physical violence. Violence is a primitive but still very widespread way in which the ego attempts to assert itself, to prove itself right or another wrong. With very unconscious people, arguments can easily lead to physical violence.
All the impressions that have entered your mind have entered you only through your five sense organs. And sense organs can perceive everything only in comparison. If you had not seen darkness in your life, you wouldn’t know what is light...The sense organs are limited perceptions. They feel everything only in comparison to something else. Whatever experience you have through the five sense perceptions is a sufficient experience only for survival in this existence.
The ego lives through comparison. How you are seen by others turns into how you see yourself.
Sense perception is not giving you an impression of reality, it is giving you a distorted impression of reality because sense organs experience everything only in comparison with something else. And when there is a comparison there is always duality. You can only perceive in parts. So your perception is all in bits and pieces and these will never make the whole.
If the ego were to disappear, or rather, to be seen as a useful fiction, there would no longer be the duality of subject and object, experiencer and experience. There would simply be a continuous, self-moving stream of experiencing, without the sense either of an active subject who controls it or of a passive subject who suffers it. The thinker would be no more than the series of thoughts, and the feeler no more than the feelings.
The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.
There is nothing that strengthens the ego more than being right. Being right is identification with a mental position - a perspective, an opinion, a judgement, a story. For you to be right, of course, you need someone else to be wrong, as so the ego loves to make wrong in order to be right.
Today in the world, we need to bring about simple sense – life sense. Right now, people only have ego sense, they have no life sense. They are ego sensitive, not life sensitive. When you are like this, you only see yourself as life, no one else is life. You can trample upon anything and anyone. But if you are life sensitive, everything is life in your experience, so you naturally behave very sensibly with every other life around you. The ego will no longer be a problem if you become life sensitive.