Ego
The ego lives through comparison. How you are seen by others turns into how you see yourself.
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.
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...Now if you wipe it with awareness, this intellect can cut through what is true and what is not true. When your intellect becomes razor sharp, so that nothing sticks to it, it doesn’t get attached to anything, it is not identified with anything, it just makes you see everything, simply the way it is. It is not influenced by your accumulation, by your identifications, by your emotions.
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.”
“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 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.
What you are referring to as confidence is a false identity that you created just for the sake of survival. People believe that they need confidence to do something. But if you do things with confidence, you may do stupid things. You do not need confidence to do activity; you just need sense to do activity. Just go and explore; if you can do it, you will do it; if you cannot do it, you will not do it. Just function according to your capabilities, neither confident nor diffident…Only an ego can feel diffident or confident.
By far the greater part of violence that humans have inflicted on each other is not the work of criminals or the mentally deranged, but of normal, respectable citizens in the service of the collective ego.
More the knowledge lesser the ego, lesser the knowledge more the ego.
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.
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.
Love is not selective, just as the light of the sun is not selective. It does not make one person special. It is not exclusive. Exclusivity is not the love of God but the "love" of ego.
Today, there is too much unnecessary talk going on in the world about destroying the ego. This has been picked up from the scriptures. Whenever your personality turns ugly, you call it ego. This is just one more way of passing the buck. When your personality turns ugly, you must just see it as you. If you see, “I am ugly,” you will want to do something about it. You would not want to be that way anymore…But we have evolved so many strategies just to avoid this possibility. At a certain moment, whether you are beautiful or ugly, it is you, isn’t it? Keep it that way. Don’t create things which are not there – your ego, your soul, or something else. The moment you create things like “What is beautiful is my soul, what is ugly is my ego,” no transformation will be possible. If you see: “Whatever nonsense I am, that which is beautiful and that which is ugly in me are both me,” then, what is ugly will naturally start changing – you will have to transform, you can’t help it.