My ego my friend, never to bend
30 June 2024

People speak about the ego as being one of the main things to conquer in this world. They talk of it as some kind of internal enemy that does not allow one to attain higher moral grounds. Many self-help books talk about “killing the ego” in order to attain a higher level of spirituality. A lot of these books give tips about how to kill your ego, some of them giving tips such as self-chastising in order to reduce the imprint of the ego on oneself and become less a “slave to it”. While I see the wisdom in some of them, albeit in a less marginalizing way, I tend to have a different approach to the ego.

It seems to me that having an ego is necessary in order to stay within this plane, concentrated as it is on allowing us to go through physical experiments. Indeed, if we had no ego, remaining on this plane would prove to be very difficult as we would be too spiritual to maintain a link with this densely material world. It’s anyone’s guess on how we would be able to survive in this world if we had no ego left. My experimentation with my ego has led me to believe that it is something that one has to tame rather than constrain and rather than trying to live in a state of self-repression, I think we ought to give the ego some leeway so that it allows us to progress in our search for spirituality rather than opposing all our efforts. 

There was a time when I tried the constraining technique and found that rather than allowing me to fully attain higher levels of spirituality, I just felt out of sync with myself and unable to retain my grasp on the world. While it was true that I did progress somewhat on the spiritual level, it was also true that my material needs were not met as I tended to lose my job and had a hard time finding another quickly. This then led to an abrupt stop of the spiritual progress as I tried to grapple with the situation and reach a new level of material comfort. Perhaps if I had pursued my research of spirituality and not given in to the fear of material loss, I could have attained higher levels of spirituality but I felt that it was not yet time to give this up.

At a later stage in life, as I sought to tame my ego by providing it with what it needed but not letting it take over my sense of moral values and search of spirituality, I found that this yielded better results and I was able to access, slowly, higher levels of spirituality. The impression I had was that I was pursuing a helicoidal path of spirituality, all the while nourishing my ego just enough to keep it cooperative with my spiritual aim. It was as if the ego was a constant at the center, fed and feeling well, while I twirled around this centerpiece, always aiming for higher levels of understanding and evolution. 

The more I kept the ego central and happy, the less resistance it opposed to my spiritual evolution. It became like a wary friend, watching me from behind as I progressed, not realizing that I was going higher than it as it watched me spin but thinking that I was just in front of it. As I move on with this experimentation with my ego, I’d like to believe that at some point there would be a sort of osmosis where my ego would not be something that I observe from outside in order to tame it but rather something that automatically adjusts to only give me a lifeline to the material world while never getting in the way of my spiritual evolution. It would then become a truly trusted friend and not a frenemy.

Thirty Seconds To Mars - Hail to the Victor