The Ego Primarily Engages-Daily Meditation-July 4, 2023
Today’s quotation:
The ego primarily engages in its defense and the furtherance of its ambitions. Everything that interferes with it must be repressed. –
Jack Sanford
Today’s Meditation:
I’ve never been a big fan of my ego. It’s kept me very limited in what I can do in life because it’s concerned only with itself. It doesn’t want to get hurt, so it causes me to be defensive and withdraw from what it sees as potential threats. It wants to feel better about itself, so it forces me to boast and even lie sometimes so that it can improve its self-image. Fortunately, I’ve kept my ego in check, mostly because I was lucky to see the damage it was causing early, and I stopped paying attention to it.
What does your ego tell you when you’re wrong about something? It means you either continue claiming to be right or never make the mistake. Your heart and mind may ask you to say, “I was wrong,” but your ego often overrules both, trying to “save face.” What it doesn’t mean in its attempt to make itself look better is that you end up being dishonest, and that’s a way that we damage ourselves–when we’re more concerned with saving face than with telling the truth, people learn very quickly that they can’t trust us.
We don’t need other people’s approval, so saying we’re wrong is just fine when appropriate. We don’t need to put ourselves above others by judging them, something else that the ego tries to do consistently. And if we want to be happy people, we don’t need to control others to get them to do what we think they should–we can let them be who they are and be just okay with that when we accept them that way.
The ego is a paradox–it’s telling us that it’s trying to make us happier, but it’s just creating more and more chains that keep us unable to reach happiness. We can’t get rid of the ego, so a good strategy to take is to recognize it for what it is and accept what it’s trying to do while deciding to do what our heart tells us is right and positive and ignoring the silly things that the ego encourages us to do and say.
Questions to consider:
How does the ego come to have such a strong influence on the lives that we live and the decisions that we make?
How often are the directives of the ego positive for more people than ourselves?
How can we learn to recognize when something comes from the ego or if it comes from the heart?
For further thought:
If you want to reach a state of bliss, then go beyond your ego and the internal dialogue. Make a decision to relinquish the need to control, the need to be approved, and the need to judge. Those are the three things the ego is doing all the time. It’s very important to be aware of them every time they come up.-
Deepak Chopra
If you missed our last Daily Meditation, it is right here.
