The Biggest Obstacle to Enlightenment: How to Escape from the Prison of Mind Games?

THE EGO

THE EGO

The Ego accompanies the Seeker along the first segment of the Journey. In the following we intend to discuss this, as being familiar with the functions and games of the mind with an Ego is indispensable for identifying whether we are on the right track.

What is an Ego?

That is the first and foremost question. Ego is we ourselves, the person we see, think and feel ourself to be. Ego is the central figure of our personal history, based upon the past and looking into the future. Ego is the deepest dream of the Consciousness. A sign of awakening is when we realize that the state when we identify with our Ego is of very low order, very poor, and there are more significant mysteries behind our existence.

How Did the Ego Emerge?

At birth, we are all innocent; we do not have an Ego. Our Ego emerges as a conditioning from our parents, culture and the society we live in. Ego is the result of a cultural hypnosis, the result of a common entrancement when, as a result of our upbringing, we believe that we are what our parents, teachers, priests said we had to be.

The truth is that we are the embodiment of Life, we are born into this world as a result of a miracle, and later we are lost amidst the multitude of teachings and dogmas. After identifying with our beliefs and convinctions we forget who we really are, who the person born in us into the world in order to experience existence and get acquainted with all the teachings.

It is necessary that an Ego emerges in us, otherwise we would not be able to separate ourselves from our environment, our individuality would not develop, though these are important for the Consciousness in its process to wake up to itself.

Ego is therefore a social product, a cultural hypnosis, programmed into us by those living around us, by telling us in our childhood who we are, what our name is, how to behave well, how to meet the expectations of others. As a result of an unconscious process, we start to identify with this artificially created center, our mind with an Ego, that is, our Ego.

The Ego is a Small Part of the Personality

If we wish to understand how the Ego works, we must not disregard the fact that Ego is only a small part of our personality. Ego is a part of the personality, and its content comes from our sensory perceptions and memories (our life history and knowledge and experience gathered throughout our life). Ego is the thinking, feeling and sensing part. The part of our Ego we show the external world is termed by Carl G. Jung as Persona, the acting personality. That part of the Ego is foregrounded when we are in the company of other people. That is, in fact, the collection of our masks.

A large part of the personality is constituted by the unconscious Ego, termed by Freud as the instinctive Ego. That is where out most basic instincts (eating, sexuality etc.) are found, and also the part of the personality described by Carl Gustav Jung as the Shadow. The Shadow is shaped and developed by society, almost simultaneously with our role playing personality. Children, when they wish to meet their parents’–and through them, society’s–expectations, begin to develop these masks. These masks are like what environment shapes them to be. Rejecting certain stimuli offered by the environment triggers the disapproval of our teachers, so the intention to reject stimuli is suppressed. That is how our shadow-personality develops. It does exists within our personality, but our education relegates it into our subconscious.

Freud believes that the third important component of our personality is the Superego. It comprises the social values that the culture in which we grow up finds important. In the course of a long and complicated process these