Struggling with my Ego – Response to your Questions
Since our get together, I feel like I’am struggling. With things like my ego. I believe I have a hard time letting go of my ego. It’s seems like I have been confusing ego for confidence. What I guess I need is help, help to see how to let go of my ego. (Rereading this short note I noticed how many times I typed “I”, just an obsevation)
Hi John,
Nice to hear from you again.
Let us talk for a moment on accessing the deepest interest in a human being’s life. Is in not oneself. Everything we do is an attempt to meet one or more of our basic needs. Years ago, giving talks to a group of priests, it was a revelation to the speaker to discover that even living in the streets of Calcutta with Mother Teresa was a movement he did to make himself feel good about his life.
We have become so self centered and we don’t see the damage it causes in our relationship with one another.
The self is the source of all our misery. To be confident in oneself is to set up the danger of thinking we know that what is best for me is best for others.
To share your confidence because you are listening to your own needs and feelings is to set in motion a meditation that allows one to live in a way that doesn’t prevent anyone else from meeting their needs.
If you were put in a room with a snake that was poisonous, you would never take your eyes off that snake. Can we be as diligent so as to keep our self interest out of other peoples’ lives? This means one must be awake and paying attention to all things going on inside and outside of oneself without any judgment. So when one perceives oneself as greedy or jealous, or angering or whatever, one does nothing about it but watch it. In that watchfulness there is perception as action. That action is love and compassion and it burns away one’s self centered activity. To practise selflessness is to be full of one’s self. To practise detachment is to greatly be attached to how detached one thinks one is.
Where self is not there is love. That love is virtue and a virtuous person can never recognize their own virtue. If they did it would be an egoism. Compassion is what the world needs and each brain must come to her unaided. Most people think that spirituality can be sought after and practiced. Any practice. To be something other than what one is is a life of self deception. Self deception is what most people want because it is a refinement of entertainment. To see oneself as a holy or religious person is the greatest deception of all. Love holds on to nothing, compassion releases the mind from the preoccupation with the demand for pleasure and escape from pain. In this world we have become schizophrenic because we want to have one foot in love and goodness and the other in pleasure and pain. To see the truth of all this to be free of it. That freedom brings about it own discipline.
Coachbri