A few days ago I participated in the contest promoted by @calumam and the word of the week chosen by him was Ego. I spoke briefly about the concept of ego that I am most used to and today I will talk a little about the vehicle responsible for the ego acts: The mind.
You've certainly been through situations where you had to respond to yourself in your thoughts. Some people even have long conversations with themselves. But after all, who are these various personalities in our heads arguing about who commands our actions?
It is I. After all, that's what the word Ego means: Me. According to Gnosticism, we carry many I's inside of us and their only goal is to be satisfied. After all, these selves are manifestations of your own ego and what the ego likes most is to feel pleasure. Desire moves the ego and that is why we are always looking for More in our lives.
Nothing ever seems to be enough, we always have a goal to reach, reaching it we change to another and it becomes an endless cycle. But, is this how life should be lived? Should we live always seeking to satisfy ourselves? Should desire and pleasure control us that much?
These are questions that we must reflect on. These are questions I've been asking for many years, but despite that, I still fall into the traps of my mind.
Eckhart Tolle tells us that we are not our mind. When we observe several voices with our timbre in our heads, judging and thinking about the next step… Who observes?
When we have some sublime experience with nature, and at that moment, we don't think about anything but living in the present. Who feels?
There is something inside us, something that the mass of our thoughts tries to hide with its frequent noise. That something is our conscience, and we should be more silent to hear it. Watch yourself, and look for the truth within yourself, look for who you are beyond those noisy personalities who keep telling you what to do and judging everyone. This is not you.
But we often say that's what we are. "Oh, I'm just like that." "I've always been like that and I'll never change." These are some of the phrases many people use, and it gives strength to the thoughts that control our minds.
But what should we do? Fighting who we think we are? This is a very serious question and I cannot answer it for anyone but myself. But I would suggest starting to question yourself and observe the pattern of your thoughts regarding different situations in your life.
Our thoughts guide our emotional states and actions. But who else expresses itself in our mind? Our conscience or our faults? Denying the ego hurts. His defense mechanism against consciousness is to make us feel pain; and that's why when some situation in our lives doesn't happen the way we imagined, we suffer.
And that's why when someone we love leaves us, we feel like our hearts are torn apart. Attachment, self-importance, anger, none of these are expressions of our consciousness. But unfortunately we easily identify with these emotional states, and inevitably suffer the consequences.
I will never accept that it is natural to hate, judge, and curse other people. I will never accept that it is normal to follow sadness or be obsessed with something that in the end ends up making me sick. I don't want to conform that the desire to feel important is what drives me in life.
Because I know that this is not who I really am.
Do you believe your thoughts express who you really are?