The ego is our sense of self. We experience it as a collection of self-referential thoughts and images entangled with our physical body, all of which create the appearance of a person that’s behind the eyes, looking out on the world and experiencing it. It has certain delusions it chooses to perpetuate itself and we’ll be looking at those today.
I’m going to go deep into the inner workings of your sense of self, and we’re going to be talking about the ego. So we better first define what I mean by the ego in this context because it’s quite a loaded term and people have negative associations with it. Then I want to point out the traps and delusions of our ego.
I define the ego as being your sense of identity, your sense of being a certain person. James Fowler called this the “centralised self”: in our first-person experience, we have the room around us, we have sights, sounds, smells, other people, plants, and so forth, and it appears that we are in the middle of everything. That’s the centralised self. This can help you get a sense of what I mean by the ego.
It’s important to realise that we actually need the ego, and I’ll say that before we talk about all these delusions. It’s not just a case of throwing away the ego, it’s more a case of transcending it and seeing its limitations and how it traps you and how you are not really the ego.
A huge part of our developmental journey as human beings is building up an ego and developing this centralised sense of self. When we are babies we have no sense of self, we have no sense of being a certain person, and we can’t function like that.
So let’s not throw it out, yet let’s not deny that there are very important delusions and traps involved.
A key thing to remember is that the ego is fundamentally an illusion looking to perpetuate itself.
It’s not an illusion in the sense that the images and thoughts and feelings that we have associated with our ego aren’t real. Those are definitely real, but they are all trying to point to something that is fundamentally not real. It’s like an optical illusion.
Perhaps the biggest delusion our ego creates is that we are going to be somebody. This is a quintessential delusion of the ego.
Life for most of us is a never-ending struggle to be someone. I think even the most conscious, awake people still struggle with this to some degree. It seems to be an intrinsic feature of the human condition.
We want to be somebody. We want to be remembered. We want to be recognized by other people. We want to be special in some way. We want to be outstanding.
This could look like wanting to be the strong guy, the rich woman, the powerful guy, the conscious girl, the person who’s going to save the world, or the benevolent vegan.
Even though the first few characters are quite obviously ego-driven in the sense of egotism and selfishness, it doesn’t have to so outrageous and in your face. It can be more like, “I’m so conscious and I’m so aware because I’m vegan and I’m so benevolent to animals.” Yes, you probably are, but that can also just become another trap, and it can get you stuck in your ego and in your sense of being a person.
It doesn’t matter what the content of the character is. Sure, there are levels of character and morals and values and worldviews, and so forth, and we want to strive to the highest levels of those, but this issue of wanting to be somebody is a feature of them all.
I’m not talking about talking content, but level of attachment to it. Our self-sense lives on meaning and structure and purpose and it’s always looking to make itself important and significant.