Ego is the Enemy of Intuition: an excerpt from Satori Now
Channel: David Tuffley
Date: 2020-05-03

Excerpt from 'Satori Now: Awakening Your Highest Self' - 
https://www.amazon.com/Satori-Now-Awakening-Your-Highest/dp/1453823549
David Tuffley's Bio at Amazon:  http://bit.ly/DavidTuffley
=======================================
Evolutionary Psychology tells us that the human ego is a survival mechanism that has allowed our species to survive and prosper in a hostile environment for millions of years. The ego works by categorizing everything it experiences in the world of form as either helpful or harmful to its survival. The ego creates a world of dualities, of polar opposites. It is quite understandable that there should be a part of our psyche that does this, given the on-going imperative to survive. 
The ego is strengthened and defined by conflict. It often creates conflict where none need exist. The world is full of people whose lives consist of one conflict-driven drama after another. They are locked in egoic thinking, dancing to the war-drums that have been beating since the Pleistocene (from around 2,000,000 to 11,000 years ago, the time of human evolution). 
But as humanity evolves to a higher level of consciousness, we begin to see that having solved or eliminated most of the problems and dangers that threatened our ancestors, egoic thinking as a survival mechanism is no longer as helpful as it once was. Take for example our instinct to eat salty/ fatty/ sweet foods so that we might store energy in body fat and have it in reserve the next time food is scarce. 
In our evolutionary past it was impossible to find so much salty/ fatty/ sweet food that it would harm you, so we are programmed to eat as much of it as we can find, as often as possible. In today's world though, we have to curb this tendency if we are not going to become obese. Our higher rational self needs to recognize that seeing the world through the eyes of our primitive ancestors, with danger behind every bush, is no longer helpful to our well-being. 
Another example of how our more primitive natures no longer serve us well is the Seven Deadly Sins. In Roman Catholicism, these serve as a warning to avoid certain behaviours that might condemn a person’s mortal soul to hell. These behaviours includes being angry, greedy, lazy, proud, lustful, envious and gluttonous. Consider for a moment how each of these behaviours would have improved our primitive ancestors’ survival chances:
Anger is an advantage as a warning to a potential attacker, or it acts as a stimulus to fight ferociously if actually attacked. 
Greed makes a person acquire useful commodities like food, weapons, shelter, reproductive partners, animal skins, access to drinking water etc, all of which improves their survival chances.
Sloth or laziness conserves energy. Food was scarce in the Pleistocene with its repeated Ice Ages; people would have been cold and hungry if not starving much of the time. Survival would have depended on conserving one’s energy for the high-dividend activities like hunting or defence. 
Pride enhances self-esteem. High self-esteem improves survivability because it leads an individual to value themselves more highly and therefore be more likely to claim and fight for the resources they need to survive. 
Lust enhances the desire to reproduce and pass one’s genetic material on to the next generation. 
Envy makes a person more likely to acquire other people’s goods on the assumption that if others value those goods enough to obtain them in the first place, they are worth trying to get for oneself.
Gluttony takes advantage of abundant food, while it lasts, to lay down fat reserves to help an individual through the famine that was always just around the corner for the Pleistocene human. 
If you recognise how much of our behaviour derives from our primitive past, you are one step away from consciously choosing to not behave that way. 
Some of our instincts still serve us well; for example the instinct to love and nurture our children. By being fully conscious, we can choose to continue behaviour that is helpful, and discontinue that which is unhelpful on our path towards higher consciousness. 
To cultivate Intuition therefore, we must learn to put our ego in its proper place as a survival tool from our evolutionary past that need not be used unless our survival is threatened. In place of the ego is an on-going awareness that the world and everyone in it is connected to and dependant upon the whole, rather than seeing the world as a disconnected and dangerous place. The ego is a practical aspect of who we are, useful at times, but not the totality of who were are, and certainly not what should be in the driver’s seat. 
Without strong Intuition, the ego takes over and soon we define ourselves in terms of our ego. Who are you? Most would say, ‘my name is ... and these are the events of my life’.