This Is What Most People Get Wrong About Giving up the Ego
By: Shivendra Misra
Tags: Meditation, Ego, Spirituality, Mindfulness, Psychology

This Is What Most People Get Wrong About Giving up the Ego

It’s not egoless, it’s egomore

Have you ever wondered what the “ego” is?

Chances are you have. We all use phrases like “He has a big ego” and “He has a huge ego problem.”

This means we do have an idea about what it means. Yet, when asked, we fail to explain it.

Many of us refer to Freud’s work on the Ego. He classified the human psyche into three parts — Id, the Ego, and the Superego.

But the reason they’re so difficult to understand is twofold:

They’re not physical aspects What psychology tells us about Ego can often be misleading.

“Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word “water” is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.”

— Alan Watts

For anyone who’s interested in spirituality, Ego comes up more often than not.

Yet, it’s dismal that the topic of Ego has also created more confusion than it has to. This confusion can often be the cause of misery for most people trying to overcome it.

The purpose of all spiritual practices is to realize your universal identity. But the ego keeps us from doing that. And a fine understanding of what you’re trying to overcome is necessary.

In that spirit, let’s explore what ego means. When someone says “you have an ego” it can mean a lot of things.

Psychological Ego

In the material world and in the works of popular psychologists, the ego is the identity of the individual sense. In Freudian and Jungian terms, it is the center of your awareness and the framework of your individual being.

To put it in simpler terms, whatever comes to your mind when you think of yourself is a part of your ego:

“I am a writer. “

“I am a businessman,”

“I like to eat pizzas without broccoli,”

“That car is mine,”

“I deserve the promotion more than John,” etc.

Any thought that considers yourself as a separate entity from others comes from the ego.

Spiritual Ego

In the spiritual world, one can portray the ego in different, esoteric ways. (It’s worth mentioning that the ego is the same, it’s the understanding of the ego that’s changing in psychological or spiritual contexts.)

In spiritual terms, the ego is anything that keeps you from realizing your Oneness with all Creation. That might seem “new-age” and “woo-woo” but it’s true.

The ego is the sole cause of our separation from our Higher Self, universal consciousness, and God.

In esoteric terms, the ego is a soul attached to the body. When the soul starts to think of its reality constrained to this physical world, it’s ego. The ego confines the soul to these bounds of limited potential in perpetuity. (Unless we do something about it, of course)

In his book Whispers from Eternity, Paramhansa Yogananda says:

When the Invisible, the One, became the many, He condescended to give freedom of choice and power of independent self-evolution to all His creations. So He gave to everything His own power — “to be able to do whatever one may want to do.” Thus, all things went farther and farther away from Him by believing in the cosmic delusion and painstakingly working for it. Yet, all things, by the right use of self-evolving reason, can move ever nearer and nearer to Him until the many again become the One. But the cosmic creation, or nature — being conscious, and having received unlimited independence — wants mostly to move farther away from the Divine Father, or God, thus creating self-imposed suffering from self-made or man-made laws of evil.

That’s a mouthful to understand. Yogananda is illustrating that God manifested into all souls and gave free will to each soul. This means man is free to believe whatever he wants. Thus, he believes that he’s only what he experiences through his material senses.

Even though man, in reality, is a soul, he refuses to see it and live his life in a cosmic delusion. God can't take this free will back from him. And that’s the essence of the spiritual path — to realize that you are a soul and not the ego — and to come to this understanding of your own will.