can you really be honest enough with yourself to get past the ego?
Vic Shayne
author
The Self is a Belief: the idea that causes suffering
Why do we behave the way we do? What is beneath our actions, reactions, thoughts, and worldview? The fact is that we do not completely know, not consciously anyway. It can be said a million times in different ways, but here is the message that is just not being heard: To know what we are and why we are the way we are means that we have to turn our attention around from the object to the subject. We have to stop our conditioning from distracting us and causing us to place our attention on other people and situations instead of on our own selves. To do this takes a lot of energy in the form of persistence and honesty. With complete honesty there is hope of uncovering what we are, psychologically and spiritually.
it’s not you, it’s me
Here’s a scenario to illustrate what I am getting at. Let’s say you meet someone who turns out to be a nasty, mean, back-stabbing individual who wrongs you. It could be in business, your HOA, or in your family. You react in a certain way and then you spend the next twenty years recounting how this miserable miscreant caused you so much pain and trouble. Was he a bad person? Sure. But what matters even more than his actions is that he provided you with the opportunity to take a good look at yourself. Did you fail to do this or did you keep things superficial and just keep repeating how horrible he was? Or are you still waiting for this person to right his wrong?
everything is me
You cannot talk yourself into an awakening; that’s not how it works. But if you keep probing into the ego it may become obvious to you that everyone and everything is yourself. If, on the other hand, you see everyone as separate from you then you find it difficult, if not impossible, to take a good look at your own problems, deficits, and source of psychological pain and needs.
It seems like all of this is paradoxical — that everything that is not you (at least superficially) is really you.
It is just plain difficult for most people to see beyond the superficiality of others and themselves. This is the way the ego works: me against you, me against them, me against it, and even me against myself. The me is central and all-important, and this is why we rarely, in one lifetime, resolve our emotional, psychological, and spiritual problems. We do not look beyond the me, and even when we think we do we are only fooling ourselves because we do not look deeply enough. And, even more importantly, the me disallows us from looking at ourselves honestly.
Even when we think we have found our way beyond the ego we are only fooling ourselves because we do not look deeply enough…
the ego isn’t honest
The ego is a false front, so it is not, by nature, honest with others or honest with itself. It will be dishonest if it benefits from dishonesty and if dishonesty is a means of protecting it from being exposed, revealed, uncovered, unmasked, or whatever word you want to use.
be honest or be on your way
So how can you be honest? We have to begin by admitting that everything is about you. You would think that this approach would be appealing to the ego, wouldn’t you? By this I mean that everything that you see, hear, feel, touch, taste, or experience is all about you, about your life and your experience. This is your life, not someone else’s. You are not experiencing life for someone else. It’s all about you. This cannot be overstated.
Recognizing that life is all about you has nothing to do with selfishness or self-centeredness. It has to do with the power to turn your attention around. All of your reactions and the way you react to people and situations is something that should be telling you about yourself. But if you never look beyond what a jerk someone is to you then you miss the whole message because you aren’t taking the attention off that person and putting it back on yourself where it belongs. This is not at all about taking the blame for everything; it is about finding out about yourself.
just turn your attention back around
This is your life, so it MUST BE about you and not the idiot driver who cut you off in traffic, the insults you endure from your mother-in-law, or the hapless teacher who insulted you when you were a child. Even Mother Theresa, with all of her so-called altruism, is only about her. Her work makes her feel good, satisfies her religious convictions, supports what she thinks is the right thing to do, and so on.
How many people truly realize that life is a play that can teach them who they really are beneath the facade of the ego or persona?
life is but a dream
It’s an ancient idea that our dreams are trying to tell us something about us and that we are all the characters, scenarios, animals, plants, and emotions within our own dreams. Freud and Jung did a marvelous job of bringing this important finding back into public awareness. Each thing in your dream is a reflection of some part of you. When you wake up you can analyze the dream and figure something out about how you are thinking and what your trauma is.
Dreams are artifacts of our own minds, yet we do not readily see the same opportunities for self-enquiry in our everyday life experiences. It’s not that life is all about teaching us a lesson or letting us see our true purpose, but rather that it affords us an opportunity to dig down deeper and uncover what we are and what we are not, as well as why we may be dysfunctional, troubled, worried, anxious, depressed, and triggered.
another plea for honesty
At the outset of this article I mentioned that we need to be honest to truly find out what we are. This is not easy, because the egoic mind has been trained since our earliest years to defend and protect us from harm. It doesn’t welcome being invaded.
Since enquiry into what lies at the bedrock of our beingness requires moving beyond the ego, the ego will naturally put up a fight. One way it does this is by being dishonest and not allowing itself to be probed — or not explored deeply enough to make any real transformation. It takes a sincere interest, persistence, and honesty to move past the egoic self. But if you can muster these elements then you can find a happiness beneath the ego and beyond the shadows that lurk in your subconscious mind. With enough honesty you will get through all the layers of the self and keep the ego from fooling you into believing you have achieved something when you’ve only gotten started.
