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Chapter 2 – Understanding the Big Bad Ego
I hope that you took some time to think about everything you read in Chapter 1. The deeper your understanding, the more successful you will be in finding peace within yourself.
Let’s discuss the big bad ego. Everyone has an opinion about the ego. We may not have that same opinion about our own, but that is what we are going to find out. Analyze what you think an ego is and figure out if you have one, if you need one and if you do need one, when is it appropriate for it to show itself?
For example, I believe that the ego is simply who we think we are. It is the physical aspect of us. My goal is to align my ego with my soul. Sounds like a lofty plan, but in my opinion, this is THE plan.
Most likely, I have had an advantage over most of you as I stay at home and do nothing all day but ponder this subject. Most people who know me probably think I’m a little out there or maybe a little not there, but ask me if I care! I only say this because to get the true benefit of becoming more conscious about your behavior, you must put substantial time towards focusing on your observations. Your mind cannot be occupied by worrisome situations in your life. This may sound scary to some people or impossible to others. Not only that, but while you are observing your experiences and trying to remain as conscious as possible throughout the process you may have to adjust your personality. In the beginning, others might notice something a little different about you, thus causing you to become uncomfortable enough to stop standing back and observing the situation from a distance. You will soon bounce right back to behaving unconsciously.
Therefore, if you are prepared to swallow your pride for a while and ready to allow others to think you may have lost it a little and you are ready to move ahead with your opportunity to grow as a person, let’s start by taking apart our ego.
Why don’t we take a moment and assume that the ego is simply what we perceive ourselves to be? We don’t need to get more philosophical than that. Our ego is our perceived self. Our soul is our real self. The next question obviously is “how do we figure out which part of ourselves is a perception and which part of ourselves is the real us or the part that is our soul?”
In order to differentiate, we have to come back to trying to come up with a goal or purpose for our soul. Without defining a purpose, we have no path to follow towards that purpose. Our decisions will be foggy because our path will not be clear. Also, I believe our true purpose has to come from our soul, otherwise the purpose would be a temporary one and a purpose that can only have temporary effects is of no value.
By now, you should know that I believe that the purpose of every soul is to guide our physical egos into living harmoniously with humankind so that there can be peace on the earth. We have to believe that our soul has much more ambitious aspirations than we can even begin to imagine.
The next thing I have to ask myself is whether or not my behavior is always in alignment with my soul’s purpose. This is where an honest, thorough evaluation of myself is not only necessary, but mandatory for further progress.
We have come to the hardest part of this mission. You must be honest with yourself. Without knowing you, I cannot tell you what it is that you must face, but what I can tell you is that you are human and by definition you are not perfect. No human being was created perfect. Imperfection is what makes us human beings and not deities. You must find all of your imperfections, especially the ones you accuse others of having. By accepting the ugliest part of yourself, you have the potential to open up to the possibility of accepting the ugliest part of others.
One warning; don’t cheat. When I talk to particularly close minded people, I find that they cheat. I have seen people with my own eyes deny that they would ever behave a certain way, and exactly ten minutes after swearing up and down that they would “never do something like that,” do exactly that. When confronted with their hypocrisy, the close minded person, without fail, feels attacked and becomes defensive, when all along they should simply accept the criticism as a potential learning experience and move on. By becoming defensive, you are in essence excusing your behavior, despite the fact that even you are disappointed with yourself. Excusing behavior that you would ideally like to change will do nothing but keep your ugliness hidden from you. If it is hidden from you, you will have a harder time finding it and if you can’t find it, how are you going to change it?
We all do it, including myself. As much as I am preaching that everyone must identify their unattractive qualities, I still have a hard time stopping myself before I behave in ways that I do not find becoming. The trick is not necessarily catching yourself in action, but analyzing your reaction retroactively and accepting the situation as a learning experience.
For example, every once in a while I work as a substitute waitress at a friend’s restaurant. Normally, the other girls there will naturally give me a little more respect because I am older and experienced and I am also friends with the boss. But, the last time I was there, this young girl came over to me and told me, as if she was my boss, to go and clean a table. I don’t know what happened, but I saw stars. I snapped back pretty uncontrollably and she told me to calm down. Ironically, this happened after I had just finished writing page 112 in this book. Once she told me to calm down, I became angry at myself and embarrassed. Holy Crap, what the f*** was that reaction to? Yeah, she told me to go clean the table like she was my boss, but that alone is justification for verbal aggression on my part?
This young girl had every right to believe she was my boss, especially if all she wanted was work to be done promptly for the benefit of the restaurant. She even had a right to bark orders at me, like I was her slave. It was her right to make any decision she wanted to make. But, I had the option to respond or not. By responding with such aggressive and self-important behavior, the part of my ego that is not aligned with my soul reared its ugly head. As long as I am aware that it happened, I can make a change. Not only can I make a temporary change by simply apologizing, but I can make a long term change by realizing that my behavior was inappropriate, regardless of whether I was right or wrong, and that it did not serve a higher purpose.
I realized that my reaction to this situation was an indication that I still have much room to grow. As much as I understand what it is that I have to do, putting the understanding into practice is much more difficult because I must remain conscious of my behavior on a constant basis. We must be acutely aware of our behavior at all times, otherwise, we can lose ourselves. It is okay to lose ourselves for a moment, as long as we have the understanding to recognize our faulty behavior and try to resolve the problem.
The instant that I lost my cool was the instant that I forgot about the higher purpose of my soul and discovered the part of my brain that needs reprogramming. It is my responsibility to be aware of that. I can choose what I want to reprogram, but there is no choice possible if I don’t make one appear. Do I want to continue as is and keep losing my cool in the midst of a situation that keeps popping up on me (probably because the Life Force of the Universe is overloading me with opportunities to reprogram myself), or do I reprogram myself by learning from my mistakes and be grateful to the Life Force of the Universe for helping me find them?
It is kind of like when your computer is running too slow and over time you get rid of the programs and other unnecessary items that are taking up space in your computer. The idea here is generally the same. Changing yourself takes time because a lot of the information is in hidden files that we must uncover. Impulsive reactions are the indicators that you have found a hidden file. Now, you have to review the entire file word for word before you can safely discard it.
After my incident at the restaurant, I went home to think about why I acted the way that I did, especially when I don’t enjoy losing my cool. I reviewed that file with a magnifying glass and I came up with this; I was the oldest of three and my mother was harder on me than on my brother and sister, demanding more of me than the other kids. I was the oldest female and I was obedient by nature. When she wanted something, I remember her barking orders at me. Whether this is accurate or not, I don’t even know, but my memories in that file led me to remember that my mother never asked me nicely for things. Quite the contrary, she asked me to do things in a demanding and a demeaning way. Now, the funny thing is that many years have passed since my childhood and those memories are really vague and unimportant at this stage of my life and my mother and I have discussed our past relationship and everything is long forgiven and forgotten, but apparently my brain is holding onto this hidden file because I haven’t resolved my anger in this area. I know this because the Universe created a situation that I am supposed to be able to deal with, but I don’t know how and I have to see that as a red light signaling to me that I need to grow in this area. I could choose to work on myself now or wait for the next opportunity the Universe will send me, but like I said before, I don’t want to wait for the Universe to slap me before I fix myself. I’d rather get fewer slaps so I try and pay attention, particularly to situations that repeat themselves often. I am not always successful, but hopefully, I have read enough of that file and can discard it once and for all.
Food for Thought
Practice detaching your ego (not your soul) from situations and allow everyone around you to behave the way that is comfortable for them without getting offended or upset. If you have truly detached your ego from the situation, notice how much less others’ behavior affects you. Take a moment and experience how it feels not to take things personally and, instead, be able to sit back and watch your life like it is a movie with a lot of exciting twists and turns.
Once you give space to others and stop inflicting your own rational and purpose onto other people, especially those closest to you, you should be able to see everything around you differently than before. When you try to see other perspectives, you realize how silly you have been thinking that your perspective was the only one that was accurate. If you think about it logically, it really makes no sense that what is good for me is in fact good for everybody else in the entire world. Are soy nuts good for everybody? Some people are allergic to them. Others need them for a vital protein source. Is marijuana bad for everyone? Some people live in states where medical marijuana is legal. Is having a lot of money good for everybody? Some people decide that they have so much money they don’t know what to do with it so they spend it on dangerous drugs that can kill them. Well, you ask – or should ask – if it’s not good for those people, why are they choosing that life path? I believe it is for the benefit of a learning experience. That’s why I try not to judge others. I have no choice but to force myself to understand that each person has different individual goals. When we need to learn something we need punishment to be able to guide ourselves to higher ground. We need to have some indication that our actions must be adjusted for the sake of ourselves. It is the same as the reason we are able to feel physical pain. If we didn’t feel pain we would not be forewarned of something more serious behind the pain. When something is uncomfortable, we should search for the root or the cause of the pain.
A physical example might be; if we have constant sharp pains coming from our abdominal area, we go to the doctor to make sure it is not serious. A spiritual example would be something like this; your spouse cheats on you and you are so angry you actually feel like you want to inflict pain on your spouse as punishment. The problem is that you haven’t had any time to stop loving your spouse. This whole time, hopefully, you have been a loving and devoted companion and you can’t understand how this could have happened. You have to understand that there is a life lesson here to be learned. I cannot speak specifically about your situation, if this is something you are going through, but I can give you a general idea of what I mean.
What I would do is sit down and list my feelings on the situation, as many as I could find. Here are some feelings that may come up:
1. Maybe I suspect that my own behavior drove him to cheat.
2. Maybe I don’t understand why my spouse would feel so free to hurt me like that, for no reason. I feel like he owes me his life and I cannot for the life of me figure out why he would leave me.
3. Maybe I think I’m not sexy enough and he was tempted by someone else.
4. Maybe I still love my husband, but I am scared that I can’t continue a relationship without trust.
There are other little side concerns, such as money being spent on the other person, private issues being shared with an outsider, but these little issues are of no consequence because once the big problem is solved, the little problems go away.
Once I analyze the reason(s) I might have for feeling what I am feeling, I should be able to find the root of my pain, and then, maybe I will be able to heal it.
1. Maybe I suspect that my own behavior drove him to cheat.
If I suspect that my behavior was the cause of the affair, then the affair is alerting me that I have guilt to work out and if I don’t work it out, it becomes stress which actually affects my physical well being. The stress of guilt might have gotten to the point that it is actually hurting me physically and it is the affair that is forcing me to release it.
Believe it or not, when you adopt this way of thinking, you will all of a sudden feel blessed that the affair happened and that it is giving you the opportunity to correct your own behavior.
In reading this book back to myself, some of it sounds a little patronizing. This is not the tone I want to set. When I suggest that a person needs to correct themselves in response to something that was done wrong to them, you must understand that it is because it is for your own benefit. If you don’t care about the spouse that cheated on you, then you don’t have a problem, you can simply get a divorce. But if you still love your spouse, then it serves your purposes to try and make your marriage better. Your spouse’s unfaithfulness can only cause you to assume that your marriage needed help.
Cheating behind someone’s back is a passive way of saying “I don’t know if I love you anymore.” This may sound harsh and the person cheating may not even know this is how they feel. But if your spouse, the person that swore they would spend the rest of their life with you in good times and in bad, cheats on you, you can be sure they aren’t really sure how they feel about you and they’re trying to find out. This, of course, does not mean that they no longer love you; it means that they need to explore their feelings.
The other side of the coin is that you should never feel that just because you might have made a mistake, your spouse does not have the responsibility of being honest with you. Even if you made mistakes along the way, like everyone in the entire world does, your spouse made also made a really big mistake. They neglected to discuss their feelings with you openly and honestly. If your spouse would have stuck to their part of the bargain to love, honor and cherish you, the whole problem could have been avoided.
If two people in a marriage are aware of what they both need and want as a unit, they may fight and disagree but at the end of the day there is no fear that one will hurt the other because they have decided to be on the same team. If you cheat on your spouse or your spouse cheats on you, you are playing on opposing teams. An affair alerts you that someone is considering switching teams. Now you have to decide if that player is valuable to you, and, if they are, you need to figure out why they would want to switch teams. Sometimes, the problem could never have been foreseen. Both of you have matured, years have passed and you have shared new experiences together that may have altered the way you used to relate to one another. If you and your spouse are able to isolate what needs to be refreshed in your relationship, rip up the old contract and write a new one. This is a great big step towards a magical relationship.
2. Maybe I don’t understand why my spouse would feel so free to hurt me like that, for no reason. I feel like he owes me his life and I cannot for the life of me figure out why he would leave me.
You’ve heard it before;
“I was the best thing that ever happened to him/her.”
“What does he/she have that I don’t have?”
“Why would someone give up a prize like me?”
“I didn’t need him/her anyway.”
Well, unfortunately, it might be hard to hear, but you may very well have to face the fact that you may have failed somewhere. The failure may lie in not seeing what an asshole the person you married was before you married them but that too is a failure. Either way, the same rule applies; the affair might have been the only way to open your eyes to see a deeper truth.
3. Maybe I think I’m not sexy enough and he was tempted by someone else.
Worrying about the fact that you might not be attractive enough to hold a man down is ridiculous. I can say that with that much venom because I was guilty of this stupidity. This is a very personal issue to me. I struggle with these thoughts on a daily basis and I am sure I am not alone in this struggle. Women everywhere know how I, and millions of other misguided women, feel when it comes to our looks.
I have spent many hours dissecting this particular fear. I have always subconsciously felt that unless I look good, I don’t deserve to be loved. I was only made aware of this feeling after years of self-analysis. There are many reasons I felt this way and I’m sure a lot of them are rooted in my childhood, but my childhood is over now and I want to focus on the more recent years and the experiences that pushed me into discovering that I was as shallow as my shallow husband.
Melech, my first husband, loves women. Everyone who knows him knows that he loves women. To not be aware of this fact or to think this fact will just disappear is very naïve. In order to fix something, you first must know it is there. It will not disappear by itself.
He used to tell me that he thought my face was pretty, but I was too heavy for him. Before we got married, he encouraged me to go to the gym and that is exactly what I did. I went to the gym five days a week for at least 2 hours a day for an entire year. I followed some sort of fat free diet and lost 15 pounds which put me into an acceptable body proportion range for Melech right in time for the wedding. I can’t say that I didn’t look good, but it was only 15 pounds. Honestly, how much “better” did that make me?
About a month after the wedding, I became pregnant with my first daughter. Now, I worked hard to look as good as I looked, and within 9 months, everything that I worked for was gone. My proportions weren’t quite right anymore. The sad and scary thing is that now I had a new born baby, and yes, I loved that baby very much and wanted to take care of her with all my might, give her things that I never had, hug her and kiss her everyday, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that all that hard work went right down the drain and now I have to hold a job, go to the gym AND take care of a newborn. I was starting to feel overwhelmed.
Long story short, I trained to be an aerobics instructor, got a second job, eventually quit my first one, had another baby, got another job and throughout everything I never lost that 15 pounds. In fact, I gained about 10. Now, does this seem fair? I can tell you that it definitely did not seem fair to me at the time. Melech was not afraid to constantly be verbal about his feelings about my weight. All I can say is this; I was not happy during my marriage to Melech. I cannot say that it was his fault because it was clear before we got married that he wanted a specific type of woman and I married him anyway. There is only one reason why I would have married a man that was apparently so shallow; because I believed the same as him. If I am not attractive I am not worthy of love. And secretly, yes, I have to admit that I believed the same for everybody else. As terrible as that sounds, it’s true.
Yes, this does sound ridiculous. But the sick part about it is, if someone would have told me back then that I was superficial, I would have laughed in their face. No, that’s not true. I would have been quite offended, because I really didn’t think I was shallow at all and I’m not. However, by marrying Melech I exposed a very small-minded side to myself and when I saw it, I didn’t like it so I disposed of it.
All my life I had been insecure about my looks, and with the help of the Life Force of the Universe, Melech came along and confirmed my hidden feelings that looks were pretty much all that mattered. Because I was not aware of the fact that I felt this way deep down, and because I had no respect for such one-dimensional thinking, I wanted to blame the way I felt on someone else. I could then point my finger and say that he was the one making me feel these trivial, petty feelings. I had nothing to do with it. According to me, I was too “intelligent” to stoop to such childish ways of thinking.
Also, by even humoring the notion that my physical flaws were so important that they could override the beauty of my soul, I gave all my power over to the physical part of the Universe. Meaning, all of my energy went into something physical and not something spiritual. This is a very undesirable circumstance because the physical cannot provide us with true pleasure. Material objects have no power by themselves and they need your energy invested into them so that they can remain “powerful.” In other words, the only way you can get any pleasure out of a material object is by collecting them and worrying about them. Understanding this concept allows you to understand why it is never a good idea to attribute your happiness to anything other than the Life Force of the Universe. The essence of the beauty of everyone’s soul is part of the Life Force of the Universe. This is the most beautiful part of you that you want to shine through. Twenty five pounds should not have the power to destroy a family or disguise the essence of a soul.
The Life Force of the Universe opened my eyes to a personality flaw I had that I was not pleased with that did not align with the intentions of my soul. I had no choice but to align with these intentions and the Life Force of the Universe made sure that I was able to. At the time that all of this was happening, I assure you that I was completely unaware of anything that I am talking about here and I was not handling the situation properly. I have tried to mend the past as much as I can, but I still have a long road
4. Maybe I still love my husband, but I am scared that I can’t continue a relationship without trust.
The fourth reason that I listed is a little different than the others, because it can bring up feelings that a person may never have dealt with before. Maybe you did truly trust the person you were with and you are wrestling with a feeling of uncertainty rather than anger and sadness.
This became an issue for me in my second marriage. Because of the feelings that surfaced in my first marriage, trust was and still is the biggest hurdle I have to overcome. I have been with my current husband, Eyal, for the last seven years. Eyal has been nothing but devoted to loving me and I sometimes feel almost guilty that he tries as hard as he does to make our marriage work. I do appreciate his efforts, for they have made me a better person.
Let me tell you something else about Eyal. Eyal will not do anything he does not want to do, for anybody. This is the truth. If I need physical help from Eyal for anything, I can pretty much forget about it (unless of course we make some kind of deal). But, when it comes to working at our marriage, I am bowled over by his efforts. We have never, not once, in all the years that we have known each other, gone to bed angry. Yes, I am very verbal and want to talk about everything and make peace, but Eyal just wants to be left alone. That is his nature. This is the way he was before we got married. Eyal is not interested in discussing stupid issues that don’t make a difference one way or another such as putting your dirty clothes inside the hamper. And, almost every issue is considered as petty as this one to Eyal. I have actually never met anyone like Eyal. Nothing really upsets him. He rarely gets offended by other people. Most people like him and respect him because he just somehow passively commands it. Now, don’t forget this is a guy that doesn’t work if he doesn’t want to, doesn’t ask anybody for anything, smokes weed all day and could care less what kind of clothes he is wearing or whether a person likes him or doesn’t like him. He marches to the beat of his own drum, but at the same time, meshes very well with almost every type of character. His motto is “live and let live.” He is my husband and my teacher.
The one thing Eyal cares about more than anything else in his life is our marriage. He regularly invests effort into our relationship. I know that it is difficult for Eyal to consider our petty fights with any level of significance, but in order to be able to understand his wife in a way that could lead to a peaceful marriage in the future, it became important to him to talk things out with me. I feel the torture he goes through every time we have an argument and he sits me down as patiently as he can and discusses all the pieces of it and how he felt about it. I know that deep down he is really feeling like a pussy (his terminology). When the fight gets resolved, and it always gets completely resolved, I make sure to let him know that I understand that he went above and beyond his own nature for the sake of our marriage and that is the reason why I love him.
This is the reason why I can understand how scary the notion is of not being able to trust anyone again, especially a spouse that cheats on you. I have absolutely no reason at all not to be able to trust Eyal, yet in the back of my head there is always a little voice telling me to check his phone, call him to see where he is and question if there are any minute discrepancies. Again, Eyal is one of the most understanding husbands in the world, but the constant distrust got to him eventually. This was another reason that he has put so much emotional effort into our relationship; he was trying very hard to build trust in me. After 7 years, I definitely feel like I can completely trust him, but those ugly thoughts always creeps up on me. What if I am wrong? What if Eyal cheats on me? I have no reason to believe he will cheat on me, because he is devoted to me and our marriage. But, nonetheless, I still fear that the day might come when I will have to face the fact that this man that I love so much and I thought loved me just as much, cheats on me.
What would I do? I’ll tell you what I think I would do. I wouldn’t even care because, if he were to cheat on me, I would not recognize him as my husband. My husband would never cheat on me because he loves me. If this man would take the chance of losing me, after all the work he had done on himself for me, and after knowing how much I loved him, I wouldn’t even be able to recognize him. I really believe that I would detach my spousal feelings for him and he would become like any other person to me. I would have nothing more than detached feelings of pity. As bad as it may sound, I truly believe that is the way I would feel about it yet I didn’t always feel this way.
Until recently, the fear that Eyal would cheat inspired feelings of rage and hurt, but once I dissected why I might feel rage or why I might feel hurt, I discovered that it would have been the same reason I was mad at Melech for cheating on me. Deep down, I still felt like I was unworthy of love and wanted to blame this feeling on someone else. Because Eyal has taught me how worthy I am of love, because he gives me so much of it, I have learned to understand that if just because someone does something bad to you, it never means that they have a right to. You have to understand that person’s motives so that you can heal your own feelings. If you find that you are feeling you might have deserved such negative treatment, you must remedy this defective thought pattern.
What does analyzing our feelings do for us in the long run?
When we can regularly analyze our feelings, we give ourselves the opportunity to treasure our good feelings and discard the bad feelings. This is the very definition of free will. In my opinion, free will means the right to decide if something is good or bad – TO OURSELVES - and act accordingly. Free will is what the Life Force of the Universe gave us as a gift. Free will is what separates us from all other life forms. Free will is what we were given and all we want. To not be able to control our own feelings and as a result, not be able to avoid unnecessary and undesirable confrontation with others, takes away our free will. If we are not able to break down what is good for us in the long term and only consider what makes us feel good for the short term, we are denying our will or, in other words, not giving it or “feeding” it what it needs. All we want (or all our soul) really wants is long term happiness. What else could it want? When we fail to deliver long term happiness to the will of our soul, the will is undernourished, weak, and ultimately, may even die. A weak will inhibits us from acknowledging and resisting behavior that prevents us from acquiring long term happiness.
However, if you insist on identifying what