Ego - The False Self

What is ego?

I'm not going to define it or debate it, I am going to tell you outright what ego is: ego is the false self we build up from the day we are born. It is a character, or a persona if you will. It is not "real" or "legit" or "authentic". Let me explain...

When you are born, you are innocent, trusting, requiring nothing more than love, nurturing, and care. As you grow up, your family, eventually your school and friends and society around you, help you to shape your personality.

Imagine for a moment, that you grew up completely differently than you did. Imagine you were rich, if you grew up poor, or that you were black if you are white or Asian or Latino. Imagine that your childhood was completely different than it was in your memory, and then ask yourself:

"Would my personality be the same?"

Of course not. There would be different factors, status-wise, heritage and culturally, societally. You would be a completely different person on the "inside" if your outside circumstances were different than they had been for you.

So now come back to you - who you believe yourself to be. You can probably define yourself in a few words or statements, such as "I am strong" or "I am compassionate" or "I am depressed", right? You can sum up your personality, your persona and character. This is because you have finely tuned, honed and perfected your persona as the years have gone by. You have been told by family and friends "you are so funny!" and so you continue to be funny. Or you were told in school "you have a learning disability" so you continue to perpetuate that disability upon yourself. You may have been told "you are ugly" by someone in the past, and that has sat eating at your confidence for years later.

All of these things, these definitions and labels, are nothing more than collected information of a "past you" which is not real. The past is gone. So should be the "you" who you identified yourself being in that past. Hold on to the memories, for they are part of your whole heritage in this lifetime, however, let yourself be liberated of the stereotypes, labels, and stigmas.

The Spirit - the truth of who you Are, is God. The Universe. Oneness. Essence. Light. Call "it" what you will, but in the grandest scheme of all things - you are the only One of you there is. Beyond your mind. Beyond your identity. When you realize that the ego is nothing more than a collection of responses, insecurities, fears, and doubts, you can then easily shed it, watch it fall away and reveal the true Self. The ego is a character in a play - the true self is the Author.

I have known these things on an academic level for many years. I read years ago about all of this, and thought "yes that makes sense". And yet I continued to live my life feeling seperate from everyone "else" and feeling as though God were everywhere but within "me".

And then... the knowledge flowered - and here I Am... seeing my Self for the first time through the eyes of my Heart and Joy. I Am. And all that is fear within me is false. And all that is hurt within me is illusion. And all that does not reflect the Light of Love I Am, is not real. And now that I know that - within my very cells and bloodstream - I am free to let false self (ego) fall away.It is natural to identify with your personality, in fact I was quite attached to mine for the past couple of years, having an internal struggle of faith based on my fear of letting my identity go. But I have realized, I am not letting go any of the beauty I love about "my Self"... rather I am stripping away the false layers of ego (pain) by revealing the truth of Self - One.

Ego will fight to remain in charge.

Ego is nothing more than a tool - created at a very early age to help you relate and identify in your human body - conditioned by all around you to behave the way it now does. And when you really grasp within your heart that it is not "real", it will rebel. That is a wonderful thing to move through, because it gives you opportunity after opportunity to re-align your thoughts to those of your truth, and to put ego in it's place - which is nowhere. Ego is not real. It is a character on stage. Nothing more. Scripted - and scripts can be re-written.Let the Author be the star on the stage As for the ego of other people - you can not change them. You can only accept that they are letting the character on stage call the shots, and you can love them for being lost in the illusion of the performance, and you can see within them a reflection of yourself. Because we are all One outside of the ego game. I hope this is helpful to anyone who is reading it.