At the Mercy of the Unbalanced Ego
As we all should know, the human body has an ego attached to it. It’s an aspect of the human form. And the ego is a curious beast.
Most of us don’t realize the existence of the ego. Yet, we are at its mercy. And the body cannot but respond to all the dysfunctional thought patterns that sometimes make up the ego.
The ego is the shell of thoughts and emotions wrapped around your spirit essence. It is part of the body-brain mechanics. It captures your thoughts, beliefs, memories, and emotions, regardless of if they are good or bad.
The ego is your ‘me-ness’ to whom experiences are happening. Once new experiences have registered in your brain, your ego assimilates them and adds them to a storehouse of pleasure, pain, fear, and desire that has accumulated since infancy.
The ego is necessary for the function of integrating all kinds of experiences. But it is prone to go awry — to become unbalanced.
We usually associate the word ‘ego’ with being arrogant, proud, or selfish. Egotism is the common term for extreme self-centeredness. However, our ego is composed of many facets. It magnifies both our best and worst sides.
The true self is awareness
The problem is the role the ego wants to play in life. The ego pretends to be the self. But the true self is awareness. And so, the ego can seriously constrict your self-awareness when it steps beyond its appointed functions.
Everyone is caught in a paradoxical situation with the ego. You can’t function without one but making everything personal can turn into ego delusion where “I, me, mine” overrides every other consideration.
Instead of having a point of view and strong core values (the good side of the ego), the egotist winds up defending his biases and prejudices just because he holds them to be true (the bad side of the ego).
When you shut out any aspect of experience by saying, “That’s not me,” or “I don’t want to think about that,” or “That has nothing to do with me,” you are excluding something from your awareness. You are building up an ego image rather than opening up to the endless possibilities of your reality-making.
One of the by-products of such narrow-mindedness is reduced or unbalanced brain activity. New experiences equal new neural networks. They cause remodeling, which keeps the brain healthy.
By contrast, when people tell themselves they don’t show their emotions — or they don’t like to overthink — they shut down regions of the brain.
The ego makes these rationalizations and, in the process, constricts a person’s awareness, which in turn impedes brain activity. The ego’s genuine function is to help you build a robust and dynamic self. But when it intervenes to protect you unnecessarily, it is cloaking fear and insecurity.
A tale of the two mallard ducks
One of the most common of all birds is the mallard duck. With their bottle-green heads and white collars, these ducks are a recognizable and pleasant sight to almost anyone who has ever sat on a bench near a pond in a city park. And surprisingly, it can be very therapeutic to encounter a mallard.
They will paddle around us, looking out for dragonflies or worms — without fear or favor. Part of what makes them such a welcome sight is how entirely indifferent they are toward all of what and who we are.
Meanwhile, everything that you may feel and think of as necessary in your life — everything that disturbs and stirs you and all that makes you feel shame or induces longing — is of absolutely no concern to a mallard.
You may be an important person in society or one of the most irrelevant. It is of no concern to the duck, who will just as willingly take a bit of stale bread off the hand of a well-known celebrity as off a homeless person.
And so, one interesting observation for us sitting on the park bench is that after two mallards get into a squabble — which never lasts long — they will separate and float off in opposite directions.
Then each duck will flap its wings vigorously a few times, thus releasing the surplus energy built up during the altercation. After they flap their wings, they float on peacefully as if the conflict had never occurred. And each holds no grudges toward the other.
But if the two mallards had egos like humans, they would keep the fight alive by obsessing over the incident.
This would probably be one duck’s story: “I can’t believe the attitude of that mallard. He swerved into my paddle lane and cut me off. He thinks he owns this pond. He has no respect for other ducks. Next time he’ll try something different just to show he’s better than me. He’s probably planning something right now. But I won’t let him get away with it. I’ll teach him a lesson he won’t forget.” And on and on.
The ego spins its delusions, still thinking and talking about the incident days, months, or years later. As far as the ego is concerned, the fight is continuing. And the energy it generates in response to all those thoughts about a previous situation is emotion, which causes more thinking. And more emotion.
Unlike sparring mallards, this is how most humans live all the time. No occurrence or event is ever really finished. The ego and its “me and my story” keep it going.
So, here are two lessons from the Tale of the Mallards. Lesson one: To a mallard — and everyone else for that matter — your importance, accomplishments, and problems don’t matter. So, get over yourself.
And lesson two: After a dispute, just flap your wings and move on. Which translates to “let go of the story” and return to the only place that matters — the present moment.
The ego’s need for identity and possessions
The ego that is out of balance always wants something from other people or situations. Selfishly, there is always a hidden agenda for the ego. There is always a sense of “not enough yet” — of insufficiency and lack that needs to be filled. The ego that is out of balance uses people and situations to get what it wants. And even when it succeeds, it is never satisfied for long.
One of the most basic mind structures through which the ego comes into existence is identification. And one of the most basic levels of identification is with possessions. My toy later becomes my car, my house, my clothes, and so on.
The unbalanced ego tries to find itself in things but never quite makes it and ends up losing itself in them. And once the ego has found an identity with things, it does not want to let them go.
The ego’s exaggerated version of itself
The ego’s voice can disrupt the body’s natural well-being. That’s why the ego could be called the “confidence trickster.” We end up buying the exaggerated version of ourselves.
The voice in the head tells a story that the body believes in and reacts to. Those reactions are emotions. The emotions, in turn, feed energy back to the thoughts that created the feeling in the first place.
This vicious loop between unexamined thoughts and emotions leads to emotional thinking and story-making, an unbalanced ego, and an ego-centered individual.
An ego-centered individual desires power and status over others — the more potent the unbalanced ego, the stronger the sense of separateness between people. A person with an elevated unbalanced ego often elicits fear and submission and lowers others to exalt their ego.
Some unbalanced egos know what they want and pursue their aim with grim and ruthless determination: Genghis Khan, Stalin, Hitler, and Trump are a few low-life examples.
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