Training the Ego: What is the ego?

Many people say many things about the ego. I will share mine, which feels clear and helpful.

Ego is a smart part of your mind. It links what you know and learn, both seen and unseen. It is the part of you that helps you get through your day, more easily.

Some ideas say ego is just bad. Others split it in parts and get lost in them. But look at this simple view, below – it shows why ego is key to who you are:

Ego learns from the world. It watches what you see and hear—TV, people you know, and books. Every day it takes notes about how folks act.

When you face new things, ego thinks back: It looks in your mind for clues. It picks the best path based on what you have done before.

Ego helps you choose for the best.

But only, if you pass it’s test

It wants you to think for yourself

It wants you to ask – “Is this right for myself?

That means your thoughts are not all yours. Sometimes they come from what ego picked up from others, even from some bad acts. Ego is not trying to tell you to execute that idea! Ego is saying, “That might be an option?”.

Your past ways shape your future thoughts. So, it’s good to be with people and ideas that lift you up. It is also good to be with people that do not keep telling you that you are wrong. Pick your friends wisely, because, they too, also affect those ideas that your ego collects, as options that might be useful, in future.

Friends can be funny, fickle creatures,

They can find you funny, with your unique features.

But often that mirth, it is all one sided,

Those false friends, can be to selfish and closed-minded.

Who need to always feel better than you,

Because they secretly do not like, and try to hurt you.

Do not stick with friends like that,

Find those friends that treat you nice.

You must watch your thoughts. Think about if they help or hurt? Then you can change or drop those that do not fit who you want to be. Ego learns what you teach it. Teach it carefully.

If you don’t do this, and you are near bad role models, you will likely copy their ways too and grow in the same bad path.

Positive Affirmation of the Lesson

Set yourself a firm intention – To become a teacher, and find a friend in your ego

That is the end of this lesson. Now you can go and relax. Rest for at least ten minutes now. Let this information soak in.

Appendix: Original Text for – What is Ego?

There are number of interpretations regarding what the ego is, so I am going to tell you my own interpretation, which I find easy to understand and useful.

“Ego is an intelligent part of our conscious and unconscious mind that connects us to all self-learning functions, be they physical or mental, both simple and complex.”

There are many interpretations of ego that are too simplistic (just the “bad” bits) or too complex – breaking ego down into sub parts and going into lengthy detail as to what those bits do, but as far as I am concerned this simple one line description above should allow you to understand how important and integral to self the ego is.

Ego is a self-learning system, it observes the world around us, including inputs such as TV, parents, friends, teachers etc. It also learns from books and other media, for all of our waking hours it is constantly observing, cataloguing, analysing and storing the behaviour of others for future reference.

Whenever we come across a situation that we have not dealt with before, ego will try to predict it and will find information within our memory relating to possible ways of responding, and it will suggest what it considers to be the best possibility through internal thoughts. Ego will choose this “best” option based on its knowledge of “self” – behaviour patterns that we have found acceptable in the past.

Thus, it can be seen that our thoughts are not always ours, they can be something that our ego mind has gained from observing someone else’s, possibly, undesirable behaviour.

We can also understand that the pattern of behaviour that we establish for ourselves determines future thought flow.

This is why it is important to surround yourself with positive role models and sources of information. It is also why we need to understand that the thought flows that we have, need to be monitored, weighed up, and modified, even rejected; they are only suggestions and it is up to us to observe and to teach ego the sort of person we wish to be.

For most people that do not understand this, who have negative role models around them, it means they themselves will also become negative by unwittingly copying the behaviour of others.