“EGO Project at Burning Man 2012” by arno gourdol is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Lesson Eight
Training your Ego
Your ego is complex, so there is a lot to learn about it. Here we will cover the basics. Some parts of ego are easier to change than others. Sometimes it might feel like your efforts don’t work, but keep trying. Remember, you created your ego’s patterns, so you already understand it deep down. Looking inside yourself will show you more over time.
Building an Ego You Love
The goal is to shape your ego into one you love. This means becoming a loving person, who loves every part of themselves, including their ego. If you don’t keep this aim, training will be harder and progress will slow. Ego helps you become your best, most loving self, and it resists anything unkind or harsh.
Quieting the Mind
The first step is to teach your ego to be quiet. This means stopping it from always pushing thoughts at you. This is called “quieting the mind” and is hard at first. You can practice by focusing on something simple like music, just listening without letting your mind wander.
Try to do this for longer and longer times, aiming for 15 minutes or more. Over time, you will get better at stopping unwanted thoughts.
Keep Trying: Build Your Intuitive Muscle
It’s normal that your ego keeps sending thoughts, worries, or distractions. Before a thought comes, you might notice a “pre-thought” — a kind of early warning. If you catch this pre-thought, tell yourself not to think about it now. You can come back to it later if needed.
With practice, you’ll learn to focus on nothing or just listen without thinking. This “no-thought” habit helps you control your mind more. Your mind will be calmer, and intuition can grow.
Lesson Affirmation
Set a firm intention to continue working with your mind, to enjoy longer and longer quiet time together. Make a firm commitment, to always listen, and to choose the best way forward, together.
Appendix: Notes
The first thing to understand is that your ego is quite complex and therefore there is a lot to learn.
This means that although, I will tell you here, the basics, that there are more advanced aspects of your ego that might lead you to think that the training is not working. Also, some aspects of ego are easier to train and manage than others. The key is to stick with it, and to realise that with the right mindset, you will come to know that you already know those advanced aspects, as it was you that “wrote the program”, so to speak. Self-introspection will ultimately reveal all.
Building an Ego that You Love
A key aspect of training your ego is that you must do it with the understanding that the goal is to create an ego that you love, and that the primary aim is for you to become a loving person, one who loves all of self, including ego. If you try to avoid this intent then the training will become problematic, and you will find yourself unable to make progress. This is one of the secrets of ego – it is there to allow us to become all that we may be – which is a truly loving person, and it will fight against training that is non-loving.
The first task is to train ego to be silent. This is often called “Quieting the mind”. Like most of what I will discuss here, this takes practice, and at first appears to be almost impossible to do. The idea is to stop ego from making suggestions for things to think about.
Quite simply, you ask ego to be silent; to not try to find things to thing about. This can be very hard at first, and therefore, what you might like to do initially, is to choose to focus on something that does not require thought, such as listening to music intentionally, without allowing your mind to drift into other thoughts.
This is something most of us can do for a little while but as a beginner you should practice doing it for longer and longer periods until you can do it for 15 minutes or longer.
Keep Trying: Develop that Intuitive Muscle
On paper, this sounds simple, but in practice, what you are likely to find is that you have trained your ego to constantly suggest things to think about. You will have dominant recurring thoughts, worries and random distractions. The idea through this exercise, is to gradually leave those behind.
Something you will realise about thought, is that prior to actually having a thought, ego will warn you about it with what I call a “pre-thought”, this is type of summary of the thought that is about to come to mind. The trick is to spot that pre-thought and tell yourself that you don’t want the thought now, if it’s important you will think about it later, but right now, you need silence.
Once you can listen to music for extended periods of time without thinking about anything else other than listening, you will find it a lot easier to simply think of nothing without concentrating on anything.
Mastering this process, what I call the “no-thought” filter, will allow you to start filtering your thoughts. You begin to have choice again, regarding your thoughts. This means, that over time, you will have less thoughts, and a more focussed mind because of that. Automatic thoughts will stop, and the thoughts that remain will be easier to work with. The idea is to free your mind of the “Ego chatter”, and to leave room for more subtle operations of the mind, such as intuition.
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