Fifty Shades of Ego

Sometimes when our youngest has a miserable day at school, he lowers his head and for a moment looks like the air has been sucked out of him. We might say, ‘his ego has been deflated at this moment’ which occasionally happens to the best of us. It is just that his body language makes the miserable situation way more obvious compared to us mature folks who have decades of training hiding how we truly feel. Eckhart Tolle himself probably has bad days now and then when a mistaken identity captures the better of him. What makes him perhaps more enlightened is that he may be able to brush aside that mistaken identity more quickly by zooming into ‘The Power of Now’. Our eleven year old son certainly does that, armed with some popcorn and his favorite tv show, in a couple of hours everything bad is distant memory.


Our ego is an identity of sorts. We identify with the body we carry abound and the thoughts and feelings that run though us. Another example involving our 11 year old son, he took an entry exam for middle school the other day and one essay question he faced was, ‘what would you do if for one day you could do whatever you wanted?’ That was so easy, he rejoiced, I simply wrote that I would go to an amusement park with free rides, free soda and cotton candy. ‘Mmm’, I responded, ‘maybe it was a trick question’. He rolled his eyes, ‘what should I have wished for, a full day at the local food pantry and world peace?’ We will find out what the evaluator had in mind for his essay, but if you asked me what our ego is really about, it’s something like that. Cravings, desires, fears and anxieties we identify with even though a higher Power would tell us that they don’t define who we truly are. I remember a response to a question in one spiritual community to a question of what we would wish for and while everyone was wishing for world peace someone responded half-jokingly that he wished for  ‘a billion bucks, a harem and a perfect body’; something like an amusement park with free soda and cotton candies for grown guys.


The ego from a psychological concept (as in Freud’s ego, id and super-ego concept for example) is the faith in a sane human consciousness and decision making process. The scientific hope is free choice, that is, that we become conscious of our sub-conscious and super-ego. The more romantic psychological interpretation goes more towards the spiritual dimension that we become less egoistic, less triggered and simply a good global citizen. We say that someone has ego, when we see someone who is very stubborn or bossy; someone who is selfish and not responsive to the feelings of others. To some extent it is an overlap of psychology and spirituality to aspire an ‘evolved ego’.


Hard-core spirituality is different though. We say that ‘Consciousness’ is beyond us, but that we can become aware moment by moment. Our ego is not an impostor, it merely doesn’t exist. All that exist is ‘I Am That I Am’—Consciousness guiding us without any personal identification.  Let there be 50 shades of ego. Let us have a bad day occasionally or irrational expectations and cravings. It is quite all right, just as it is fine to spend a day at the amusement part with free soda and cotton candy. We always have the Now to fall back on. Identification, craving, fear and aspirations be gone here and now!