Chapter 2: Ego Plant
Your ego is your self-preservation. It is a natural occurrence, beneficial for survival. With fear as the driving force, we have been conditioned to never feel comfortable letting go of this protection, as it may become an invitation to pain. As a result, we try to make good choices to live a life where even in death, we can hopefully leave on our own terms. Yet, this function is not strong enough to keep us living.
The essential, inherent function of self-preservation has learned a sense of superiority and a sense of victimhood. When we feel pain, we take this pain as our own. When we hurt others we take the justification as our own. It should be understood that we all are sensitive and deserving, and in a macro perspective it is understood. However, within each individual the ego can disagree, believing it is the exception. Bolstering itself further into its additional functions as means to self-preserve. This cycle then gives the ego enough depth to attach itself deeper into your concept of self, concept of others and your world view; whether to convince you the world is for you or against you.
Our self-preservation function has weakened with time. As mentioned in chapter 1, we fear our reflection and therefore don’t like to be seen. As if to be seen is to be scrutinized in a way your ego rejects. People have become more afraid of their ego dying rather than their being. Usually because correcting a worldview built from ego feels like having to accept the life lived thus far was wasted. Through this resistance, ego has overcome death. Living on as energy to plague and condition humans to reproduce it and make it immortal; make it the norm. Despite us having innate natural protection programmed into us, we’ve allowed a weak spot to develop that is killing the planet; a lack of conscious empathy.
The suffering caused by a lack of empathy is not anyone’s fault, but the actions are all of our responsibilities. But if the ego leads your life, this begins the debate of ‘good and bad’ which has become rooted in our day to day. From a macro perspective, we may ask who is morally right or wrong. From a micro perspective, we may ask who conducts themselves well or poorly. These egoic opinions over time became cultural differences. Which today, influences biased beliefs based on that history. These are used to further reinforce the world view of dead men. Misogyny, racism, classism, homophobia, islamophobia, transphobia are all ego differences taught to become bigotry.
The human brain’s ability to compartmentalize forgets its ability to connect and find relation. Empathy is the friend of ego, but to ego, it’s enemy. Empathy is not just the understanding of others, as much as it is the understanding that others are just like you. The differences we see in nature that we co-exist with and respect to the best of our ego’s ability, are themselves reminders and reflections of who we are within. But recognizing the pain that our egos share, feels like inviting the death of its identity. We cope by limiting our ego’s ability and as a consequence, we’ve learned to not be fully receptive to empathy or ourselves.
In this world of conditional love, an unexplored function we all have within is a sense of imperfectness. What I would call earnestness, it is the energy that most other creatures on this planet possess and harness. The function is silenced and suppressed by a pained ego, hiding itself away in exchange for control. However if the ego is used in full, this function is truly a marvel to possess. You may have experienced it when you did something nice for someone unprompted, or a sudden burst of joy in a time of pain or an act of self-sacrifice. It comes from being one with yourself, which means being one with the reflection of you in others.
This function rewards you when you give the world around you interactions that are based on how you would want to be treated, not how you were treated. To channel this is unconditional love.