* How do we become conscious? * A tyrant who lives inside our heads * The ego's death *
You must often meet people who are very caracan, strong and serious personalities: they embrace all sorts of beliefs, they are stubborn, they are rigidly adherent to their "principles", they have carved out an inflexible, hard personality for themselves, they often suffer and are subjected to "injustices" - as if they are at war with the whole Universe. They take it as a personal affront when someone disagrees with them, they become rude and speak their truth... even when they no longer have an audience. They carry the heavy burden of their fixed thoughts, life is a misery for them, they live only in the captivity of their thoughts. If you think that you are not "that crazy", but sober-minded, you have to face reality: inside your head there is a constantly nagging, wanting, willful tyrannical "little me" - who often makes your life hell.
You'll notice: you simply can't stop thinking!
You are not using the thoughts, they are insidiously using you, consuming your life energies. When you should be eating, you don't enjoy the taste, when you have to do something, you do it robotically, almost automatically, while an endless stream of thoughts swirls around inside you. Many people can't even sleep: it's night, it's dark, you're tired, but your mind is racing: instead of sleep, it wants to solve your problems. "-Not sleeping? -No, thinking!" - as if thinking were really voluntary, and not just happening uncontrollably, unstoppably.
From an innocent curious child, open to the world, to an increasingly clever adult, to a bitter, rigid old man - who over time becomes a more inflexible and serious personality, a spastic, willful, know-it-all "little me".
Here we are, in the realm of the ego, the territory of the ego that plagues all our lives. Here we are, in a world of 7+ billion individual, isolated "selves". We can say for sure that the one responsible for the senseless suffering and destruction in human history is none other than this small, spasmodically contracted 'I' - or more precisely, what we think of as our self, the 'I'.
The infant does not yet have a separate "I" consciousness from its mother; it and the world are one indistinguishable cavalcade of tastes, sounds, colours, shapes, sensations. Then he becomes aware of his emotions, he detaches himself from his mother - a kind of separate "I" emerges. He begins to identify himself by his name "Johnny is hungry!" he says, and then the initial "selflessness" learns the concepts of "I", "mine" - and he feels that the more he possesses, the more he asserts his will, the more he becomes "more" - thus the ego unfolds and he dives into deeper and deeper dreams. His world becomes wider and wider, he possesses more and more, and then, as he learns to assume roles, he adopts more and more thoughts and beliefs, most of them unconsciously, as he believes unquestioningly in all the ideas that his parents, his environment, his teachers, the adults he perceives as "all-knowing gods", suggest to him.
And so the pure space of consciousness becomes more and more overwhelmed by thoughts, thoughts are joined to emotions, and these thoughts and emotions grow into complex belief systems which completely overwhelm the space of consciousness - and keep it in a kind of stupor, a stupor of belief systems, for the rest of its life. Inside the mind, a condensation of thoughts is created, a Golem, a Frankenstein - a phantom that does not really have an independent existence. It is merely the content of consciousness claiming to be "I"!
He begins to identify himself completely with his thoughts: his name, his gender, his labels, his education, his titles, his job, his wealth, he makes up stories and these life stories are his "I". He wants to possess, to be more and more: more knowledge, more beliefs, more material things... he wants to absorb more and more, more and more greedily. Many people identify themselves with their cars, their homes or even their companies.
As a human being, it identifies itself with a "special" species, which has a privileged role on Earth (our habitat): to dominate all creatures, to drive nature into a yoke - it is separate, alienated from its natural environment, of which it is in fact an integral part, even One, identical with it.
The thought-formation, the belief system, opposes the natural life-program at work in the depths, the instinct, the warning emotions, banishes them - resulting in neurosis, stress, burnout, and even in some cases, the ability to self-destruct in various forms. It defies its external nature ("Let's just drive the earth into the yoke!"), its existence is marked by the destruction of species, violence, wars, ecological disasters.
It readily identifies with its religion, its nationality, its various prefabricated belief systems, its beliefs, even to the point of considering its own beliefs as superior and those that differ from it as inferior - the latter being seen as unnecessary, to be eliminated, to be destroyed - 170 million dead in the last century alone. Terrorists, religious fundamentalists, nations waging wars of conquest, power-mad political leaders and unscrupulously greedy financiers - representatives of the inflated ego. Our entire culture, our civilisation, is based on a selfish and possessive little 'I', the ego - and since the ego has created our social institutions, they have inevitably become expressions of the ego.
The social and ecological crises that threaten our planet and humanity are increasingly forcing us to face a choice: we must overcome our egoic mind-programmes or destroy ourselves and part of the world!
Ego is neither good nor bad
.. simply is. A tangled web of thoughts, beliefs - which are dual. Every claim has its opposite, its refutation, which is just as real and true as the refuted claim itself - just seen from a different angle. They may be relatively true if examined from only one angle, from the point of view of one system of arguments. They are just ideas: a kind of partial, perhaps biased, approach to the whole, to reality. The mind, which is an interconnected web of thoughts, is in fact an artificial construct capable of making itself appear real, existing - a phantom.
In the state of pure consciousness, when you are aware of the space of consciousness in which information, thoughts and associated feelings are generated, you can clearly experience that this little "I" is a fraud: it calls itself a real and single "I", while it is nothing but the unreal "I", the ever-changing content of the space of consciousness - a thought-formation.
In meditation, in a wakeful state of listening to yourself, you search for this chattering, demanding, willful "I" in your head, but you can't find it anywhere. You penetrate to the source of the constantly judging, labeling, chattering voice; but as soon as you try to grasp it, it dissipates. Your inner monologue, the chatter of the little "I" within you, fades into nothingness, and you find that you have no real "I" other than consciousness itself.
But as soon as your attention is not focused on yourself, on the attention within you, the stream of thoughts reappears, the usual chatter, judgement, grumbling, wanting returns to your mind, and you get caught up in the whirl of thoughts and the emotions of desires and fears associated with thoughts.
You cannot confront the ego, but you can recognize its falsity. It cannot be confronted because it has no real existence: if you look for it, you will find it nowhere but in the pure space of consciousness, and in it a swirling thought-emotional formation. On the other hand, if you confront it, you only strengthen it.
Whatever you focus your attention on is amplified. And the ego is hidden and tenacious: as soon as you question one of your beliefs, one of your thoughts, it disappears, it becomes nothing, it ceases to haunt you as a mind-program, but gives way to some other belief, some other thought.
What can you do? You focus your attention on the attention within you, and you recognize the consciousness - the consciousness becomes aware of itself. Thoughts come and go, but you don't get involved in them: you just let them flow. You call them "Hey, this is a thought!", and as soon as you recognize it as a mere thought, you become aware of yourself again. And as you observe the thoughts and emotions more and more, they "slip away", they uncoil from the space of consciousness, they no longer stun you, they no longer demand your exclusive attention. You maintain a kind of distance from them while remaining in a state of attentive awareness.
The only natural antidote to the ego's morbid proliferation is vigilance, attention. To face it, to recognize its falsity, and to stop identifying with it completely. It is the beginning of a different life, which is also a redemption for humanity.
After having recognized our bodily sensations as primitive man, we have put the extremes of our emotions on a pedestal in the Middle Ages, and the reason on a pedestal in the modern age. Well, we are now at a crucial evolutionary turning point: we are recognizing that beyond the world of feelings, emotions, thoughts, there is a wakeful, attentive, loving, conscious spatial "something" - and that "something" is "I". Thus - literally - a new humanity is born: the man awakened from the ego's sleep to self-consciousness.
Excerpt from the book "The Mysteries of Consciousness” by Ervin Kery