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Wednesday, January 29, 2020

When the ego gets out of control

When you believe that you are better or even worse than somebody else, then the ego is born. A newborn child does not have an ego because he/she doesn't know it self. The child has no idea who or what it is at the moment of birth. All it knows is something is strange and doesn't seem normal. 

As the child grows and learns it has a name and other people (mother, father, siblings, neighbors) have names too, it begins to develop an ego - a persona. There is nothing wrong with having an ego; we all have one, the problems is when it gets out of control. 

Soon after birth values are developed. Values are what we  consider important and necessary to live a "good" and "normal" life. Someone might consider an intimate relationship better than an acceptance relationship. Someone might consider that being an achiever is better than being competent and so on and so forth. There are thousands of variables when it comes to values and no particular set of values is necessarily better than another set. But the ego may think that there is. 

When the ego gets larger than life it can turn into despair, bigotry, hate, anger, greed, lust, etc. and when it does it often becomes an obsession. This is what we have to be on the lookout for. We must be aware of the ego and its various manifestations. 

Next post we take a look at some of these manifestations and what to do about them.

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