What Is The Ego?

The ego is your identity as a unique personality in existence. This identity is composed of your public persona as well as your internal attitudes, beliefs, and desires.

Your ego identity creates the boundaries of your conscious awareness. The ego functions as an egg, a cocoon. It encloses and insulates you from the greater reality, from which you are not yet prepared to exist, just like a chick before it hatches.

Through a lengthy existence within ego consciousness, you have become identified with your personal self. This is the cause of egocentrism, which gives the ego its association with pride and arrogance. The notion that the personal self is your whole self leads to the conclusion that there is nothing greater than the human personality, that you as an individual are your own god.

The ego identified with human life has false knowledge and is, consequently, highly insecure and fearful. The greatest challenge to the ego personality is to admit that you do not understand yourself or your purpose and that there is something greater than you. This admission is the beginning of humility and the journey to truth.

Humility is a most essential virtue for an awakening soul, since it is the medicine for the egocentrism. Perfect humility indicates to the universe that a soul is mature and ripe, thus, allowing the mind to dissolve false ego beliefs and open the door to all true things:

Wisdom: Personal fictions dissipate from your mind. You are not a person in a world, you are the world experienced as a person. All reality is your own consciousness. The vastness of the universe shows your enormity, not your insignificance.

Love: An awakened person knows its total equality and unity with all existence. Every living thing is an aspect of your highest Self. Every person is a unique version of You. To know thy Self is to love and serve all selves.

Power: Your deepest desire is to have life's will flow continuously through you, to be a vehicle for the pure expression of God. Your purpose for living becomes to expand and improve life for all … to achieve the harmonious synchronicity of all beings.

(The narcissistic ego is completely consumed with itself. It professes there to be no god and no higher purpose in order to increase its own sense of power and justify its actions. It often deceives itself by creating a positive self-image of success. However, it cannot escape the internal and external conflicts caused by its feelings of isolation and insecurity.)

“The greatest amongst you shall be your servant. For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”

~Matthew 23:12

“The Impersonal Life” (1916), by Joseph Benner, is a holy book which describes the path of being in perfect egoless humility, a vessel for God. It is spoken in first person singular as the Divine Self, and was published anonymously until postmortem.