Whenever our day or life seems sucky, there’s a good chance that we have gotten tripped up by ego. The solution is not to tame or suppress our egos but to shift our perspective about what ego really is.
We attribute to our ego all sorts of flaws. We give it the basest motivations. It is the source of all our poor habits. And we blame our egos and other people’s egos when bad things happen. So we are told we must control or defeat our egos.
This is all quite amusing since our egos don’t really exist. They are projections, figments, explanations. They are symptoms. They are scapegoats. They are what we think we are when we are what I call “running on battery power” versus “being plugged into the mains.”
The more we run on battery power, the more we see life as a harsh puzzle. We then spend lots of energy trying hard to figure out how to survive life. Ego is the set of thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors that we think we are when we run on battery power.
The more we are plugged in, the more we see life as a fun game, as an experiment or as an adventure of our own making. Plugged in, we find life compelling. We appreciate, celebrate, and honor more. We engage what we care about, we employ our talents, we live, and we–in any way–help others to live. We feel good.
And the more we are plugged in, the more the illusion of ego fades away.
Plug in, then.
In your corner,
Mike