Today's
Meditation:
I've
never been a big fan of my ego. It's kept me very
limited in the things that I can do in life because it's
concerned only with itself. It doesn't want to get
hurt, so it causes me to be defensive and to withdraw from
what it sees as potential threats. It wants to feel
better about itself, so it causes me to boast and even lie
sometimes so that it can improve its self-image.
Fortunately, I've been able to keep my ego in check,
mostly because I was lucky to see the damage it was
causing early and I simply stopped paying attention to it.
What
does your ego tell you when you're wrong about
something? It tells you either to continue to claim
to be right or to claim that you never made the
mistake. Your heart and mind may tell you simply to
say, "I was wrong," but your ego often overrules
both of them, trying to "save face." What
it doesn't tell you in its attempt to make itself look
better is that you actually end up being dishonest, and
that's a way that we damage ourselves-- when we're more
concerned with saving face than with telling the truth,
people learn very quickly that they can't really trust us.
We
really don't need other people's approval, so saying that
we're wrong is just fine when it's appropriate. We
don't need to put ourselves above others by judging them,
something else that the ego tries to do
consistently. And if we want to be happy people, we
don't need to control others to get them to do what we
think they should-- we can let them be who they are and be
just fine with that when we accept them that way.
The
ego is a paradox-- it's telling us that it's trying to make
us happier, but it's really just creating more and more
chains that keep us unable to reach happiness at
all. We can't really get rid of the ego, so a good
strategy to take is to recognize it for what it is and
accept what it's trying to do, while deciding to do what
our heart tells us is right and positive and ignoring the
silly things that the ego encourages us to do and say.
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For further
thought:
If
you want to reach a state of bliss, then go beyond your ego
and the internal dialogue. Make a decision to relinquish the
need
to control, the need to be approved, and the need to judge. Those are the three things the ego is doing all the time.
It's very
important to be aware of them every time they come up.
Deepak
Chopra
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