What is the ego?

Is the mind your enemy? Not at all. The mind is a brilliant and invaluable function of reflection and action, and the mental voice is its natural processing tool. This voice is how it thinks. The problem is formed when we consider this function to be who we are rather than our tool. That is the birth of the ego and of the lifelong pathological condition of suffering.

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But why would we make the mistake of considering the mind to be who we are in the first place? Each individual is composed of two fundamental elements: (1) the silent essence, or the soul, which is an unbound space of peace, joy and love, and (2) the human expression, which is the extension of the soul into the mind, personality and body.

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The average person is ignorant of their silent essence, their soul, and therefore lives exclusively through their human expression. This is the condition of spiritual forgetfulness, which all humanity shares.

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Despite the fact that the soul is initially fully dormant, each of us has intuitive connection to her potential and attributes. This powerful, yet entirely unconscious, connection shapes the fundamental motivations of our life. It endows us with the precious and sacred impulse to seek to actualize two of her most fundamental characteristics: her undeniable, substantial sense of self, and her profound, unconditional wellbeing.

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However, due to our complete forgetfulness of our deeper essence, we are bound to follow these instincts exclusively through the mind and personality. And so we attempt to carry out that primal and precious task of finding a sense of self and wellbeing through our thoughts, emotions, memories and conditioning – through the content of the mind. But there is no chance to actualize those essential goals there. They can only be actualized through discovering and embodying the soul, to whom these are simply her natural attributes.

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And yet the mind, which was given this command, can’t but obey it and pursue it in the limited way and with the limited resources it has. The result of this is the ego-identity. The mind is a function of thinking, feeling and acting; the ego is an identity wrongfully based on those functions. The consequence of this misplaced identity is a dysfunctional life of suffering – the one you are now seeking to awaken from.