Acknowledging Your Ego - How the Ego Is Connected to Spirituality

There are many factors which have built up your ego or self-image, who or what you think you are in relation to others who live around you. Some of these factors you are not even explicitly aware of, but they are there.

Factors Making up Your Ego

To begin with your parents have the first determining factor in the process of forming your ego. The color of your skin, the contour of your face, the blood in your veins, and a host of other physical characteristics come from your parents and you formed your self-image according to these data about you.

If you are born of black parents your skin by the genes transmitted from them is also black. And you see your self as a black guy or gal. On the other hand if your parents were white you inherit their white complexion and so you think of your self as a white guy or gal.

But the image of your self goes beyond your skin. Your parents also influenced your image of your self in the society where you live. If they are well to do, then your tendency is to consider your self as well off. If your parents are poor then you think of your self as a poor member of society.

Teachers, especially religion or values education teachers, your peers, your neighbors, your friends, your enemies, the animals around you, the plants that give you oxygen, the total environment around you influenced the making of your self-image.

Redefining Your Ego

As you grow up you redefine or remake your ego. Your poor parents won in the lotto and suddenly you think of your self as a rich person. You got the highest score in an exam in your class and you think of your self as not so dull. A handsome man falls in love with you and you think you are a beauty queen in your community. Your ego or self-image does change.

Sometimes the image in your ego hardens and becomes difficult to change. You think you are the underdog and you fight anybody who comes to oppose you. I know of an old man, he is a senior citizen now, who has maintained this image of being an underdog from the time he was in the elementary school and he has no friends.

Acknowledging Your Ego

Most do not reflect upon their ego, who or what they think they are. They just go through life acting without reflecting on their identity.

But a crisis may come which forces them to reflect on who they really are. A courtship break-up occurs and the man reflects what in him caused his girl friend to leave him. He begins to ask who or what he is to himself and to his girl friend.

A valedictorian in a law school fails in a bar exam and she asks, Why? Is there something in her personality which disqualifies her from passing that exam?

The ideal and proper thing to do is not to wait for a crisis to change or redefine our ego for the better. If a person is perceptive of herself and asks the great questions of life (Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going?) then she can begin to investigate her ego and acknowledge it for what it is.

You do not have to wait for a critical moment in your life. Right now you can take stock of your ego or self-image, acknowledge it and if you are not satisfied with it, then change it.

The Ego’s Connection to Spirituality

Spirituality is the life of the real you, the spirit in you. As the Christian existentialist philosophers keep on saying, you are an embodied spirit, a spirit enclosed in a body of flesh, blood and bones. And the task of spirituality is to discover your real self, who you really are. Once you discover your real self, or as some have expressed it, once you have reached self-realization, then you can function as a full human being.

To reach self-realization you have to cut your way through the ego, because in a sense this ego has blocked your view of your real self. You have an image of yourself as defined by others, your parents, teachers, peers, friends, and even enemies.

The first steps then in living the spiritual life consist of knowing your ego, acknowledging it and then discovering or realizing our true self. Once you discover this true self you redefine or remodel your ego to conform to this real self so that you can function as a full human being.

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Here are my other blogs which may be of help to you:

http://bit.ly/spiritdev for your spiritual growth

http://bit.ly/alterhealthcare for your health

http://bit.ly/novotrends for learning about the new trends around us

http://bit.ly/bepaidonline for earning some income from the Internet

Here are your links to download the e-books for FREE. To download a copy of A NEW CHRIST by Wallace D. Wattles click this website http://bit.ly/anewchrist. To download a free copy of A NEW EARTH by Eckhart Tolle click this website http://bit.ly/ebookanewearth. I hope that you enjoy reading these free e-books and profit much from them, as I have also profited greatly from them.

What Is the Purpose of Your Ego?

"How was the exam?" Somebody might have asked you before. And you probably answered, "I thought I did well." That image of yourself doing well in your exam was your ego. When the teacher informed you of your score and grade in that exam that image of yourself which was your ego was either built up (if your expectation was fulfilled or more than fulfilled), shattered (if you got a low score or one you did not expect), or just disregarded (if it didn't matter to you either way).

What Your Ego Is

If you look at the dictionary you will find that the word "ego" has many meanings, from the simple translation of the Latin ego as an emphatic "I" in English to the more complicated understanding of this word in psychoanalysis. But the meaning which is apropos to our discussion here is that it is the image we have of our self, or self-image. This is one of the meanings we find in the dictionary and it is one which we can use with consistency.

Your ego is what you think of yourself in relation to others around you, whether persons, animals, plants or simply things. It is your identity as you see it. Thus it may be different from what you really are. It is only your estimate of yourself. That is why some understand the ego as self-esteem. This image of yourself, if it is positive, gives you self-confidence. If the image of yourself is negative then your ego gives you the feeling of dejection and even depression.

Tendency to Identify Your Ego and Your Self

There is a tendency in you, as with the rest of mankind, to identify your ego with your real self. Most people think that what they think of themselves is what they are. For example, in underdeveloped and developing countries most people think of themselves as poor, as poverty ridden and unable to get out of the curse of poverty. There is even a joke circulated in one developing country that God so loved the poor that he made so many of them.

The truth, as so well pointed out by Bob Proctor, is that all of us were born rich. Our real self is rich, not poor, as those living in poverty tend to think of themselves. It is only in our self-image, in our estimation that we are poor. In reality our self is rich.

There are times when a person is hurt because he was despised for something that he did. Maybe he was not able to answer an oral question in class and the rest of the class laughed at him. He may not realize that what they despised was only their image of him as a dull student, not his real self. This is because we tend to identify our real self with our ego. He may in reality be a brilliant student although nobody knows about this.

The Purpose of Your Ego

The purpose of your ego is to influence the way you think, talk and act. Your ego is as it were the natural, built-in pre-conscious rudder in your life. It is pre-conscious because normally you do not think about this ego as guiding your life. If you think of your self as someone with potential for music, you are going to think of learning more about music and engaging in musical activities. If you think of your self as someone with a broken, out of tune voice, then you are likely to decide to overcome this musical disability or keep out of singing in the presence of other people.

In school our teachers helped to form our ego or self-image. If a teacher told us that we would not amount to anything in life and we believed her then indeed we would go through life not amounting to anything because that is what we think of our selves. On the other hand if we believed otherwise we would go on proving to ourselves and our teachers that we would amount to something in life later on.

We might have teachers also who praised us for our work and told us we would succeed in life and so we did. This was because we believed the image of ourselves as presented by those encouraging teachers. Belief led to actions which helped us to succeed.

So it is very important that you build up your ego in the right way, if possible nearer to the reality that you are. You are a champion, a rich person, endowed with so many abilities by your Creator.

If you do not have the correct self-image it is better that you abandon this and learn more about your real self. Then you form your ego or self-image according to your real self.

Click Here!

Here are my other blogs which may be of help to you:

http://bit.ly/spiritdev for your spiritual growth

http://bit.ly/alterhealthcare for your health

http://bit.ly/novotrends for learning about the new trends around us

http://bit.ly/bepaidonline for earning some income from the Internet

Here are your links to download the e-books for FREE. To download a copy of A NEW CHRIST by Wallace D. Wattles click this website http://bit.ly/anewchrist. To download a free copy of A NEW EARTH by Eckhart Tolle click this website http://bit.ly/ebookanewearth. I hope that you enjoy reading these free e-books and profit much from them, as I have also profited greatly from them.