Oakville Zen Meditation
EGO Part1: the #1 hacker of our mind
The ego is I me, myself, mine that is our opinion and perception of ourselves physically, mentally, emotionally and socially. It is our own created self-image with its positive and negative components, which can be true or false.By definition, our ego takes everything personally whether the causes are right or wrong. Like an iceberg, most of our ego is submerged deep into our subconscious mind and, yet, its power is such that our day-to-day behaviors such as physical, mental, emotional, and societal are, too often, under its control.
Like a coin, our ego has 2 sides: good and bad. They are entangled and one cannot exist w/o the other one.
If our ego is obviously our best friend; without it, our functional, intellectual, emotional, and societal life will be impossible.
But our ego is also our worst enemy by its ability to negatively hack our mind using very powerful and efficient tricks. All of them can have detrimental consequences unless you learn to be mindful of them when they pop-up ,and to learn to minimize, if not to neutralize them as much as possible.
Here is the initial list of the main hacking weapons used by our ego. Next week, I will complete the list.
1 The first weapon of our ego-mind is the most frequent and more important, namely our endless desires, craving, attachment, hatred, aversion and illusion/ delusion called ignorance. All of them are responsible for our unhappiness, frustration, dissatisfaction, stress, anxiety,doom& gloom, discontent, and any other negative feelings ; all of them under the umbrella word “suffering “ or Dukka.
Desire, hatred, and ignorance (delusion) are therefore called the 3 poisons in the Buddhist Sutras.
2 The second hacking tool is creating thoughts/ emotions whether positive but mostly negative is frequent and very effective since these ego-driven thoughts are the best traps to control not only our emotions but also our day-to-day intellectual and behavioral personal and societal activities.
Negative feelings already mentioned but also anger, fear, resentment, jealousy, regret, worries, guilt are the most common weapons used by our ego.
Interesting to know that most of these negative feelings are generated while travelling into the past
or future which, by definition, are either dead for the past or unborn for the future. Next week, I will elaborate more specifically about the hacking power by travelling in the past and future spacetimes.
Created by our ego-mind, our negative and positive feelings do exist but the question is the following:
Are they based on absolute concrete reality or are they pure fiction?
The answer that is being fictional or based on genuine reality will dictate the optimal approach in dealing with them appropriately.
3 Thirdly: Our ego creates unrealistic expectations about people, events, and situations.
Being trapped in them could have negative consequences as far as our cognitive, emotional, behaviour, and interactions with others because they are all hypothetical since the future is unknown, and unpredictable.
