A. You need to know
The ego is always in hiding and often in disguise. It is a cunning creature, never showing its own face, so that even the person who wants to destroy its rule is easily tricked into attacking everything else but the ego! Therefore, the first (as well as the final) essential piece of knowledge needed to track it down to its secret lair is how to recognize and identify it. Notebooks 8.4.391
AD: Listen to that… Long or short path or combination, it doesn't matter. You've got to know what it is you're dealing with--so this knowledge is absolutely vital. Anybody who talks about the nonexistence of the ego, or glorifies it, or says it's illusory, all that is besides the point. Standing in Your Own Way
As we read and discuss these quotes, you’ll get a comprehensive picture of what the ego is in terms of its lowest and its highest, the range that it encompasses. On one hand, it’s a projection or a manifestation of the Overself. But on the other hand, you can misidentify yourself with the ego and get lost in the net or the web of illusion that it spins out for you.
…So you have to plant yourself firmly in the middle of everything PB says about the ego and go about systematically exploring what he means by it: metaphysically, ontologically, epistemologically, psychologically. You need to see all these various aspects that it has--instead of assuming that you know it just because you feel nice and warm here and there, now and then. Anything that we can understand about it will be to our benefit.
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When you become aware of the ego in you, it does not mean you know who you are—it means you know who you are not. You take the story of yourself to be yourself. You take what you can know about yourself to be yourself. So, there is a great value to knowing about your ego… to knowing who you are not. It is through knowing who you are not that the greatest obstacle to truly knowing yourself is removed. Eckhart Tolle A New Earth p.189
Ego: matrix of thoughts, emotions, images
There is no real ego but only a quick succession of thoughts which constitutes the “I” process. There is no separate entity forming the personal consciousness but only a series of impressions, ideas, images revolving round a common center. The latter is completely empty; the feeling of something being there derives from a totally different plane--that of the Overself. 8.2.31
AD: "I call it a matrix of possibilities actualizing themselves continuously and uninterruptedly and believing in that actualization. What you call your identity is this constant, incessant process of one thought following another. Don't think of it as a thing....
AD: “just look into yourself, just stop for a moment. Haven’t you noticed that it’s always there, the emptiness you’re running away from ? … A big black hole in you, did you ever notice it? Or don’t you even look that way?. P. 19 Standing in Your Own Way
Ego and consciousness
What is the ego but the Overself surrounded with barriers, conditioned by its instruments--the body, the feelings, and the intellect--and forgetful of its own nature? 8.1.6
The Overself-consciousness is reflected into the ego, which then imagines that it has its own original, and not derived awareness. 1.32
The ego borrows its reality, its power of perception its very capacity to be aware, from its association with the Overself. 8.1.28
AD: The nature of the soul's consciousness is unchanging. What about the nature of the ego? It's changing from instant to instant. Understand the nature of the consciousness that the ego represents, that is from moment to moment...understand the nature of the consciousness which is always abiding, never changing... understand this interrelationship. Standing in Your Own Way
When it is declared that the ego is a fictitious entity, what is meant is that it does not exist as a real entity. Nevertheless, it does exist as a thought. (8:2.32)
Egoism: Entanglement: Mis-Identification
A friend believes he is Napoleon, and we feel so sad. But we say “I am this finite ego-person” we think it is all fine.
Experience as we ordinarily know it is constantly changing contents, lit up by consciousness. As consciousness projects and shines on thoughts (including feelings, images, perceptions), a sense of an ego-I-self arises.
The ego borrows, reflects its sense of being an entity, a self, an I, from the consciousness shining on and in it. In the confusion, the sense of I seem to belong to the ego person, and the ego seems to be conscious
Because this emanated consciousness of the Overself ties itself so completely and so continuously to the thought-series, which after all are its own creations, it identifies itself with the illusory ego produced by their activity and forgets its own larger, less limited origin. 8.2.47
AD: On the one hand, you have the I Am which is present in the matrix of thoughts. And then the matrix of thoughts takes itself to be the I Am, which it is not. That will account for egoism. The consequences are inevitable. Once you accept the congeries of thoughts with that light fused into it as separate, each one is going to think itself superior to every other one. And each thought does. Just like each ego thinks itself superior to every other one.” P.22
I-ness:
The root of all the trouble is not man's wickedness or animality or cunning greedy mind. It is his very I-ness, for all those other evils grow out of it. it is his own ego. Here is the extraordinary and baffling self-contradiction of the human situation. it is man's individual existence which brings him suffering and yet it is this very existence which he holds as dear as life to him. P 139
The ego is by nature a deceiver and in its operations a liar. For if it revealed things as they really are, or told what is profoundly true, it would have to expose its own self as the arch-trickster pretending to be the man himself and proffering the illusion of happiness. 8.3.79
Egoism: Self-separation of thoughts
The ego is after all only an idea. It derives its seeming actuality from a higher source. If we make the inner effort to search for its origin we shall eventually find the Mind in which this idea originated. That mind is the Overself. This search is the Quest. The self-separation of the idea from the mind which makes its existence possible, is egoism. (8:1.9)
The personal ego of man forms itself out of the impersonal life of the universe like a wave forming itself out of the ocean. It constricts, confines, restricts, and limits that infinite life to a small finite area. The wave does just the same to the water of the ocean. The ego shuts out so much of the power and intelligence contained in the universal being that it seems to belong to an entirely different and utterly inferior order of existence. The wave, too, since it forms itself only on the surface of the water gives no indication in its tiny stature of the tremendous depth and breadth and volume of water beneath it. The work of the quest is simply this: to free the ego from its self-imposed limitations, to let the wave of conscious being subside and straighten itself out into the waters whence it came. The little wave is thus reconverted into the infinite Overself. 8.1.102
AD: Once it takes itself to be that bundle of thoughts, it cuts itself off from the ocean.
S: How could that idea take itself to be anything else than what it is?
AD: Self-will. To your first question, self-will. Go over what you said: What is there in it that makes it take itself to be other than it is? You’ve got to look it straight in the eyes Standing in Your Own Way
Egoism: powerful habit energy
This wrong self-identification is not only a metaphysical error but also a mental habit. We may correct the error intellectually but we shall still have to deal with the habit. So deeply ingrained is it that only a total effort can successfully alter it. That effort is called the Quest. P9
AD: It’s the emotional attachment to this separativeness that is the problem. The ego is dependent on that emotional attachment to its separateness. That’s what keeps it going. Otherwise if a person could understand that metaphysically--he should be released. Right? But it doesn’t work like that. The emotional attachment persists. If that emotional support was taken away, you would feel like you were falling into an abyss. Standing in Your Waty
The ego is a collection of thoughts circulating around a fixed but empty centre. If the habits of many, many reincarnations had not given them such strength and persistence, they could be voided. The reality--MIND--could then reveal Itself. 8.2.37
AD: The constant self-reconstitution of a self is what PB calls ego. “it can provide itself with all the necessary means and material to persist in its own identity.”
The ego has been around as long as the Overself has been projecting itself and manifesting through some kind of life. The residue of that living is a strong tendency, or matrix of habits, which is not a real entity, but powerful enough to keep you from recognizing yourself.” Standing in Your Own Way P.12
Mental and spiritual evolution are both Sacred!
How can person fully express himself unless he fully develops himself? The spiritual evolution which requires him to abandon the ego runs parallel to the mental evolution which requires him to perfect it. 8.1.158 1982 0908
AD "Read the natal planets from the transiting, not the other way around. ... We as individual are the transiting Chaldeans. That's what we really are. That is your undivided, spontaneously active mind. Identify yourself with the transiting Chaldeans; that gives you the opportunity to identify with the illuminating idea which is coming in.
...Now the rational soul is always going around that (the natal) and it's trying to make necessary additions, subtractions--whatever's necessary to perfect the ego. That's a part of the mental perfection that PB's speaking about. . . . The development and refinement of the ego is taking place because you're constantly having [Chaldean] transits going on. . . . Whereas the spiritual evolution would be implemented through the outer three planets [Uranus, Neptune and Pluto]--which require abandoning the ego—
The ego to which he is so attached turns out on enquiry to be none other than the presence of World-Mind within his own heart. If identification is then shifted by constant practice from one to the other, he has achieved the purpose of life. 8.1.127
Light of Soul and Organized Body
We said that in order for there to be an individual existence we had to think of this infinite light or this mind which is boundless--we can’t speak about it, except in this sense of being authentic being. And only when this is associated with, or permeates a cluster of thought, can you speak about an individual existent. And then I went further and gave the example: Now I examine into my behavior, into my thinking, and every time I have a thought, I can see that that thought is a manifestation of the degrees I’m working with. SIW?
… through this very medium, the organization of the earth's memories into a functioning entity, is imparted a ray of light or mind by the individual soul,”
This partial consciousness streaming out through the organism gives rise to an appearance, the image of the world, within which it finds itself situated and it is these images in their totality that will constitute the lowest level of knowledge as for instance in Plato's divided line.
So we must bear in mind that these bodies [-minds] are the medium through which a soul becomes sensitive to the sensible world--but these bodies are at the same time agents of the powers that are continuously being organized by the planetary powers.
It would be correct to speak of the light of the soul as having this knowledge of the ideas. It would be included in what we refer to as that mental being which as it reincarnates a sufficient number of times accumulates within itself a content of the ideas. The other way of looking at it would say that the soul already has these ideas within it, and the experience on earth provides the occasion by which these ideas are evoked in its memory. And a combination of these two I think would be the answer to that....The ideas already exist in the soul, and by experiences in the world, these ideas are called forth or evoked. Or what they call reminiscences -- they're brought forth, and you can recognize that that is a square or whatever because the idea is, to begin with, in the soul. But we're saying that a combination of both would account for the evolution, the unfoldment and the spiritual maturation of the human being. Otherwise there would be no reason for him to come here, if he knew what the ideas in the soul were all about. 10/14/83
Looking into Mind Copyright 2019