Ego Juice

The ego survives by “juicing” suffering out of thoughts and experiences. It is nourished by energies that are detrimental to life and well-being. It is almost as if the ego once got lost in the desert without food or water and eventually adapted by learning to live off of sand and dirt. :puke The “food” has no nutritional value, but it was all that was available at the time and the ego got used to it.

Let’s look at some examples to see how the ego survives by eating “crap” in day-to-day life.

Let’s say something goes “wrong” in your life. Let’s say you just found out that your wife cheated on you.

Instead of taking an honest look at what role you played in creating this reality and noticing what warning signs you ignored, the ego will automatically create a victim/perpetrator consciousness where it assigns itself the role of innocent victim and makes the other the big bad evil doer. All of the blame and responsibility falls on the wife for it was she who decided to be unfaithful and cheat.

So the ego will seek to justify and make wrong the other person at the cost of Peace, Joy, and Love. Those three states, among others, are fatal to the ego and always compromised as the ego further solidifies its stance. So, by creating the right/wrong, good/bad duality, the ego pushes others away and gets satisfaction from being right, playing the innocent victim, and being the superior ego in the battle.

From the standpoint of the ego, “resolving” this situation requires the strengthening of its own position and attack upon the other ego’s position. It’s black and white. I’m right. You’re wrong. Period.

Now, let’s look at another situation where something starts to go “right” in your life. Let’s say you start to develop a crush on someone you know and the possibility of a new relationship begins to arise.

When you’re off by yourself, all sorts of mental movies and daydreams about the other person will start to play in your head. The mind will start to imagine many different scenarios of what you could do with this person, how they’ll respond to you, the good times the two of you will have, the pleasure each of you will give to the other, and so forth. All of this seems to feel good in the moment, but it’s actually setting you up for failure in the end. Let’s see why.

When the mental movies start playing, you’re being pulled out of the Now moment. What you’re experiencing towards the other is not Love, but the weaker egoic substitute called neediness. The ego begins to project all these expectations on how it thinks the person should be in its ideal world. Once you actually wind up getting to know the person for who they really are, you will inevitably find that they do not live up to your expectations of them and you will begin to feel disappointed. The person never was that way to begin with, but the ego imagined them to be this way and then creates a feeling of disappointment when its illusions turn out to be false. Instead of recognizing the fact that this problem is self-created and illusionary, it sends itself into a state such as disappointment, resentment, let down, or feeling that the other person is not enough.

Expectations can kill relationships. They are not based in reality, yet the expectations can seem to override reality in importance as perceived by the mind. Afterall, the mind-made beliefs have a feeling of “me” associated with them since it was “me” who created them. Thus, they are given an extra feeling of importance, but this is simply narcissistic vanity.

No matter what happens, the ego is always looking for a way to either eat “crap” that already exists or juice an event to extract “crap” from it.

By “crap” I mean anything such as pain, guilt, shame, fear, anxiety, worry, pride, jealousy, superiority, and so on.

Any time you’re experiencing a negative sensation, it’s a sign that you’ve reidentified with the ego and it is juicing something to create suffering.

Warning! Warning!

Use the negative feeling to notice it’s time to come back to the Now moment, to release the stuck energy, and come back to your natural state by reconnecting to the Source within.

Thank you, emotional guidance system, for reminding me it’s time to become Present once again.