I met one of my favorite authors at his book signing. I asked if he was happy with the book. He said he would have completed it much sooner had he been less important to himself. He offered a wry smile. It felt like he was telling me something about myself.
I have always been important to myself. I carry self significance around like a weight. It precedes me everywhere. I remember seeing Sam Kinison on stage. The crowd erupted in anticipation before he even walked out. I wanted that power, the kind that announces itself and demands its place. The kind that seems overbearing to others, yet feels like a minimum level of self-protection to me.
Once, I was hired to tell jokes at a party. The host, our benefactor, nodded and smiled but never laughed. At the end of the night, when he paid me, I asked him why he never laughed at my jokes. He said, “Because I feel like you’re forcing me to.” It hit me. My need to coerce people for my validation was pretty narcissistic. We all have ego. We place ourselves at the center. Some of us close ourselves off completely to feedback, creating an impenetrable wall. We protect ourselves from a safe distance, all the while suffering crushing doubt and loneliness inside the performative fortress.
This is a description of my style of ego. Your mileage may vary. But we all try and control our lives from an insulated booth removed from everything else. We all have our style and we are all generally trapped there. It is said that ego is like a general that becomes more powerful than the king. In an ironic reversal, the king now serves the general. Ego is a like defensive blister on the self that becomes inflamed anger or is threatened. The self is semi-permeable, allowing communication. Ego, however, tries to control everything to protect the self. Some people bruise their environment, like I did. Others pull inward, making everyone come to them. Some are late, making others wait. Some are generous, marking their good deeds. These are styles of imprisonment. The tools we use to defend ourselves become our prison guards.
We diminish our hearts. We cut ourselves off from sustenance. We compete with everything, seeking protection and power. We become like a government under martial law, curtailing information, stopping openness, becoming vicious little creatures who see what they believe. Each of us has a style, but all are controlling and because of that ego is limiting. The surest way to control life is to reduce life to a manageable size.
Ego is ignorant of itself. It protects our self-awareness by demanding control. This sets up massive expectations without us even knowing what or why. Sometimes, I can’t get out of bed. Many have felt that. My version was embarrassment for not living up to the outsized expectations my ego set. I was too important to myself to be myself. I had to be larger or smaller than life.
The antidote to this neurosis is awareness. With meditation practice we grow our awareness and begin to see the defensive patterns that limit us. We live in extremes to avoid seeing ourselves. Like a black hole, we can’t see the ego directly, but we see its effects. Hurt people hurt people. We inflate when hurt, trying to become bigger. Or deflate when threatened, trying to be invisible
But ego isn’t the problem; cherishing the self is. Protecting, building, and cherishing the self creates pain. Meditation helps us see clearly, without judgment. We see how we hurt others and ourselves, how we limit ourselves. We develop mindfulness—awareness of body, life force, life itself, and emotions. We start to unpack the ego net that has ensnared us, making us it’s puppet.
If we give up all the things that make us “me,” we might find ourselves connected to everything else. This is a much richer and more sustainable place to be than living in our projections, which is a lot of work.
Carrying around the weight of all of the expectations of having to live up to the idea of “me” is exhausting. Carrying around the baggage of our defensive habitual patterns is exhausting. Looking at other people only as a means to substantiate ourselves also cuts us off from the sustenance we get from connecting spiritually to other people and to the world around us. We are starving ourselves spiritually as we try to gorge ourselves materially. We work so hard to substantiate this fiction of “me.”
This makes our life incredibly heavy and incredibly sad, because we are cutting ourselves off from true connection to each other and cutting ourselves off from connection to the environment. We are cutting ourselves off from leading healthy, lives connected to all of the life around us.
And we create this idea that we are so special that we deserve everything we could possibly get in the world, and yet our ego is never satisfied. So we need more and more things to make it feel as though it’s protecting us. So, in order to protect us, the ego is demanding that we do all of this work and put all of this effort into its own self-substantiation. It’s as though the country’s entire economy is being subsumed into a military that’s nominally there to protect them but actually is parasitically feeding off them. And that’s what begins to happen with ego when it’s unchecked. It parasitically feeds off us. It’s supposed to protect us, but we end up having living up to it.
And ego does not disengage easily. That’s why we resist meditation. That’s why we are threatened in relationships. That’s why we are too tight to orgasm. Because these are all moments when the “me” thing falls apart. We don’t like that because we absolutely need to control the world. We end up grabbing and clinging and carrying and expecting – living with this incredible, unbearable weight of being “me.”
Trungpa Rinpoche likened walking around with an ego to our wearing a clown suit carrying a teaspoon filled with water. We are trying so hard to not spill a drop.
Meanwhile we’re wearing a clown suit.
I admire you ability to write Joe. What popped into my head was…..no weight if no scales.
Ooo, I like that Sandy