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You made a mistake and you learnt from it. It is no longer a mistake. [url]www.steemit.com/@gokike[/url].

Ola: Good evening Uche.

Uche: Good evening Ola. How are you?

Ola: I am fine. And you?

Uche: Same with me. I believe you have come as usual for a discussion.

Ola: Yes, you are right. My discussions with you has been helping me to understand some things that seemed confusing to me.

Uche: So, what are we going to be discussing about today?

Ola: Why Christ had to die.

Uche: I see. Let me hear you.

Ola: Sometimes I do not seem to understand God. I mean, why would Christ have to die before God could forgive man’s sin. I am tempted to ask, “Which kind of God is this?” Couldn’t God just forgive man without the sacrifice of Christ? God is omnipotent, he can do all things. Why then could he not forgive man without Christ having to die?

Uche: From the way and manner you asked it, this question seems to have been bothering you.

Ola: Somewhat.

Uche: Let us start from the gravity of sin.

Ola: Alright. I am listening.

Uche: The higher the dignity of a person, the greater the gravity of the offence committed against that person. Take for instance the act of slapping. If your friend, David, slaps his younger brother, John, for no reason at all, is that right?

Ola: Of course not.

Uche: What if David slaps his elder sister, Judith, for no reason?

Ola: That is even worse than slapping his younger brother, John.

Uche: Now imagine David slapping his father?

Ola: Ah! That is the worst of all.

Uche: Do you see that even though the act was the same for all three of them – a slap – the gravity of the offence increased according to the dignity of the person offended?

Ola: Yes, I see.

Uche: Now when we sin, it is like us “slapping” God.

Ola: Oh, I see. God has infinite dignity so a sin against God is infinitely grievous.

Uche: Precisely. God is infinitely perfect, thus his dignity is limitless. Hence, the malice of an offence against God is an infinite malice. It is an evil which cannot be measured. Now an infinite malice requires an infinite atonement. But man does not have the power to make an infinite atonement for an infinite malice against a perfect being with limitless dignity.

Ola: That makes a lot of sense to me. I now see why the sacrifice of animals, as was being done in the Old Testament, was not sufficient to pay for sins once and for all. Every year they had to keep offering sacrifice.

Uche: Right. If it is not within the power of man to do anything of infinite worth, animals cannot possibly suffice.

Ola: But why Christ?

Uche: Man committed the sin and it is proper that man pays for the sin. That is justice. Who do you think can do anything of infinite worth?

Ola: God.

Uche: So, there has to a person who being man and through his action pays for the sin man committed and being God, his action will carry an infinite worth that will once and for all atone for man’s sin. And who do you think that person is?

Ola: Jesus Christ – true God and true man.

I write and speak on the transformation of consciousness. Once your consciousness is transformed, there is a shift inside you. You may not know this consciously when it happens but when it does, something changes deep inside you which you may not be able to explain initially. Your experience of life becomes different. Addiction, anxiety, worry, pain, and other negative things you have been expereincing give way to peace, joy, and love. This is my purpose in the lives of people. You can digest more of my content by going through this thread: https://www.nairaland.com/4639514/conscious-evolution or visiting https://steemit.com/@gokike.

Transcend your Mind

Many thoughts arise without you even knowing it. You usually end up identifying with these thoughts and that defines your experience. So you have many worries, many troubles which do not seem to be going away. Even though you are not conscious of your identification with your thoughts, you still suffer the consequences.

Say you have to get your car fixed. You know you have to get your car fixed but that thought keeps repeating itself asking to be resolved. You carry the thought which seems to have a hundred pound weight on your shoulders. Now your thought tells you life is not the way it is supposed to be and will not be as it is supposed to be until the car is fixed. All of a sudden the mechanic calls to tell you, “I cannot come until Monday.” This hurts you as you have to carry the hundred pound weight around until Monday. Many thoughts arise fast in your life – car fixing, appointment with the doctor, office work with deadline, rent payment. When you are asleep in the night, you are in a state of deep peace and you are free from all your identifications. You wake up. Boom! Mind activity resumes and the mind at a terrible speed looks for something to identify with and quickly finds the car to be fixed, the appointment with the doctor, the office work with a deadline, the rent. While you were asleep you were at peace but now you are awake and thanks to your mind, your life appears miserable.

It is not as if you do not have what you may call good thoughts. The presence of the “good” and “bad” thoughts creates conflict. You want one over the other and the result is stress. The remedy is not to have one thought over another but to stop identifying with your thoughts altogether. You can witness your thoughts by being the watcher of your thoughts. You can bring your attention to what is here and now. And by doing so you break the thought pattern and your identification with thought.

Right now you are breathing. It is happening in this moment but you are hardly aware of that. In your natural state of being you have peace. This peace is not some emotional experience which takes place on the surface. This peace is deep within you and you have it regardless of your life situation. The activities of your mind however obscures you from experiencing that peace. To experience that peace means you are no longer identified with thoughts. The car still have to be fixed, you still have to see the doctor, office work has to be completed, rent has to be paid, but you are no longer wearing these like a hat. The hundred pound weight is off your shoulder. What you may not know is this: When you lose your identification with thought and experience the peace that is an aspect of the nature of your being, you have opened yourself up to the creativity that lies within you and this brings up ideas and leads you to take steps that will be helpful in changing the situation you consider undesirable.
So we are hindered and kept down in many ways when we believe that our thoughts are literal representations of our circumstances, people, ourselves and things around us. That is an illusion. If I say, “Orange,” you know what I am referring to but the word “orange” is not what the thing is – orange. In the same way, your thoughts about your parent, sibling, friends, situation, or anything else, are not what those people or things are. The mind which produces thought is a wonderful instrument helpful in the creative process. It is also necessary for practical day-to-day living. But to use the mind as an interpretative tool for situations, people, and things can be highly misleading. It can trap you in an illusion where you think what you think is real.

I write and speak on the transformation of consciousness. Once your consciousness is transformed, there is a shift inside you. You may not know this consciously when it happens but when it does, something changes deep inside you which you may not be able to explain initially. Your experience of life becomes different. Addiction, anxiety, worry, pain, and other negative things you have been expereincing give way to peace, joy, and love. This is my purpose in the lives of people. You can digest more of my content by going through this thread or visiting https://steemit.com/@gokike.

If you would like me to come speak at your event, seminar, or retreat on the transformation of consciousness, call or WhatsApp 08034140381.

Transcend your Mind

Many thoughts arise without you even knowing it. You usually end up identifying with these thoughts and that defines your experience. So you have many worries, many troubles which do not seem to be going away. Even though you are not conscious of your identification with your thoughts, you still suffer the consequences.

Say you have to get your car fixed. You know you have to get your car fixed but that thought keeps repeating itself asking to be resolved. You carry the thought which seems to have a hundred pound weight on your shoulders. Now your thought tells you life is not the way it is supposed to be and will not be as it is supposed to be until the car is fixed. All of a sudden the mechanic calls to tell you, “I cannot come until Monday.” This hurts you as you have to carry the hundred pound weight around until Monday. Many thoughts arise fast in your life – car fixing, appointment with the doctor, office work with deadline, rent payment. When you are asleep in the night, you are in a state of deep peace and you are free from all your identifications. You wake up. Boom! Mind activity resumes and the mind at a terrible speed looks for something to identify with and quickly finds the car to be fixed, the appointment with the doctor, the office work with a deadline, the rent. While you were asleep you were at peace but now you are awake and thanks to your mind, your life appears miserable.

It is not as if you do not have what you may call good thoughts. The presence of the “good” and “bad” thoughts creates conflict. You want one over the other and the result is stress. The remedy is not to have one thought over another but to stop identifying with your thoughts altogether. You can witness your thoughts by being the watcher of your thoughts. You can bring your attention to what is here and now. And by doing so you break the thought pattern and your identification with thought.

Right now you are breathing. It is happening in this moment but you are hardly aware of that. In your natural state of being you have peace. This peace is not some emotional experience which takes place on the surface. This peace is deep within you and you have it regardless of your life situation. The activities of your mind however obscures you from experiencing that peace. To experience that peace means you are no longer identified with thoughts. The car still have to be fixed, you still have to see the doctor, office work has to be completed, rent has to be paid, but you are no longer wearing these like a hat. The hundred pound weight is off your shoulder. What you may not know is this: When you lose your identification with thought and experience the peace that is an aspect of the nature of your being, you have opened yourself up to the creativity that lies within you and this brings up ideas and leads you to take steps that will be helpful in changing the situation you consider undesirable.
So we are hindered and kept down in many ways when we believe that our thoughts are literal representations of our circumstances, people, ourselves and things around us. That is an illusion. If I say, “Orange,” you know what I am referring to but the word “orange” is not what the thing is – orange. In the same way, your thoughts about your parent, sibling, friends, situation, or anything else, are not what those people or things are. The mind which produces thought is a wonderful instrument helpful in the creative process. It is also necessary for practical day-to-day living. But to use the mind as an interpretative tool for situations, people, and things can be highly misleading. It can trap you in an illusion where you think what you think is real.

I write and speak on the transformation of consciousness. Once your consciousness is transformed, there is a shift inside you. You may not know this consciously when it happens but when it does, something changes deep inside you which you may not be able to explain initially. Your experience of life becomes different. Addiction, anxiety, worry, pain, and other negative things you have been experiencing give way to peace, joy, and love. This is my purpose in the lives of people. You can digest more of my content by going through this thread or visiting https://steemit.com/@gokike.

If you would like me to come speak at your event, seminar, or retreat on the transformation of consciousness, call or WhatsApp 08034140381.

gnwaokike@gmail.com

Recovery from Emotional Pain

As we go through life, we sustain physical injuries. However we have access to bandages and ointments to treat cuts and sprains. We also sustain what we may call psychological injuries. But you hardly know how to treat emotional pain and you end up brooding over memories or thoughts that are distressing to you. The urge to brood over them is compelling. Over time, stress hormones are released into your bloodstream which can put you at an increased risk for cardiovascular disease.

You have ideas about how things should be in your life but those ideas collide with how things are presently. Sometimes you torment yourself about choices you have made or a path you did not follow. Or you may find yourself postponing your happiness with thoughts about what is wrong now or what is missing. Thus, you live in the future. You fail to see that your pain arises from your thoughts.
It is easy for the body to let go of pain the moment the underlying cause is healed but the mind has a sort of instinct for holding on. It finds it difficult to let go. With the use of your mind you create suffering and you imprison yourself in this suffering. You then forget that you created what seems to have imprisoned you so you do not even know that they key to your liberation is with you.

We can feel overwhelmed by the intensity of a strong emotion and simply not know how to deal with it. As a result, we unconsciously try to suppress our feelings and in the process form various coping mechanisms. We suppress our feelings because we seem to believe that we will die if we feel them. So growing up, we have learnt how to push intense emotions down into the subconscious. In trying to survive under challenging circumstances, we not only turn away from emotional pain, we also deny it. But even though we unconsciously suppress the feelings, their energy operates in our lives. You may be cut off from your feelings but that does not mean that they are not there. You are only trying to protect yourself from what you perceive to be intolerable. You feel powerless. So you go about your life pretending to be fine but in the background, there is a feeling which ranges from some sort of uneasiness to intense emotional pain. You wish you had a word to define or describe it.

We often make the mistake of believing that it is something outside that makes us anxious, angry, or afraid. But the cause of every emotion is within. Outside events can only serve as triggers. Give permission to yourself to feel your emotion. See it and experience it. You have been running away from your feeling. First, stop running. Now summon the courage to turn inward and face the pain. You will not die. Your emotion will not kill you even though it seems it will. Your thoughts however can kill you – suicide. So do not dwell in your thoughts but you can bring your presence to your emotion. If you are conscious and allow your emotion to be without labeling or judging it, you create a space around it such that the emotion feels safe to leave.

Do you want to heal that emotional pain? Go within and let it rise into your conscious awareness. Care enough about yourself to spend time with yourself looking within. There is an infinite source of wellbeing and emotional support available to you. But this is available to you from within. What you call negative emotion lets you know that something needs to be seen within you. The negative emotion is therefore calling for your attention. It is calling for your presence. Go within.

I write and speak on the transformation of consciousness. Once your consciousness is transformed, there is a shift inside you. You may not know this consciously when it happens but when it does, something changes deep inside you which you may not be able to explain initially. Your experience of life becomes different. Addiction, anxiety, worry, pain, and other negative things you have been expereincing give way to peace, joy, and love. This is my purpose in the lives of people. You can digest more of my content by going through this thread or visiting https://steemit.com/@gokike.

If you would like me to come speak at your event, seminar, or retreat on the transformation of consciousness, call or WhatsApp 08034140381.

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Accept the Now

You may want a life that is predictable, a life in which you have control over everything that happens in your life. But the reality is that your life is unpredictable. We are in a world of forms and no form is permanent. So things come and go and even form changes form. You are not able to choose what happens in your life but you can choose how you respond to what happens. Respond not react. When people react, they are not in alignment with reality. When you accept what is, you align with the Now and your power is ready to manifest as a response. What you do when you are in alignment with the Now will have the power to move you forward which is a step in changing the situation you consider undesirable.
Accepting the Now is the beginning of the end of suffering. It is a liberating experience. By accepting what is, a new door will be opened for you to go through. But when you do not accept what is, you struggle. What is already is and you are fighting it. That is insanity. It is a fight you can never win. To accept what is is to accept the truth and this will set you free.

Acceptance does not mean that you do not desire in any way to change your present situation. No. Acceptance does not imply helplessness. On the contrary, it is when you have accepted what is that you can really move past it. You go deeper in yourself and you find a new resource, a new way, or a new opportunity. You act with what you have found to create a different life situation for yourself. This is how you change your situation. Accept, then act. See what happens afterwards.

You do not need to create an identity out of what you have accepted. Say for instance you told a lie and you have fully accepted that you lied, if you create an identity for yourself by saying, “I accept myself the way I am. I am a liar,” then you are keeping yourself stuck. In such a situation, there is hardly any chance for change. Acceptance is realizing the situation as it is. It is unnecessary and not helpful to identify with it. No singular act, whether you describe it as good or bad, can define who you are.

In his book, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, Eckhart Tolle narrates the session he had with a woman in her thirties. When she started telling Eckhart her story, she began to sob uncontrollably. She felt lonely and unfulfilled with much anger and sadness. She had been abused as a child by a physically violent father. Eckhart quickly saw that her pain was not caused by her present life circumstances but by an extraordinarily heavy pain-body (which I simply refer to as the pain entity in her). Eckhart saw that the pain in her had become the filter through which she viewed her life situation. She was unable then to see the link between the emotional pain and her thoughts and she was completely identified with both. So with her thoughts she fed the pain in her and this resulted to a deeply unhappy self.

Eckhart directed the focus of her attention to what she was feeling inside her body and asked her to sense the emotion directly, instead of through the filter of her unhappy thoughts. Thinking that this was a way into her unhappiness instead of a way out of it, she reluctantly did what she was asked to do. Tears rolled down her face while her body was shaking. “At this moment, this is what you feel,” Eckhart said. “There is nothing you can do about the fact that at this moment this is what you feel. Now instead of wanting this moment to be different from the way it is, which adds more pain to the pain that is already there, is it possible for you to completely accept that this is what you feel right now?”¹

She was quiet for a moment. Suddenly she looked impatient, as if she was about to get up, and she said angrily, “No, I don’t want to accept this.” “Who is speaking?” I (Eckhart) asked her. “You or the unhappiness in you? Can you see that your unhappiness about being unhappy is just another layer of unhappiness?” She became quiet again. “I am not asking you to do anything. All I’m asking is that you find out whether it is possible for you to allow those feelings to be there. In other words, and this may sound strange, if you don’t mind being unhappy, what happens to the unhappiness? Don’t you want to find out?”

She looked puzzled briefly, and after a minute or so of sitting silently, I suddenly noticed a significant shift in her energy field. She said, “This is weird. I’m still unhappy, but now there is space around it. It seems to matter less…” That space, of course, comes when there is inner acceptance of whatever you are experiencing in the present moment.

I didn’t say much else, allowing her to be with the experience. Later she came to understand that the moment she stopped identifying with the feeling, the old painful emotion that lived in her, the moment she put her attention on it directly without trying to resist it, it could no longer control her thinking and so become mixed up with a mentally constructed story called “The Unhappy Me.” Another dimension had come into her life that transcended her personal past – the dimension of presence… Emotion in itself is not unhappiness. Only emotion plus an unhappy story is unhappiness.²

I write and speak on the transformation of consciousness. Once your consciousness is transformed, there is a shift inside you. You may not know this consciously when it happens but when it does, something changes deep inside you which you may not be able to explain initially. Your experience of life becomes different. Addiction, anxiety, worry, pain, and other negative things you have been expereincing give way to peace, joy, and love. This is my purpose in the lives of people. You can digest more of my content by going through this thread or visiting https://steemit.com/@gokike.

If you would like me to come speak at your event, seminar, or retreat on the transformation of consciousness, call or WhatsApp 08034140381.

Notes
1. Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, 2005, Penguin Group, New York, USA, p. 165.
2. Ibid., pp. 165 - 166

Pain is Due to Non-acceptance

As I talk about pain, I am not referring to physical pain or such pain that can be felt if you touch a hot stove. When you feel the heat from the stove, you quickly remove your hand. You responded to an external situation by removing your hand when you felt the heat. The pain I am referring to is the mental-emotional pain which is as a result of your internal response to a situation.

You are upset – understandably upset – about a situation you consider undesirable. You get angry and question how unfair life is to you. You are not at ease with the current situation. Your thoughts have taken over you and your body has responded with the feeling of distress. You are in pain but you do not stop there. You are in resistance to the pain so you deny it. The consequence is suffering – pain plus resistance. The pain is real and you are fighting against what is real, what is. You suffer.

A common form of resistance is people rejecting their emotions. You feel anger towards your brother for instance and instead of acknowledging the feeling of anger which is there, you deny it. So you experience an inner conflict with your anger as you continue to harbour the anger. If you want a change for the better, acceptance is the first step. But many people find acceptance difficult. Perhaps they have these beliefs about acceptance unconsciously:

• If I accept this painful situation, I will give in to it and it will take over my life.
• If I do not accept this it will miraculously change and I will not have to face it.
• If I accept this painful situation, I am accepting a life of pain without end.

But how do you move on to problem solving without first accepting that what you call problem is? Let us assume you do not like the colour brown. Then you move into a house where the room is brown. If you refuse to accept that the room is brown because you do not like the colour, you will be fighting reality and that will make you suffer. You deny the colour of the room which you do not like while still living in the room. The room remains brown. You get so caught up in denial that you do not change anything. Accepting the brownness of the room is the first step to having that room painted with a colour you like. Acceptance is not approval. It is not the same thing as judging something good. Acceptance is acknowledging what is. That is the beginning of your freedom from suffering.

The way your child died, the way your father treated you, the way your husband cheated on you, these may be hard to accept. The memory comes with pain and so you avoid the painful thoughts. When this avoidance becomes habitual, it turns to denial. Denial makes it difficult for you to be aware of the pain in yourself or in others. So here you are hoping to eliminate the pain through denial. Ironically, the denial perpetuates the pain.

I write and speak on the transformation of consciousness. Once your consciousness is transformed, there is a shift inside you. You may not know this consciously when it happens but when it does, something changes deep inside you which you may not be able to explain initially. Your experience of life becomes different. Addiction, anxiety, worry, pain, and other negative things you have been expereincing give way to peace, joy, and love. This is my purpose in the lives of people. You can digest more of my content by going through this thread or visiting https://steemit.com/@gokike.

If you would like me to come speak at your event, seminar, or retreat on the transformation of consciousness, call or WhatsApp 08034140381.

Suppressing an emotion does not mean you have dealt with it. It may seem as if you are protecting yourself by shutting off your emotion but that is not really what you are doing. Many cultures believe that it is a masculine quality to suppress emotion and that the expression of emotion qualifies one as weak. Avoiding your emotions never makes them go away. If the same situation that led to the emotion were to happen again, you are likely to find it more difficult to manage. In fact suppressing your emotion can strengthen it. If you feel pain because your girlfriend left you, you may try to avoid the pain by watching movies, going out or chatting, however, the pain is still present in you and a little incident can trigger it and cause you to overreact to the situation. Effects of consistent emotion suppression include high blood pressure, stress, and heart disease. While I was having a conversation with a lady one day, she told me she does not forgive anyone who has made her cry. Even if she tries to forgive, she will never forget. When someone does something which makes her feel hurt, she does not tell the person about her hurt but she carries it within her. Hardly does the person know how hurt she has come to be. There was a time someone very close to her was giving her a cold treatment. She was very much hurt by this as she never expected such a treatment from the other person. I asked her to go have a discussion with the person concerning this and she was emphatic that she would never do such. She expected the other person to talk to her about whatever she may have done that led to the cold treatment instead of being quiet about it. At a point while we were talking she broke down in tears. I saw clearly that this lady was suppressing so much emotion in her. I saw a child who was feeling hurt. She was able to discuss this with me but not with the other person involved in this even though the discussion would have been a forward step in letting go of the pent-up emotion. In a matter of minutes she was back to her old state. Now she smiles but the emotion is not gone. It has gone back to its dormant state waiting for a situation to activate it again.

There is so much pain in the world but the greater part of human pain is unnecessary. This pain is self-created but we are hardly aware of this due to unconsciousness. When the mind possesses you and runs your life, you are unconscious and in such a state, you will create pain for yourself and activate other people’s pain.

Pain comes in when you are in resistance to something particularly to what is. So behind pain, you find non-acceptance. You have what is but you do not accept it, so you resist it. Your resistance then brings about pain. Your resistance is in your thought in which you have judged what is. You have judged what is and labeled it unacceptable. So you are in resistance. This reflects in your emotion which manifests as negativity. The greater the degree of your resistance to what is, the present moment, the greater the intensity of your pain. You have the present moment but you are denying it, you want to escape from it. This gives you pain and you suffer, the consequence of mind identification.
When you suppress your negative emotion, you are avoiding it. You are trying to escape from it so you do not even bother to look at it. Since you do not face it, you do not see the negative emotion for what it is, you do not see what it is in the present moment. You succeed in suppressing it. But is the pain gone? No. The pain cannot be completely dissolved without you fully facing it. So you have a remnant of the pain as you go about your life situation.

We have much to learn from nature and even animals if only we could be present and watch or listen. Hear Eckhart Tolle:

In “The Power of Now,” I mentioned my observation that after two ducks get into a fight, which never lasts long, they will separate and float off in opposite directions. Then each duck will flap its wings vigorously a few times, thus releasing the surplus energy that built up during the fight. After they flap their wings, they float on peacefully, as if nothing ever happened.
If the duck had a human mind, it would keep the fight alive by thinking, by story-making. This would probably be the duck’s story: “I don’t believe what he just did. He came to within five inches of me. He thinks he owns this pond. He has no consideration for my private space. I’ll never trust him again. Next time he’ll try something else just to annoy me. I’m sure he’s plotting something already. But I’m not going to stand for this. I’ll teach him a lesson he won’t forget.” And on and on the mind spins its tales, still thinking and talking about it days, months, or years later. As far as the body is concerned, the fight is still continuing, and the energy it generates in response to all those thoughts is emotion, which in turn generates more thinking. This becomes the emotional thinking of the ego. You can see how problematic the duck’s life would become if it had a human mind. But this is how most humans live all the time. No situation or event is ever really finished. The mind and the mind-made “me and my story” keep it going.¹

Eckhart goes on to say, “Flap your wings” which means “let go of the story.” Let go of that story and return to Now. The Now is your place of power.
Instead of dwelling in the Now and paying brief visits to the past and future when necessary to deal with the practical aspects of life situation, most people are living in the past and future and paying brief visits to the Now. So they exist but they do not live. Show me the past. Show me where it is except in your thought. You do not have the past, it does not exist. Neither do you have the future. What you have is the present moment and you are not even living in it. What are you doing with your life then?

You are not willing or not yet able to let go of situations internally so your story stays and accumulates more pain. That is a heavy burden of the past you are carrying in your mind and you carry it about. What you call past is memory and memories are not a problem in themselves. You can learn from your memories, your past mistakes. But when thoughts about the past take over you, you become imprisoned by them. In such a situation you are in resistance. You are resisting the present moment so you are not in it. You are in a state of non-acceptance.

Note:

1. Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, 2005, Penguin Group, New York, USA, pp. 137-138.

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Emotion: The Reflection of the Mind on the Body

You are here now but your mind is not. Your mind has raced to the future and it does not see good. It sees “bad” things coming, “bad” things that will happen to you. And you feel something in your body. Something we call emotion. Your mind is at work and your body is reacting. Emotion is your body’s reaction to your mind.

Love, joy, and peace are aspects of your true nature. When you are still without the activity of your mind trying to sabotage you, you can experience true love, true joy, and inner peace. They are connected to your being. They do not have opposite because they do not arise from the mind but from beyond it.

When you are unconscious, you often call pleasure joy. But it is not. Joy arises from within you but you derive pleasure from something external. When that thing that gives you pleasure leaves you, you feel pain due to its absence. The thing may even give you pleasure today and tomorrow give you pain. When it comes to addiction, the “high” gives you pleasure and the “low” that follows afterwards gives you pain. In this way, pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin. This is nothing like the aspects of your true nature – love, joy, peace - which you cannot get from external things.

These aspects of your true nature are obscured by the activity of your mind. Through thinking compulsively, your mind serves as a noise-maker that hinders your connection to your nature. You do not feel connected to your true nature because you are not conscious. Love, joy, peace are already part of you. Seeking them in external things is vain. They are within you already. What you have to do is to connect to your true nature. The sky may be cloudy but that does not mean that the sun is gone. On the other side of the cloudy sky is the sun. It is there but obscured by the clouds. Your true nature is, but it is obscured by the mind. The mind cannot however destroy your true nature. The disturbance of your mind causes you to feel emotion. That is literally what emotion means – “disturbance.” The word “emotion” comes from the Latin emovere which means “to disturb.”

There is an energetic charge that results from the amplification of a thought pattern. You feel this as emotion. The emotion usually succeeds in taking over you because you are not conscious. You have not being able to bring the presence of your being into the Now. With enough presence, your emotion cannot take over you. But you lack presence and you identify with the emotion unconsciously. In other words, the emotion becomes “you.” A loop develops between your thinking and your emotion. Both power each other. The thought pattern which is magnified results into an emotion in your body. You magnify the thought by giving it your attention and dwelling on it. The emotion this creates energizes the thought pattern. And it goes on: the thinking-emotion loop.

The emotion gives you pain and your mind fights the pain so that it can remove it. But it never succeeds. Imagine the Inspector General of Police trying to find a murderer where he himself is the murderer. The mind can never find the solution to emotional pain because it is part of the problem.
The solution then is to free yourself from your mind. Disidentify with your mind and become conscious. The mind which has held a place of power is toppled and you connect to your being. This is consciousness. When you are conscious, the true nature of your Being will reveal itself.

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Pain

Emotional pain is as real as physical pain. We have all experienced it. However, the way most people deal with emotional pain is different from how they deal with physical pain. When we have physical pain, we hardly deny it. We have no problem going to see a doctor about it so that the pain is looked at and treated. If someone breaks a leg for instance, there is no hesitation in going to see an orthopedist and taking pain relievers to stop the leg from hurting. There is hardly any negative self talk or blame like, “You fool. You good-for-nothing. What can you do right? You broke your leg due to your stupidity.” But when we feel emotional pain, we hardly ask for help. What do we do? We deny it or we look for something to distract us from feeling the pain. We seem to find it hard to deal with emotional pain or even get help. For a broken leg, you know that something is wrong. But for an emotional pain, you may not know that something is wrong with you apart from your pain. Also, a broken leg is a broken leg but each person’s emotional pain can manifest in different ways or symptoms.

When you experience emotional pain, people may not know that you are in pain. You may even doubt that there is something wrong. Added to that is your negative self talk, “You are a loser… You will never amount to anything... This is all in your head…Come on, snap out of it.” Your mind goes on and on. You do not want to admit to anyone that you are not feeling well and so you end up self-medicating with distractions – watching TV, going on social media, going for an outing. You end up pretending to be happy. You think the pain is gone but it has not. You have covered it up probably with an addiction. The pain is there. It is dormant but it is there. When it awakens, it will demand for food. The food will be your negative thought or emotion, or other people’s reactions. When the pain is being fed, you are not conscious. Somehow the pain possesses you then. The result is drama. You blame others for how they make you feel and your feeling then is the consequence of believing the story in your head.

Psychologists have used four experiments to discover how people get over emotional or physical pain. In their paper When Hurt Will Not Heal: Exploring the Capacity to Relieve Social and Physical Pain, the authors propose discoveries suggesting social or emotional pain is as real as physical pain. Participants were asked by the researchers to relieve their past painful experiences by writing in detail what had happened and how they had felt. In the first two studies, students were asked to relive both emotional and physical pain, answering a series of questions and then recalling in detail an experience of betrayal by a person who was close to them, or both. Each experience was to have occurred in the previous five years. The students were asked to note how long ago the event happened, how much it hurt at the time, how many times they had talked about the experience, and how painful the experience felt now. The researchers from Purdue University in the US and Macquarie University and the University of New South Wales in Australia found that participants in the emotional pain condition reported higher levels of pain than participants in the physical pain condition. The students also reported less pain when they relived the experience than they had reported before writing the account.

Participants were given cognitive tasks with different levels of difficulty after reliving a socially or physically painful event in experiments three and four. Those in the emotional pain condition performed worse than those thinking about physical injury.
Dr. Kip Williams from Purdue, one of the authors, said, “While both types of pain can hurt very much at the time they occur, social pain has the unique ability to come back over and over again, whereas physical pain lingers only as an awareness that it was indeed at one time painful.
“Why aren’t we always suffering pain by recollections of social betrayal and other forms of social pain? Because we are pretty good at keeping these memories at bay.

“We had to induce our participants to think about the details of the social painful event in order to get them to feel pain at the present. Merely saying, ‘Oh yeah, my boyfriend cheated on me once…’ is insufficient to cause current pain. They have to steep themselves in the memory, and that’s something we don’t ordinarily do.”

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olamz4real:
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How the Ego Sabotages you

Your ego left unchecked sabotages you. You call a number of things that happen in your life “bad.” What you may not know is that most of these so-called bad things are ego-created, so in essence, they are self-created. I call those things drama. The ego in its operation creates drama, and if only you will be fully conscious, the drama will end.

Eckhart Tolle defines the ego as the unobserved mind that runs your life when you are not present as the witnessing consciousness, the watcher. When this ego encounters other egos, it will either see them as a potential threat or attempt to use them for its own ends. The ego has no real connection to any other being. When you observe the ego, you see the patterns because it has a deep-seated fear and a sense of lack. So it comes up with strategies to combat the fear and sense of lack. These strategies can be clever but they never truly solve the ego’s problems. Ego cannot solve your problems. Why? Ego is the problem.

“Bad” things happen when egos come together. They can come together in groups, institutions, or personal relationships. The resulting drama of the coming together of egos can be in the form of emotional or physical violence, power struggles, conflict, and so on. You can still create your own drama all by yourself. You create drama when you see yourself as a victim, feel guilty or anxious, or sorry for yourself. Most people have invested their sense of self in their drama. Ego runs their life. They are in love with their story which is their identity. They therefore fear and resist the end of their drama. This is why someone with financial need can win N5,000,000 today through sports betting and be back to the same situation of financial need three months later. That is why after being in dysfunctional relationships filled with drama, you sabotage a situation where someone comes into your life to truly love you. You unconsciously act so as to send the person away. In a way, what you are saying is, “If I should respond to your love, that is the end of my drama,” because you think the end of your drama is the death of yourself. You do not see that you are addicted to your drama.

Your ego, your false sense of self, has reigned for a long time and has made decisions, taken actions, and brought up thoughts. Your Being then follows the thoughts, actions, and decisions of the ego even though the agenda of the ego is mostly at odds with your Being. As your Being follows the dictates of the ego, you undergo misery. This is because your ego does not have the capacity to lead your Being which is way more intelligent than the mind that constructs the ego. As long as the ego presides in your life, you cannot have peace and joy. You may get pleasure but remember that joy and pleasure are not the same. Whereas you do not need to look for joy because joy is an aspect of the nature of your Being (you have it already even though it is obscured by your ego), you get pleasure from external things. The pleasure which your ego seeks from external things is superficial and temporal. External things are bound by the law of impermanence, they come and go, and they also change form. They may satisfy you today and tomorrow you are no longer satisfied by them. Rather than seeing what is happening and understand that transients cannot fulfill you, you seek bigger “toys.” This is the reason consumerism is thriving today and the advertising industry keeps having its way in exploiting your ego. They make you feel a sense of lack and present you with a product that will make you complete by filling the lack. You purchase the product and your temporary satisfaction with the product makes you think that your lack has been taken care of. Sometime later the sense of lack returns and you try to fill it up with another advertised product. This goes on and on.

Your Being wants to be in charge but your ego which lives in constant fear does not want to allow that. And so your ego fights your Being. Your ego knows that your Being being in charge implies the end of its reign and even its death. It fights for survival. This is why after decades of living under the dictates of the ego, you find it difficult or challenging to be who you are. When you allow your Being to be without trying to be this or that, the works of your ego comes to question. Your Being examines things that the ego has spent decades putting in place, things like alcohol and drugs. Your Being tries to stop certain foods from coming in but the ego sees this as foolishness. “Have you forgotten the pleasure you derive from these things?” asks the ego, “I need to fix this right away!” Most people then will gladly settle for much less. The reason is not difficult to understand: the inner battle of dethroning the ego and breaking free of its influence to trust and follow the unpredictable, unfamiliar, unorthodox, and uncertain ways of Being seems too difficult. But ask yourself which is more difficult: simply being or trying to be this or that.

Ever heard of John Kennedy Toole? He wrote a novel called A Confederacy of Dunces. He lived in New Orleans and he submitted the manuscript to Simon and Schuster for publication. However, he and the publisher could not come to an agreement on the novel’s need for significant revision. Ultimately, the book was rejected and Toole took his manuscript back. Further attempts by Toole to publish his book were unsuccessful.

The rejection of A Confederacy of Dunces sent Toole into depression. He started to drink heavily and increasingly became agitated and paranoid. His mental state continued to deteriorate until Toole committed suicide. He killed himself in his car with a garden hose running from the exhaust pipe to the window.
Two years after Toole’s death, his mother started making attempts to find a publisher for A Confederacy of Dunces. She got numerous rejections. She took it to Walker Percy who was a novelist and teaching at Loyola University in New Orleans. Walker Percy read the manuscript which impressed him. He went on to submit it to a publisher. It was finally published by Lousiana State University Press. As a result of A Confederacy of Dunces, Toole was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Literature.
Now what happened? What is the difference between the rejected manuscript and the published manuscript? It was the same. The author was dead. He did not edit it.

If your personal worth is tied to getting other people’s approval such that you are devastated when you do not get it, this is what you have done: you have taken your worth, put it on a roulette wheel, and spun the wheel saying, “Whatever the world decides is my worth, that is it for me.” This action is very dangerous because the world (the wheel) will not come up with your number as often as you would want.

It is important that you separate your worth from your work. It is also important that you separate the result of your work from your work but when your ego runs you, you find this pretty difficult. Your worth as a person is not tied to the success of your career, album, book, or anything else.

When one gets a taste of success, one can begin to have a more inflated sense of oneself and even become addicted to the positive feedback and attention. This is why you may find popular celebrities, star athletes and top CEOs who have become huge, self-entitled egomaniacs. They have made it and they have switched their mindset to “getting what is mine.” Now that recognition, that award, matters. They need the media attention, the money and the title, not for the team but for themselves, “It belongs to me. I have earned it.” Controlled by the ego, they fail to realize that none of the things they presently crave got them to where they presently are.

The egomaniac feels entitled to future success as a result of past success. Life hardly works that way. No one is totally immune to obstacles, mistakes, and failures. As the sense of self of the egomaniac keeps getting inflated, life looks for ways to get him humble. As life does this through his life situation, the egomaniac instead of becoming humble ends up getting angry and frustrated, “What I have earned is being denied me,” he thinks. Put aside your ego and see this: no single result can completely define you for better or worse.

You are not the result of your work. Stop attaching so much importance to what happens to you. Even what happens to you should come under question. What happened simply happened. It did not happen to you. You think it happened to you because you brought yourself into it and told yourself a story. It is a matter of a negative interpretation. For instance consider Ifeanyi and Titi who are in a relationship. Their relationship is three years old and Titi has just gained admission into the university. All the while, Titi has been evolving and now that she is in school, she wishes to move on, not out of hatred for Ifeanyi but simply to continue to allow the process of her awakening without hindering what is trying to come through her. At this point in her life, she also wants to focus on her studies. She decides to move on and tries to explain to Ifeanyi why she does not want to continue with the relationship. What does Ifeanyi do? He blames her. He gets angry and develops hatred for her. Titi does not in any way intend to hurt Ifeanyi but Ifeanyi has interpreted the whole thing negatively and his ego has created a story out of it. He finds himself in a drama. What really happened is quite different from what Ifeanyi is telling himself. Where Titi has actually not hurt him, he has brought himself into the picture and sees Titi hurting him. He has not bothered to consider what is best for Titi. He has identified with his ego. The consequence is what you call pain.

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How the Ego is Formed

How did the ego come about in the first place? This sense of self that is false, how did it develop? As a baby you had no idea of you as an “I.” You were not able to recognize your inherent nature. You heard your parents refer to you again and again by a name and you got the idea that your name refers to you. You went on to adopt your name as your identity, your sense of self. As time went on, you identified with your attributes and you defined yourself with forms: I am beautiful/ugly, I am intelligent/stupid, I am tall/short. And so your family, education, friend, profession, cultural and social conditioning determined how you think of yourself. A sense of separation was what you got when you started identifying yourself with “I.” Your ego which is your self-image developed. In relation to others and the world, you see yourself as separate. Ego is your self-image and it includes that compulsion you feel to defend the image. The ego is a concept, an idea, it is therefore not real. And for something that is not real, the ego certainly brings a lot of problems. If you say, “I am tired of myself,” then one can ask, “Are you one or two?” Even though there is ultimately one “you,” the statement, “I am tired of myself,” implies there are two of you: the I and the self which the I is tired of. One of them is real, the other is not.
The ego’s role is to form and to protect the images you have of yourself. You may think that you are a good leader. If someone criticizes your leadership, the image you have of yourself as a “good leader” will feel attacked or threatened. Before you know it, you are fighting to protect or defend that image. Your defensiveness causes you to withdraw or attack. Then your ego feels threatened and you react with fear. Your reaction may seem bold and powerful but underneath it is fear. People usually react in negative ways because they feel threatened and unsafe.
You hardly take cognizance of who you really are. In the process of identifying with a false sense of self, your awareness has been absorbed into the forms you identify with. You lost your mind in the process and now your mind runs you. You actually have an awareness that has the ability to look at things with clarity but this awareness has been obstructed; it is there but it is covered up. As a result of this, you seem to have lost the freedom you have. Then your often irrational feelings, habits, and unconscious reactions run your life.
You seem to have lost your true self. You really have not but it seems so. Your true self is always there, covered up but there. You can get to be who you are but first you have to become aware. When your awareness comes alive, you can see things as they are. Be present in this moment. Be present and be aware of your thoughts and feelings. If you become fully aware of your thoughts and feelings, your identity with them is dissolved already. In your natural awareness, you will be able to see the transient nature of forms, they come and go: money, career, beauty, thoughts, emotions. All of these come as forms, stay for a while and then dissolve. In your awareness you will realize that your true Being is a space for all these. It is formless and without concrete identity. It is because you do not know yourself that you feel the need to find an identity. This leads you to get entangled and lost in the forms you identify with. You look for yourself in clothes for instance. You cannot find yourself in clothes. You end up losing yourself in clothes.

Manifestations of the Ego

We have created a self out of our thoughts. We did not stop there. We have gone on to identify with this self we have created. That is the ego – our self-created identity. It is who we think we are. But you are not who you think you are. Your thought is a product of your mind and your Being is beyond your mind. Your mind finds it difficult to grasp your Being.
You are a manifestation of God, made in God’s image and likeness. Who you are then is after doing good. But your ego, your false sense of self, is standing in the way of you bringing about good. It does this by trying to prevent you from connecting to your Being and it often succeeds. Your true nature then is obscured.
The ego is always trying to protect itself. So, it is always attacking and defending. You may have been in a relationship where you tried to give love only for you to come out of the relationship feeling hurt. You still have love in you but your ego will repress the feelings or expressions of love in order to feel safe. Who you are was not hurt as a result of the end of the relationship. It was your ego that was hurt. Now it wants to feel safe, so it makes you build a wall around your heart to feel protected. What this wall does is to prevent you from giving or receiving love. The ego then prevents you from expressing who you truly are. You are still who you are but the light of your Being is obscured.
Here are some of the ways the ego manifests:
1. Wishing the present was different: The ego does not live in the moment; it cannot. It is preoccupied with past and future. Living in the present moment is actually the only conscious way to feel. The ego is scared of the Now and to live in the Now is the death of the ego. So to continue being in charge, the ego flees the Now to the past or future.
“I will be happy when I become a graduate,” “I will be happy when I get a job,” “I will be happy when I get married”… The ego goes on and on. To become a graduate, get a job, or get married is fine. But when you think that these will make you happy, that they will permanently satisfy you, you have an illusory expectation. You are being distracted from living in the present moment by the active ego. You are waiting to start living. Ego makes you believe that you need this or that to be happy or be at peace. But joy, love, and peace are aspects of your true nature – you have them already. Nothing outside of you can give you these. Things can only give you momentary pleasure. Before you know it, that which seemed to have satisfied you some time ago now dissatisfies you. It can even become a source of unhappiness. The ego which does not want to allow what is to be is always searching for more and more. It tells you that you will find peace when everything falls into place.
2. Identifying with your story: “I suffered as a result,” “He did this to me,” “She did that”… You keep retelling your story. Telling your story again and again is a pattern the ego likes to hold on to. Complaining about your story puts you in the victim mode and stirs up emotions as if it was still happening. This happens because you have identified with your story. The present is actually different but the ego is keeping you in that “story space” not wanting you to let go of the past. If it keeps you out of the present moment, suspect the ego at work. By retelling your story again and again, playing the victim, you create more drama which the ego feeds on.
3. Addiction: When ego wants something like money or sex, it sets out trying to “make it.” It can manipulate or entice others to get what it wants. You are not your ego so even if the ego gets what it wants, it cannot fulfill you. You may get pleasure but it will be short lived. Before you know it, you have an addiction and you engage in a behaviour repetitively trying to fill a hole you consciously or unconsciously perceive to be inside you.
Fame, for instance, can keep you identified to the ego. Ego is an idea of who you are which you project onto the world. People fall in love with the image they have created of the famous person. They fall in love with the image but they really do not care about the person. Fame reinforces the ego and this serves to further disconnect one from one’s Being. The same ego that tells you, “You are smart,” “You are special,” later tells you, “You are dumb,” “You are incomplete.”
The ego leaves you chasing transients, vapours. It urges you toward a life of narcissistic self-absorption. The ego makes you center your existence on the desire of yourself rather than the common good. You then proceed to make yourself the centre of the universe.
What can permanently satisfy the ego? Nothing. As it tries to satisfy itself with this or that, it grows bigger and hungrier like a fire requiring more fuel to sustain it. So, the ego creates a spot light pointed at things outside of us. Unfortunately this keeps us feeling separate from our Being as well as from others.
The divine in us is what we call God. So, God is in you and is also in every other person. We are therefore one for God does not have parts. Because God does not have parts, he can never come apart. God is love and by being who we are we can manifest love. One who manifests love is not empty. In fact, we cannot be empty. But living through the ego often results in a feeling of emptiness. Then you feel a void in you; you feel that something is missing in you; you feel that you are not whole. But we were created in the image of God, in God’s love. Feeling empty therefore is not a natural expression for anyone. Feeling empty comes from a false belief that we are separate from the divine. Feeling empty then is an indication that we have separated ourselves from our Being. The ego is in control.
The ego promises to offer us joy and peace. But the ego is an illusion so whatever it offers can never be real, permanent, or fulfilling. Regardless of how you try to fill yourself with what the ego offers you, you will never be permanently satisfied by that. Usually the ego starts by offering us small “gifts.” We get the gifts and are temporarily satisfied. Soon the same gifts that were satisfying become unsatisfying and even meaningless. The ego does not give us the chance to question what has happened and before you know it, it is offering another gift, a bigger gift. We get this gift and it seems as if the feeling of emptiness has been taken care of. Before long, the feeling returns, maybe even stronger. You try to ask why but the ego offers a bigger illusion. It is time for you to realize that whether these gifts, these illusions, are big or small, they can never fill you up. It is time for you to awaken and be conscious.
If you try to ask, “How come I was satisfied by this a while ago but I am not now? Why?” the ego becomes nervous because its existence is being threatened. The ego does not like being questioned, it does not want questions. Asking questions is a step towards consciousness and consciousness cannot co-exist with the ego. Consciousness dissolves the ego. The ego, in an attempt to keep us from asking questions, keeps us busy. When you are busy, you hardly find time to question the ego. So the ego fills your time with as many illusions as possible. Then you find it difficult to be still by yourself. You cannot bear to be alone all by yourself. You dread that. You would rather be preoccupied with outings, watching TV or movies, going online to view posts and pictures or chat on social media. These are some of the means the ego uses to prevent you from being who you are. You remain unconscious. The ego is ready to defend till death that the illusions it offers are truth. You often buy into these illusions as truth. But illusions are false, they are nothing. That is why illusions cannot fulfill anyone. The ego is keeping you from experiencing peace, love, and joy. These are eternal and they are aspects of your Being. You have them already but the ego obstructs you from experiencing them.
To recognize the truth, start by questioning the illusions. The word recognize means to “know again.” This implies that you knew before. The truth is already in you, what you have to do is to recognize it. As you begin to be conscious, you will increasingly be unable to tolerate false beliefs and illusions.
When you begin this search in you to know who you are, the ego will not let go without a fight. Then it becomes fearful, fearful of the light. The ego lives in darkness and consciousness beams light on it. Where there is light, there cannot be darkness; where there is consciousness, the ego dissolves. Ego cannot withstand consciousness just as darkness cannot withstand light. Darkness reigns in the absence of light; ego rules where consciousness is not. So on your way to consciousness, the ego fights and tries to defend itself. It makes you feel uncomfortable and tells you that you are being ridiculous. By continuing your steps towards consciousness, the power of the ego over you weakens. You start seeing its illusions clearer. It wants to take you back to where you have been but you are already seeing the falsity of what it offers. You have heard the defenses of the ego before but now you no longer believe them. You choose not to blindly follow the ego. Enlightenment has come, awareness is rising. You are awakening.

The Birth of the Ego

You have just been born. You see shapes and patterns and hear voices. You will later be told that the shapes are faces and the sounds are voices. The shapes and patterns keep moving and the voices just won’t stop. You have been comfortable in the womb. Now the external environment makes you uncomfortable. All these upset you. You cry. You are aware of what you see and hear but you are not aware of who is aware of those things – you. You perceive what you see, hear, and feel but you do not perceive them as happening to you. You are only aware that they are happening.
Soon you begin making associations. X makes you expect Y. Before long, X begins to symbolize Y. Eventually over time, you may not be able to distinguish X and Y. You make many associations like this growing up.
The biggest association happens when your parent points at your image in the mirror, with you in front of it, and tells you, “That is you.” You are told that your image is you. This is probably the worst association.
You grow older and you associate many worldly things with yourself – your family, your toys, your room, your car, your friends, your clothes, your house. What you do not realize is that you have invested part of yourself in all these. So part of you seem to be invested everywhere. You try to control all of the things you have associated with yourself. That is really out of your control. This makes you worry. You have a lot of things to worry about. No peace.
Remember what I said earlier, “You are aware of what you see and hear but you are not aware of who is aware of those things – you. You perceive what you see, hear, and feel, but you do not perceive them as happening to you.” When you were born, you were egoless. Now you have a false sense of self – ego. You think you are this and that but you really are not what you think you are. Who you are is beyond your thought because it is beyond your mind, and your thought is a product of your mind. You do not think who you are; you know who you are. You know who you are by experiencing your Being.
The ego is a false identity which is a construction of the mind. For people who are not aware, the ego is difficult to see. Ego hides behind thoughts that appear true: “I am ugly,” “I am not smart,” “I am smart,” “I am better than him.” One who has not practiced watching may not see or catch the ego. Ego usually ends up creating emotional drama in your life. It generates emotional reactions like anger, jealousy, and feeling of insecurity. The emotion is as a result of the agreement with the false beliefs that comprise the ego. One sees the emotions and drama but does not see the ego that caused them.

One of the most deceptive aspects of the ego is that it generates powerful emotional reactions, and then blames us for how it made us feel. The anger we react with comes from ego based beliefs of being right and “knowing better” than someone else. Perhaps there is also a victim interpretation of betrayal or injustice underneath. After we overreact with anger we might feel badly for what we expressed. The ego shifts to a “righteous self” that “knows better” and berates us for overreacting. All these attitudes, thoughts, and beliefs take place in the mind, and even though they are completely different, we assume all of them come from us. If they really were expressions coming from our genuine self, they wouldn’t contradict…”¹

Note:
1. Pathway to Happiness, What is the Ego?, www.pathwaytohappiness.com/happiness/2013/02/26/what-is-the-ego/