The Ego Is A Dirty Liar

Aug 2023

Thinking about the past and the future is a perfectly normal healthy thing to do.

At my best I can learn from the past and then let it go. Forget the mistake, remember the lesson.

I can try to avoid judgement and blame, instead look for the inherent opportunity to learn and grow.

At my best I do the minimum planning with the knowledge that things will turn out differently to my visions.

My plans should be flexible and open to constant readjustment.  I will laugh when they inevitably turn to disaster and remind myself, when they succeed, just how lucky I am.

But we are all fallible and such fragile creatures. I should see myself as comical but instead I take myself so seriously. Reprimanding myself for failure with endless conviction of my guilt.

There is a voice in my head that never stops talking, it follows me from room to room, in the car, in the shower, walking down the street, waiting in line, while I eat, while I wash the dishes.

I suspect you’ve heard it too? It’s ceaselessly feeding a carefully constructed narrative. But who is listening? Is there two of me? The one who talks and the one who listens?

How is it that I make choices I immediately regret? How is that I become embarrassed and my face turns red beyond my will. How is it, that I promise someone I won’t say anything and hours later it slips out in conversation with some else? How is that I steadfastly decide I’m going to commit to the gym three times a week and with a short time I’ve failed. How is that I pledge to give up junk food, or drinking only to find Myself doing both a week later.

Think about this for a moment. You’ve had arguments with yourself, we all have, but who are we arguing with? We’ve never stopped to consider the absurdity of this. Either there is two of us or one? Once you spend a bit of time examining this conundrum you will see the possibility that this is true.

If you arrive at conclusion that there is only one of us, it should be the single most liberating discovery you will ever make. Because now you can observe it, now you can question it, now you can step back and fail to be controlled by it.

In the morning when you open my eyes, before the first thought or story begins, I am just open awareness. There will be times during the day, between stories, when I’m watching nature or something interrupts the endless flow of thoughts that I return to this state.

Normally you don’t notice but I invite you now to try. Stop reading and observe your awareness. The part of you that just witnesses everything. Then come back.

When you attempt the rather strange task of meditating, of focusing on your breath to the exclusion of all else, it becomes quite clear that this voice is uncontrollable, a mad woman (or man) inside our head ranting, jabbering, babbling, muttering, arguing.

If you've tried meditation and found it impossible, exasperating, painful, and torturous, then you can join the bulk of the population who feels the same.

Of those who succeed and claim to like it (I know, ridiculous right), they all come to the same conclusion. That we are the open awareness, not the voice and not the thoughts.

This revelation is extremely freeing. It's a terrible pity that more people don't arrive at this universal truth.

So, if the voice is not me or us, then who is it? The ego, the master storyteller, who attempts to control us while hiding in plain sight, impersonating us. What a devilishly clever trick.

When the magic is broken and the curtain is pulled back, the impostor is revealed. Much like the Wizard Of Oz or Scooby Doo, the levers and props suddenly become visible. Everything changes. We are able to question the stories and the motives behind them.

The two favourite stores of the ego are 'I am the victim' and 'I am the hero'. These play on repeat ad nauseam if left unchecked. Both are designed to make us feel superior to the perceived 'others'.

They create drama, scarcity, pettiness, and self-importance. They emphasise danger, fear, anxiety, and threats. They foster outrage, indignation, blame, and anger.

To step back from this process and see it as a charade or illusion is shocking at first, but once fully grasped, it brings calm and choice.

If you can increase your awareness to the point that you can, many times each hour, break the spell of stories and question them, then you will be rewarded. Released from capture, no longer hijacked by your compulsive ego.

This sounds really hard, but it isn't. To witness our mind, its mechanisms, and flaws. To break free from the cycle of the capturing of our attention.

Try it, watch the stories your mind tells you, and see if you can spot the deception.

The alternative story is judgement. The 'other' person did this action or said these words and they are bad. But judgement is a tool to reinforce the favourite stories.

The bad person's words or actions caused me to be the victim, so I am morally superior to them, and therefore, I am the hero.

When we sit with friends and judge others, a popular bonding practice, we are reinforcing the moral superiority narrative. Sadly, we don’t need friends to do this, we are quite capable with the friend inside our head. The desperate dirty liar.

Watch the stories play out in your head, learn to recognise them. Use awareness to spot them and then evaluate their function and integrity. So quickly they fall apart when exposed as fiction.

The ego employs another crafty deception in order to abduct our attention, emotions. Certain words or images create emotions and the ego deliberately harnesses these to keep the story playing longer than what is healthy.

Try this as an experiment. Think of a person you really care about, not a romantic partner but a family member or close friend. See if you can feel in your body the warm emotions and name them.

Now think about someone who hurt you, try to avoid the story and see if you can feel the raw emotions these thoughts trigger and name them.

Next think about people you don’t know personally but are suffering. Earthquakes, floods, fires, war, it shouldn’t be hard to feel empathy, sympathy, compassion and even a slither of their pain.

It’s fascinating that we can do this. So now we see one of the levers that we normally don’t pay attention to.

Our mind produces thoughts, most random, many strange, some useful, some useless. The ego weaves them into its favourite narratives (victim, hero, judgement, blame) and triggers emotions which we rarely catch and never question.

They slide under the surface of our awareness to create a loop, triggering new thoughts that suit the ego, so it can construct more stories, which triggers more emotions, which triggers more thoughts.

The loops speeds up into a fever, until we are helplessly captured in this spiral of rumination of the past. A frenzy of anxiety about the future. A cycle of judgement about others or ourselves, which leaves us angry, indignant, bewildered, sad, ashamed and paralysed.

Late at night, when we are tired, the ego is at it’s most powerful, it goes into overdrive. This is also true if we don’t get enough sleep. Our fatigue and lack of awareness are the ego’s best friends.

Our ego is so dominant, we feel imprisoned, and powerless. So confused and demoralised by our own inability to control the very tool we believe is us.

How is it that we can’t control our own mind, our own thoughts, our own emotions. But the ego is a dirty liar. It's job is not to tell the truth but to be in control.

Wanna see it on display, wanna see it on steroids? Social media is the ultimate playground for the ego. It can tell stories so devoid of reality and get instant feedback, reinforcing it's superior self-image.

To look smarter, more worthy, more honourable, cooler, more chic, more physically attractive, more powerful, more popular, more wealthy, more enlightened, more intelligent, more deserving, more loveable, more desirable, more astute, funnier, more caring, more enviable than we really are.

Social media has taken the existing perversion of our ego and turned it into a public nightmare. Spend some time scrolling back through our old posts with the above in mind and see the horror of our ego, exposed once again.

We're all guilty so why fight it? Well, because peace, calm, satisfaction, contentment and self-forgiveness will never be found feeding the ego monster. Letting it run free in the insane digital playground makes it far worse.

Try proving this wrong, try spending a month denying your ego it's digital stimulus and reward addiction. Try at the same time to puncture your stream of stories with an anchor, your breath, your feet as the touch the ground, every door handle you touch, a signal to step out of the stream and come back to awareness.

Your ego will fight you. It will try everything to regain control, to get you back into the mindless cloud of being captured.

It also has a secret weapon, another tool it employs to keep us keep us in place.

We don’t like pain but we do like pleasure. We push away the things we don’t want to experience and desperately grasp at what we perceive as positive or our needs and desires.

The ego knows this and offers to shield us from the horrors of life and keep us safe. But the ego is a dirty liar. It traps us with our own weaknesses, it preys upon our fears and feeds our lust for pleasure.

It’s not until we are willing to walk straight towards the negative, to feel it, to embrace it will we grow and evolve.

When we allow ourselves to feel the perceived unbearable emotions, we find something really surprising. They are not as scary and we had told ourselves they are.

They are really much more tolerable than we'd dreamed possible. As we wade into the water of previously terrifying feelings, instead of drowning, we find them rather refreshing.

That our willingness to sit with them makes them slowly easier to navigate

It’s not until we are willing to deny ourselves pleasure, to hold back from feeding our desires without constraint will we be free.

It’s not until we are willing to see the stories, challenge them and stop identifying with them will we be released from the madness of our own ego.

We don’t need to destroy the ego, just regain control and make peace with it’s needs. To learn to use it as a tool and put it aside instead of being used by it.

The ego has another mechanism it employs to trap us. We crave safety and control, it’s a normal and reasonable thing to want. Think of it as a scale, at one end too little safety and control, at the other end too much.

When by our choice or by circumstance safety and control are suddenly removed, we quite rightly panic and do everything in our power to restore it.

The ego pounces on our fear and tells us that if we plan better and spend much more time running scenarios about how the future will be, we can be safe.

Bit by bit the ego feeds our fears and we spend ever more time caught up in devising strategies to control the future. We move on the scale further toward more control and in doing so we feel less, less in control.

At the extreme end of this we are paralysed with indecision and obsessed with controlling every outcome. Our mind a swirling mess of over thinking, over-planning, lost in the future which never works out as we plan it. The prospect of letting go seams more and more terrifying.

The voice claims to help us, but secretly, it enslaves us and tortures us without remission. We are captives to a process that fuels our unhappiness.

So, what to do now? Well, the first step is to just observe it in action as much as possible. Pick a few prompts to bring you back to awareness in this moment.

Every time you stand or sit for example. Every time you touch a door handle is another option. You can listen for sounds to try to hold back the stories.

You can find your own. I personally use nature, every time I see a tree, plant, flower, cloud, bird or anything that will jolt me back to awareness.

Now ask yourself, what was the story playing? Which category does it fall into. It won’t take long to see the patterns.

So really this is all you need. You don’t necessarily need to learn to meditate, just observe your mind. Regularly puncture the capture process and then examine it without self-judgement.

Slowly the number of times per day, per hour can be increased. Breaking the loop and seeing the underlying process will bring some control back in your hands. The less oblivious we are the more control we have over our own attention and the quality of our thoughts.

It is possible to find another way to exist that is not at the mercy of this bizarre voice in our head. It just takes a bit of effort, a few minutes many times a day.

But consider that alternative, if you do nothing, where will you be in a year, five years, ten years? Still hostage to the insidious storyteller that pretends to be you.

Take a leap into the unknown, it’s less scary than it sounds. The rewards are there to be discovered. The control of your attention is the greatest gift you could give yourself.