The Ego Unmasked

“He who dies with the most toys wins” – saying on a bumper sticker

If I want to leave my ego at the door, whether it be at the yoga studio door, the schoolhouse door, or the door to my own house, I need to know where to find it. I need to know what it looks like; the signals it gives just before it springs into action.

This is not an easy task for the ego is connected to thereptilian and limbic brains; the former is over 300 million years old and contains what we need for survival, while the latter is only 100 million years old and handles complex emotions like love and hate. In Freudian psychology, the ego is responsible for reason and sanity; it is the face of the id onto the real world. But today, spiritual instructors like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra believe that the ego is something quite different.
The ego is that part of us that identifies with what it sees in the mirror. It compares itself with what others have, what others look like. It is the “I” factor. It is constantly crying out, “what about me!”

When I was a young man in my first (swab) year at the Coast Guard Academy, we cadets were told that we were nothing; that we were lower than “whale shit” which lies at the bottom of the ocean. This was what I consider a medieval process of tearing down and building up that still goes on in military indoctrination. The concept was that our egos were transformed into a collective ego, “I am waiting for my classmates” type of group think. We looked alike, acted similarly, and were expected to all end up in the same place – an officer in the Coast Guard.

For many of us, this was a continuous struggle; the ego was resisting this control, this attempt to reconfigure itself. The ego does not like change – that’s why you often hear people both young and old, talk about the “good old days.” At the Academy, it was voiced by upperclassman, only a few years removed from the bottom of the ocean, who echoed the sentiments, “When I was a swab…” This was the rationale for perpetuating a system of degradation and mindless power over others that was uncovered in the famous Stanford prison experiment where typical college students became sadistic to their classmates when playing the role of jailor to their friends who were the inmates. Fortunately, this methodology has long been removed from the training of perspective Coast Guard Officers.

It was at the Academy that my own ego began to take control over me – it was a powerful force that was not congruent with the complicity that was required to survive at a military academy. It began to scream, “I am more than just a cadet, you know!”

It was during this first year that I experienced some success on the football field. My name was in the paper; upperclassman would stop me and ask if I was that “football player” followed by some extra hazing just to insure I remembered my place in the food chain. My friends reacted to my notoriety by drawing a picture of a football player with a tiny body and a huge helmeted head and hanging it on my door. Even though the change was invisible to me, they saw my ego growing.

It is difficult to survive in an institution that encourages compliance when there is a driving force emanating from within that is crying out for approval. It happens to all of us at some point, just in different degrees. The ego wants recognition; it is constantly reacting to those primordial urges of “I’m somebody – look at me!” My personal struggle was complicated by my introduction to alcohol. The ego loves beer. It fed mine like some sort of limbic fertilizer.

If the ego was only about recognition, it might be easy to discover in oneself. The ego is much more than that. The ego is constantly comparing, always identifying with the next “big thing.” When I was a young adult, my friends and I went out every night. There was this motivating force that we would miss something if we stayed home. It continued into my married life; then it became “keeping up with the Joneses.” My wife and I were seldom satisfied.” Look our friends are going on a cruise! Our neighbors have a new car! Why aren’t you making more money?

There was a time when I felt happiness was all about rewards. I was driven to make more money, to look good, to be a respected member of society. It wasn’t until I stopped drinking and participated in years of psychotherapy that the control my ego had over me began to diminish. It allowed me to see its power and how it was responsible for most of the suffering in my life.

Much of what we do is unconscious, automatic, and done without a great deal of awareness. Stephen Covey reported that one of his greatest discoveries while doing research for The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, was that there is a “gap or space between stimulus and response, and the key to both our growth and happiness is how we use that space” (p 310).

The ego does not like this gap, it functions at it most efficient capacity when this space is minimized. The ego is impulsive; it creates a stabbing feeling inside. It is the stimulus receptor. It keeps one from widening that gap; the gap where awareness lies.

Chopra (2006) gives what I feel is a perfect description of the ego when he writes, “Behind the curtain of your intellect and emotions is your self-image or ego. The ego is not your real self; it is the image of yourself that you have slowly built over time.  It is the mask behind which you hide, but it is not the real you, but a fraud, it lives in fear. It wants approval. It needs control. And it follows you wherever you go” (p. 81).

Approval and control – these are the two characteristics of the ego that I will try to expose in this writing. I will try to uncover the many faces of the ego, what it feels like when it begins to kick in and take over and how many of the impediments to educational improvement are because of the need for power and control that the ego requires.

Of course, this is really not about education, but of the process of waking up, of experiencing the freedom that comes when the ego does not really define who we are. I hope you will take this journey with me.