#5 Is the Ego important?

You will be asking yourself this question for quite some time, every time you want to conclude whether you are being spiritual enough or not. The truth is that you will stop wondering eventually, because your soul and ego are not really incompatible. 

Initially, you’ll encounter ego everywhere, as it’s mentioned frequently in books. It’s difficult to understand why it represents a supposed risk to our growth and why it is present so many times in our journey. 

The ego is our mind, and it is amazingly useful in all our tasks. Our mind helps us with everything, from our childhood. From a young age, we’re encouraged to develop our mental and intellectual abilities, receiving praise in school and later in our careers. The truth is that it is very hard not to believe everything our mind says. 

Our brain formulates hypotheses, draws conclusions, and ensures our survival by steering us away from danger. Since adolescence, it’s guided us through weighing the pros and cons of decisions, and has helped us with the advantages and disadvantages of starting one or another relationship with this or another person, until convincing us of who’s right for us or why a breakup might be necessary.

The truth is that you cannot be resentful of your mind, nor show ungratefulness. It’s incredibly useful and will be with you for life. What happens is that everything it says, with its formulas and conclusions, doesn’t make us happy. All their calculations and measurements end up being insufficient and perhaps at some point in your life you’ll encounter the scenario where, despite faithfully following all its instructions, the promised happiness never arrives. Or it arrives but only to enjoy it for a while before disappearing again. Ego matters, but where we pay attention matters more.

If you’re on this journey, it’s because you’ve decided to force yourself to change. You’ve already seen that your usual way of thinking is not giving you the happiness you are looking for. This point is important because you sense that something always keeps you on the same hamster wheel, going around without moving forward. If you are there, remember this sentence and think about it whenever you reach an incoherence between what is happening and what you should feel: You are not your mind. 

Say it again: I am not my mind. I’m sorry if you thought otherwise. No, you are not. The so-called conscience, your regrets and your guilt, or what you should have done but didn’t, what others expected of you, or what would be best for you, blah, blah, blah, it’s not you. Notice where all these thoughts come from. If they come full of pros and cons, advantages or disadvantages, assumptions and facts, they are not you. It’s your mind. The soul doesn’t express itself like this, with formulas and logical constructs trying to convince you or explain how you should feel or act. It’s not their language. This is the language of the ego because it only knows how to do it like this. 

The ego is your tool or your supercomputer. Unfortunately for the ego, there’s a mode of expression, or rather feeling, that it simply can’t access even if it desires to. Consequently, it bombards you with reasons and motives to convince you that it’s a no-brainer to feel the way it thinks you should feel. However, the soul communicates differently.

Think that if the soul used such language, you might get distracted and lose track of its logical arguments or very important deductions and it could not reach you. That would be absurd, right? This will never happen to the soul because her communication with you transcends everything. Her communication is immediate and powerful above all things. Your soul speaks to you directly through your feelings, you feel what it whispers to your heart. That’s how you know if someone is trying to hurt you, if someone is trying to trick you, or if that person is the right one for you. She has told you, she tells you and she will tell you. It will simply be up to you to pay attention to her or not. 

Surely it has happened to you that after a heartbreak, you knew that something inside you was telling you that he/she was not the right person, although you didn’t want to see it then. But you knew that a small voice was telling you. And that voice is the one you should pay attention to. As you can see, this voice doesn’t fill your head with charts and tables about the benefits or losses of a decision. You feel this voice just by closing your eyes and placing your hands on your heart. 

The ego is important, but we don’t care how much or why. You are not your mind. You are that little voice that asks you to pay attention to it. It’s just up to you to concentrate, close your eyes and tune in to it above the chatter.