Lesson 4 - VANQUISH EGO!

To win, Sun Tzu says:

Keep your friends close,

and your enemy even closer.

          Thanks to Hollywood just about everyone has heard this saying from The Art of War at least once and usually can quote the last tricky part – keeping those troublesome enemies closer. Back in the day, Sun Tzu was strategizing bloody battles. Let’s see how we can unpack Sun Tzu’s sayings and reformulate them for our amorphous thinking processes.

          Our battleground will be within the unlimited and cloudlike substance of our thoughts.  We can train our bodies to be superior fighting machines with skills and stamina. But now our training must include totally different skills and a stamina that must last through the constant and vigilant attacks of ego.

          Remember ego is a persistent opponent. Its greatest strength is its own belief that what it does it does to protect you and help you survive. The myopic, limited view of ego is actually our mind choosing to see with tunnel vision. We block out the whole and see only the now twisted and distorted right in front of us. This leads directly to a perceived a world of lack, need, greed, attack and pain. Survival is paramount and ego shows us how.

          So, why should we keep this unpleasant enemy closer than even our beloved friends? After all, ego is already as close as you can get. Ego pervades and directs our beliefs, perceptions and ultimately our actions.

You keep someone close by understanding them fully and in the understanding comes the answers you will need to win.

Beloved friends are easy to like and easy to love. They are easy to forgive, and we usually find their pesky quirks kind of cute. We love keeping them near. But, all those others? The ones that are annoying, irritating, causing pain and havoc in our lives? They are obnoxiously repulsive and we either turn our backs on them or beat them to a pulp.

When it come to our own thoughts, we do the same thing. We hold onto the ones that give us pleasure and ignore or battle the ones we find offensive. Denial and battle, however, will not bring an end to the emotional pain we live with daily.

There must be another way. We must do something else. We must choose first to look closely at ego and how it works. We must get very, very close to it indeed and apply something totally radical, something miraculous.

As ‘A Course in Miracles’ says in Chapter 2, “The escape from darkness involves two stages. . This (first) step usually entails fear. . .This (second) step brings escape from fear. . .When you have become willing to hide nothing. . you will understand peace and joy.

Some thoughts to contemplate. . .

1.     Take some time to survey your willingness to handle your issues first with your mind, rather than with immediate action. How consistently have you been able to do that in the past?

2.     How you define ego will directly determine how you can combat it correctly. How have you in the past, and how would you now, define ego?

3.     Try to notice when you are ignoring the ego and when you try to fight against it?