You're welcome. Being fed religious beliefs and simply accepting therm is indicative of having a low/lesser ego because you'd simply accepted them. As your ego began to assert itself then it began to question and hopefully it struck a healthier balance that didn't blindly accept but needed the beliefs to make sense to you in your own way. What's known as ego might have happened when you wielded your beliefs to gain status within a peer group.

Oh I would believe how many people will not give you an answer and there are probably any number of reasons for that. What people also don't realise is that beliefs are only a small part of their consciousness and there's been quite a bit of unconscious 'processing' that has gone on prior to them saying "I believe that...." What would probably be the most interesting of threads is one that asks the reasons people have beliefs.

Beliefs are a very intimate part of some people, to others they're wealth and status and to others yet the bubble of an alter ego that's escaping and evading from the 'real world'. Some become as protective of their beliefs as those that are protective of material wealth - people own their beliefs and have invested quite a lot in them. The ego doesn't differentiate between what people won.

the balance you mentioned definitely did happen. As far as being within a peer group I am really not in one. Hahaha. The last number of year's I led a solitary life. I did most of my life by choice you could say. Never did fit in one single "slot" When you take beliefs from different areas, your beliefs don't match up fully with anyone's. But I don't mind it. I've really grown during this time.

Yup. One great blob of undifferentiated stuff. No need for a brain as there'd be no interaction, no individual thought or experience. It would solve a lot of human problems....except there'd be no human.

Well, I can't think the planet would be worse off for that! :laugh:
.

Without an ego we'd be in a world of hurt or others around us would. :biggrin:

In the Freudian sense "the ego's job is to strike a balance between the two often competing forces and to make sure that fulfilling the needs of the id and superego conforms to the demands of reality".

Without that balance we would either swing back and forth between extremes or get stuck at one extreme or the other. From a spiritual perspective my take is awareness can be a sanity-check with veto power over ego.


Yup. It's all an accumulation of experience over one's life and one approach to the spiritual path is to assess all the habits of mind and sort out the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. At least that's my current take.

Interesting this came up in this thread because this recently occurred to me in the context of the underlying non-duality, if one subscribes to such a philosophy.

Imagine that non-duality, Brahman if you will, all by its lonesome with no playground to play out and experience its intelligence and creativity.

Yeah I know well about being the square peg in the round hole, it certainly makes Life more interesting for sure. When you have a healthy ego IU think you can tell when others have the same, and when they don't so much. It's not a criticism for me but a way of better understanding myself - in Haile Selassie's definition of Spirituality it's all about the connections we make to ourselves and others. If your perception of yourself is screwed then that connection goes out of the window, and all this 'ego as the bad guy' only means that people become dissociative. Not a good basis for Spirituality.

In an ideal Spiritual world, ego would be annihilated, ego-deathed and destroyed out of existence but the brochure leaves something out. The Spiritual gurus that have actually achieved an ego-less state are spoon fed and have their nappies changed, and if they can't experience a state of non-ego without an ego???? Gotta love the irony.

What's also almost always ignored is that if people don't have an ego, they are unable to function. Jung's simplest definition of 'ego' is "It is a sense of I am" and without that we'd be in a psychiatric ward, literally with no sense of "I am hungry" or "I need to pee."

I wonder how that would change Spirituality if people took it on board.

This is a very limited and erroneous understanding of ego and egolessness.

Peace

And your professional - NOT Spiritual - expertise is????