I picture man with a wealth of knowledge,
yet he struggles to apply that knowledge to how he lives
his life.
‘Something is missing’ I thought to myself.
There is something essential that is missing. Something
that completes the puzzle. That something that will enable
man to embrace all his knowledge and apply it to his life.
Somewhere along the road, I had picked up
that 'something', yet I noticed that many others did not
seem to have it.
But I couldn’t figure out what it was.
Then, late one night, battling to sleep
as usual, a picture suddenly popped into my mind.
I saw man standing in an open field.
Orbiting around
him like planets around the sun, were all these packages
of knowledge that he had accumulated throughout his
life.
But man was protected by a glass dome, and although
the packages of knowledge were within his reach, this
dome prevented him from reaching out and connecting
to the knowledge.
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It was not that something was missing.
Rather, there was something there that prevented man from
embracing all his knowledge and applying it to how he lived
his life.
In order for man to embrace his knowledge
and make it a part of who he is, he had to remove the glass
dome.
The glass dome is ego.
So exactly what is ego?
According to Sigmund Freud's theoretical
structural model, ego is the organised, realistic
part of the psyche, but in reality ego is formed through
'outside' influences.
A child is born without any knowledge, and
without any consciousness of self.
Because the senses open outwards, the first thing the child
becomes aware of is the mother.
It soon learns that it has to behave in a certain way to
please the mother. As the child grows this develops to include
the father, the siblings, all the relatives, the friends,
the teacher, the preacher and eventually society.
So we all live to please others, looking
to others to validate who we are.
But, nothing can be further from the truth,
because every child is born with a centre.
It’s a really long story, but this
centre, over time, is so neglected that we find it very
difficult to accept that it is in fact this centre that
determines who we are.
Ego is false and ego stops you from reaching
your true potential.
It is what you think of yourself, rather
than what others think of you that makes you who you are.
