There was a moment, years ago, when I thought I understood exactly the relationship between my ego and my soul. And now, I spent a morning haunted by that lost clarity. Which now seems like the lost light from another realm. An image, briefly captured, but now dried up and leeched of the color of true understanding.
I wrote Sometimes ego is not as clever as it thinks it is. When things go wrong, Ego has a tantrum. Ego hides. Ego walks away.
I was journalling towards healing a past wound, describing it as an ego lesson. To understand the lesson, I needed to make sense of the nature of ego and the masks it wears to impersonate my true self. Because your ego is not you. I knew that then, and I still know it. But to be frank, I am unsure of whether I retained my past sensitivity at detecting the difference between the two, after more than a decade of trying to survive in a world intensely optimized for ego stroking on a massive scale.
I remember once reading that Gurdjieff and his closest disciples played a game of cutting each other down with insults. A game designed to pare away the ego's disguise and enable the higher self to take control. 2026 sensibilities would no doubt define such an exercise as toxic and abusive. But that replaces introspection with something more comfortable and easily accessible. Outrage. The ego has a moment and the soul learns nothing.
The ego is your child, shaped by others.
The ego is merely an idea of you. A reactionary youngling that doesn't want to appear stupid or scared or mean or, above all, wrong. I could use other, more specific slurs and buzzwords, but I'm sure you know them already. Because no safe space remains for the insult game anymore. It has evolved into something fiercely fixated on annihilation. Something that feeds attention economies and drives ever-shifting power hierarchies.
So, where are we? Are souls blinded by the illumination of so many ego-driven meltdowns polluting our mental horizons? Has your ego become the dictator that numbs you from feeling anything real? That makes you afraid to look at anything with emotional honesty?
