The Ego Is Not the Enemy
There is a popular book, I believe based on Stoic philosophy, called The Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday. This title always makes me think because it highlights a really major misunderstanding, a major mistake, about how to approach the ego, what to do about the ego.
The ego is not the enemy. And why?
Because the concept of an enemy is from the ego, so that's an egoic concept in the first place. If you approach the ego as the enemy, it means you're fighting ego with ego—you're fighting fire with fire. It's not wise to fight the ego.
The Spiritual Hijack
So the ego is really, really clever and it will hijack your spiritual path, your spiritual journey. You start to realize all these egoic patterns in you, negative thinking patterns. You want to improve, you want to let them go, but then if you think of it as your enemy, you start fighting it and you struggle and you're not getting anywhere.
So what can you do? What can you do about it?
The very first step is seeing it: awareness, recognizing it. Just an aha moment that, "Oh okay, this is going on," like you notice it in your mind. That's the first really critical step.
Becoming the Witness
Once you've done that, then you start to be able to just observe the negative thinking or negative emotion, whatever is going on in the mind, without acting upon it. It can start to slowly dissipate, release.
It is really important to not judge yourself about it for having an unsettling or negative thought. As soon as you judge yourself about it, that's again from ego. Ego is judging ego.
If you notice that you're judging yourself about it, OK, you just say, "OK, OK, this is going on." Don't take it too seriously.
The Path of Unlearning
These are highly learned automatic patterns. The way out of it is to become really aware of it and let it kind of dissolve in your awareness over time.
If you don't let it take hold of your behaviors, of your mind, then it kind of just peters out eventually. We've learned this over long periods of time, so it also takes quite a bit of time and practice to unlearn it.
