Regaining control

3 characteristics of the Ego:

1. It wants to be special.
2. It is always righteous.
3. It wants to be separated: creates conflict while competing with others and isolating, a strong sense of individualization.

When we keep living with an unattended egoic mind, we pay the price by enslaving ourselves to an eternal demanding inner child.
That is a fact: our egoic minds are like the counter of a time bomb. Thoughts are the mitotic cells, mind is the cancer.
The complains starts as an instinctive pursuit of primordial needs, and become more sophisticated but nevertheless, endless shopping lists. The need of food, shelter and love becomes a need of sex, fashion and commodity. The need of comfort, care and attention becomes a need of power, success and popularity. The need of security, identity and presence becomes a need of every external source of self-indulgence.
And it takes over our lives, giving us a sense of continual urgency to silence the continual stressful voices within. We than do one of 2 things: we cling to the past or dread for the future.
We cling to the past whenever we feel guilt, resentment, frustration, remorse. Or we eagerly wait the counting years that will take us to that imagined future when we will finally be ok. Meanwhile the living moment of now stays unattended, while we live overlapping our past to it or projecting it to our future. Now is never the moment, because if that is the case, we don’t want to even live the now with that torturer of the mind.

The ego, as it appears, is a self-destroying device. In its effort to rule over our lives, it takes us over and leads us to the most difficult path of all. The outwardly directed mind, unaware of it self can run amok at any moment of provocation. It can be a sudden raise of stress or anxiety levels, a severe life threatening situation, or any kind of highly emotional upheaval. The triggers can be as slight as the “last drop” to provoke a flood, or impactful as loss, illness and so on.
We feel powerless the moment that “the beast” is released from its cage. It seams uncontrollable, the forever talkative mind becomes a loud machine of mixed thoughts…a real torture chamber that drains out the life from us.
It seams natural that we try to escape it, and we do it usually. Nobody wants to dig in their minds to find out what is buried inside.

A way to disempowering the ego starts with simply looking at it. As a very wise spiritual master said: “Looking at it makes it disappear, ignoring it makes it stay”.
By looking at it we are identifying it as what it is: a feature of our minds, that accomplish the task of giving us a sense of individuals. Just that, nothing more.
Taking it too personal empowers it, so acting out every command only perpetuates it.
What I mean is that we must pay attention to what we are thinking, to our thoughts.
If we find most of the time egoic patterns (that is, as I said before, the need to be right, the sense of superiority, the strong sense of individualization by means of competing or creating conflict) we should not act it out, and rather stop. And acknowledge that this is our ego; but that we are not egos walking.


When we become used to deal with the inner complaining child, by time it will recede in its efforts to take over our lives. In the start it will use all sort of strategies to manipulate us and break us down. But with constant effort and compromise, it will understand that there is a higher self who can take care of its needs very well and that there is nothing outside to find, that will provide better than what can be found within.