Can You Ever Completely Dismantle Ego?

If your ego is the biggest barrier to happiness, can you simply get rid of it? Probably not.

At best all you can do is gain consciousness; awareness that it exists. You can alter and change ego but I don't think you can eliminate or completely dismantle it.

I am committed to this practice each day. It is difficult. Every once in awhile, old emotions rear their ugly head inside of me. That old black magic. Today my ability to recognize, harness, and process negative emotions quickly is greatly enhanced.

As I write, I am aware of the ego contained within my words. I simply can't escape that. I have to accept that risk if I want to help others achieve happiness. If I was here selling snake oil, or writing simply because my ego required it, I wouldn't write. I don't write to hear myself talk, to impress anyone, to hurt or diminish anyone. Those are negative and ego driven emotions and I am working hard to eliminate them.

My experience has shown me that virtually all of my old belief systems were ego driven and insane. They were the product of an unconscious life that worked nominally-until it didn't. I see that unconscious behavior all around me every day. And I have to let those people be who they are. They haven't found the ultimate trump card.

To intuitively know what is right. To love those who others hate. To realize that the biggest problem that you are going to have all day is you. Every day.

Clinging to old ego driven belief systems, requires you to defend them. As you do, you engage in one up and diminishing behavior. Behavior that you know is intuitively wrong. And the reason we do it? We simply don't know a better way. We have not emotionally evolved to treat others humanely. We take all discourse personally. If someone disagrees with an idea of ours, we believe they disagree and thus they don't like- us. We take that personally and launch personally diminishing counterattacks, challenging intelligence, credibility, labeling others, engaging in any number of hurtful and vicious word attacks.

That type of conduct is intuitively wrong. I can actually feel it. And if I am aware of it, and committed to this process, I simply have to accept it and let it go. I can't engage in any discourse that purposefully or unintentionally hurts someone else. The best I can do, is stay on point and focused on a subject. When I sense that those boundaries are being over run, I must dis-engage.

And I am ok with that. As so often is the case now, ego and happiness are often mutually exclusive. I understand that- there was a time not so long ago- when I didn't.