The ego. As a psychological construct, it maintains incredible control over our lives. By this incessant control, it brings a greater limitation to our experience and a far lesser degree of freedom. But why does it do so? What are its motivations for usurping the power in our lives for its own benefit? I suggest three reasons why our egos are so controlling:
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Reason #1: The Ego Wants Desperately To Survive
The controlling tendency of ego is born first of all from its vulnerability. It must be remembered that the ego has long ago seceded from the power and wholeness of Source energy, our true spiritual nature. It departed from a state of fullness and total adequacy to a place where it must construct itself from the ground up. As a “startup” entity it must bootstrap itself from only the capital it can find by which to associate and attach. All egos survive by superficial identities—that is all they have.
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The Ego Has Everything To Lose
The ego has only what it has managed to construct throughout its brief lifetime. If it loses any strength of identity at all it must search out new attachments with which to identify in order to restore its ego-health. It, therefore, proceeds through its reign in a constant battle to retain its image and repair and shore it up as needed. And this means it must maintain control in order to do so.
But ego’s vulnerabilities go even deeper. While in spirit, we are able to live a life of greater trust and ease we also understand, even here in this place of time and space, that should our physical lives cease our essence will in some form continue on. This is a great source of comfort and some of us even look toward our horizon in anticipation. But ego has not come from spirit and it cannot return to spirit. In the truest sense, when the ego dies it is lost forever.
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The Greatest Threat To Ego
Of course, by way of our own physical passing ego is severed as the body dies and spirit continues on. There is not much ego can do to avoid the inevitable except to ignore it and ego is quite adept at that skill. But there is a “death” that is even more concerning to ego and is so by far. In our physical death, although ego has terminated, there is no shame; it has occurred despite any ability of the ego to deter it. But the ego cannot accept that we may come to awaken to a new spiritual awareness and bypass the need of it altogether.
The greatest threat to ego is not our physical death but our spiritual life. Recall that ego has established itself in spite of spirit and is perpetually concerned with maintaining that separation. The finish line is of no concern relative to maintaining its lead along the way against this rival competitor.
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Should ego slip and allow us to glimpse our spiritual nature then its dominance is immediately undone. To be spirit-aware is to gain a new level of consciousness or, put another way, the stranglehold of un-consciousness is defeated. Ego only can survive because we are unaware of it, allowing it to do its phantom work in our lives, unnoticed and unquestioned.
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The Ego Takes Control To Protect Itself
Ego, therefore, has a great task at hand in defending its position from dethronement. This is why it takes its need for control to neurotic levels. One small mistake could be its last. So ego keeps grabbing us by the chin and setting our attention forward lest we catch something truly interesting in our periphery. It forces us to believe that ego is all we are and that all our focus should be directed towards its ends. We are engaged in busywork, forced to distraction, and controlled in ways we might never know or understand.
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Reason #2: By Control, Ego Finds Strength Through Importance
In all of this desire for survival, the ego finds the need to buttress itself in numerous ways, increasing its sense of solidity and substance. Wrenching control from our hands so that ego can ensure its immediate survival is is one thing but enhancing the ego’s sense of validity is another.
The Ego Is Constantly Seeking Validation
Because the ego has pulled itself up out of the “primordial goo” of spirit and onto the shores of its own manufactured self there is this sense that it is weak and exposed, perhaps not strong enough to grow legs and run or clever enough to sprout wings and fly.
Out of this vulnerability is a desire for ever greater validation. Through the ages of ego’s reign, it has discovered and developed ways of securing that need of which the chieftain ruler is that of a sense of importance. Importance equates to substance in ego math and although that summation is only conceptual, for ego, it is sufficient. As far as ego is concerned, beggars can’t be choosers. Because it finds its roots not in the greater essence of Source, all its resources must come second-hand. While Source provides nourishment from within, the ego must scrounge for it without. And so, like a vulture, ego capitalizes on any carrion it can sniff out and find sustenance by.
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Control Allows Ego To Feel Important
Believing itself important, the ego is able to build and strengthen itself, having found its lifeblood in how it (and hopefully others) find need in its presence.
And considering all of the ways we can attain to some self-delusion of importance, what better, quicker, easier way than to follow the lead of the child. We’ve all known one or were one; that bossy pack leader in our neighborhood or school playground that sought to control everything you and your friends did.
If ego understands one concept more than any other, it is this: Taking control is the quickest way to the spotlight. Even if people hate you, when you have control, guess where they’re all looking? That’s right, at someone important. Ego will capitalize on this and find its importance through association with all that incoming attention. Such energy is the fuel it craves.
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In all ways, the ego is eking out some measure of merit, trying to prove itself to others, to itself, and possibly even to spirit. And being that it has no past lineage or support it is up to it to drudge up its own apparatuses of acknowledgment. This is ego’s go-to understanding: Possessing control makes us important . . . importance validates the ego . . . validation is ego’s conceptual substance.
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Reason #3: By Being In Control Ego Holds ALL The Cards
The final reason I offer as a motivation for ego’s incessant need for control requires a little background. While the first two points presented are generally intuitive, this last, for most people, is not. The majority of the human population might consider that perfection is a crucial criterion for the ego’s sense of importance. This is true in most cases. The ego loves to be perfect and when you find someone guilty of perfectionism (perhaps even yourself), that is ego at work.
If we are perfect then not only do people look up to us, they find no reason to question our merit. The ego marches on in validation-victory.
It makes sense then, that ego demands control so often because by its micromanagement it can hope to attain it. By cutting out all middlemen, the ego can quality-check each step of the way and ensure its continued success. But even though ego seeks control to achieve perfection, not all of us can believe ourselves so able or worthy of standing on the victory podium, at least not in all instances. What then?
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The Fallacy of Perfection
One of the greatest misconceptions of the ego I find again and again is that ego desires perfection and only perfection. Again, perfection is preferred but not all of us are cut out for it. There are plenty of people on this planet who are living lives in deep despair, simply trying to make it out of their bed in the morning only to try to return to it relatively unscathed at night. In such a condition, these individuals haven’t the capacity to attain to anything more. Rather, they embrace their sense of low worth or failure and find identity in that.
Remember that ego has no inherent identity but must attain to it surrogately through whatever attachments it may find. For some (admittedly most) an identity of importance may come through wealth or power or accolades. But for the number of individuals who don’t find themselves in those successful circles, they tend to forego the unattainable for that which they have really, truly learned to believe—that they are not good enough or worthy enough.
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Only The Extremes Matter
The foremost concern of ego is identity because without it ego is just an empty construction. Its appearance as a shell would, therefore, represent something of a carcass, dead and ready to be buried in the past. Without an identity, ego has no other justification for being. And, as already discussed, survival is a critical need to which it will hope to attain at all costs.
This means that the ego will do anything to survive. Like a government that presents a polished face to the constituents but operates behind the scenes as a sinister deep-state, the ego will carry out its own shadow operations. This includes acting the part of the saboteur if the situation calls for it.
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Ego will cut out our possibilities for success if it deems it strategic to do so. And this is exactly what happens to many of us, unable to trace the sources of what seems like an unending string of failures. Ego must find and maintain identity, in whatever form it can, regardless of what’s best for us. For ego, success is its survival and validation no matter what that looks like to others.
While success places one out of the bell-curve and toward one extreme of the continuum, there remains one more end of the spectrum, the polar state, failure. Setting aside what seems more enjoyable or more reasonable to expect of ego, the opposite condition singles one out from the masses in just as strong a manner as those we would call successful. Many people are known by their victimhood. Some cling to it like it is life itself and now you know why—to the ego that represents the only lifeline to a validated identity it has.
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Seamless Versus Flawless
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What is most important to ego is not necessarily that our image is flawless. What matters more is that our image to ourselves and others is seamless. Only that entity that is in control can cover all the bases. By holding all the cards, the ego can ensure its survival even if its means are questionable. Ego will hamstring our efforts if it believes its own “deep-state” will remain hidden and unhampered into the future. As the saying goes, Absolute power corrupts and ego is especially guilty in this regard. It is by retaining control that ego keeps such insidious methods hidden and available should the need arise to implement them..
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Summary
The ego desires control for primarily selfish reasons. It is about self-protection and self-promotion. By maintaining control in one’s life ego ensures its own security and strength of life-force. Through control, the ego can do so in three primary ways:
- It keeps us isolated from the greater connection and the spiritual experience which would otherwise render ego as unnecessary.
- By claiming control ego can find a certain measure of substance by way of importance.
- Having full control means that the ego can retain all the options for ensuring its survival—even the more sinister ones.
By understanding the motives of the ego we may begin to forgive ourselves and others for having struggled to find purpose, meaning, and clarity in life. We can relieve ourselves and those around us of fault for our lack of growth or our misdirections and failures. And perhaps by our greater understanding, we can alleviate the ego’s ability to gather and maintain its stronghold.
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Aaron Force is a blogger from Seattle, Washington. He writes to educate others about the nature of an expanded consciousness to evolve humanity. Aaron unexpectedly experienced his own profound awakening and ego transcendence in 2015 and soon understood that the qualities of his own experience (a greater expansion and evolution in his life) could be applied to mankind collectively.