Most people are so completely identified with the voice in the head—the perpetual stream of reflexive and compulsive thinking and the emotions that accompany it—that we may describe them as being possessed by their mind. As long as you are completely unaware of this, you take the thinker to be who you are. This is the egoic mind. We call it egoic because there is a sense of self, of I (ego), in every thought—every memory, every interpretation, opinion, viewpoint, reaction, emotion. This is unconsciousness, spiritually speaking. Your thinking, the content of your mind is of course conditioned by the past: your upbringing, culture, family background, and so on. The core of all your mind activity consists of certain repetitious and persistent thought, emotions, and reactive patterns that you identify with most strongly. This entity is the ego speaking, it is not you, as we have seen. It consists of thought and emotion, of a bunch of memories you identify with as “me and my story,” of habitual roles you play without knowing it, of collective identifications such as nationality, religion, race, social class, or political allegiance.
The content of the ego differs from person to person, but every ego has the same structural function. In other words: Egos only differ on the surface. Deep down they are all the same. In what way are they the same? They thrive on identification and separation. When you live through the mind-made self comprised of thought and emotion that is the ego, the basis for your identity is fragile because thought and emotions are by their very nature ephemeral, fleeting. So every ego is continuously struggling for survival, trying to protect and enlarge itself. To uphold the I-thought, it needs the opposite thought of “the other: The conceptual “I” cannot exist without the conceptual “others.” The others are most other when I see them as my enemies. As one end of the scale of this unconscious egoic pattern lies the egoic compulsive habit of faultfinding and complaining about others. Jesus referred to it when he said, “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” At the other end of the scale, there is physical violence between individuals and warfare between nations. In the Bible, Jesus’ question remains unanswered, but the answer is, of course: Because when I criticize or condemn another, it makes me feel bigger, superior.
COMPLAINING AND RESENTMENT
Complaining is one of the egos’ desired strategies for strengthening itself. Every complaint is a little story the mind makes up that you completely believe in. Whether you complain aloud or only in thought matters not. There are egos that perhaps do not have much else to identify with and will easily endure on complaining alone. When you are in the throes of such an ego, complaining, especially about other people, is habitual and, of course, unconscious, which means you don’t know what you are doing. Applying negative mental labels to people, either to their face or more commonly when you speak about them to others, or even just think about them, is often part of this pattern. Name-calling is the crudest form of such labeling and of the ego’s need to be right and gain superiority over others: “asshole, racist, bitch”—all definitive proclamations that you cannot argue with. On the next level down on the scale, you have shouting and screaming, and just beneath that, physical violence.
Resentment is the kindred emotion that goes with complaining and the mental labeling of people adds even more energy to the ego. Resentment means to feel bitter, indignant, aggrieved, or offended. You resent other people’s greed, their dishonesty, their lack of integrity, what they are doing, what they did in the past, what they said, what they failed to do, what they should or shouldn’t have done. The ego loves it. Instead of overlooking unconsciousness in others, you make it into their identity. Who is that? The unconscious in you, the ego. Sometimes the “fault” you see in others isn’t even there. It is a total misinterpretation, a projection by a mind conditioned to see enemies and to make itself right or superior. At other times, the fault may be there, but by focusing on it to the exclusion of everything else, you amplify it. And what you react to in another, you strengthen in yourself.
Nonreaction to the ego in others is one of the most constructive ways not only of going beyond the ego in yourself but also of dissipating the collective human ego. But you can only be in a state of nonreaction if you can recognize someone’s behavior as coming from the ego, as being a manifestation of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it’s not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were. By not reacting to the ego, you will often be able to bring out the sanity in another, which is the unconditioned consciousness as opposed to the conditioned. At times you may have to take practical steps to protect yourself from unconscious people. This you can do without making them into enemies. Your greatest protection is being conscious. Consciousness is the only true reality. Someone becomes the enemy when you personalize the unconsciousness that is the ego. Nonreaction is not weakness but strength. Another word for nonreaction is forgiveness. To forgive is to let go, or rather to look pass. You look pass the ego to the sanity that is in every human being as his or her essences.
The ego loves to complain and feel resentful not only about other people but also about situations. What you can do to a person, you can also do to a situation: make it into an enemy. The implication is always: This should not be happening; I don’t like it here; I don’t want to be doing this; I’m being treated unfairly. And the ego’s greatest enemy of all is, of course, the present moment, which is to say, life itself.
Complaining is not to be confused with informing someone of a mistake or deficiency so that it can be corrected. And refraining from complaining doesn’t imply putting up with bad quality or behavior. There is no ego in telling the waiter that your food is cold and needs to be heated up—if you stick to the facts, which are always neutral. “How dare you serve me cold food….” That’s complaining. There is a “me” here that needs, and even loves, to feel personally offended by the cold food and is going to make the most of it, a “me” who enjoys making someone wrong. The complaining we are talking about is in the service of the ego, not of change. Sometimes it becomes obvious that the ego doesn’t really want change so that it can go on complaining.
See if you can catch, which is to say, notice, the voice in the head, perhaps in the very moment it complains about something, and recognize it for what it is: the voice of the ego, no more than a conditioned mind-pattern, a thought. Whenever you notice that voice, you will also realize that you are not the voice, but the one who is aware of it. In fact, you are the awareness that is aware of the voice. In the background, there is the awareness. In the foreground, there is the voice, thinker. In this way you are becoming free of the ego, simply just an old, conditioned mind-pattern. Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist. The old mind-pattern of mental habits may still survive and reoccur for a while because it has the momentum of thousands of years of collective human unconsciousness behind it, but every time it is recognized, it is weakened.
