The Ego Can't be Happy

Here's something pretty weird that, if you can somehow grasp and remember, there probably isn't much more that you'll ever have to know. This is enough.

The ego cannot be happy.

There. The end. Write that down somewhere and whenever you're unhappy, remember it -- and you'll eventually start to see (or maybe see right away, who knows?) that this is oddly and powerfully true.

Now, many of us will need some more time with this cryptic little statement -- the ego cannot be happy -- so let's take a few big steps back and take a look.

For starters, by "ego" I don't mean "egotistical" as in prideful or boastful. That is the conventional usage of the word ego, but it's certainly not the mystical one. In the most basic sense, the ego is any sense of separation from the whole. That sense of separation need not be boastful or prideful -- it need not be someone telling you how great they are. It can be the opposite, too: someone who is telling you how bad they are, or unworthy or even humble they are. Or, on an even more subtle level, it doesn't even have to require speaking at all. A person can just believe, inside, that they are separate -- good, bad, better, worse, smart, stupid, successful, failure -- in order to activate the ego.

The ego is the idea of separation. It is the very notion of having a separate agenda from the whole.

Think of your body.

Right now, look at your hands. Pick a finger; any finger.

Now, imagine that this finger that you're looking at "decided" that it was not merely a finger, but a completely separate entity.

How absurd is that? What would this finger do? Well, it would start to worry a lot, that's for sure -- because it's just one mere finger, and "survival" in this world needs other things: it needs other body parts. But the finger, believing that it's separate, lives in perpetual, ongoing fear.

That's what we are when we submerge ourselves in the idea of ego: we are in perpetual fear. We cannot not be in fear, because to identify with the ego is to identify with fear.

Why? Because the ego is not real, but think that it is. And because of this fundamental disconnect, the problems of the ego can never be solved. Yes, the ego thinks that it can solve them: some more money would be nice, a better spouse, nicer weather, whatever. But really, has it ever worked?

You have received SO many things in your life that you thought you wanted -- that your ego claimed it needed. Are you satisfied?

No. Not because you're excessively greedy. Because your ego is not real and as such you cannot satisfy something that doesn't exist. It's an empty hole. It will never be happy.

Success doesn't lead to happiness. Neither does failure. Winning doesn't work; and we know that losing doesn't either. Great relationships don't work (because they don't stay great), and no relationships is even worse (because we are bound to each other -- we are all relatives of each other).

Whatever you name will not work -- and you know from experience, that nothing has worked.

Not because you haven't tried.

But because it doesn't work.

Identification with the ego is a total commitment to misery.

The exit?

Stop identifying with your ego.

Start, instead, watching yourself as you do things. As you interact. As you reflect.

Discover a well of deep silence within that is your true self. This is your eternal witness. This is what you came into this life with. And if you start looking from these eyes, you'll realize that they don't age. They are the same eyes that you used as a small child.

Except now, as an adult, you can see the world again -- like T.S. Elliot says, for the very first time.