Ego - friend or foe?
(excerpts from the lecture by Kumu Obi)
"It's about time to understand that your experience is a consequence of your doings (or not doings) and take responsibility.
You can't blame others.
The quality of your experience depends on your decisions, choices, and actions.
Accepting this means growing up, maturing. Taking responsibility for the quality of your life experience.
It's about time to understand that, as life goes on, your body and overall health will suffer and deteriorate if you do things wrong.
Most people were not born broken, they were granted healthy and capable bodies, but they get sick and live in pain.
For most people, it is true: you were given life as a gift.
You were given a body, which develops, repairs, heals, renews itself - a fascinating system that works autonomously, you don't have to think about whether to breathe, whether to pump blood, how to digest food, where to make new tissue cells... Just don't poison it, deprive it of energy or break it with nonsense.
You were given a mind, immersed in one mind (razum/reason), an infinite pool of information and ideas, with endless potential for learning and development. And free will to do what you want.
But the Ego has a task, only one task: to ensure survival, to preserve itself, the current self, regardless of the quality of the self and the experience of the soul. So it will insist even on wrongness, maintaining its wrongness, justifying its wrongness. The ego generally does not evolve, it does not correct itself, it does not improve, but it strengthens and consolidates itself, develops defense mechanisms, all in an effort to fulfill its task: self-preservation.
So:
Is your Ego working for you, for your good?
Who are you? What are you? And what is your Ego?
How is your Ego? And how is it for you, what is your experience? Is there a correlation, do you see a connection?"
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From the previous presentation:
Kumu Obi:
"Ego is a set of beliefs about oneself, others and the outside world, life.
Ego is a mental construct, it is not a living being, but it behaves as if it is because it follows programs, laws and uses logical operations to make decisions, draw conclusions and create beliefs, convictions, rules and laws. Like today's popular AI, it collects information, learns and rationalizes.
And do not confuse the Ego with your intellectual process, the thoughts of which you are, conditionally speaking, aware, or with the voices you hear in your head. These are all parts of your Ego, either they form the Ego or are its manifestation.
But, since your mental body is not limited to the organ we call the brain - it is much larger, in fact, physically unlimited, just like the energy body - the Ego actually resides in the lower abdomen.
The Ego is made up of unconscious (and inherited) and subconscious contents. You do not even know what you have learned and when, from whom, what you have accepted, what has been input into you, into your idea of yourself. The Ego regulates the so-called human qualities and basic needs of existence: food, shelter, procreation (mating), because it ensures the survival of both you and itself. Therefore, it influences emotions, manifestations of passion, desire, greed, jealousy, and the like, and reacts to fear, insecurity, and self-doubt.
Because of its mental structure and origin, I will say that there is nothing Divine in the existence of the Ego. It is a demonic construct by my definition: it is mental, it does not exchange energy, it is not alive. Necessary for existence at this level, for the experience of separation from God, on the way back to God, to the Divine.
The ego can be strong, socially successful or powerful, but it is still not beautiful, because it is not Divine and has no divine qualities."