Ego runs your mind. It’s the dream most of us are living in.
An emotion is the body’s reaction to your mind. What message is the body receiving continuously from the ego, the false mind-made state? I am under threat. And what is the emotion generated from this continuous message? Fear of course.
Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego’s fear of death, of annihilation. To ego death is always just around the corner. In this mind identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life.
The ego cannot afford to be wrong – to be wrong is to die. This generates a compulsive need to be right in an argument & make the other person wrong defending the mental position with which you have identified – is due to a fear of death. If you identify with a mental position and you are wrong then your mind based sense of self is seriously threatened with annihilation, so you as ego can’t afford to be wrong. To be wrong is to die. Wars have been fought over this and countless relationships have broken down.
If you disidentified from your mind, whether you are right or wrong makes no difference to your sense of self. So the need to be right, which is a form of violence, will no longer be there. You can state clearly and firmly how you think but there will be no aggression or defensiveness about it. Your sense of self is then derived from a deeper and truer place within yourself, not from the mind. Watch out for defensiveness within yourself. What are you defending? An illusionary identity, an image of your mind, a fictitious entity. By making this pattern conscious, by witnessing it, you disidentify from it. In the light of your consciousness, the unconscious pattern will quickly dissolve. This is the end of all arguments and power games which are so corrosive to relationships. Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within. The more you identify with your mind the more you will suffer.
Most of the above is from Eckhart Tolle
Michael
