Deepak Chopra said that recently in an interview regarding how he feels of what others think of him. It was a brilliant one-liner which goes to the heart of understanding the place of the Ego in our life and the lives of others. At the core of Deepak Chopra’s statement is the realization that what other people do and say is really about them – their own mental and emotional state, level of consciousness, and overall phase of evolution. We can either speak from the heart or from the Ego and when people are being aggressive, un-kind, critical, or un-caring, they are usually communicating through their Ego. The Ego is the small voice in your head that operates from a place of fear, anxiety, anger, self-preservation, and a host of other non-loving elements that make up the human psyche. It’s not who we truly are, the underlying well-meaning soul. It is a mask we create and wear that conveys our personality in less than authentic ways.
Eckhart Tolle explains the roots of the Ego in this way: “Most people are so completly identified with the voice in the head – the incessant stream of involuntary 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 it is a sense of self, of I (ego), in every thought – every memory, every interpretation, opinion, viewpoint, reaction, and emotion. This is the 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 central core of all your mind activity consists of certain repetitive and persistent thoughts, emotions, and reactive patterns you identify with most strongly. This entity is the Ego itself.”
So, someone’s reaction to you or more correctly, their perception of you or what you have done or said, is not simply a case of stimulus and response (though we should certainly pay close attention to sincere feedback and criticism). It comes with a truck load of baggage. Baggage that is truly unique to that individual and clearly, None of Your Business… Through this practice, we learn acceptance, non-attachment, and forgiveness. We learn to not react egoically ourselves to people and situations – to not take things personally. By doing this, we come closer to achieving the best version of our true self.
–Jay Kshatri
www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com
