Learn what the ego is, and how it consists of the unconscious.
We all have an ego. We can be hurt by what people say about us, we can be selfish, we want to look good to others, and we lie to avoid trouble. We say that some people have a "big ego."
What is this ego? Though most people take it for granted, it seems a bit like a limitation.
Actually, not everyone does have an ego. Those few who are "enlightened" are supposed to not have one.
The Defensive Ego
How the ego protects and defends itself from unpleasant feelings.
We don't feel particularly safe with ourselves, though it may not always be that obvious. We often are protecting ourselves, in one way or another, from some kind of hurt. Psychology calls this self-protection "defense." We perceive threatening events or feelings as "attacks" that we need to "defend" from. It is the ego's primary activity.
Defending in conflicts
That we defend ourselves from feeling hurt is obvious during conflicts, especially when these escalate into quarrels and fights.
It seems more noticeable in others than in ourselves that this self-protection can be more important than the truth. The other person often seems to be saying things that we are convinced aren't true. It seems that the other says these things just to defend himself, and should know that they aren't entirely true. But everyone feels the need to defend from emotional pain, and parties do make efforts to inflict it onto each other during fights. The truth is the first thing that is out of the window, for the ego, then.
Blaming is often a part of conflicts. When someone blames us for something, we may get to blame the other person instead. Sometimes, the other person is really accusing us unjustly. But sometimes what's happening is that we just can't bear to feel the guilt, and blame the other person just because of that, on the belief that one of the parties has got to be blamed.
Telling the other person that he's only defending himself, and because of that not accepting the truth, will usually have the effect of the other person defending himself even more. The need to defend is quite compelling.
Self-protection from hurt
But even when we are not in an obvious conflict do we defend ourselves. Our egos have numerous ways of doing that.
When we notice that we are about to feel hurt, we may get tense, which makes us not feel it. In fact, when we are not feeling relaxed, we are usually avoiding some kind of unpleasant feeling, or several feelings.
We may be using one feeling to avoid feeling another. When we get angry, but don't want to act angry towards the other person, it may be hard to actually stop being angry. Angry thoughts just keep coming up. We are angry, of course, because we got hurt. The reason we can't stop being angry, is because we'd have to feel the underlying unpleasant feelings that caused the anger in the first place, and we don't want to do that.
We can also deny feeling something. When we want to be with someone, and that person doesn't want to be with us, we may decide that we actually don't like that person after all. It's not entirely true, but it does make life more bearable.
Lack of feeling
This defensiveness makes us very concerned with the outside of us, with how we appear to other people. It makes it harder to notice what goes on inside of us, with our inner feelings.
When we are thinking and fantasizing, we don't feel much of what goes on with our more subtle feelings. We then only notice feelings that are at the surface, if we feel anything at all. Retreating into our thoughts thus is a way of avoiding feelings that are unpleasant.
Our constant concern with self-protections makes that we don't really feel much any more when we've arrived at an adult age. Sometimes, it can seem unsafe to feel anything at all. We then have the same flat state all the time. Some will deny that feelings are a real part of them, and consider themselves "completely rational" people.
Losing touch with ourselves
The result of all these defensive tactics is that we're not really in touch with ourselves. We don't really know ourselves, when we don't feel ourselves. Consequently, we are unaware why we really are doing things.
The self-protection makes it impossible to deal with our deeper feelings, and the result is that these feelings stay hidden and don't dissolve. They disappear into our unconscious, but do not cease to influence us.
The Superego
The superego that, in irrational ways, makes us adhere to lots of rules.
The superego makes up a large part of our unconscious. It is the part of us that makes us conform to particular rules, that makes us "behave." It judges us, criticizes us, and makes us feel bad when we do something "wrong." It is what makes us feel guilty and ashamed. It is our "inner critic" or "inner judge."
Our superego tells us things like that we shouldn't break things, not be rude to people, and say "please." It tells us which ways to sit, walk and talk are not appropriate. It tells us not to be lazy, to be cooperative and that we should do like we're told.
It judges us for whether or not we conform to the rules. Next to making us feel guilty and ashamed, it makes us feel stupid, idiotic, foolish, thick, dense, and a loser. That is, if we do not suppress these painful feelings.
While the superego has our best interest in mind, it is not a friendly character.
We usually hardly notice the superego controlling us. We just "know" we shouldn't do certain things, and we shy away from them, or we just know that we "must" do things. Most of it is, in fact, unconscious.
Formation of the superego
Most of the superego is formed during our upbringing. Our parents taught us what is right and wrong, what we should and shouldn't do, what is normal and what not. To get us to accept the rules, we were forced in various subtle and not so subtle ways, like by punishment, being shamed, or being degraded for doing something wrong. This is what's formed into the superego.
It's not only our parents, but, in fact, many other people too in our early environment that pressured us to abide by certain rules. Adults in positions of authority, as well as other children. And people still pressure us to when we are adults, when they act out their superegos on us, as we do on them.
The superego is kind of the sum of all people that have tried to make us behave according to certain rules in the past.
The need for the superego
Children aren't much capable of themselves to see the consequences of their actions. They need to be taught to abide by certain rules, or else they or others get hurt or worse, things get damaged, or things go wrong. They need to be taught to take responsibility.
Therefore, it is unavoidable and beneficial that children develop a superego. There is a need for it to be a guide through people's lives.
When the superego works against us
Sometimes we feel that we are guilty of something, when in truth there is nothing wrong with what we did. We may feel guilty for being lazy, when there really is no work to do. We can feel stupid for not knowing how to do something, when we never actually had an opportunity to learn it. Children are known to feel irrationally guilty for the death of relatives, or for parents divorcing.
Sometimes we need to be assertive, like when sales people or telemarketers intrude on us and treat us manipulatively. But if they seem nice, which they usually make great efforts to, we are inclined not to assert ourselves, because our superego stops us from being rude.
The superego isn't particularly precise. It may tell us not to do certain things when there is objectively nothing wrong with doing them. Thus, it is an aspect of us that can limit us more than necessary.
The Unconscious
What the unconscious is, and how it works.
While to most people it'll seem that what goes on inside of them is pretty straightforward, everyone does have an unconscious. This unconscious is a part of us that we aren't aware of, but which does influence much of our acts and feelings. Of lots of things we do or feel, we do not really know where they come from, although they feel compelling nevertheless.
Noticing the unconscious
We can sometimes notice parts of the unconscious, or what it makes us do or feel.
We may start feeling sad, scared or angry for no apparent reason, although it does seem to make sense somewhere inside. We may, as adults, sometimes start feeling like a child (and perhaps try to resist that feeling, as we are adults, right?). We may not feel much at all, having the same flat state all the time, while we can remember that this was not the case when we were young children.
We may stay occupied with particular thoughts for long periods of time. We may fantasize about situations from the past, or things that might happen in the future. We can stay angry about things way longer than seems reasonable. Even when we realize that this doesn't actually help us in any way, we are not really able to stop doing that.
We feel we need to protect or defend ourselves from some kind of emotional hurt quite often. While this need feels quite real, we often cannot quite put our finger on what it is exactly that is happening in us that needs protection.
We have pretty standard ways of reacting to situations, that most of us take for granted. It seems that we just are that way, even when we think some of these patterns are not very helpful to living our lives satisfactorily.
Some people seem to be able to get us to do things we had no intention of doing. When that isn't by some obvious display of force, we may even have no idea what actually made us change our mind. We are susceptible to manipulation.
There are lots of things we feel we "should" or "should not" do or feel. We are only aware that we should, and we feel compelled to comply. We also keep to certain rules without being much aware of doing that, it just seems to happen by itself.
All of these things have some kind of unconscious cause.
Suppression of feelings
When we don't really understand why we are feeling something, apparently, we are not aware of some part of ourselves. It is unconscious.
We suppress feelings, trying not to have feelings that are unpleasant, negative, or uncomfortable, or when they are overwhelming. We might, for example, think it's weak to feel fear, and don't want to feel it because of that. Or we may be convinced it's wrong to be angry or to feel hatred, and because of that suppress these emotions. It may be unbearable to feel rejected or hurt. We want to protect ourselves from these feelings.
When we do that, we are making those feelings unconscious. In fact, feelings don't go away when we suppress them, they just go hidden. Although we are no longer aware of them, they are still influencing us. Our behavior and reactions keep being influenced by those unconscious feelings, and we keep having thoughts that are related to them.
The formation of the unconscious
Most of our unconscious was formed during our childhood, from when we were a baby of a couple of months old on (and for some of us even earlier). As a young child, we experience lots of things as too much for us, and we usually then suppress some of the associated feelings.
During our upbringing, we need to learn to deal with other people and society. Learning the rules is a painful process, that leads to lots of suppression of feelings.
All this creates our unconscious, that most of us need to live with for the rest of our lives.
What the unconscious does
It's not only feelings we keep in our unconscious, it's whole views of situations, and ways of acting in them. In the present we take these memories from experiences from the past as patterns of behavior. We habitually take on particular roles from these patterns, in response to situations with people. We react quite automatically and thoughtlessly, exactly like we did in the past.
These patterns are triggered by how we feel in the moment.
When we, for instance, experience a new situation that disappoints us, a pattern may come up from an old situation that made us feel disappointment. We then deal with the actual situation like we did in the old one. If we got angry about the disappointment earlier, we may now become angry again automatically, whether it makes sense or not.
Someone who experienced a stressful crowded situation in a confined space in her childhood, may now become very frightened in an elevator that is nearly full.
These patterns make us quite predictable and not very aware of what is really happening. It makes us susceptible to manipulation by others. It is the stuff our egos are made of.
The reason we don't notice this process of old suppressed memories influencing our current behavior, is that part of the memory is the suppression itself. We also repeat the pattern of suppression. Thus, we keep forgetting.
History
In the Western world, it was Sigmund Freud, the renowned psychologist, who is credited for discovering the unconscious.
In Buddhism and other Eastern spiritual ways, the existence of the unconscious has been known a while longer. Various meditation techniques have been used since time immemorial to return to a state of self-awareness.
Being Yourself
Dealing with the unconscious to be more yourself.
While we want to be ourselves, we often are not. We reject our own feelings, when they are unpleasant or "wrong," and whenever we are defensive.
Being happy
In order to be happy, we need to be ourselves. It may seem paradoxical, but to be able to be happy, we do need to allow also our unpleasant feelings. How can you be genuinely happy when you're not completely yourself, dissatisfied with the feelings that are actually there deep inside? If we don't allow all of our feelings, we can only have a superficial sense of happiness, with suffering going on under the surface, leaking out into our awareness every so often.
Feelings only stay forever if we suppress them. They will then stay in our unconscious. If we do allow ourselves feeling them as they come up in the moment, they'll run their natural course, which means that they'll eventually dissolve. This doesn't mean acting them out, though that can in certain instances help becoming aware.
Being in touch with your feelings
Being in touch with yourself means that you face inconvenient truths and unpleasant feelings, when that is what reality is. This is the hardest thing to do. The information in the other sections of this site can help you with that. You can also chat with Eliza, the electronic therapist, which can support your exploring your feelings.
Spirituality is ultimately about being real, and thereby being yourself. Enlightenment is the most radical way of being yourself. There usually is a place for meditation in spirituality, to help you become more aware of yourself.
Meditation
In meditation, you concentrate on a particular point in your body. When you notice that your have drifted away from this point of concentration, usually by thinking about something, you gently return to it. See for more details on how to meditate, the page about meditation.
By meditating, you learn to become more aware of what's happening in you, and to stay present with that. You learn to be more in the moment, and just be with what is there. Over time, this makes you calmer and more relaxed, and more yourself.
A.H. Almaas's Diamond Approach
The books written by A.H. Almaas, that describe his Diamond Approach, can be particularly helpful with becoming more self-aware. Central to the Diamond Approach is the Inquiry practice, where you investigate what goes on inside of you, and thereby make the unconscious conscious.
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