Music Production, DJ, Live PA and Random Ramblings
Posts tagged Ego
Right or happy?
Jul 7th
Strange mental space at the moment….Through the psychological voyage of the mind’s eye over the many years and in some respects, in complete opposite directions at times, I feel a tremendous inner strength.
I see the egos’ flashing around me and I feel the desire of my own ego to claw its way back to its former glory and then I feel that calming feeling that you can only feel once you have learned what the ego is an how damaging its claws can be. And then I realise and remember and feel, and feel sorry for, all those around me, that will spend the rest of their lives, most likely, chasing their tail trying to make themselves appears greater or bigger than what they are. When I feel these feelings, I also deeply remember that in feeling them, there is a part of me that is judging those people and thinking that I am better because I do not feel them in the same way, for a sizeable portion of life-time, any longer.
Of course, that is my ego 
We are never far away from it. My ability to keep my ego in check has been challenged recently through certain events at home, at work, and just in general but the one thing that I know, is that I have immeasurable inner strength and this strength keeps me pushing and trying. It especially keeps me from saying what you sometimes want to say certain people, when you see their ego and it’s personal self-destructive nature coming to the fore.
I can’t say what I want to say to them.
Each of us needs to find our own path and come to realise these concepts (or never realise or acknowledge them or accept them) over the course of our lives.
We may choose to accept or to reject and either option may work for us and thus allow us to conclude that the option is irrelevant because hey, we’re successful, our approach worked and yours, therefore, didn’t. What do we mean by “worked”? Does this mean wealth and career success? Does this mean great friends and relationships? Does this means we are right and you are wrong?
In all our rightness, how often are we ever really happy? Do you want to be right? Or do you want to be happy?
I am so happy that we are doing an EQ course…All the prodding and pushing the right people, with the right words, in the way that they needed to hear it, has paid off….manipulation and job done haha
You see….that was my ego, right there. It wants you to know what I did. It’s wants you to know how clever I was in manipulating the people I needed to, to achieve my goal.
That’s why we all need it, because we are never free from it.
So you tell me, so what if we all have a massively giant ego? “I don’t care, I am happy” you say. You will never know what happiness is until you understand what your ego is. And even then, you will struggle to control it most of the time. It will get the better of you and when it does, you will revert into your old patterns of attention desperation, chasing the future but never living in the present (the future brings salvation and a better life) and being unable to let go of what others said or didn’t and should have said.
I have come to terms with the fact that I will never be able to truly subside my ego fully.
And I think, I am finally ok with that.
My Life Changing Book List
Mar 9th
If you have read this blog for any amount of time, you will have realised that I am someone who has been on a transformational journey for the last 5 years. This journey has led me out of the manic aggression, wrought with interesting episodes (which ultimately ended up in me hurting someone I didn’t know) into someone who is seeking enlightenment.
My journey has brought me to a place where I believe most will never reach due to their obsession with money, greed, fame, lust, desire for power and all the other symptoms of the ego.
I have had many helpers along the way and as I continue to grow to become a better, more caring, more genuine person I wanted to acknowledge those helpers who have played a cardinal role in what has become a life worth treasuring.
Now besides from my wife, who is obviously the most influential force and person I have ever had on my life and who, over the last 10 years, has made me into a man that I respect and love, I have some secondary influences in the form of pieces of literature.
Now you might be thinking, what can a book do to change your life, well, you need to read these books and then you will understand. These books will help you understand how poisonous you are to yourself. If you are not so obtuse and ignorant that you cannot look deep into yourself, then these books will change the rest of your life for the better. Without further ado my top 5:
1. A New Earth – Eckhart Tolle
This is the most life changing book I have ever read. This is the source of dissolving your ego. Your ego, which you may or may not realise is the everything and anything upon which your apparent life is created. It is why you say and do practically everything and you have no idea how much it has polluted your life.
It creates that niggling little voice which is making you insane, every second of every day (though you may not realise your insanity until it’s gone). Every conversation you have, every thought, every thing you do, is affected by your ego’s desire to attain more.
Those who think they have no ego, are some of the most egotistical people alive by virtue of the fact that they use their apparent higher plain of consciousness to perceive themselves as better than everyone else. This of course, is the ego. It is only we you can be truly non-judgemental that you will understand this fully.
One day, although I suspect it will take a lifetime, I hope to be non-judgemental and ego-less from a purely genuine place.
If you think you do not need to read this, then you are precisely the person who needs to read it. Everyone on earth needs to read this, simple.
Does the following mean anything to you:
When I do well, it is because of my intelligence, but when others do well, it is because of their environment.
When I do badly, it is because of my environment but when others do badly, it is because of their intelligence.
You know what your answer is to this, that is why you need to read this book.
2. The Power Of Now – Eckhart Tolle
This book is by the same author as above and although written first, I believe should be read after you have read and absorbed the first book. This book conveys another side to the ego that we all struggle with every single day and most importantly how you overcome it.
For most people, the future will always be better, brighter and greater. We will achieve all our goals in the future and we will be happy, fulfilled and successful in the future. On top of this, most feel defined by their past. Their past shapes their abilities, their reactions, their lifestyle and their ambitions.
The problem with this, is that if this is how you define you life, you will spend the rest of you life blaming the past and wishing for the believed to be better, but never attainable, future.
Again, this is the ego’s desire to be better and in the same way as described previously, it completely poisons you out of your own future. This book provides the same solution as the first one, because it is the only solution to the same underlying problem.
You need to understand that the message in both above books takes years to understand and digest and it is not something that you just read. It is something you need to live. But after merely reading, the transformation will have already begun. You will be staggered at how much happier you are and how much more comes into your life.
3. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Steven Covey
Possibly the most famous, “self-help” book in the world. The definition of effectiveness. An absolute master-class of how to create everything you want, practically.
7 life-long habits that will take you a life time to embrace. These habits make you believe that anything is possible and if you are naive like me, then you will certainly welcome this way of thinking. If you are a glass is half-empty kind of pessimist, then you need to read this in order to not spend a life wishing for what you can only blame yourself for not attaining.
4. Emotional Intelligence – Daniel Goleman
Emotional Intelligence has nothing to do with how well you handle pressure or stress at work or how nervous you get in a job interview. This is what MBA students are taught to understand it as, but that is not it.
EQ is related to everything spoken about already and it is all of the above. This book discusses both the physiological and psychological aspects of EQ and if you love science like me, then you will find the biological aspects of the brain and mind discussed in this book, incredibly interesting.
This is the authoritative work on the subject by the man who first understood it and while it is a challenging read, you will feel incredibly awakened by the notions of how pointless and meaningless things like IQ really are. If you love the fact that you are clever and all you think of is shallow financial success, then you need to read this because you need to understand that clever has nothing to do with getting you the materialistic props that you seek so badly.
5. Gut Feelings – Gerd Gigerenzer
Superb. If you want to trust every decision you ever make and know that it comes from a place of depth so far beyond what the primitive, conscious, logical mind can fathom, then you need to read this. I think we all know, intuitively that all the best decisions, that we all make, are not those that come to use by way of logic and deep analytical thinking.
I have tried to live my life avoiding logical thinking for as long as I can remember and I have always made the right decisions for better or for worse. Note, that your gut may not always lead you along the path of least resistance. It may not even lead you on a pleasurable journey, but, it will lead you where you need to go, because there is a message and life-lesson for you in that journey.
This book is fascinating in that the author actually shows you how, though a multitude of verbal and thought experiments, just how powerful and correct your intuition is. It is staggering and provoking. It will make you understand that life is not as serious as we all wish it to be. Life is as fun as we make it and life is everything that we think it is. If you think it is bad, it will be bad.
So how have these 5 books (amongst many others) changed me? Well, everyday I am living the life I want, I am happy, I have all sorts of amazing opportunities coming to me, money always seems to make itself available to me when I need it and most importantly, I have a soul mate to share it all with.
Couldn’t ask for anything better really!
Stereotypes
Nov 19th
The stereotype has such a strong presence in much of society. Right or wrong, they dictate a lot of perceptions and belief systems which can be both amusing and catastrophic. I will use some of the stereotypes of Jewish people as an example since I am a Jew so I can J
Us jews are seen as somewhat a thrifty bunch. Knowing a few jews I can both confirm and deny this stereotype in equal amounts but of course, the collective mind likes to generalise about a few examples and in a secondary fashion, generalise about the most recent occurrences as well. By this I mean that most people will take the most recent memory of something occurring such as a person being sick and go make the generalisation “you are always getting sick, what wrong with you”. In fact, all that needs to happen is that the mind attaches the stereotype of sickness to that person when it happens in recent memory and perhaps once before, possible even quite a while before.
The generalisation powers of the mind are some of our greatest strength and greatest egoic weakness.
Based on partial information we are able to generalise a system, situation or action to the point where we can plan, strategise and apply logic. Our ability to do these things is why we are so successful as a species. We are able to generalise the action process needs to track a ball travelling through the air and actually catch it through a reactionary instinct that has taken millions o years of evolution. It sounds so trivial but try get a robot to do the same thing. Yes you are right, it hasn’t been done yet because the mind’s parallel computer and vision system and mechanism by which actions performed over time become “common sense” are pretty hard to replicate.
Of course, the greatest weakness comes in when the stereotypes lead to a desire for separation and an incorrect feeling of superiority caused by the ego’s need to distinguish itself from others. With specific references to the Jews, the Holocaust is an easily identifiable case in point.
But between both extremes lie some of what effects most of our life. Those little generalisations that come out after a few too many drinks or in casual conversation. Those stereotypes of jews, blacks, whites, women, homosexuals etc etc. You know those ones, you have them too. We all do at some time.
Of course they affect how we interact with people who are part of that generalisation and it is pretty difficult firstly, to realise that a certain reaction is due to the stereotype you have and then secondly, to acknowledge it and try make a decision independently of it.
I have a particular issue with a very specific person at present and although I am aware of the stereotype in my mind and the effect it’s having on our interactions, I still choose to act in a certain way because of it. That is my fault and I need to resolve it. I cannot change them but I can change myself and how I respond to this person. Again this is my ego’s need to separate at work in trying to prove to me that because I do not act like them, I am therefore “better” than them. This is all ego, this is not me.
Hopefully this will be the last post on this current theme that I seem to be on, I will probably be boring all 3 of my readers to death by now J
The egoic mind
Oct 15th
If at all possible, I am always on the prowl to reduce the effects that the mind-identified mind has on me. My own mind, that is.
I have been reading the 2 famous books by Eckhard Tolle namely, “The Power of Now” and “The New Earth” and of course they are life changing, mind altering and truly revolutionary. I have been on the quest of self-improvement for a number of years now and at this point, I have been able to reach a good place in terms of ego balance yet I am still battling a bit with acceptance of The Now, acceptance of what-is.
It is a difficult thing to comprehend because our entire lives, upbringing and culture is fixated on making you, effectively, the conglomeration of the past who constantly yearns for the future, believing that the future is better and the grass is greener.
I see this around me mostly because I am now able to see it in myself. I want to help those around me get out of this train of thought but I know it would be too condescending to mention. Of course, my emotional awareness also makes me realise that I want to make it aware to them because at some level, it would satisfy the always present need to have my ego scratched, due to the ego’s desire to prove a separation between them and me. I am aware of it. The work place seems to be where people need the most awakening but it is also the one place that would probably never understand.
The trick is to not be too hard on yourself for having the egoic thoughts. It is merely to acknowledge them. Acknowledgement does 2 things. Firstly, it stops the thought in its tracks. Secondly, stepping outside of the thought, over time, will stop the egoic thoughts from happening in the first place because that’s just part of how the mind seems to work.
I love where I am right now in terms of my consciousness but ironically the world seems simpler when you let your mind run on auto-pilot and never truly thinking about what you are thinking or feeling.
My true aim for the next while is to be able to completely focus on the now without needing to focus on the now. If what is, just is, then, well….I have reached that point where few will ever tread.
The Oscars
Feb 27th
Most of us love to act. Not for the camera, nor for others. Rather, we act in a way that hopefully makes us believe we are something that we are not. Is this is good thing? I don’t know but is it a necessary evil? I believe so…
Many sources suggest the concepts of “acting as if” until the “if” becomes the reality. It makes sense really…positive thinking, the secret, John Kehoe, all subtle variations of the same thing….believe you can and you will. In order to believe you can, you sometimes need to “act as if”.
I have to admit that realising that someone is doing it and then watching how they act in accordance with those thoughts or feelings does piss me off quite a bit. Why? Well most of the time, it comes across as arrogance for one thing but more importantly it usually seems so insincere. Or perhaps that is just my ego suggesting to me that I hope they fail in their wishes and desires, who knows?
It is most definitely true that we all hope that others fail, even if we are not aware of it consciously or refuse to admit it to ourselves. Only when one delves deep into why the news of a friends success, on occasion, causes a feeling of “wanker” or “they were brought up around money” , does one sit up and take notice of the jealousy, the greed or the sadness. If you say that you are always happy for others’ success, then I say to you that you are lying to yourself and you should spend some time trying to bring those emotions out and correct them, so that you can truelly revil in someone else’s happiness and joy.
It’s harder than it sounds…
