Ego

“ How much confusion of thought comes from our interest in self, and from our vanity when thinking 'I am so great,' or 'I have done this wonderful deed?' The thought of thine ego stands between thy rational nature and truth; banish it, and then wilt thou see things as they are. He who thinks correctly will rid himself of ignorance and acquire wisdom. ”

“ Dimly, persistently, doggedly, stubbornly the ego, the self—that small spark of assertiveness and awareness—struggled to arrange and order, to reason and make sense of—to unify and master—the knowledge it possessed. ”

“ Moreover, if our ego remains, how can we attain true deliverance? If the ego is to be reborn in any of the three worlds, be it in hell, upon earth, or be it even in heaven, we shall meet again and again the same inevitable doom of sorrow. We shall remain chained to the wheel of individuality and shall be implicated in egotism and wrong. ”

“ Thus, it must be that your function is established by God through His Voice, or is made by the ego which you have made to replace Him. Which is true? Unless God gave your function to you, it must be the gift of the ego. Does the ego really have gifts to give, being itself an illusion and offering only the illusion of gifts? ”

“ What is the one feature present in all our knowledge,—the common point in which all our cognitions unite and agree,—the element in which they are identical? The ego is this feature, point, or element: it is the common centre which is at all times known, and in which all our cognitions, however diverse they may be in other respects, are known as uniting and agreeing; and besides the ego, or oneself, there is no other identical quality in our cognitions—as any one may convince himself upon reflection. ”

“ The Ego now appears as the shaft in which all these sensations, representations, cognitions and thoughts are preserved, which is with them all, and constitutes the centre in which they all come together. ”

“ To-day I am somebody, to-morrow somebody else, if the scenes have shifted; my Ego is a gibbering phantom, pirouetting in the glass, gesticulating, transforming, hourly or momentarily, gleaming with the phosphor light of a deceptive unreality, melting like the mist upon the hills. ”

“ Here, what I want is known to me by virtue of its contrast with what another wants, and this contrast, rendering relatively clear my consciousness of my own intent, tends, by its very existence, and by reason of the blindness of my passion, to inflame the opposition. In a more benign, but also, as I judge, in even a more primitive form, appears the simple contrast of ego and non-ego in all my imitative, or explicitly plastic and socially submissive, states of consciousness. ”

“ We sometimes think of the ego as a mere point of consciousness, or we think of the ordinary self of daily life as a fragile and ephemeral entity bounded by a few bodily tissues and a few mental views and habits. ”

“ In consequence, the true or metaphysically real Ego of a man, as I venture now with emphasis to repeat, is simply the totality of his experience in so far as he consciously views this experience as, in its meaning, the struggling but never completed expression of his coherent plan in life, the changing but never completed partial embodiment of his one ideal. ”

“ Under what conditions can the Ego be conscious of itself? Only in so far as it is practical, in so far as it is a striving force, only in so far as it is will. “The practical Ego is the Ego of original self-consciousness; a rational being immediately perceives itself only in willing; and were it not practical, would perceive neither itself nor the world—would not be an intelligence at all. Will is in a special sense the essence of reason.” ”

“ According to him the ego alone exists, and the universe is but a projection of the ego, a phantasmagoria which we ourselves create without suspecting it, believing all the time that we are lookers-on. ”

“ He knew that a true spirit, a pure ego, could not wholly perish, yet now he asked himself what would be the effect of close proximity to such an enormous center of elemental activity upon an ego not wholly sublimated, such as his. ”

“ Of the ego itself nothing more can be said than that it is the thought of me as the subject of all experience, willing, and action, and if we try to take hold of it nothing more than this formula remains. Yet the fact that the ego is the subject of all this, gives conduct, will, and experience that peculiar character which distinguishes them from mere action and reaction. For it is directly certain that all the psychical contents are not only co-existences in one consciousness but that they are possessed by it. ”

“ A thought, a feeling, an act, may reveal a complete soul. My ideas, my sensations, are like me. How would such facts be possible, if the multiple unity of the ego did not present the essential characteristic of vibrating in its entirety in the depths of each of the parts descried or rather determined in it by analysis? ”

“ In what sense, despite this complexity and variability of the individual self-consciousness as it comes to us empirically, have we still a right to say that there is in the universe a real, and, within the range of our individual experience, a permanent being, to be called this individual Ego? ”

“ Try to dislodge the thoughts that rise in your mind, in the manner of the incessant vibrations in the air, by thinking that you are not the ego, nor has your ego any foundation at all.
21. The man who has not overcome his egotism, and its concomitants of covetousness, pride and delusion, doth in vain attend to these lectures which are useless to him. ”

“ I am the leading-string of the ego, and the prompter of its notions.” ”

“ My absolute Ego is obviously not the Individual;—although this has been maintained by offended courtiers and chagrined philosophers in order to impute to me the scandalous doctrine of practical Egoism. ”

“ Nay, it is what makes up the Ego. For the ego, as we are beginning to understand, is no mysterious separate entity, still less a succession of disconnected, conflicting, blind impulses; the ego is the congruous, perceived, nay, thought-out system of habits, which feels all incongruity towards itself as accidental and external. Hence, when we ask which are the statements we believe in, we answer instinctively (logic being but a form of congruity) those statements which accord with themselves and with other statements; when we ask, which are the persons we trust? ”

“ Thus object apart from subject—matter apart from mind—the ego apart from the non-ego, and separated from all thoughts and determinations—the non-ego divorced from the ego, and existing as it best can,—these are the substantial, not indeed in human knowledge, for human knowledge cannot lay hold of the substantial, but in reality, in rerum natura. ”

“ The Ego, as understood in common fashion, posits neither the external object nor itself, but both are posited through general, absolute thinking, and through this the object is given for the Ego, as well as the Ego for itself. ”

“ What is not supposed to be my concern! [2] First and foremost, the good cause [3] , then God's cause, the cause of mankind, of truth, of freedom, of humanity, of justice; further, the cause of my people, my prince, my fatherland; finally, even the cause of Mind, and a thousand other causes. Only my cause is never to be my concern. "Shame on the egoist who thinks only of himself!" ”

“ And as all the matter which the human Ego gathered to it retains the stamp or photographic impression of the human being, the matter transmigrates to the lower level when given an animal impress by the Ego. ”

“ Within the body, as a dweller and a motive power, is the ego, the real self. It is that and that only which can be developed and which possesses those attributes, compelling, bye and bye, success. It is that which must, to some degree, be understood. Be the body what it may, the real self has the power of expression and improvement. That real self will be spoken of as the ego, and its power considered. ”

“ We learn in The Secret Doctrine how the Ego looks down upon the waters of the astral plane and the lower world, how it reflects itself in the personality, how it identifies itself with the personality and, falling in love with its image, is bound to earth. ”

“ The ego is the animal in us, the heritage of the flesh which is full of selfish desires. By obeying the laws of God, seeking to live the life laid down in our teachings, and prayer and struggle, we can subdue our egos. ”

“ His empirical ego, or collection of egos, is constituted by his relatively self-conscious moments just as they chance to come. His metaphysically real Ego is constituted by his experiences in so far as they mean for him the struggle towards his one ideal. ”

“ No, Gentola̤, repeated embodiments do not inure the mortal expression of the Ego to the sorrows and vicissitudes of the physical plane, but through such experiences the Ego evolves into loftier, grander states of Being. Does the Ego and its mortal expression mutually experience joy and sorrow? Aye, truly, but the ego knows, while the objective expression or Soul only sees through a glass darkly. Only the fully freed Ego is capable of comprehending this occult statement, so patiently you will await its solution. ”

“ When it reaches down into the higher subdivisions of the mental world it is the ego, a lesser expression of the same divine life that pours from the Logos through the monad—lesser because it is then functioning through the denser matter of a lower level. ”

“ But the ego ideal comprises the sum of all the limitations in which the ego has to acquiesce, and for that reason the abrogation of the ideal would necessarily be a magnificent festival for the ego, which might then once again feel satisfied with itself. [3]
There is always a feeling of triumph when something in the ego coincides with the ego ideal. ”

“ And this environment all lies in the common field of consciousness, and in the one correlating and unifying apperceptivity of the ego,—that Ego which is the inseparable comrade, vehicle, and judge, of all our perceptions. ”

“ The Ego as cognitive recognises reality in the non-Ego, and as active or practical, as determining the non-Ego, likewise ascribes reality to it. But how is it possible that there should be for the Ego, which is pure activity, mere self-position, a negation or opposition? ”

“ As the ego is by itself only a formal identity, the dialectical movement of its intelligible unity, i.e. the successive steps in further specification of consciousness, does not to it seem to be its own activity, but is implicit, and to the ego it seems an alteration of the object. ”

“ The composition of the elements, intimately connected with pleasure and pain, into an ideal mental-economical unity, the ego, is a work of the highest significance for the intellectual functions that act in the service of the pain-avoiding, pleasure-seeking will. The formation of the ego by this process of circumscription and delimitation is therefore instinctively effected, it grows familiar and natural, and fixes itself perhaps through heredity. ”

“ If He is our centre and our goal, then be sure our Ego will begin to live, because it is 'grounded' and rooted in His. Any trouble and anxiety that leads you out of self to the Infinite Ego, that makes you feel helpless and lonely and in need of a Human Helper and a Human Comforter, thank God for it. He is teaching you to cast yourself upon One who is perfectly human because perfectly divine. ”

“ Let us first try to understand what we know concerning ourselves. The longer one lives and the more one studies the mystery of "Being," the more one is forced to the conclusion that in every Human Being there are two Personalities, call them what you like—"the Real and its Image," "the Spiritual and its Material Shadow," or "the Transcendental and its Physical Ego." ”

“ Generalized it might be restated as the fact that people say You to themselves whenever the dual nature of the ego becomes visible, i.e., whenever one no longer entertains a former opinion, or when one is undecided and carries about contradictory intentions, or whenever one wants to compel himself to some achievement. ”

“ I dwelled on the birth of the Ego out of the mythical collective, the Abrahamitic Ego which is pretentious enough to assume that man should serve only the Highest, from which assumption the discovery of God followed. ”

“ The wishes of the ego gave rise to it, and the ego's need for grievances, which are necessary to maintain it, peoples it with figures that seem to attack you and call for "righteous" judgment. These figures become the middlemen the ego employs to traffic in grievances. They stand between your awareness and your brothers' reality. ”

“ For each of the three five-minute practice periods today, begin by repeating today's idea to yourself, and then close your eyes and search your mind for the various kinds of descriptive terms in which you see yourself. Include all the ego-based attributes which you ascribe to yourself, positive or negative, desirable or undesirable, grandiose or debased. All of them are equally unreal, because you do not look upon yourself through the eyes of holiness. ”

“ A stream of judgments flow through the mind. As the ego has self-activity it changes its position in the environment at will and a different environment plays on the senses at every change in the position of the ego. ”

“ I separate myself as a distinct person, as this particular Ego, from the universality of Spirit, in order to compare myself with it. The sense of unison of myself with myself through this comparison produces this self-satisfaction, in which this determinate Ego, as this core of unity, rejoices in itself. No doubt this personal Ego is involved in all that a man knows, wills, or carries out; but it makes an immense difference whether, in-dealing with knowledge and action, the matter of concern is the man's own unique Ego, or that in which the essential content of consciousness consists ”