A Quote by Frederick Lenz
Personality is a manifestation of ego. Ego is the central sense of separateness that a person has from the rest of the universe. Personality is the form that that separateness take.
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We have to distinguish between a man as he is in essence, and as he is in ego or personality. In essence, every person is perfect, fearless, and in a loving unity with the entire cosmos; there is no conflict within the person between head, heart, and stomach or between the person and others. Then something happens: the ego begins to develop, karma accumulates, there is a transition from objectivity to subjectivity; man falls from essence into personality.
Put bluntly, the ego is not an obstruction to Spirit, but a radiant manifestation of Spirit. All Forms are not other than Emptiness, including the form of the ego. It is not necessary to get rid of the ego, but simply to live with it a certain exuberance.
Man is important in one sense only. He was made in the image of God: That is his importance. He is not important for his body, ego, or personality. His constant affirmation of ego-consciousness is the source of all his problems.
There are only two states of consciousness that exist - the state of the ego and the state of love. The ego is the narrow state, the seed-form, the atomic stage; love is all encompassing, love is God. The center of the ego is I; the ego exists for itself. The nectar of love is the universe. Love exists for all.
"When you accept your life - when you take your breakfast, and when you sleep and when you walk and when you take your bath - how can you create an ego out of these things? Sleeping when feeling sleepy, eating when feeling hungry, how can you create your ego? No, if you fast, you can create ego. If you are on a vigilance for the whole night, and you say, "I am not going to sleep," you can create the ego. By the morning, the person who has slept well will have no ego, you will have a great ego."
The hallucination of separateness prevents one from seeing that to cherish the ego is to cherish misery. We do not realize that our so-called love and concern for the individual is simply the other face of our own fear of death or rejection. In his exaggerated valuation of separate identity, the personal ego is sawing off the branch on which he is sitting, and then getting more and more anxious about the coming crash!
We all feel a separateness; we wish that a drop of water would soften our ego; the world needs a common conscience: agreement... we must concentrate outside ourselves.
As a holistic being you shatter the illusion of your separateness and reveal your connection to everything. This empowers you in a way that the ego-driven self could never contemplate.
The ego isn't wrong; it's just unconscious. When you observe the ego in yourself, you are beginning to go beyond it. Don't take the ego too seriously. When you detect egoic behavior in yourself, smile. At times you may even laugh. How could humanity have been taken in by this for so long? Above all, know that the ego isn't personal. It isn't who you are. If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, that's just more ego.
You need your ego to survive in the three-dimensional world, but you need only that part of the ego which processes information. The rest - pride, arrogance, defensiveness, fear - is worse than useless. The rest of the ego separates you from wisdom, joy, and God.
People are not afraid of death, they are afraid of losing their separation, they are afraid of losing their ego. Once you start feeling separate from existence the fear of death arises because then death seems to be dangerous. You will no longer be separate; what will happen to your ego, your personality? And you have cultivated the personality with such care, with such great effort; you have polished it your whole life, and death will come and destroy it
The point is that if you accept that there is only one energy in all things, then on an energy level there is no giving or receiving - just energy moving around within itself. It's only the ego that sees a separateness in things. So the ego will say, "The Cadillac went from Harry to Sally." But on an infinite level, it is neither Harry's nor Sally's, it is a part of all things. It is. Where it finds itself and whose name is on the owner's manual is irrelevant.
I learned that our deepest need is to overcome our aloneness and our separateness. We seek to escape from separateness in various ways. We seek conformity, mistaking it for union. This is a soul-crushing way to exist. Or we seek union through orgiastic states - drugs, alcoholism, overwork - or through creative activities. But the ultimate escape from separateness is through interpersonal union.
If your own strong ego clashes with other strong egos, you not going to get anywhere. I studied psychology and learned about the many parts of us that we need to integrate so we don't walk around feeling disconnected: personality, soul, ego. If you do feel disconnected, you need to ask which part is feeling that way. Your ego is there to boost you up, if recognized and used correctly.
Rebirth is an affirmation that must be counted among the primordial affirmations of mankind. The concept of rebirth necessarily implies the continuity of personality. Here the human personality is regarded as continuous and accessible to memory, so that, when one is incarnated or born, one is able, potentially, to remember that one has lived through previous existences, and that these existences were one's own, ie, they had the same ego form as the present life. As a rule, reincarnation means rebirth in a human body.
In the West, as well as some other parts of the world, the personal sense of ego tends to predominate, whereas in other areas, there is a more collective sense of ego. This collective ego emphasizes the 'we' rather than the 'I.'
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