February 02, 2023

Illuminating The Inner Workings Of The Ego + Eric Ajna

24 minutes

Have you ever tried to invoke a feeling of love in something you knew in your heart you didn’t feel love for? Though, despite the conviction you’d feel over this absence of feeling, you’d still push forward in expressing a type of love that felt true to others, but not at all true to yourself.

I’ve always found it fascinating how we tend to embody two polar opposite and contradictory sides of ourselves at all times. We can keep friends we secretively despise, yet on the surface behave in such a way that implied how much we truly care about them at the same time. We can tell our partners how truly happy we are with them while at the same time longing for the touch of another person. Of course, when we reflect on this quality of behavior in others, it’s easy for us to access a type of moral compass and judge this as irrational and perhaps even erratic behavior. The part we often overlook is how we unconsciously buy into this same form of neurosis in how we live our lives. It’s fairly easy for humans to notice these patterns in others because we live in a society that appears to normalize this system of projection towards others, but avoidance of self at the same time.

The truth is, we all do it. Some of it can be innocent, but often times it’s a system we’ve designed to protect us from being hurt or feeling pain both inwardly and outwardly. There seems to be too much of a risk in committing to the vulnerability of our own authenticity, that we would rather fabricate an identity that is often nothing like who we actually are inside. Thus the ego is born.

At this point, you’ve probably gathered how passionate I am about illuminating the inner workings of the ego. I’ve spent years in the spiritual community hearing all about why we should eradicate it from our lives, though I would rarely hear about how it actually works. I would rarely hear about the ways in which it influences our inner world. It’s a complex journey to understand for sure, though it may be the most important journey to explore if the hope is to develop a different relationship to it. Perhaps if we committed to understanding the inner workings of ego, we’d then realize how impossible it is to eradicate it from our lives. This episode is a reflection on the journey in understanding what many people consider the enemy; the ego.

In this episode I discuss,