The ego’s bad rap

I admit I’ve read more than my share of popular spiritual self-help books like Eckhart Tolle’s ‘A New Earth’. And although I was able to glean helpful truth from such books (thank you for the wisdom), there is one significant idea that doesn’t quite fit for me in the current arena of spiritual self-help and that is the ego and its place in our lives. A lot of our spiritual leaders will have us believe that the ego is something inherently bad that we just have to learn to live with and do our best to ignore, dismiss or extinguish even.

Well my ego just refuses to let that one go.

Our duality

1968 film cover

Ever wonder why life feels like a constant tugging between two sides of your one-self? One part of you wants to eat fried chicken, while the other part of you tempers that desire (or tries to anyway) so you don’t eat too much of it or too often. One part of you wants to lie on the beach all day and watch cloud-tv, while the other part of you keeps track of when it’s time to go and get some errands done. It’s constant unrest and feels a little crazy sometimes. It’s like the Odd Couple, sharing the same house of ‘you’.

This blog entry makes an argument for the idea that you are not crazy and the reason for the constant tugging is because you are a composite of two distinct selves; further these two selves are the Odd Couple with opposite personalities, but a couple nonetheless, and a couple whose strength is in fact their oddness.