The Ego: How it Relates to Your Happiness

The ego is a part of the body that many people have a hard time understanding. Even modern psychology has a hard time understanding what the ego is. According to Sigmund Freud, the ego is the system within the brain that gives intellectual-cognitive, perceptual, defensive and executive functions. These functions help us to organize and understand our thoughts, which gives us reason and common sense so we don’t destroy ourselves. One of the ego’s main jobs is to keep the Id in check, which is considered by Freud as the selfish and destructive side. It is important that we understand the ego because it plays an important role for how we experience life. If our ego is imbalanced, it may allow the destructive side of our personality to take control. This can make our lives miserable because we may attract a lot of negative experiences.

Sigmund Freud did a great job explaining what the ego is but he also failed to mention many important details about the ego. The ego is a function in the body that gives us awareness of what we are experiencing in a linear fashion. It acts like a tape recorder and is the observer of our thoughts and emotions. Some people like to refer to the ego as an entity but this is not very accurate. The ego is not an entity but a process which records our thoughts in a robotic fashion. This gives us awareness of our thoughts which allow them to manifest and create our experiences. Think of the ego as like a computer chip that contains the code which controls our action. The ego is like the puppet and the puppet master is the subconscious mind. Therefore, the ego is created by the subconscious mind (the programmer) and is also the controller of the ego. Because the ego plays a very important role for creating our experiences, many of our positive and negative experiences are partially manifested through the ego. For example, when we have an idea that we want to experience, the ego allows that idea to be held. This allows time for it to manifest through the action of the Law of Attraction. It is important that we are specific about the things we want to experience, because we may end up attracting things that we don’t want. For example, if we want change we need to be specific about the kind of change we want. Otherwise we may end up experiencing so many changes that our lives would feel very chaotic.

People who have an imbalanced ego will have a hard time finding happiness because they don’t know what they want. An imbalanced ego can become overstimulated which allows it to be dominant over our thoughts and emotions. This can be bad because it makes us vulnerable to manipulation and control. The society that we live in revolves around manipulation and control, which is why we should learn to take control of our ego. Because of the way our society operates, our ego has been distorted to support excuses instead of personal responsibility, hate instead of love, wars instead of peace, and competition instead of cooperation. Instead of fighting with our ego, we need to learn to work with it and bring it back into balance. When our ego is back into balance, finding happiness becomes a lot easier because we are more able to let go of undesired attachments and addictions.

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