If we were to experience a physical attack it would be instinctual to defend ourselves.
The strange thing is that if someone attacks what we believe, self defence also seems to be the natural response.
Why is this?
Why are our ideas and beliefs so important that we rise to defend them?
What's happening is that our ideas and beliefs have become associated to our sense of who we are - our self.
This sense of self - and our instinct to protect it - is the ego function in us.
The origin of the word 'ego' is from Latin, literally meaning ‘I’.
This sense of self or 'I' comes into our awareness from a very early age.
As we become increasingly aware of the world, the sense of self - the ego - develops complexity because as we learn about our life through our experiences, we attach most importance to what we need to survive.
If the ego stopped at attaching only to what was essential for survival, all of life would be in balance.
But it never does. The essentials never feel enough because our egoic nature only knows the threatening world we live in.
This is why fear is the primary driver of our egoic self.
This egoic instinctual behaviour runs in the background like a computer program - always active in our unconscious mind.
This unconscious 'programming' that is the ego, is entirely self-focussed - it is its only purpose.
This results in our self interested behaviour.
At the far extreme this self-interested tendency of the egoic nature results in cruelty and wickedness.
The only path to salvation, and the cause of the beginning of the Inner Journey of Awakening, lies deeper in the self, at the very centre of our being.
It is an intuitive spark of knowing that somehow calls us back towards goodness.
In time, with enough experience of the life lived under the rule of ego, we eventually come to realise we have been the victims of our own egoic nature - our own self!
As we become ever more aware of the ego function in us, we increasingly see how it is at the root of so much of our wrong thinking and behaviour - and how this causes us and others so much suffering.
When this happens, we become highly motivated to attempt to rid ourselves of it.
This is no easy task because the ego is deeply embedded in our operating system.
And we cannot access it directly because it lives in our unconscious.
We are not consciously aware of how it works in us to control how we think, feel and behave.
To begin to diminish the control of the ego, the best way is to notice it's influence in our thoughts, feelings, impulses and behaviour.
John