How Do We Overcome the Ego?
At the end of the day, all we really want is to have a good life. A good life means more or less the same for everyone: a decent place to live, food on the table, good health, education for our children, and most importantly—the certainty of a bright tomorrow. When we ask ourselves what is preventing us from leading this kind a life, it's starting to be clear to many people that it's only our ego, in all its forms—disrespect, discrimination, exploitation, bullying, cruelty, gossip and slander—are preventing us from leading a good life. But instead of asking how to overcome the ego, which seems like an insurmountable task, we invest our resources in protecting ourselves from other people’s egos. The problem is that in the name of protecting ourselves and securing our future, we often impose our own egos on other people.
Nothing represents the ego more than the skyscrapers we've built that literally remind us how the people of Babylon tried to reach God by building a tower to the sky. How many more of them do we need to assuage the human ego? Apparently many more. A new $7 Billion real estate project has just been approved for around Penn Station -
Nearly 40% of office space at nearby Hudson Yards is vacant and the Governor is giving another sweet tax deal to a developer (and large campaign donor) to construct another 30 million s.f. of new space around Penn Station. If built, it will be one of the largest projects in American history.?Meanwhile, NYC office occupancy in the city is less than 38% of its pre-pandemic level, local subway ridership under 40%, and big lessees including WarnerMedia, Chase, and others have already announced their intent to reduce their NYC footprint. Another 7 in 10 leases have not come up for renewal yet.?The new space will take 20 years to complete and ultra premium rents are planned. Is is just me or is this insane? Kate Lister
Obstacles on Our Way To Happiness
There is a reason why we are not asking the obvious question: How do we overcome the only obstacle on our way to happiness? The thing that obstructs us, namely the ego, distracts us and diverts our attention into seeing other things or other people as the problem. But if we rise above our feelings and think logically for just a moment, we will realize that if we felt close to one another, if we felt like we're in this together rather than like enemies, we would not clash with each other.
The tricks that the ego plays on us are nothing new. For thousands of years, it has been pitting us against each other. For thousands of years, we have been killing, exploiting, abusing each other, and we're secretly happy when others stumble, since it's not us. No other being think that way, only humans, because only humans have this little monster inside called “ego.”
Past societies were not as toxic as ours is today. In some cases, they truly lived like a family. But the ego doesn't remain static; it intensifies and poisons everything in its path. Humanity has exhausted every option. It tried the extreme left and the extreme right, capitalism and socialism, anarchy and rigid orders, monarchy, democracy, theocracy, and the list goes on and on. Nothing has worked and nothing will work as long as the ego governs our minds and hearts.
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The First Social Entrepreneur
While humanity has been embroiled in incessant fighting, one man, who lived nearly 4,000 years ago, asked the right question: How can humanity defeat the ego? The answer he found made him so happy that he began to share it wherever he went. He realized he'd discovered how to help humanity. His name was Abraham, and the social innovation he introduced was that instead of trying to defeat other people’s egos, or even our own ego, we need to focus on the positive, on nurturing our non-egoistic connections. That was quite breakthrough thinking at the time, and still is today. There are some early adopters but for the most part everyone is still waiting to see what will happen instead of taking preemptive action. And meanwhile our untamed egos keep growing and wreaking havoc.
The First Road Show
Abraham began to accumulate followers who understood that he was right. Pressured by the authorities in his homeland, Babylon, he took to the road and headed for Canaan. Along the way, he accumulated more followers who saw the beauty in his idea. When they began to implement Abraham’s method among themselves by nurturing care and consideration instead of alienation and selfishness, they began to experience a powerful sense of bonding.
Through their bonding, they discovered something that people didn't know before: Everything is connected. Because they added the element of giving to their self-centered nature, they could feel that everything in reality not only receives but also gives to everything else. In this way, they established a balanced and harmonious society that became a model for the rest of the world.
Today we're finally ready to ask the right question: How do we overcome the ego? And the first generation sophisticated enough to apply the method of connection.
The problem was that their egos kept growing, and eventually they succumbed to it. But Abraham’s legacy remained ingrained in them, and it was passed on behind the scenes through a handful of people throughout the generations.
Now that the world has exhausted its options, this wisdom is opening up to the whole world, offering a model for optimal human integration. The futile efforts to find a way to overpower the ego have opened people’s minds to a method of connection that does not try to suppress the ego, but rather focuses on how to enhance connection.
Today we're finally ready to ask the right question: How do we overcome the ego? We're the first generation sophisticated enough to apply the method of connection. We're also the first generation to have ideal conditions for implementing the method. But what are we doing with all this progress and technology? Are we using it to make things better or worse?
It's time to stop allowing the ego to lure us into false ideologies that lead nowhere except to more misery. Today we have the opportunity to discover the true key to happiness.