Are you the star in your movie of life?

The Ego Difficulty:

To paraphrase Freud, - the best that any human being can do is to reach the sublime state of being mildly neurotic.  In this statement he is suggesting that every human being even the most healthful will be troubled.  Yes, the trouble for that healthy person will be significantly less than her peers, but still there is going to be some difficulty.  

Freud is indicating, whether he knows it or not, that the view from the ego as a separate-self is inherently painful.  Buddha implied this very same idea 2400 years before Freud was born.  The first of Buddha’s noble truths is to proclaim life is suffering, and by this he will later indicate that identifying self as the ego is suffering.

With this ego identity loss is inevitable.  The pain of loss is inevitable.  By its very nature ego identity is transitory at best.  The idea that life is always changing is born via the ego.  The Buddhist called this the realm of the relative as opposed to the realm of the absolute. The absolute realm corresponds to being conscious of the unity-consciousness of the old woman.

Life as suffering is life lived as an ego, yet life in human form is impossible to live without ego.   This is the ego difficulty.  Identifying self as a particular feeling attached to someone or something will eventually lead to the intricacies, of that feeling or person or thing.

So much can be seen here that the nuances of this dilemma are impossible to express with any degree of completeness.  The situation as such leads to fear of inevitable loss.  It can lead to the destructive behavior of trying to avoid the loss or perpetuating the loss.  Loss is, of course, equal to dying, and perhaps the greatest fear human beings have is the fear of dying.

The mystics proclaim that one needs to die before one actually dies in physical form.  If this doesn’t happen while living then ego difficulty is always there.  

Identifying oneself as a particular thought brings about the same inevitable loss – even more so.  Thoughts are more fleeting than feelings and thus more quickly changing in the ego field.  Hence to believe in a particular idea or system, and to become attached to that belief is destined to bring about a loss.  So many people are at present lost in depression – is there any wonder why!

Identifying self as the body is again leading to loss as the body again is only transitory.  Here physical death is to be avoided at all costs yet it is only a fool or madman that could ponder escaping such an experience.  All our Western medical practices have attempted to do this to an obsessive degree, however.  It is only recently that the idea of assisted suicide could even be pondered without society at large vehemently rejecting the idea.

When one begins to understand that the only thing that is reliable is change one is becoming acquainted with the ego’s essence.  Again the ego is the identification with the aspects of the continuous movement of life as if an aspect was a still picture rather than a part of an ongoing movie.

Here we can say that the ego is a still photo, while our real individuation (Self), some call the soul, is an entire ongoing movie.