The ego positions us in situations where we regularly want to exploit others. We look at others through our egoistic lenses of how we can use them to benefit ourselves: “How can they do something for me?” “How can I trample on them in various ways?” Eventually, the ego kills us. It corrupts students in classrooms, people at workplaces and in all kinds of relationships—it ruins our lives.
Since the ego ruins our relationships and our lives in general, the immediate follow-up question is: What should we do with the ego? We need to take the ego’s reins and control it. We should not suppress or kill it, but use it correctly, because we have to use everything created by nature in ways that benefit us all.
Our bodies function automatically on nature’s still, vegetative and animate levels, knowing what is beneficial and detrimental for their functioning. However, on the human level, which is above the still, vegetative and animate, we do not know how to correctly function.
We thus have to learn the ways of positive connection to others, because our ego makes us relate to people and nature solely out of a desire to benefit ourselves alone. In addition to simply benefiting ourselves, the ego also sometimes makes us want to enjoy by suppressing others, i.e. exploiting, manipulating and abusing others. In other words, it makes us enjoy ourselves by making us feel superior to others. That is the truly negative form of the ego that ruins our lives, and learning how to control this ego and make it acquire a positive form requires regularly learning and promoting to each other how we can positively connect.
Based on the video “How the Ego Ruins Our Lives” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Oren Levi. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
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