The False Self: Where it Comes from and How to Get Rid of it

This article, which contains ideas from some of my other posts, was featured on MyEmpoweredWorld.com

------

You were whole and at peace once. Then people criticized, ridiculed, or placed expectations on you. 

Since your true self wasn’t “good” enough, you created another “self” that you hoped would be more acceptable. You “performed” in order to be loved, accepted, or “successful”: you competed in athletics, or used cosmetics/clothing/bodybuilding to make yourself physically attractive, or studied/cheated for exams, or showed off your possessions/accomplishments, or accumulated money, or acted “cool”, or joined groups, or put others down (to make yourself look better by comparison). You’ve perpetuated this “self” for decades. Since the things that compose it are not you, it is, by definition, a false self (also called ego).

Realize that you are not “wrong” or “bad” for having an ego. It is your way of avoiding the pain of non-acceptance. It is self-defense. And you know what? We’ve all done it.

Because it’s not real, a lot of time and energy must be invested in the ego in order to keep up the façade. You see, anything real exists on its own and needs no outside help; anything false disappears as soon as upkeep stops. This is why losing a game, failing an exam, making a mistake, not getting a desired item, or not being as pretty/rich/cool as someone else causes pain: the ego that we have tried so desperately to upkeep disappears. Our mental fabrication is exposed as a fraud. We live in fear of this happening, which is why we fear loss, failure, lack, and inferiority. We think about how to prevent these “calamities”, so we cannot enjoy the present because we’re calculating how to use it to improve our future. 

As painful as this burdensome ego is, we insist on carrying it. Why? Because we’ve invested a lot of time and effort in it. We have wealth to hold onto, a reputation to uphold, ideas to maintain. We believe that these are all we have -- indeed, all we are -- so we accept the worry, regret, anger, and frustration as the “cost of doing business”, the price we have to pay for our material wealth, social status, etc.

The upkeep of the false self is nothing short of slavery. It is a daily chore. Our reputation, wealth, etc are not joys but compulsions. Do we really own them, or do they own us?

We might attempt to become happier by “improving” ourselves: we join a gym, buy a new wardrobe, take a class, learn how to paint, go on a diet, or whatever. These activities can bring health and/or enjoyment, but if they’re done only to increase our or others’ opinion of us, we are merely exacerbating the ego problem. How can adding to the false self – the very thing that’s making us miserable – make us happier? The best we can hope for in this endeavor is temporary relief via either gratifying or being distracted from the ego. Seeing bigger muscles or nicer clothing in the mirror gratifies the ego. Focusing on exercising, painting, or studying distracts us from the ego. However, after the activity is over, the painful thoughts and feelings generated by the false self will start again, and we will feel miserable when we’re not looking in the mirror or exercising or learning or painting.

The only way to stop the agony is to shed the false self.

This is easier said than done, of course. Egoic thoughts are bad habits that have built up momentum over decades, so you won’t be able to stop them overnight. Could you ride a bike or drive a car or throw a basketball through a hoop the first time you tried? No. It took time, practice, and diligence. Well, so does living free of the false self.

Each day, spend a few minutes letting go of thoughts. It might seem impossible at first. Eventually you will be able to quiet your mind for just a few seconds at a time before thoughts creep back in. Each day or week your “thoughtless” gaps will grow longer. These gaps are the real you experiencing being.

In your everyday life, whenever you find yourself resenting someone or worrying that you won’t get something you want, stop and ask yourself:

“Is he/she really that bad?”

“Is worrying going to help me get what I want?”

“Do I really need this thing that I want?”

“Do I want to keep torturing myself with these painful thoughts?”

Over the course of months/years the bad habit of ego will lose momentum and weaken because you will no longer be feeding it. You will see that your ego has been nothing more than a huge, painful illusion. You will no longer carry any burden. You will feel free, clean, and light. You will see things as they are. What a great feeling!

Existential Despair / Depression

There are two types of depression: the “normal” type, where we fail to attain things we want; and existential, where we realize that there is nothing worthwhile to attain. This post focuses on the latter.

Let’s do a chronology:

1. As children we have natural enthusiasm that makes mere existence wonderful. Most things are interesting, and we feel frequent joy and wonder.

2. Then we get indoctrinated with the idea that we must “attain” things. We must study and take exams in order to get good grades. We must compete in sports in order to conquer others. We must dress or act a certain way in order to gain others’ acceptance. This becomes our way of life. No longer can we simply go with our natural, inner motivation to catch frogs or play with dolls or chase butterflies; now we must force ourselves to adopt an unnatural, external motivation to strive for things that other people tell us we must strive for. It is all based on desire and fear.

3. Eventually we start to see how unimportant things such as climbing the corporate ladder, consumerism, and social status are. We realize that the reward-punishment system we had subjected ourselves to is a silly farce. We stop jumping through other people’s hoops and become (mostly) free of that system of slavery.

4. It seems that nothing is important or worthwhile. The system we broke free of might have been ridiculous, but it gave us a reward-punishment scheme that provided incentives for doing things. Now it’s gone. Now what? What’s the point of living if nothing ultimately matters?

This sort of existential despair/depression can happen when we’ve seen through the normal illusions of consumerism, accomplishment, and status, but have still not let go of the idea that our reason(s) for living must be external. We no longer have external incentives, so we feel that life is pointless.

We might believe that we can solve this by replacing the old external incentives with new ones. For example, we might strive to become a great author, martial artist, or meditation guru. But if we choose an endeavor just to give us something to do, it is nothing more than an artificial goal, a way to attain accomplishment. That will merely perpetuate our slavery. As long as we keep looking outward for reasons to live or to do anything, our sense of well-being will be at the mercy of our environment, and we will remain blind to our own natural joy. It is this loss of joy that defines any kind of depression.

We need to find the natural joy that lives inside us. We can do this by focusing within. It might take practice because we have to learn to stop looking outward for incentives. Only when we have found our bliss will our natural enthusiasm return. Only then will we know what we truly want to do, because we will feel it from within rather than being persuaded by external forces. We will do things we have a true passion for rather than what we’re told we “should” do. We will return to the natural joy of existing that we had before we got brainwashed. Life will once again be good not only when something exciting is happening, but all the time, because our joy will come from our very selves and hence not be dependent on “peak” experiences.

So, the solution to existential despair is to stop expecting external rewards and to find the joy that naturally accompanies being.

Existential Questions

“Why am I here?”
“What is the meaning of life?”

These are egoic questions. The ego wants to feel important, and the only way it can do so is to believe that someone or something created it for some grand purpose, or that life itself must have meaning because otherwise existing would be “beneath” the ego. To think that it exists only by accident, or without any grand cosmic purpose, would be very deflating. Therefore the ego wants the Universe to provide it with something that will make life “worth living”.

The true self does not need such “justification” for existence. Each moment is perfectly adequate in and of itself. The very idea of meaning or purpose doesn’t even appear. Existence is its own reward.

The ego’s desire for meaning and purpose is the reason that religion exists. All the major religions have one thing in common: the idea that we are “going somewhere”, that we must perform certain actions or believe particular dogmas in order to achieve some goal (Heaven, enlightenment, nirvana). These belief systems appeal to people’s egos because the ego is always looking to attain rewards. The idea of merely enjoying one’s being right here and now is incomprehensible to the ego; only the true self can do that.

Once we find our true self, other existential questions also lose their importance. For example, “Are we spirit or matter?” The ego wants a story – a sequential synopsis of events to tell it where it came from and where it’s going – because it cannot exist in the Now. The true self simply is, and does not look outside the Now for answers, because there are no questions.

Balancing Mind and Spirit

We know that if we overuse our minds by working too much or chasing and worrying about things like money and social status, we can become miserable. But that doesn’t mean that we should run to the opposite end of the spectrum. If we stop thinking, working, and pursuing needs, and spend the rest of our lives just floating along, looking at everything with wonder, meditating, playing bongos, etc, then we will be unable to obtain housing, medicine, food, or healthcare. We might avoid the stress of fretting about money and social status, but we will be cold, hungry, and possibly alone.

The idea of putting aside our thinking and living a care-free life sounds nice, but it is not very practical. Even monks who spend their lives meditating obtain clothing and food via some form of work, whether it’s teaching or manual labor. They can’t simply sit alone in the wilderness for years at a time.

The mind is a necessary tool for functioning in this world, so we need to use it sometimes. Thinking helps with all our worldly chores such as working, driving, shopping, mowing the lawn, etc. But at the same time we need to know when to not think. We need to relax at times, and to do this the mind needs to relinquish control to the spirit, for spirit is what we ultimately are. The mind is for doing; the spirit is for being. You don’t want your mind spinning its gears when you’re lying on a beach in Jamaica.

Let us not demonize things that we sometimes torture ourselves with. Money, possessions, and social status are not bad; it is the frantic, desperate pursuit of more than we need that causes suffering. This is why the art of balance is so important: well-being is maximized by pursuing what we need but not overdoing it.

Never Enough

The vast majority of us are afflicted with an almost constant sense of lack. We never feel that we have enough money, possessions, time, beauty, social acceptance, love, etc. Why?

The sense of lack is a direct cause of feeling inadequate. When we feel that we aren’t enough, we attempt to compensate by acquiring. But what causes us to feel inadequate?

During our young, impressionable years we were criticized, ridiculed, rejected, and/or punished. Parents, schoolmates, and/or teachers told us, via words or actions, that we were not worthy of love just the way we were. That hurt deeply.

In self-defense, we created another self -- a false persona (ego) -- in which we acted or appeared different from the way we truly were in an attempt to be more acceptable to others. We each developed our own particular brand of ego (the athlete, the know-it-all, the seductress, the comedian, the hoodlum, the soldier, the victim, the goth) and used that as a way of impressing others (or ourselves).

We put up this façade for years or decades, and while we might have gained some people’s “acceptance”, all they accepted was our fabricated, phony self; they didn’t accept the true us because they didn’t even know us. Deep down we knew this, and so we held onto the (erroneous) belief that we were unworthy of love. As a result, our need to “prove” our worth never diminished. No matter how many times we impressed others with our accomplishments or appearance (i.e., our ego), we never believed we (our true self that we kept hidden) had worth, so we had to “prove” it again and again and again using guile and deception. We lived in constant fear of anyone finding out how worthless we “really” were, of being exposed as the frauds that we were.

And so here we are. We have an almost constant, nagging sense of inadequacy. Since we can’t become more, we attempt to compensate by acquiring more. This need to acquire is constant because our sense of inadequacy is constant. This is precisely why we never feel that we have enough: enough money, enough time, enough love. It is not these things that we need; what we need is a feeling of self-worth.

The sense of inadequacy is a major source of fear, anger, and conflict. The need to feel adequate is so great that we deceive, belittle, rob, and even commit violence against one another in an attempt to feel better about ourselves.

As long as we feel this deep sense of inadequacy, we will continue to maintain our ego as a protective mechanism. We cannot shed our ego by merely deciding to do so, because the sense of inadequacy will fuel it. What we need to shed is the idea that we have no inherent worth; once we do that, our ego will disappear on its own. When we know and accept our true self, we will no longer feel the need to gain others’ acceptance or delude ourselves that we’re better than they are. Judgment, conflict and drama will all but disappear because the ego is their main cause.

How do we stop feeling worthless? By looking back on the ignorance it took for others to devalue us. Perhaps they didn’t like something we said or did. Did that make us worthless? Of course not. Their dislike of our words or actions was merely their opinion. If they verbally or physically attacked us, did that make us worthless? No. They were acting from their own sense of inadequacy, trying to make themselves feel better by putting us down. Even if we did something selfish, we were only acting from our current state of development; we have learned and grown since then, so we are no longer like that and hence it would be foolish to keep beating ourselves up over it.

The erroneous belief in our inadequacy has persisted way too long. It started when we were young children, and to keep it going is one of the hugest mistakes we can possibly make. It is time to move on.

Right Brain Left Brain

The left side of the brain is very good at focusing on one thing at a time. It sees reality as a collection of little bits, and can analyze those bits quite well using logic and reason. It can distinguish individual notes in a song or individual beams in a structure. It is what enables us to excel at mathematics, engineering, physics, mechanics, chemistry, and so forth. It helped our ancestors stalk prey and build dwellings.

The right side of the brain is the master controller that directs us, not by logic or reason, but by feeling (intuition). It is not good at technical matters, but it tells us where and when to apply our technical skills. It hears a song or sees a structure as a single, continuous entity. It helped our ancestors be aware of their surroundings so that while they were stalking prey they didn’t themselves become prey.

The right brain directs our lives, and the left brain handles all the logistics. The right brain says, “It would be nice to vacation in Bermuda.” The left brain says, “I have two weeks of leave to burn, and I have nothing planned January 21-29, so I’ll fly out there on the 21^st and return on the 29^th. I’ll book a hotel for the nights of the 21^st to the 28^th. I’ll arrange some time on the beach, a snorkeling excursion, and some parasailing.”

In school we are taught how to use our left brains. We learn math, science, social studies, language, etc. This helps us later on as we perform various tasks at our jobs, balance our checkbooks, run errands, and fix things around the house. Our right brains get little attention so they remain largely underdeveloped. As a result we often make mistakes in deciding how to direct our lives, for example, who to become romantically involved with or which investments to make.

The left brain sees a dual world of distinct, separate entities: people, animals, objects, mountains, oceans, units of distance, and blocks of time. The right brain takes the overview, seeing everything as a unified whole – a nondual world. Which way we view things at any particular time depends on whether our right or left brain is more active. Sometimes we see a lonely, harsh world in which we are separate from everything and everyone else; and other times we feel as though we belong here because we are one with everything and everyone.

Many of us favor one side of our brain over the other, and we see the effects all the time: the engineer who can’t pick up on human nuances, the artist who can’t balance a checkbook, the man with a great career but awkward social skills, the woman who can simultaneously manage household chores and children but can’t do math, the goal-oriented businessman, the romantic poet. Thus we have strengths in some areas and weaknesses in others.

Both brain hemispheres are important for being able to function in life, so if we find ourselves decidedly in favor of one, it might behoove us to practice using the other. The left brain can be exercised via puzzles and math problems. The right brain can be exercised by doing what we “feel” like doing and not allowing thoughts to take over.

Why Love is Frightening

Why is love so frightening?  Because love requires death of the ego.

What most people think of as “love” is nothing more than ego gratification. Someone does something that someone approves of, so he “loves” her. What he “loves” is the fact that something was done that his ego wanted, not the sentient being who did it, because as soon as she does something he doesn’t approve of, his “love” will turn to anger, resentment, or hate. True love cannot do this.

True love endures through all, even when the doer commits undesired deeds, because true love loves the doer, not deeds.

As long as the ego is in control, no understanding or love is possible. Therefore love requires the ego to die.

Ego-death is a frightening experience. The ego is a shield that we have carried for most of our life in an attempt to protect us from hurt. There is nothing more frightening than putting it down, because doing so leaves us totally naked and vulnerable.

So, in order to truly love, we must stand in total nakedness and vulnerability. As long as we “protect” ourselves with our ego, we will be unable to love. We will continue to judge others, wanting them to jump through hoops, deluding ourselves that we “love” them when they do, and feeling pain and resentment when they don’t. All relationships – whether intimate, familial, or friendly – will be rollercoasters of desire, judgment, expectation, and disappointment.