The Library
The ego, although itself a projection, draws from its creative source enough power to project in turn its own small world.
6.8.3.4Listen The ego has two sides to its nature: a dark and a bright one, an animal and a human one.
6.8.3.6Listen The ego is the shadow-self accompanying the light-self, or Overself. The ego holds all that is dark in the man’s character.
6.8.3.15Listen The persona, the mask which he presents to the world, is only one part of his ego. The conscious nature, composed of thoughts and feelings, is the second part. The hidden store of tendencies, impulses, memories, and ideas--formerly expressed and then reburied, or brought over, from earlier lives, and all latent--is the third part.
6.8.3.17Listen Inside ourselves there is not one ego but several. We live in a condition of recurring feelings that successively contradict one another, deny each other, or shame each other. The “I” is really torn into pieces, each claiming ascendency but none holding it permanently. The animal, the human, and the angel jostle elbows in our hearts. We are degraded today, elevated tomorrow. The quest seeks to integrate all these different egos.
6.8.3.18Listen A man is made up of several different factors: what he has inherited from his parents; what he has picked up from his surroundings; what he has brought over from previous reincarnations; what he thinks, feels and does; what his reactions are to other people. It is the combination of all these elements which make one man.
6.8.3.21Listen The sum total of our past actions and thoughts, and especially of our tendencies, constitutes our character and makes us what we are today.
6.8.3.23Listen The ego moves from childhood to old age, from waking to dreaming, but it moves round in a circle. It does not move toward freedom, reality, or peace.
6.8.3.24Listen ... What is the use of taking a few small sections of the past, such as childhood or adolescence, and attempting to deal with them only, when the true past of the ego contains innumerable subconscious memories of former lives on earth and numerous tendencies which arise from episodes belonging to that vanished history..?
6.8.3.34,Listen … in every mind there is an unconscious conflict which he is ordinarily powerless to deal with--the conflict between the line of evolution which the Overself has marked out for the person, and the line of blind desire which the ego is trying to pursue…
6.8.3.34,Listen At every chance of a forward step he will be tricked, deceived, misguided, or even driven back by the ego--if he will not be alert enough to recognize the endeavour.
6.8.3.37Listen The ”I” gets angry when someone provokes it, then remembers it must gain self-control, and thus forms a higher and calmer state for itself but one which is still within the personal ego-sphere. It has not escaped from itself but only replaced a negative emotion by a positive feeling.
6.8.3.40Listen It is natural for the ego to react negatively to its experiences when these bring loss or opposition. But this is so only when, as is most common, man is still unawakened, untaught, uncontrolled, and unable to enter into higher states of being.
6.8.3.42Listen The ego knows well enough how to protect itself, how to prevent the seeker from straying away from its power over him.
6.8.3.54Listen The ego is just as powerful whether it is condoned or condemned, for in both cases it keeps the man engaged on a self-centered quest.
6.8.3.55Listen Every move made by the ego has as its basis the desire of its own survival, its own self-perpetuation.
6.8.3.56Listen The ego is perfectly capable of making all sorts of compromises or truces with itself--moral ones with its conscience, logical ones with its intellect, spiritual ones with its aspirations--and perfectly capable of all sorts of dodges, quibbles, evasions, and disguises, whether dealing with matters on the highest or lowest level of reference.
6.8.3.57Listen The ego poses as being the only self, the real self, the whole self.
6.8.3.60Listen The ego can find many dodges and give many pretexts to prevent him from making the first humiliating gesture of mental surrender. They are intended to protect its own life or power and to keep him, through pride, from making any space for the Overself’s entry.
6.8.3.65Listen The ego uses all the cunning of its logical intellect and all the seduction of its pleasure-loving nature to keep a man away from the quest.
6.8.3.71Listen The ego is by nature a deceiver and in its operations a liar. For if it revealed things as they really are, or told what is profoundly true, it would have to expose its own self as the arch-trickster pretending to be the man himself and proffering the illusion of happiness.
6.8.3.79Listen The ego lies to itself, lies to the man who identifies himself with it, and lies to other men.
6.8.3.83Listen So long as the ego's rule is preserved, so long will the karmic tendencies which come with it be preserved. But when its rule is weakened they too will automatically be starved and weakened. To start this process, start trying to take an impersonal detached view.
6.8.3.84Listen The Overself is there but the ego intercepts its communication.
6.8.3.92Listen The ego is soon appeased by flattery, soon bruised by criticism; but the man who transcends its tyranny is able justly to evaluate both.
6.8.3.96Listen The ego, which is so quick to complain about other people's bad treatment of it and so slow to confess its own bad conduct, is his first and worst enemy.
6.8.3.104Listen The ego will always seek, and find, ways to excuse itself. It will do anything else it can rather than honestly confess its own vileness or weakness or erroneousness. It will cling stubbornly to them rather than admit the need for a thorough change.
6.8.3.106Listen When the ego sees a danger to its own continued existence in any proposed move or decision, it creates fears, invents false hopes, and exaggerates difficulties in order to prevent it.
6.8.3.108Listen If the ego were as prone to condemn itself as it is to justify itself, or to justify others as it is to condemn them, how quick and easy would the quest be.
6.8.3.112Listen The ego knows well how to cover up its ugliest activities with the noblest self-justifications.
6.8.3.116Listen The more he advances intuitively, the more will the ego’s sophistries seek to lure him astray.
6.8.3.118Listen The ego senses the peril in which it is placed and resorts to tricks, deceptions, and subterfuges to save itself.
6.8.3.130Listen A man's pride in his own capacity to find truth, gain enlightenment, and achieve purity shuts out the humility needed to let the ego go and let the Overself in.
6.8.3.148Listen Egoism, the limiting of consciousness to individual life as separate from the one infinite life, is the last barrier to the attainment of unity with the infinite life.
6.8.3.149A man has many burdens to bear at different times during his life, but the heaviest of them all is the burden of his own ego.
6.8.3.155Listen If his egoism is too strong, the highest part of the Overself's light will be quite unable to get through into his consciousness, no matter how fervent his aspiration for it may be.
6.8.3.161Listen It is not wrong that we love and serve ourselves—for who else is closer?—but only that we do so by excluding the higher purpose of life.
6.8.3.163Listen From the moment that the lower ego manifested itself, it embarked on a career of ever-expanding separativeness from the other egos and ever-increasing externalization from its sacred source.
6.8.3.172Listen The same mixture of egoism and idealism will show in his character through most of the Quest. Only in the more advanced stages will the egoism thin down and down until its final elimination.
6.8.3.176Listen
31 Jan 2013
21 Sep 2016
15 May 2021
15 Nov 2012
26 Jun 2024
26 Jan 2017
1 Mar 2021
15 Nov 2013
20 Oct 2011
6 Jan 2021
28 Jan 2021
5 Jun 2015
21 Jul 2024
29 Jan 2022
29 Apr 2017
4 Nov 2022
25 Jan 2016
22 Nov 2017
13 Jul 2023
8 Feb 2018
13 Sep 2024
31 May 2018
29 Mar 2017
18 Nov 2017
10 Aug 2018
9 May 2019
12 Oct 2014
18 Dec 2017
13 Sep 2021
26 Sep 2021
9 Jan 2022
23 Feb 2024
16 Dec 2015
9 Mar 2011
18 Apr 2022
23 May 2019
8 Nov 2021
5 Nov 2017
23 Jan 2021
The notebooks are copyright © 1984-1989 The Paul Brunton Philosophic Foundation
This site is run by Paul Brunton-stiftelsen · info@paulbruntondailynote.se