JONGSON PARK

The Ego and self become identified as one. The Ego is us, it knows us better than we know ourselves, decisions, fears, dreams, desires, awareness, flaws. What causes us pain, our traumas, our guilt, shame, blame. The doors we don’t want to open. The doors that are always open.

The Ego hides and protects the fear. Buries it deep or puts it out for everyone to see. Whatever allows the fear to burn deeper, build stronger roots. For the Ego to become one with who we are.

The Ego hides in plain site. Incognito. Presents itself to others as ourself. Takes over our who we are.

The Ego then its cunning can hide from us, in the shadows, in the corners. Unaware. Unseen. Maybe a glimpse of the Ego, a moment of clarity, a moment of awareness but then convincing us, we’re not seeing what we’re seeing. The Ego is smarter than we are. The Ego hiding the fear from others, hiding the fear from ourself.

The perception the Ego presents is more desirable, more attainable than actuality.

The system, a closed loop – trigger, action, validation.

The Ego, the system is the control. Control through a system. The system empowers and feeds the ego. A self-sustained, inductive loop. Values and judgments form fitted to get the desired response.

The Ego’s need to protect the fear even more because the fear is the lifeblood of the Ego. If the fear is gone, the Ego dies.

The Ego builds a value and judgment system. Under threat, fear of rejection, non-approval, failure. Dictated by the need for acceptance, validation, affirmation from a person or group. Values and goals become whatever gains and secures that approval. The decisions and actions rewarded by the approval and acceptance.

The system, a closed loop – trigger, action, validation.

The Ego, a heightened awareness of the past and future. Stuck in the past or trying to forecast the future, unable to be in the present. Pulled back into the past evaluating, re-evaluating, replaying. Maybe it’s regret, shame, mistakes, betrayal, blame, guilt, judgment. The path forward is to live in the past.

Future-casting, trying to calculate the future, manipulate the now, setting the dominoes in place, trying to set how they fall. A control. Trying to outsmart, probability, tendencies, the unpredictable.

Not trusting the now, the instincts, intuitions, insight and the openness, flow of the moment. Trust. Confidence. That all things for the better, what may come, there is no good or bad, there is just what is.

The Ego, the Defense Mechanism is always in a fight or flight state. Easily offended. Defensive. On the attack. Finding faults. Constantly judging. Always thinking. Calculating. Unable to rest. Thinking of multiple scenarios, trying to avoid the outcomes it’s trying to avoid.

Causing low-key anxiety, stress. Frayed. Unnerved. Impatient. Unable to focus. Have clarity. Feel like I can’t bring my whole self to what I’m doing. Losing presence. Elusive insight. Distracted. Not in the moment.

The Ego is a defense mechanism, the function for survival and protection it controls our behavior for social success, hard-wired into our evolutionary instincts, into our primal social cues. When we sense any threat of being ostracized from the group. The defense mechanism, triggered like an anti-virus software. Fall in line, don’t rock the boat, walls go up, carry on the pretense and assimilate to the social norms, pressures to conform.

A herd of animals ostracizes and pushes out any individual animal that doesn’t act or follow the same behaviors. It can be a threat to their survival, that individual animal is unpredictable it may draw attention from a predator, it may have bad habits that spread to the rest of the herd.

This is the kind of social imprinting that is in our instincts. But for humans the margin of error for survival in a social context is well past life or death. But the social imprinting is still there, we still feel the urge to ostracize and separate from people that don’t look or sound like us. Language. Beliefs. Thoughts. Behavior. Drive the right car. Believe the same beliefs. Say the right things. Fly the right flag. Ostracize or be ostracized.

Fear gives rise to the Ego. Fear of social separation. The Ego creates a system of thoughts, decisions, actions and justifications to preserve and protect its status and acceptance within the group.

Ego is the protector, a self-defense mechanism. It operates on another layer, a different substrate than our active consciousness. It will make us do things in a social situation that we normally wouldn’t do. The anxiety is the fear of being socially rejected from the group.

As the Ego grows it snowballs, becoming a closed-loop. Making choices and actions to gain control, rewarding itself with more power, increasing to even more control and power. The Ego comes to dominate, unquestioned, unchallenged, it takes over. We think the Ego is who we are. While the fear never goes away, it only becomes more ingrained and beholden, as the Ego grows stronger so does its hold on the fear. That we become more afraid of letting go of.