How ego is developed

Egos develop when you are praised, when you are bribed, when you are flattered. That ego develops on the physical level, emotional level, and mental level. At the physical level it mostly develops when you help somebody too much. He develops the ego because he thinks he is something, and that is why you are helping him. Your help must be very intellectual, very wise about the one you are helping. Most of the problems of humanity are caused by the wrong help in the wrong place at the wrong time. "Ah, I am something." He becomes an ant on the forehead of the elephant.

One day an elephant was entering with a victorious king into a city. A fly on the elephant's nose said, "Look, everyone is applauding me." Sometimes we are that fly. We think that people are applauding us. They are not applauding us sometimes. They are applauding for the king, but the fly says, "It is for me."

If you are flattered, if you are not told your mistakes, you develop an ego straight away. The Teacher takes you and tells you that you are like this and that. If the person is hurt, ti means the Teacher is cracking the glamor, the illusions, the maya, the Threshold. That is the role that sometimes the Teacher plays to crack these things.

If you talk about his illusions and glamors and foolishness and vanity and ego, he will react, not on the outside sometimes, but his inner mechanism starts to work. "Son of a gun... I did these things for him and he still does not like me." The inner tape recorder runs day and night to justify himself, or herself, that he is a very nice man, or woman, and the Teacher is wrong. If this reaction is there, there is no hope for now. Sometimes Teachers, to test your ego, even say something is wrong that is right and you react. It is the reaction that is important.

Ego develops with praise and with accepting a  person as is. For eχample we generally accept our friends as the are, but this is a very bad state of consciousness. One day I saw a lady who had a very nice friend who was late for dinner. She said to her, "You must come here at the right time, not two hours later." I liked it because she fixed her. She did not say, "Come any time you want. We eat our dinner and you come two hours later to satisfy your own glamor." Have straight words with your friends, or sometimes keep a long time of silence until you know that you are really right. This helps the person destroy his ego.


-Torkom Saraydarian
Self-Actualization & Self-Mastery