Hi this is Emerald and welcome to The Diamond Net!
And today I'm going to be talking to you about the Ego in the Jungian psychological model.
So what is the ego?
well the ego is basically the center of consciousness.
It's everything that we identify with our self-concept.
So when we use the word "I" to describe ourselves what we're actually referring to is the ego.
In fact, I have even described the ego in the past as being
a huge bundle of thoughts beliefs and ideas all centered around one single thought called "I".
Because of this, most people think of the ego as being the full extent of themselves
and anything that falls outside of the range of ego is deemed as "other"
...and most of which is unconscious.
But the fact of the matter is that the ego is just a very small segment of the internal landscape.
And the internal landscape is just as vast and as infinite as the external landscape.
Now, it's important to realize that the ego
is not a thing in and of itself it's more of a conglomeration of different
ideas thoughts and beliefs that are added to the self-concept over time that
are always open to change and for this reason I think it's important to think
of the ego is more of a verb than a noun something that's done instead of
something that is because the ego is always being added to and always being
taken away from now as children we have very simple ego structures but as we
become indoctrinated into our society and we start to learn our families
expectations for us and we start to learn about our place in the world and
what our preferences are and how we think everything works more and more
layers get added to that ego structure and eventually what we get is a fully
formed adult ego now again I want to stress to you all that the ego is not
real in and of itself so if we took that fully formed adult ego and we started to
peel back the layers of thoughts and ideas and beliefs eventually what we
would end up with is nothing so the ego is essentially an illusion and it's an
illusion that can be transcended but the ego can be developed as well in fact
Carl Jung actually favored this approach and recommended spending the
first half of life developing a strong and healthy ego and then spending the
latter half of life turning inward in looking toward deeper aspects of the
psyche he called this process Individuation now in a moment I'm gonna
go over some common ego related issues but first I want to really hammer out
what the ego is not so one thing that the ego is not is that it's not the
persona so the persona is another aspect of the Jungian psychological model and
it really has to do with how we come off to others so it's our social mask and
it's how we can essentially fit into a particular social role within society
now oftentimes our persona is related to our ego in many ways there's a kind of
congruence there and so that's why many people could mix up the two but the ego
and the persona are very different so the persona is external it's how we come
off to others and the ego is internal it's how we identify ourselves so the
persona is usually a really edited down version of the ego because there are
aspects of our ego that we may not feel comfortable with other people seeing
about us now another thing that the ego is not as the ego is not the full extent
of the personal conscious so in the Jungian model of the psyche there are
aspects of our psyche that we're conscious of and there are aspects of
our psyche that we're unconscious of so we have a personal consciousness that's
what we are conscious of then we have a personal unconscious and then we have a
collective unconscious so the ego is essentially the center of the personal
consciousness so we might have a tendency to think that the ego is the
full extent of the personal consciousness but there are many other
things going on within the personal consciousness that don't directly have
to do with ego so for example our wants and desires their self referential but
they aren't necessarily an aspect of our ego because we don't necessarily
identify with them also the things that we know or our memories are part of our
personal consciousness but they're not necessarily an aspect of our ego we kind
of think about ourselves in relation to those things as opposed to being those
things themselves all right so moving forward into the issues there are really
two main types of issues that I see with ego development the first problem is we
ego so this is where a person doesn't quite develop a strong enough or healthy
enough ego to function in the adult world so for those suffering weak ego
what happens is that most of the personal conscious is undifferentiated
so the person hasn't separated the wheat from the chaff in terms of what they
identify with and what they don't identify with all right some issues that
stem off of this main problem of weak ego would be number one that a person
has a hard time adapting in adult life so being an adult is hard you have to go
through a lot of very difficult situations day by day and you have to
have an ego structure that's resilient enough to deal with those challenges and
to be able to find positive emotions and positive ways to think about yourself
but a person with weak ego will have a very hard time finding positive things
to think about themselves because they don't know themselves very well and so
they tend to gravitate more toward negative thoughts and negative feelings
about themselves now another issue would be this sense of not really knowing
yourself so the self-concept sort of exists in like this haze where you're
not really sure what you really identify with you don't know what your identity
is you don't know what your preferences are you don't know what your values are
you just kind of exist in this place where you're not really sure and this
muddies the water is and creates a lot of indecision and a person who is
dealing with weak ego also has a lot of problems with making decisions because
they don't really know what they want because they don't really know who they
are now stemming off of this lack of clarity
also comes the problem of lack of motivation and lack of ability to sort
of build up momentum behind your sense of motivation because most people their
motivations come directly through their ego you know so they're thinking even if
they're not thinking about it consciously deep down they're thinking
how is this serving me how is this bringing me forward and that's a very
natural thing for the ego to do and so if a person doesn't have a really clear
sense of self that it becomes very difficult for them to garner that
motivation of hope and bringing this one person forward also many coping
mechanisms this happened within the ego so if a
person has a weak ego they're gonna have a lot harder time coping with the
challenges of life so coping mechanisms for somebody with a strong ego those
would be quite strong and fortified and you know would allow them to have
positive thoughts about themselves even in negative situations but a person with
weak ego doesn't really have that luxury now for those of you who watch my
channel regularly you may be wondering because I talk a lot about ego
transcendence which I've experienced before and you know it is a very very
positive thing that said repressing the ego or having a weak ego doesn't bring
you closer to ego transcendence ego transcendence comes whenever you
recognize the ego for the illusion that it is it doesn't come from making the
ego weak you want to have a strong ego to function through and that will
actually help you create many positive habits so that if you happen to one day
transcend the ego you have a lot of good routines built up and I'm always finding
people who are trying to tear away at their ego and sort of strip it down to
nothing and to try to not be yourself and what that ends up doing is it ends
up for pressing unless it comes from a really genuine place of self inquiry and
looking into the nature of reality what's going to happen is that the
person is just going to suppress the ego because they believe particular things
about the way things work so this would be ego repression which is a really
negative thing so it's actually the exact opposite of ego transcendence
because ego transcendence causes an expansion of consciousness but ego
repression causes a contraction in consciousness now I have a video on my
channel titled ego transcendence versus ego repression if you want to check it
out and I'll make sure that I put a card up above here but especially if somebody
has the problem of weak eagle I highly recommend taking some time to develop a
strong ego because you'll really notice a lot more potentials that you weren't
before able to access and if you should want to transcend the ego in the future
it'll give you more motivation to do so now the second major issue with ego
development would be the unand dividual ego so this is a person who has a highly
developed adult ego but they think that they are only the
ego so they haven't really looked into deeper aspects of themselves and they
really believe that the ego is the full extent of themselves so this type of
person is going to have the coping skills to make them feel okay about
themselves where they can tell themselves a particular type of
narrative and they can derive a sense of meaning from that and they can derive a
sense of being okay as they are but the problem is that they don't have any kind
of deeper awareness about their shadow or their anima animus or their higher
self and so there's just so much that's unconscious to them and so some major
issues with this would be number one lack of consciousness of one's own
behaviors so a person who has an individual ego might believe themselves
to be the good guy of life and might believe other people to be the bad guy
and they would have certain narratives that sort of reinforce that but the
problem with that is it's often the people who think they're the good people
that end up doing the worst things now people with an unindicted ego also have
a tendency towards judgment because the strong ego has an ability to cope with
certain realities in life much better than someone with a weak ego you know
someone with a strong ego is going to notice that according to the general
worldview we're just a very very small speck in this vastly infinite universe
but the ego needs to feel like it's the center of that it needs to feel the most
significant so essentially what a person with an unindicted ego will do is that
they'll create a lot of arbitrary standards to judge themselves and others
by so they'll create some kind of thing that means oh if I'm doing this or I'm
like this or if I'm smart like that or if I'm good with that then that means
I'm significant and then necessarily because the ego is competitive you know
it has to differentiate itself from other people so there have to be people
that are less significant so there's always this tendency of the strong
uninhibited ego to try to create narratives around why it is superior to
other people now this tendency might be very overt but it also might be very
very subtle I'll give a per has an idea that old judgment is bad and
judgment is wrong they might not catch the judgments
they're making because they would judge those judgments as wrong and they would
relegate it to the shadow so this is something that a person with any type of
ego structure would really have to watch out for is judging other people as a
basis for sort of bolstering up the self-concept now another issue of unand
eviscerated ego that stems off of the last issue is megalomania
now when I say megalomania it might draw images of Hitler or some other dictator
to mine but megalomania is a very very common emotion that almost everyone
feels definitely everyone with an ego especially those with a strong ego so
there's this sense that you are the center of the universe there's a sense
that what you are is somehow more special more important than other people
now someone with a weak ego might feel the opposite they might feel like oh I'm
the worst in the world oh I'm so terrible but again there's still this
centering of the cell as the reference for all other things so in a sense that
has a touch of megalomania as well but you can notice this in yourself so if
you have an ego watch out for megalomania it's not just for Hitler and
Stalin another problem with this type of ego structure is over refinement of ego
so when I was a teenager I wanted to be perceived in just a certain way and I
wanted to think about myself in just a particular way and so anything that fell
outside of the range of how I wanted to be perceived I sort of just chopped that
part of myself off and tried to forget about it because I wanted to come off in
a very very particular way and so as I grew older my judgments grew so much
more and so I kept sort of chopping away at myself so if you imagine like I had a
piece of clay right here and then I was just peeling back the layers of clay and
what I ended up with was very very small and so that was my consciousness at that
point because once you start chopping away aspects of your ego and repressing
them what happens is that you become less and less and
conscious so you become like Wiley coyote trying to chop off the tree limb
and ending up you know chopping yourself down with it now an issue that stems
from over refinement of ego is a sense of disconnection from reality so a lack
of groundedness I remember when I had that really really refined ego structure
I remember walking around my freshman year of college and I was like my
goodness I don't even feel like my feet are touching the floor right now because
I didn't feel like I was really there and I relate that to the fact that all
of my focus and all of my energy was going to my headspace where I was
essentially being the steward of this really really complex ego structure so I
really didn't have the ability to focus on anything else so at this point in the
video you may want to stop for a moment and sort of self-diagnosed what kind of
ego structure you believe yourself to have so if you have a weak ego structure
what you're going to really want to be focused on is creating a stronger ego
structure because that's going to make life so much easier for you and you're
going to be able to cope so much better with the world but if you already have a
strong ego then I recommend turning inward so really looking to reintegrate
things from the shadow doing different inner work practices and the like now in
a moment I'm going to go into how to create a strong ego and then after that
I'm going to talk about the process of individuation and turning inward and how
to do that but when it comes to strong ego it's a good idea to know exactly
what constitutes a strong ego so in my view there are three main aspects to
creating a strong ego now the first is that it's authentic which means that
it's derived from self observation so you're not just creating the ego out of
thin air and making it whatever you'd like it to be you're actually self
observing and you're seeing how you actually are and this will help you get
more clear about your identity about your values and about your preferences
now another quality of a strong ego would be that it helps a person thrive
within their society so it's not just an adaptive mechanism it helps you really
sort of navigate the world in such a way that you can achieve whatever it is that
you achieve and you'll be able to derive the
motivation needed to do so and a third quality of a strong ego is that it's
more expansive than it is contractive now in a sense some ego refinement has
to happen that'll help you sort of separate the wheat from the chaff in
terms of what you identify with and what you don't identify with but what you
don't want to end up with is the over refinement of ego and so you want to
make sure that you build an ego structure that's not based off of you
know being judgmental and trying to cut away aspects of yourself so you want to
be able to add as much to your ego structure as you possibly can while
still being able to keep a clear sense of self so here are some steps for
creating a strong ego now before I go into those steps I want to caution you
to remember that the ego is only an illusion so it's only your own thoughts
and ideas being all bundled together so make sure that you deal with the ego
with a sense of detachment because it's not actually you it's just your idea of
you and what you identify with so the first thing that you want to do when
creating a strong ego is that you want to spend a lot of time with self
observation and you want to really hammer out what your preference is for
things are so if you're somebody who like if you get asked questions on a
personality quiz that you can't really come up with a clear answer really fast
you might want to hammer out some things you know within yourself like oh what do
I actually like in these situations and just ask yourself lots of questions
about what you prefer and what you don't prefer alright the second step is that
once you find your preferences then decide what your values are going to be
so it's important for a person who wants a strong ego to have a really clear set
of principles and values for themselves to follow and this will help give them a
sense of meaning in life in a sense that they're doing the right thing by their
own idea of themselves now when you're solidifying your values you want to make
sure that you're giving yourself values that are going to serve you so for
example when I was a teenager in first building up my ego structure hard work
was one of my values that I chose for myself and I'm very very grateful to
younger self for doing that because I learned how to work hard and to
persevere through difficult tasks and it served me very well in my adult life but
if I had created some different value of like Yolo or something like that you
know who knows where I would have ended up with that so you can create positive
values and negative values so make sure that you're creating values that
actually serve you alright step number three is to develop latent potentials so
if you come from a state of weak and underdeveloped ego as you start to build
up your ego structure new potentials will arise just like they do during teen
years when most people are building up their ego structure so if you're looking
at your preferences and you realize that you have let's say a preference toward
artistic endeavors you may go on to discover that you have some raw talent
toward artistic endeavors you know maybe maybe not and then once you know what
you have a raw talent for you can then develop that raw talent and do a
full-blown skill so developing skills off of these latent potentials that can
be used out in the real world is very very important for this aspect of ego
development alright step number four is to look at yourself very honestly and
become aware of your genuine strengths and genuine weaknesses now this can be a
little bit difficult for someone who is suffering from weak ego to look at their
weaknesses because they might have a tendency to think very lowly of their
self in the first place and so it might be a bit uncomfortable to look at these
things even more but if you take an honest assessment of yourself and you
find out what your strengths are and what your weaknesses are what you can do
is you can leverage your strengths to your advantage and try to focus more on
your strengths and step number five is to get a really solid sense of what
you're identifying with and what your ego is this is going to help bring the
ego out of that undifferentiated state and more into the center of
consciousness so that way you will know like if somebody asks you questions
about yourself you should know it immediately it shouldn't be like oh I'm
not really sure you know I never really thought about that you know you want to
really ask yourself lots of questions about yourself like what your
preferences are what your values are how you
think about things what your opinion is on things so these types of things are
very important to know if you're trying to get to know the ego all right so next
I'm going to talk about some of the qualities of the individuated ego so the
individuated ego knows that it's not the center of the universe and it knows that
it's not the center of the psyche and so it doesn't mind necessarily playing
second fiddle to someone else and it doesn't really have a lot of fears about
insignificance it's also geared toward introspection and integration so it can
look toward deeper layers of the psyche like the shadow and integrate from it it
can also have a direct connection to the anima or animus or even a direct
connection to the self with a capital S which is really the God within us so a
person with an individual ego tends to know their inner landscape quite well
and this is because they can look at it without blinders on
they don't have to see themselves as good all the time they can notice that
there are forces inside of them that are destructive and downright evil so this
is very very important to be able to be aware of the deeper aspects of the self
because there are things down there that don't paint us in the nicest light and
so if you're the type of person who has a strong ego and likes to think of
themselves is a good person all the time and thinks that they don't have any
flaws in this way well I would say that you're not really looking at the
internal landscape deep enough there is some really scary things in there and
that's just inherent to the internal landscape alright so here are some
things that I recommend for the individuation process now this is by no
means an exhausted list but I think this is a good start
alright so the first one is to do shadow work so a lot of our unconsciousness
comes from the fact that we want our ego to be just a particular way and so we
tend to cut away aspects of our ego as we get older and we relegate them to the
shadow and then there's also things all the way back from childhood down in our
shadow and so many things that were not aware of so if we do shadow work what
we're essentially trying to do is we're trying to reintegrate aspects of ourself
that we've left behind all right the second step is to practice brutal
honesty and I when I say brutal honesty I don't mean
honesty with other people that doesn't matter that much now be as honest as
it's nice to be but when it comes to the self you want to be brutally honest to a
tee so if you're the type of person that likes to see yourself in a good light
and likes to think of yourself as a good person what you'll have to do is you'll
have to suspend that and look down inside of yourself and you can notice
some pretty gnarly tendencies that you might have had a tendency to repress
away so brutal honesty takes a lot of detachment from ego to do so it's very
very important in the individuation process now the second step is to be
able to recognize and reverse judgment so the first part of this step is to
actually recognize judgment as you're doing it now a lot of people might have
a tendency to think that they're not a judgmental person but the ego sort of
has a naturally way of judging people in subtle ways and saying oh it's like well
I'm not judgmental because I don't say it out loud but I just I don't think
that that person's behaving in the proper way or I think that there are a
little bit lame for doing this or you know just very subtle things that you
may not notice and so brutal honesty will also help you recognize the
judgments as they come up now it's important to mention that when
you recognize those judgments you may be tempted to try to suppress them because
they paint you in a more negative two light that you probably don't want to be
seen in and so you want to make sure that you just let whatever judgmental
thoughts come up and sort of hang back and observe them in a detached way and
then you can start to do the other part of the process which is to reverse the
judgment so let's say that you're judging someone for being a trashy
person and deep down what you're really judging is you're trying to protect
yourself from seeming trashy yourself because you think it would mean that
you're worth less than the average person or you're not worth as much as
you thought you were so it has a lot of ideas in there like Worth and
significance that you may not have even realized that you were trafficking in
when you were judging someone this will also help you be more empathetic to
people who are different from you alright step number four is to integrate
the anima and the anima so the anima is essentially the inner
woman in every man and the animus is the inner man and every woman so basically
this aspect of ourself is the mediator between the conscious and the
unconscious mind so if you're trying to get access to deeper layers of the
psyche it's very important to get in touch with your animal or animus now
personally I've suffered issues with both my anima and my animus so I'm more
inclined to believe that everyone has both it's just that maybe in the past
when Jung was conducting his research it was more common for people to identify
with one to the extreme exclusion of the other so you may have an issue with one
or both that you would have to remedy before you actually have access to those
deeper insights and to the self with a capital S all right step number five is
to do lots of contemplation and question everything that includes everything
about yourself and everything about your worldview so what you'll notice is that
you have a tendency to think that you know the way things go on in the world
but we actually know very little if we look at it everything could potentially
be an illusion so if I'm sitting in here in my bedroom right now I don't actually
know that my living room exists when I walk away from it so there's so much
that we have to take for granted as human beings in order to really function
in the world now that's not to say that I'm trying to advocate debunking basic
fact-based beliefs but just to suspend a little judgment just to be a little bit
more open-minded in your inquiries into the self and into the world now you may
have noticed that the main idea in all of these steps is to open things up in
the psyche as much as possible so a person with a strong ego or weak ego
they still are kind of stuck within that ego structure that's all where they
allow their awareness of themself to go but if they can look deeper at things
they can get any more expansive sense of self and get more access to the full
depth and breadth of their internal landscape now many of these dovetail
nicely with common practices of trying to get to enlightenment
so especially like contemplation or things like self inquiry being brutally
honest with yourself these things are recommended for that but enlightenment
work is really a topic for another video but I'm just going to go ahead and leave
you guys with this so I think the most important piece of advice here is that
if you're suffering from week ago make sure that you develop yourself a strong
ego because it's going to make your life a lot easier anyway that's all I have
for now I hope that you enjoyed this video if you did go ahead click the like
button below and subscribe if you haven't already also leave me a comment
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patrons in exchange for rewards I'll leave a link down below in the
description box and anyway that's all I have for now and until next time keep
becoming more you
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