The Ego Diet

The Ego Diet
By
Bill Cottringer

“Learning that just increases self-importance and autonomy, isn’t really learning at that point, it is over-nourishment of the ego, just like too much food causes the body to become obese.” ~The author.

We pretty well understand the importance of temperance in eating and the need for physical dieting for our health and appearance when we get overweight. But we are just now embracing the importance of a mental diet with this thing we call “ego.” Most self-development books these days emphasize this problem but are a little shy on what to do about it. I think we can better understand the need for the ego diet in relation to making progress at self-improvement and long range success, if we understood what aspect of the ego needs to go on a diet and why.

Our ego gathers valuable self-confidence during the process of learning important things about being successful in whatever it is we are trying to do. Our ego is indispensable to helping us make progress in our self-development journeys of learning, growing and improving. But like anything else in this life, even the ego can outlive its original purpose and start becoming exactly what it is trying to avoid—uncomfortable insecurity, failure, not knowing what to do, uncertainty, and inability to control our realities.

The stronger our egos have become from better than average success, the more resistive we become to noticing they have outgrown their purpose and the less we notice we have gone past the point on no return with the ego’s utility. It is not the whole ego that needs to go, just the part that takes itself so seriously about being right and higher up on the food chain than anyone or anything else. In this sense the ego, when unquestioned or unchecked, can deceive us into believing in illusions, such as our version of reality being the most correct and complete one and that we captured that brilliance all by our self and all on our own.

I think we were given egos by the Creator, just so we could go full circle in our development—from separating ourselves from everything to better understand and control things and gain more security, to realizing the truth and joy in shedding this accumulated false sense of autonomous security so we can rejoin the rest of life in inter-connected unity. It is not the entire ego that needs to go on a diet, but rather just the tunnel vision that gives us this sense of separation from everything else and over-identification with the idea of our self, especially our self importance and certainty of being right at what we think and do.

Coming full circle to completion and wholeness in our self-actualization journey—from short-sighted self-consciousness of what we think is, to open-minded awareness of what really is—requires some ego dieting. Here is why:

• Your ego can only take you half-way home in your self-improvement success journey. Sooner or later you have to accept the reality that all you think you know may not necessarily be so. At most you only have a 180-degree field of vision. And you can’t arrive at that important insight all on your own. You have to let someone else who you trust tell you. And of course the more you think you can do this on your own from being so successful in the past, the harder it becomes and the more obese your ego gets.

• The ego that has seemingly gone past the point of no return in its own self-importance and separation drive from everything else (way overweight), becomes very lonely and continues the emotional disconnection from others in a negative vicious circle going nowhere but inevitable unhappiness and failure. But there is enough proof that it is never too late to start the ego diet. There is always an opportunity now.

• The main problems of our country today are a result of our country’s need for an ego diet. And of course every citizen who needs to go on the ego diet is just contributing to the larger problem. Our lives and welfare is at stake and appreciation for our own freedom and the responsibility that necessary to guarantee it, dictates we own the problem personally and do something about it ourselves.

People who understand what part of our ego needs to go on a diet and how to be successful in doing that can be a good resource for those who sense something needs to give. In the meantime, here are some survival tips for living with an ego in need of dieting, no matter which side of the fence you are on:

1. If you want more true friends, it is a good idea to find out ways to mitigate the expression of your superiority and judgments of others, especially when it comes to who is right. We all need to be accepted before we are willing to listen to external advice, even from someone who obviously knows better. Other people simply don’t like to be around someone else who needs to go on an ego diet.

2. We are all on a journey of self-betterment but traveling at different speeds. And we may be slower than most others in some parts of this journey, while being much faster than the rest of the crowd in other parts. And of course the opportunity to unravel the difficult pretzel of thinking, feeling, choosing and the results we get, re-occurs often and problem-solving progress is rarely steady within the same person. Tolerance and empathy go a long way here.

3. You can take one thing to the bank when it comes to getting a reliably good feeling. The more inter-c0nnectedness we see with ourselves and other people and things in life, the more contentment we feel from our successes; the more separation and superiority we see through our own sense of autonomous self, there is no real contentment from anything. Even huge successes are empty.

Do you need to go on an ego diet? If you are not sure, you probably do so ask a trusted friend for a second opinion. And if you want to go on an ego diet, seek out the advice from others who have been successful doing this.

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