Friday, July 17, 2020

Minimalism and Checking Your Ego

 


In our day to day life, this word often appears in our conversation that this person is so egoistic or this person has a lot of ego. But what we talk about in our daily conversation is just a little part of the ego. The truth is we all are surrounded by ego. No matter how much we try to avoid this thing called ego, it appears in various forms and disturbs our psyche and upset our journey not only towards minimalism but of overall well being. Some learned mystics and gurus define Ego as something which appears when you differentiate yourself with the person standing next to you.  In other words, when you distinguish people between “you and I” ego appears.

My dear friends, you might be thinking that why I’m writing about Ego in this series of blog posts related to minimalism and simple living. The thing is, if we try to look into this a bit deeper, we’ll be able to understand that Minimalism and ego has an Inverse relationship.

Let’s try to find out what actually ego is and how it is connected or has an inverse relationship with minimalism.

I might be wrong, but I would like to define ego as – Ego is the difference between who you are and what you actually are and/or what people think you are.

Knowing your true self is a never-ending process for people like us, but the more we get closer to our real selves, we can recognize the difference between who we are and what society calls us and/or what we think we are.

What society calls us can be either serving your ego if people or you are considering your image as better than your true self or, it can deteriorate your self-confidence if you or people consider your image not as good as your true identity. If I can take a little liberty to sound a bit philosophical, I would like to say that Image is actually an illusion and that illusion can make you egoistic and can take you far away from your true self.

Now let us try to understand how this all is connected to Minimalism.

See this society has a simple philosophy of categorizing people under those evergreen heads called status. A person who is having an Audi has a better status according to the person who is driving a Honda city. And a person having a Honda city has a better status than the person driving a hatchback car.

I’m not saying that everyone has this philosophy, but the majority of people believe that so. These statuses are nothing but sketching a person’s illusionary image which is far away from one’s true image. And that is what my friends breed Ego.

If you have read my articles in this series, and believe that living a minimalist life is worthy enough I would suggest not to rise above this league of status and illusions, but to stay away from it. As far and as fast you can run away from this league, the better is for you as well as for the people around you.

So my dear ones, Let’s try to live with this philosophy in mind.

And with this, I would like to conclude this article.

See you next week then.

Om Shanti:

Love, Laughter, and Peace

Himanshu R Nagpal

Edited by:- Geetika Nagpal


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