The popular notion that people need an ego to live and succeed in life is untrue. We can only begin to appreciate who we truly are when we lessen our need to prove ourselves," especially the need to prove ourselves as being worthy to be here in the first place.
According to Christianity, heaven is a place all of us must prove we are worthy of reaching. And until we have and are properly forgiven, hell is a place we are born deserving. For some, gaining access to such a paradise requires merely submission to the will of God, as an act of faith, even though no one can agree, or often make sense out of, what God's will even is. And those with different opinions about that divine will have been killing each other for thousands of years. For others, faith requires works, as if one must prove they are worthy of being moved from the cotton plantation of planet Earth to the mansion of heaven. All those who fail in this endeavor deserve the eternal tortures of hell they inherit, according to this thinking. In a similar way, then, earth is also a proving ground, where a person must prove they are worthy of being human through their willingness to act like a robot in how they obey a Church and a religion. And failure to prove such worthiness results in a person being treated like a Jew in the eternal ovens of Auschwitz.
"As we let go of our thoughts of who we think we are, our insecurity begins to lift." It is then that we can begin to live outside of the barnyard of our "beliefs," the temple of our thought system, the Iron Maiden of our ego. Only then do we connect with our healthy functioning.
Shedding our ego like dead skin, allows us to see new options and alternatives that were previously hidden from us, which our ego, to defend its existence, blinded us from seeing as a viable option. The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die, wrote Nietzsche, "as well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind." The addict who claims they are not an addict because they can stop using their drug of choice whenever they want to - they just don't want to - is no different from the person who insists they can change their mind whenever they want to, because they have "free will," but then never does. To never change one's mind requires always looking at new information, and old information, from the perspective that none of it should ever lead a person to see things differently than they always have.
Whenever we are able to step outside the confines of our thought system and drop the thoughts we have that are interfering with our well-being, we step out of the temple of our ego that serves as the tomb of our potential. Such a tomb feels like our comfort zone. But only by stepping out of it can our minds open to the possibility of seeing ourselves in a new light.
A thought system is based on thinking, and is the opposite of love, which is pure feeling. On the one hand, a thought system loves only its thoughts, and sees its perspective as superior to any other possible way of looking at or thinking about things. It strives, therefore, to always prove itself worthy of being retained and depended on. This is like a parent of 12 children who decides they love the one who reminds them of their ideal self the most, who therefore abandons the other 11.
As such, a thought system loves to play a never ending game with thoughts, that is, with itself. Like playing chess with yourself, it loves the challenge of validating itself as useful and worthy of being venerated and loved, more than any other thought system. It does this by using itself to navigate an unsolvable problem. We assume a thought system is to solve problems, but that is part of the allure and the illusion. The problem the thought system is forever trying to solve, like Sisyphus pushing a boulder, must be and remain always unsolvable. Why? Because a thought system is a trouble shooter. But a troubleshooter can never be satisfied because if there is nothing to troubleshoot, they are out of a job, and have no identity. The need to find imperfection, as such, is its own reward, either in ourselves or others, or both., because it means our thought system is working. And every time it finds an imperfection, be it within or without, it triggers a reward by releasing dopamine.
The more secure your environment, the more able you are to admit mistakes and change on the one hand, and the more willing you are to try something new. People who gravitate toward the theater, for example, often feel flexible enough in their own skin to try being as many different someone's as possible. The less secure your environment, however, the less able you are to change or let go of the thought system that has kept you safe.
But the problem the thought system is trying to resolve must also remain unresolvable. For we do not continue to think about a question or an equation that we have already solved. We do not continue to read the same mystery book or watch the same mystery movie over and over again, foregoing all other books or movies, long after we already know the answer to the mystery. No matter how much we love the story, the dopamine it is capable of releasing in our brain only gets increasingly smaller and smaller, until we receive none at all. This is why we need constant reinterpretation of even the most sacred of stories, because, like a perpetual treadmill in our mind, we need new mysteries to continue to generate the release of more dopamine.
Atheists who argue with "believers," by comparison, never realize that by doing so, they are providing the believer with an environment to flex the artistic creativity of their thought system, which releases more dopamine in the brains of both the believer and the atheist, only ensuring both will become ever more entrenched in their view as they becomes more addicted to the argument-game, regardless of what is true. Truth, in this sense, is simply the euphoria one feels from proving they are "right," if only to themselves. Doing that reinforces our dependence on, and belief in, the superiority of our thought system.
Love, on the other hand, is not about thinking, it's about being guided by feelings, intuition, and trust (or what religion calls "faith"). Love does not think in terms of what is right or wrong, so it does not need to analyze or argue for what it desires. Lovers do not endlessly analyses their love for each other, or argue why they love, lest they find either no solid reason for loving each other as they do, or the reasons they find loose their luster over time
Love lets go, like falling into a pool of water, while thought systems hang on to every thought. The former wants to swim, while the other holds onto a buoy of a belief, and uses it to chase its own reflection. Love says "It's okay," while a thought system says "figure this out or else!" Love doesn't care if we agree about an idea, but our thought system does. To validate itself, and its' worth, a thought system must always win. It enjoys competition, as a result, and hates to loose. Love does not compete, and keeps no record of wrongs, as it says in Corinthians, either of others or oneself.
Healthy functioning and love are similar, and come from a place of acceptance and trust. In our mind, it is a peaceful grove in which we sit enjoying the sensation of the sun on our face, the breeze through our hair, the smells of spring in our nostrils, the sound of birds and bees serenading us with the songs of life. A thought system or belief systems are a barking dog, threatening to bite us if we fail to head their call, their warnings, their invitation to exercise them, and feed them, by worrying about their logic, their intricacies. One wishes only to be, the other is always strategizing how to convince us to depend upon them by winning. One bathes in the sun, the other plays chess. and we are all made up of both, but fail to notice how we need these two sides to live in harmony with each other so we can too.
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