Good morning.
I came to the realisation that ego is what prevented me from expressing mettā all these years. The pseudo-christian upbringing which suggests that good deeds need to come from a sense of guilt or shame; the imprinting that believing yourself a force for good is somehow egocentric.
Despite instinctively acting in ways which benefit others I was taught that embracing this truth was a form of egomania.
But how is a seed to grow if you do not water it?
And why would ego-dissolution result in overwhelming feelings of goodwill unless goodwill was not dependent on the ego?
The doer of good rejoices in both the worlds. Yet is there even a doer when you are doing good?
I remember an ex-girlfriend telling me to stop helping people in the street because their problems would become my own. Where is the ego there?
Stepping in to defend friends from bullies in school was pre-cognition, even if those friends later abandoned me or became the bullies themselves.
The doing of good does not come from ego. The doing of good comes from the lack thereof.
This idea that we need a conscience or guilt or superego in order to motivate us to do good is mistaken. The conscience or guilt or superego is the ego; it is the thing trying to police the goodness and to bring it into a container where it can be controlled so it serves our purpose. It is the fence we put around the seeds so that they will not grow beyond where we intended to plant them.
But the doing of good? That is not ego. That is the opposite of ego. That is action which does itself, uncontrolled and unbidden.
Even in business I did good; I chose the right clients and worked in the interest of candidates instead of fees. I paid my partners over double the going rate and never called them employees or controlled their working hours. I gave out half a year’s bereavement to a new employee. These actions were not motivated by ego; they were just the right things to do.
And sometimes they were rewarded with betrayal. The guy stole my bike after getting his bereavement pay. Clients didn’t pay. The friend whose dog I saved accused me of trying to kill it, instead of being able to accept his own guilt for leaving his pet to die of loneliness while he went on a 2 month holiday.
Yet still, writing this feels strange. There’s a part of me that thinks ‘calling yourself good will make people brand you an egomaniac’. Because they have. They’ve used the word ‘narcissist’, for trying to cultivate the seed of goodness which resides in us all.
Narcissus merely looked at his own reflection in the water. He formed a self-image. He did not act.
And yes - there are few things more dangerous than someone who has a self-image of themselves as being a ‘good person’. The dogman has an image of himself as a good person, so when he fails to live up to it he lashes out and causes people harm.
But saving that dog was not ego motivated. Stepping in to protect people - both friends and strangers - is not ego motivated.
Having the boundaries of the self dissolve in an explosive awakening and feeling so much love for the world that you believe yourself to be the Buddha or Jesus is not ego-motivated; it is precisely the opposite. In an event like that your ego has ceased to exist, so the love and goodwill you feel is by default the opposite of egomania.
But the medical establishment will use that word ‘mania’ and give you lifetime drugs because of research funded by profit-motivated pharmaceutical companies. Drugs which will pull you back into your ego container so you are easier to control; a dutiful worker ant.
An ego is very easy to manipulate. It exists to protect ourselves physically and mentally in a society where normality is a virtue. To make us look like a nail which does not stick out, so we will not be hammered down. The purpose of the ego is to make you one of the flock; ideally the alpha, but if not, someone the alpha will not single out.
Uncontrolled love and goodwill is by default without ego. There is no doer. You do not think before you jump in front of a car to push a child out of the way; not if you want to get there in time to save them. If you let the deliberating mind step in then you will be too late.
Conscience is to goodwill what philosophy is to insight.
It is a construct and a convolution; a convoluted neural maze we build so that our ego can explain away the fact the our ‘baser drives’ are not all that base after all.
I would say that our base drive is actually to help and to care and to love and to share. Then our ego sits atop that, and it says ‘hold up there Nelly; you need to look after yourself first’. This next layer is where our greed and our hatred and our cajoling and our conscience comes in.
But goodness?
Goodness is the foundation of it all; spontaneous and self-creating. When you dig enough and you remove your ego-constructs, what remains? It is goodness, it is engagement, and it is joy.
… and pain and hurt and grief and sorrow. It is the raw feelings. But the raw feelings themselves will never make you into a ‘bad person’; the feelings are felt and then they are gone and it is the self that sits atop which says ‘we don’t want that again so we will create an ego-construct to try to logic it away’.
But that doesn’t work, does it? You can’t logic away sorrow any more than you can drink away grief. It will always resurface.
And it’s this ego which gets in the way of us expressing and experiencing our love for the world in its purest form. ‘What will they think’, we tell ourselves, while we build a wall.
But there’s practicalities too.
We live in a word where the commons have been stolen from the masses. Barbarians and warlords came in; they fenced off the fields and said ‘pay our taxes or go elsewhere’. They became the lords and the kings and they built our socio-economic and legal systems and we put them on pedestals and we said ‘look at those royalty and aristocrats oh how grand it must be to live as one’.
And this is the world we live in now. We celebrate the wealthy. Our religions say ‘if he was reborn a wealthy brahmin then surely he lived virtuous lives’ or ‘for him to be elected into a position of power the god almighty must be smiling on his actions’.
We mistake prestige for virtue, and we chase the prestige.
We chase the approval of our priest or our abbot; or manager or our teacher; our friends or our family. We try to placate these people so that they will say ‘you are a good person’ and fuel our ego and our self-image so we can lie there in bed and repeat the words ‘they said I was good’.
But that is not virtue. That is prestige. That is ego. That is renown and supplication and ideological slavery.
Goodness is not something to be attained.
Goodness is something that is within us all, at the deepest level possible.
Goodness predates ego. It is the foundational stratum on which life itself is built.
Goodness is.
It’s that simple.
Calling goodness a manifestation of ego is like saying that reality is a manifestation of philosophy.
But we live in a game not of our making. The game of our society was created by the institutions which were created by the laws which were created by the egos that stole the commons. This goes for politics and religion and even science, in how it chooses what to research and what to ignore.
So in terms of practical spreading of goodness we need to tread a line. We can’t just go and give away all of our money to a few people on the street and expect it to ripple outward from there.
We need to use skilful means and right livelihood. We need to play the game and earn some money in a virtuous manner, then use that money to have a good impact on the people around us and start some dominoes toppling.
We need to be the change we want to see, but we need to remember that change is iterative. We are operating within a system which will not easily crumble. Breaking the individual ego is hard enough; breaking a societal ego is orders of magnitude more difficult.
We need to model how to operate with goodness to our children and our families and our friends and our neighbours, and we need to change things one step at a time.
So don’t go and give away your house or your earnings. Just use them wisely.
And drop the idea that goodness is something which needs validating. Goodness simply ‘is’. It was our default state, before the world made us fight for a place to survive.
When I built my company recruiting for AI I was hopeful that the incoming technologies could free us all from this struggle to feed ourselves by selling our lives for a salary. I still am hopeful, though current political and economic movements definitely seem to be going in the opposite direction.
Maybe the world also needs to reach a crisis point. A global version of the implosion which leads to so many of our awakenings. An 8-billion-person-strong desire for deliverance after the dark night to end all dark nights.
But maybe if we all start our own little ripples in our own little ponds we can prevent things from getting too dark before the dawn.
Who knows. For now; I’ll do me. Small step by small step.
Goodness is all that remains once ego is abandoned.
Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
/jb202511091058