What is the Ego or the “I”?

About Time – A Definition of the “I”

Now that the ego or “I” has been mentioned it is certainly time to define the ego. There is the myself and there are egos or “I’s”. We’ve mentioned that the many egos make up the myself. An “I” or ego is something psychological and there are so many definitions that we can attribute to the ego or the “I”.

Conditioned Essence

Gnosis says that an ego is really nothing without the essence, what is first is the essence. Before there was the ego there was the essence and coincidentally there was no defect and no virtue either. The ego is the conditioning or the bottling of the essence, and as soon as the essence is trapped or bottled duality arises, and defect and virtue appear.

You may be asking yourself right now, “what is the essence?” and what is that conditioning that is being mentioned. Master Samael, says that the essence is our psychic material itself, or in other words the material that our psychology is contained within. As far as the conditioning goes we can say that the conditioning is duality then relativity.

So far we have seen what the ego or ‘I’ is from an esoteric point of view, however it can also be defined from a psychological point of view, as the ego or ‘I’ is something esoteric and psychological.

A Mental Process

From a psychological point of view we can say that the ego is the thought of ‘I’ or a mental process that contains the concept of “I” and mine. Gnosis also says that it is a psychological person living within our psyche that has its particular way of thinking, feeling and acting. The essence does not have the concept of “I” or mine. The essence though has what is called a scared individuality, but not the egoic individuality of I am or mine.

The ego has a relative existence in us, because it depends upon thought, if we don’t think, then there is no ego in our human machine. The ego is “I” implying it is not the other person or in other words “I” which means “not you”. The ego is the false separation from others and from one’s own inner Being or divinity.

An Answer to the Events of Life

We may say also that every ego or ‘I’ is an answer to the diverse events of life. The ego has taken the place of the essence in giving answers to life. It should really be that a function or part of the essence with in us produces the different answers to the events of life. We in fact have an ego for every occasion of life. We can say that every ego is really a fractioned and distortion part of the essence, in the sense that a part of the essence could produce an answer to a given event in life in a constructive, just and correct way, however the ego being conditioned produces an answer to the particular events of life it has been conditioned to give an answer to.

For example we have the “I” of pride to be used in situations where we need to justify or cover our mistakes, the “I” of greed when dealing with money and possessions, the “I” of self-love, lust and jealousy when dealing with relationships, the “I” of gluttony when dealing with food and drink etc.

Relative Existence

When we try to investigate who we are, or who we think we are, we find that we are that “I” that has a mind, a body, legs, stomach and so on. We are the possessor of those parts of the mind-body complex. That “I” that we think we are, is something psychological. If you try to find it inside your body or mind you won’t find it. It is only something that appears or exists dependent upon thought. So that is the ego, it is relative or dependent upon the relative thinking that is relative to the concept of “I” and the concept of mine.

If we want to find our essence we will find it when our mind is quiet, when that is, there is an absence of thought. Meditation is very useful for this.

The essence is something that is outside of relativity and duality, something that embraces the unity. We are really a great unity, if you don’t believe that karma shows us that this is so. Just go and slap someone in the face and soon enough someone will slap you in the face. So slapping someone in the face is equivalent to slapping yourself, showing us that the other person and ourselves are the same.