Bruce Morgen Defines Ego

File under: Real True Gurus

Bruce Morgenji was our first online guru and a sometime contributor to this blog. He's been at online punditry since the early 90s, but has been carrying the secrets of self-realization since the late 70s. Here is his simple yet profound definition of the ego, that great bugaboo that egos all over the world have been trying to eliminate ever since some misguided Sanskrit scholar mistranslated Shankara's concept of the ahamkara:

Ego is a quasi-reiterative pattern of thoughts that represents (for better or worse) the perceived survival requirements of the host organism. The "perceived" part is what's so often problematic, not the phenomenon of ego per se -- it's pretty easy for "perceived survival requirements" to cross over into "perceived dominance advantage(s)," up to and including outright megalomania, but more often resulting in some degree of garden variety self-absorption, with the usual paucity of empathy that comes with that territory.

There's plenty more of Bruceji's wisdom here.