Executive Summary

• Understanding The Ego & How It Can Be Manipulated
• Shifting Our Own Minds
• Creating A World Worth Inheriting
• Becoming The Change We Wish To See

If you have not yet read Part 1: The Way To Save Ourselves available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

In beginning to tackle this big topic, first, let's take a closer look at the ego.

The Ego

Humans are indeed set apart from the other sentient species on the planet such as dogs, elephants, whales, and dolphins. But what makes us 'special’ is not the use of language or tools. Plenty of other animals make use of both.  Humans seem to be unique in having an ego. 

The ego is the part of the mind we interact with (almost) entirely each day. It mediates between the conscious and unconscious parts of ourselves, and is how we interact with the world. It forms our sense of personal identity.  For most people it's a fair statement to say they are their ego.  They identify with it fully, just as I did with mine until not that long ago.

The ego thinks, assumes, that it is everything about you. 

Ekhart Tolle, who has had a huge impact on my thinking, puts it this way:

Most people are so completely identified with the voice in the head—the incessant stream of involuntary and compulsive thinking and the emotions that accompany it—that we may describe them as being possessed by their mind. As long as you are completely unaware of this, you take the thinker to be who you are. This is the egoic mind. We call it egoic because there is a sense of self, of I (ego), in every thought, every memory, every interpretation, opinion, viewpoint, reaction, emotion. This is unconsciousness, spiritually speaking.

Your thinking, the content of your mind, is of course conditioned by the past: your upbringing, culture, family background, and so on. The central core of all your mind activity consists of certain repetitive and persistent thoughts, emotions, and reactive patterns that you identify with most strongly. This entity is the ego itself.