Although everybody knows the expressions: "I do not know what I want anymore, I feel as if I am lost"or "I feel disconnected" or "I do not know, if I love you anymore, I do not know what I want".
To get to the true essence of who "one`s self" really is, let`s begin with the words of Eckhart Tolle, because he wrote it so beautifully:
"The word “I” embodies the greatest error and the deepest truth, depending on how it is used. In conventional usage, it is not only one of the most frequently used words in the language (together with the related words: “me,” “my,” “mine,” and “myself”) but also one of the most misleading. In normal everyday usage, “I” embodies the primordial error, a missperception of who you are, an illusory sense of identity. This is the ego. What you usually refer to when you say “I” is not who you are."
"When a young child learns that a sequence of sounds produced by the parents’ vocal cords is his or her name, the child begins to equate a word, which in the mind becomes a thought, with who he or she is. At that stage, some children refer to themselves in the third person. “Johnny is hungry.” Soon after, they learn the magic word “I” and equate it with their name, which they have already equated with who they are. Then other thoughts come and merge with the original I thought. The next step are thoughts of me and mine to designate things that are somehow part of “I.” This is identification with objects, which means investing things, but ultimately thoughts that represent things, with a sense of self, thereby deriving an identity from them. When “my” toy breaks or is taken away, intense suffering arises. Not because of any intrinsic value that the toy has the child will soon lose interest in it, and it will be replaced by other toys, other objects – but because of the thought of “mine”. The toy became part of the child’s developing sense of self, of “I.” And so as the child grows up, the original I thought attracts other thoughts to itself: It becomes identified with a gender, possessions, the sense perceived body, a nationality, race, religion, profession. Other things the “I” identifies with are roles – mother, father, husband, wife, and so on, accumulated knowledge or opinions, likes and dislikes, and also things that happened to “me” in the past, the memory of which are thoughts that further define my sense of self as “me and my story.” These are only some of the things people derive their sense of identity form. They are ultimately no more than thoughts held together precariously by the fact that they are all invested with a sense of self. This mental construct is what you normally refer to when you say “I.” To be more precise: Most of the time it is not you who speaks when you say or think “I” but some aspect of that mental construct, the egoic self." .
"One of the most basic mind structures through which the ego comes into existence is identification. The word “identification” is derived from the Latin word idem, meaning “same” and facere, which means “to make.” So when I identify with something, I “make it the same.” The same as what? The same as I. I endow it with a sense of self, and so it becomes part of my “identity.” One of the most basic levels of identification is with things: My toy later becomes my car, my house, my clothes, and so on. I try to find myself in things but never quite make it and end up losing myself in them. That is the fate of the ego."
The ego identifies with having, which does not necessarily mean the material having it can also mean having different kinds of identifications, such as: having power, being right, or having the "right" opinion, having the "right way of doing something ("my way is the "right" way"), etc. Everything that deals with a hierarchy, of something being better than something else, or being more "right", and thus something or somebody is automatically "less", (being "more" of something ) that is the construct of the ego and is a total illusion. Concealed within it remains a deep seated sense of dissatisfaction, of incompleteness, of “not enough.” “I don't have enough yet,” by which the ego really means, “I am not enough yet, I have to make more people "wrong and me right" or "smaller" than me (by making them feel as something less, or by making me more right, or by controlling other people)”, or one has to be accepted and liked by people and one is never accepted and liked by enough people and has a very hard time when somebody does not like the ego based facade one is projecting in to the world. In the last case it is about being liked by enough people, or put in a another way "having enough people like me", so "having", that is never full non the less.
Even when one looks at charity of an individual it can come from one`s need for having a good opinion about one`s self and the intention of those charitable acts are in essence very different compared to an act of charity coming from self love and compassion. The intent is different because in the first example the individual or the people on the receiving end do not matter really, they just represent the means of how one can feel better about one`s self nothing more and the main purpose is to satisfy one`s own ego, so the whole action is ego based and the "charitable person" is automatically something "more", "better" and can have a good opinion about one`s self. The second example is different because it comes from the place of feeling and being connected, from love and compassion which in it`s essence does not look at an individual, in need of help as a lesser being. but rather views everybody as equal beings. That said, there is a huge difference between empathy, sympathy and compassion.
The ego has constructed a lot of ways in how to fill up the void of not feeling, or not being enough, or not having enough, or feeling powerless. Few of the ways that are the most destructive is through control or obtaining power from or over other beings (human or otherwise), which is done through manipulation and different forms of violence: emotional, verbal, psychological, physical, sexual, economical, etc. It is important to know that every act with intent (conscious or unconscious) that belittles and makes one feel and seem "less" is a form of violence a manifestation of the ego filling up the void of the illusion of "not enough", through making somebody else even smaller or less important or powerless.
This “I” or “me” and all of the labels, in this case, are of course not the true essence of who one is, it is just the ego and it`s identifications.
Let`s look at what is really going on in the case of ego and it`s needs:
the ego is an always hungry entity that in never satisfied and the more one feeds it, the more it is hungry. Hungry for material things, identifications, labels,....., or in other words it is hungry for power. But what power really is? Ego power is merelly an illusion, it is a strive for happiness, for a feeling of being worthy, of being strong and not having to be afraid. Afraid? What does fear have to do with it one asks? Everything. But lets now first look closely at the egoic power.
When one identifies with the ego, and believes that the ego is actually one`s true self, that is when the disconnection from one`s true self happens. That is not to say that it happens on all levels of being, it just means that the more one identifies with all of the constructs of ego, the more one becomes disconnected from one`s self. What that really means is that one is disconnected from the life`s energy, the flow and also that one forgets who he or she really is, thus one can not feel joy, love and happiness all around us.
Fear is an automatic disconnector from one`s self and the universe. So that said one is automatically on autopilot, once one becomes affraid, or let`s say on ego-pilot, unconscious and oblivious of what is really happening, wrapped in an ego`s ilusion of reality.
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