What is EGO?

To me the ego is an identity of ourselves that we have constructed, an identity which is false. If we take all the beliefs of what we are – beliefs about our personality, our talents and abilities – we can possibly trace the structure of our ego.

The talents, abilities and other aspects of our personality are nothing but gifts from God, but our mind has over a period of years created an imaginary image of ourselves and is continuously modifying and enhancing it on self-assumptions. One may not realize but our ego is an active and dynamic part of our personalities and plays a tremendous role in creating continuous delusions and destructions in our lives. It is part of everything we think of and every decision we make; the ways we react or don’t react all are linked with our egos. Everything for an egoistic person revolves around “I” and “me.”

Our greatest fear is that our deficiencies and limitations get exposed. We keep thinking, planning in our minds, finding reasons until we convince ourselves that we are without a flaw, one of the best humans. In case these deficiencies are detected by others, our true colors surface and we react with mixed emotions,

often with arguments, anger, foul language, false reasoning; we don’t accept them.

It is not easy to detect or define our egos because in our eyes our image is near perfect, where we are always the good guy, pure at heart, humble, kind, generous, fair in all respects and so on. We are also the most intelligent and we have answers for everything. Our ego makes us feel so perfect that we technically have no negative traits, and those that we have are voluntary and compulsory to enable us to survive in this so-called cruel world.

For example, if we are too humble and polite, other people will take undue advantage of us. Many a time foul language is a must. We can’t afford to be straight forward. Many times we must create a story (lie) to get things done. Lying is a business strategy, nothing to do with good or bad. We need to show people a picture of what they want to see. We need to show urgency and exaggerate things. All our rules are bent because they are only made to suit our EGO. The majority of things that we end up doing is all to feed our egos. This is encouraged with Satan’s whispers. Our most ardent enemy (2:208, 36:60).

The Quran teaches us about ego. Killing a person is like killing everyone in the world and we know the reason for the first murder was also ego. One of the most important commandments in the Quran is to kill our egos.

The Quran tells that all of us are here in this world simply because we were asked not to approach a certain tree, but Satan gave us a story (2:35-39), and since we have big egos we tried to figure out things on our own and decided to believe in Satan. This way we each set up Satan and our own ego as a god beside God. Just imagine, we gave up Paradise and ended up here in this world. It’s a final chance offered to us by God in order to kill our egos and get back to the heaven.

If we analyze this episode: Satan approached us and asked us to eat from the forbidden tree so that we could live forever despite God’s commandment to not approach that tree. We believed Satan and did not seek refuge in God and pray to Him for guidance about Satan’s claim. It is a problem when we only look to God after having tried everything else first. This can indicate that our Ego is our primary god.

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