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Ego in Our Daily Life and Solution to it in the Bhagavad Gita

A highly thought provoking and inspirational article in The Huffington Post by Ramnath Subramanian, CEO and President, The Bhakti Center discusses Ego in our daily life and about the solution to it in the Bhagavad Gita. The thoughts put forwarded in the article titled ‘The Bhagavad Gita and the Problem of Ego' by Ramnath Subramanian, who has taught Bhagavad Gita at Cornell University and the University of Albany, delves into areas in our day today life where ego sprouts unknowingly and completely devours a person’s ability to be honest.
Some excerpts from the article
Modern psychology has been wrestling with the vast territory of the human ego for a great while now, and its complexity continues to mystify us. Even before I learned about Freudian ideas on the ego, I first encountered the concept of the ego explicitly mentioned in the Bhagavad Gita. According to the Gita, there is a fundamental difference between "real" ego and what it defines as the "false" ego. Real ego is our very essence, the consciousness that makes us aware and awake to reality. The false ego is a false identity crafted to preserve the sense of being the most significant and the most important all the time. In short, it is a narcissistic search for being loved, validated and appreciated. This is what we generally refer to as the ego. The Gita further describes the subtleties of the ego and how it manifests moment to moment in our thoughts, words and deeds.
The concept seems to be stretched too far when we first read about it. But when we honestly study our own lives, we can clearly isolate various episodes of how this tendency manifests itself in our personality, either covertly or explicitly. The events can range from simple conversations on which football team is the best to intense debates in boardrooms on the next important decision for the organization. What's worse is that the ego blinds us from seeing its own ploy, the ultimate of which is rationalized excuses for avoiding honest introspection and admittance.
The Bhagavad Gita's prescription to combat this crafty enemy within us is to create a culture of introspection and self-knowledge whose basic components lie in courage and humility -- a healthy skepticism of our own "goodness" combined with an unending desire to learn more about ourselves. They work as powerful radars that uncover the camouflage of the ego and disarm it. Real self-knowledge is an invaluable guardian against self-deception mechanisms of the ego, and any true and beneficial culture of transformation will teach us this. And the more we practice this awareness, the more we can realize that it is not systems that are good or evil; rather it is our ego-centric adoption of those systems that we need to explore before we make those judgments.
You can read the article here at The Huffington Post - ‘The Bhagavad Gita and the Problem of Ego’