Transcription
The ego is the system that runs your sense of self. It is made out of thought patterns, emotions, and behavior loops, and the stories that try to hold it all together. Left unchecked, it creates endless existential searching, chronic disconnection, and the persistent sense that something is wrong. The goal of my videos is clarity, to see your identity and its contradictions for what they are, named precisely, to finally understand what it is that we're all running away from.
In our modern culture, there's a toxic performance of a sort of hyper empathy. It is a form of empathy that actually is about signaling to your social group and those around you that you are a good and compassionate person. It is so that you are accepted in the tribe of other people, and in the meantime, you lose your own voice, and you lose what you genuinely care about. The internet is blasting you information from all over the world and telling you to care about all sorts of things. There are some drama there, this guy did this awful thing, there's a war happened at this place, and some other awful stuff at the other side of the planet. It's not that caring about this stuff is bad, of course not. But I'd argue that real compassion is most of the time not what is happening here. It is more like a sort of pretending to be above other people and showing a moral high ground so that you can have a common enemy amongst others and have sort of pretend goal with which to strive for.
But modern activism barely exists for most people. Just because people are mad on Twitter or on social media or complain to each other all the time, nothing really changes and nothing really happens. This is on the cultural social media aspect, but then personally, there's also this need to reflexively mirror other people and their pain and to validate that their own pain matters. And if you don't acknowledge this, then you're immediately seen as evil. I would say that this creates a society where a lot of genuine compassion is being mixed with, yeah, moral grandstanding and a sort of ego mechanism that forces you to signal to the world that you are a good person. What this does is that you don't say your real opinion. You don't say what actually matters to you and people can manipulate you into all sorts of stuff. Manipulating you into donations, manipulating you in spending money on the on on a certain thing, manipulating your attention so that you can, yeah, rack up views or rack up um space for another person because, yeah, they're emotionally dependent on you. There are so many ways where manipulative people use the need for empathy in order to get you to do what they want. You can see this in your personal life, but also in, yeah, the grand political schema where so many words that are being used are just there to load morally a sort of association with them and then you hear the word and then immediately it has this negative connotation.
In the realm of politics, there are so many words now that are just like poison. Like if you say the word trans, it's now a political word. If you say the word liberal, it's now a political word. God, if you say the word vaccine, it's now even a political topic. There's a huge propaganda campaign happening all over the world where things are getting muddied and you're getting pushed into certain bubbles and you are supposed to stay in these bubbles and grandstand and to signal to other people that you're supposed to be there. And from, yeah, this personal level, it is also the need for other people to be around you and be with you and for you to do them the favors that they tell you you deserve to to do for them. Or it's even not wanting to disappoint your parents because you are doing the career that you actually don't want, but they want you to do. Or you are not studying the exact thing in university you wanted to study. There are so many ways people use their own negative emotion in order to push a certain feeling onto you and then make you feel responsible for it.
Compassion is a genuine desire to want to help other people in suffering and acting out this need for um, yeah, help is virtuous. But most of the time, what we're doing right now is a form of toxic empathy where we are feeling other people's pain, but not actually doing about it, but feeling like that we should feel bad about stuff. Imagine how bad you would have to feel if you genuinely were to feel all the suffering of the world all the time. If every problem around this planet is your own. Even in your own country, there are so many problems that you cannot actually feel all of them. I would say that empathy is very important in one-on-one interactions with people. It is important when you see stuff you can do something about. But if it is this existential form of suffering that feels so bad for all the suffering that is in the world and stuff you cannot do anything about, then it becomes extremely toxic and mentally unhealthy.
I used to have this a lot with just the nature of pain. Um, I had this also when I looked at at animal documentaries, for example, and then I just saw animals getting eaten and um, yeah, I still get this sometimes where I'm just so aware of how much pain is involved in nature. And it doesn't existentially trouble me anymore, but back in the day it was something that really bothered me, and I felt like I needed to do something about it, but I felt absolutely incapable. And animal suffering in the natural world is a good example, actually, because there's very little you can do on the grand scheme of things. Of course, any dog or cat you rescue is generally an act of good and compassion and empathy. And it matters, right? Like imagine one dog life. It is something enormous. It is gigantic in the same way that your own life is, yeah, basically the entire universe from your perspective. So, it does matter. But you cannot fight against the nature of nature. You cannot change that pain is a possibility. And what I had is just being dragged down by the sense of empathy for the world. And um, in German, there's a word called Weltschmerz. And I was suffering from so much Weltschmerz, which is the pains of the world. And this was dragging me down to the point that if I were to be happy, I felt like it wasn't morally correct. Like if I am happy in a world that is suffering so much, then I'm also complicit and I'm also evil. And in this way, I didn't allow myself to be happy, and I built this entire mindset of having to suffer with the world, having to suffer with current culture in order to feel like part of the culture. And here is also a bit where this bubble thing starts again, also um, yeah, although it's in a more abstract sense, and also, yeah, kind of self-inflicted way.
So, there's a reactive chain of social conditioning that basically demands you to be immediately emotionally responsive to any global event. And if you are able to cut this chain and actually focus on yourself, what is it that you care about? What is it that is in your vicinity to change, especially about your own suffering and your own pain? Like, is there something that you are really pushing off that would serve you well that is not in service of other people, but in service of yourself? Which is the classical idea of plane flights, right? Like, put on your own oxygen mask mask first before you try to help others. This makes your own help much more effective because, first of all, the person who you can help the most at any given point in time is yourself. So, if you are able to help yourself and you have a cup that overflows from joy and contentment, then naturally it leads you to helping other people and making the world a better place instead of trying to get into this sort of savior complex mode where you have this narrative about needing to save the world in order to kind of be like this hero of of a person.
>> [clears throat] >> It is a an archetype of a psychological model, which is the hero, which sees itself as the savior of the current paradigm. And it is an egoic illness in a way. It is trying to justify or correct its own internal suffering. And instead of accepting one's own suffering, it then projects outward to the world this need to save reality from all the suffering. Which um, yeah, I I am quite familiar with. I still believe that suffering as like the the nature of resistance is something that can be eliminated as much as possible or should be eliminated as much as possible. The more we understand how consciousness and friction in in this state works, the more we should do stuff to alleviate it. And this is kind of obvious, right? That's why technology is advancing in the medical fields and our morality as like a human species, although it doesn't seem like it, is improving like in most societies now. Clear and obvious slavery is not allowed anymore. Um, we um, yeah, don't torture people for fun. Um, in general, of course, there are exceptions, but if you were to go back in time, things were very different, right? We had public executions and all sorts of, yeah, horrible stuff, which over time, since we learn how to see ourselves as a as a as an organism that sprawls around multiple people, we start to connect with them and have genuine empathy and be like, okay, let's not do this because we might actually just, yeah, cause more pain in a reality that has already more than enough of it.
The contrast of how much pain is possible in in, yeah, this world is the main reason for all existential and psychological and spiritual searching. It's the fact that you wake up as this monkey that basically has to feel pain and then wonders what it it is all for. And then you find sort of grounding in either God or spirituality or some philosophical framework and find a way to, yeah, relate with existence in a more cooperative manner instead of seeing it as like something that you've been forced into, something that has been done to you. And the more you can accept the conditionings of the universe and how everything kind of connect with each other inevitably, you'll start to notice that there's not really another option to but to accept the pain because if you resist it, you create suffering and the pain increases, which is what nobody wants. This ability to connect with your own painful experiences and to move through them is what I help people with in my ego architecture audits, which is a design system for you to be able to understand your own nature and understand where it is where your identity creates friction and dislike and lack of acceptance for reality. And if you're feeling empty inside or uncertain about who you are or want to truly understand non-duality fully, then check out the link in the description and we will talk soon.
Now, this video is not an allowance for you to not care about anybody but yourself as the ego would love to do, but it is a clear statement to say, "Yeah, you can care about yourself first and foremost and more than other people." It's like some baseline importance. Because if you don't care about yourself, then everything else falls apart. And if you care about yourself, then you're also not going to perform empathy or perform compassion, but you're generally going to care for your own principles and then act on those principles. The real intelligence in empathy is that of true compassion that has the ability to maintain internal distance and to not be swept up by the emotions of those around you. This way, you can react with empathy when it is appropriate, react with compassion as a neutral movement, but not manipulated by those around you or algorithms that are using this emotional, yeah, impulse for empathy for their own personal gain.
The real importance in connection is to understand oneness between all things and that when something is experiencing pain, this being that is experiencing pain could have also been you. And you just happen to be in your body and in your reality framework. And if you were in another um either person's body or animal body and you were experiencing it from this point of view, then it would be as real as your own. And if you understand then this is what reality means, then the natural impulse is to not cause more suffering on others. Now, you have the ability, of course, to reject that and say that if something else feels pain, it's not me who's feeling pain, so why should I care about it? And of course, you can say that, but recognize that this is precisely what the ego does. It creates a separation between you and others. The perspective is real, like the difference of perspective is real from your your own point of view, but the separation isn't. What the other person's experiencing is as real as your own and any rejection of that is just pure denial. It is precisely this denial that the ego does all the time. The ego doesn't want to be human. The ego doesn't want to be a biological organism. It wants to transcend it. It wants to be above it. It uses status and money and social um, yeah, social status to put itself above his standard humanity. Everything to be somehow higher in the hierarchy, which on one hand is clearly there for survival, but on the other hand is also a sort of cosmic aggrandizement. Something that makes you feel valuable and important, which then needs to be fueled by, yeah, other people looking up to you. And the real issue here or why this happens is because you're not empathizing with you enough. You're not caring for your own feelings enough. You're not looking at you like you would um as you being a child where your natural impulse is to help it or protect it. And if you connect with your own emotions, you will naturally feel this compassion and empathy towards yourself. You will naturally will want to make yourself feel better. Because like I discussed before, suffering is bad in its own nature. Like you don't want to experience it. So whenever you do stuff that is unkind to yourself, which also includes being addicted to stuff by the way that will hurt you in the long run, or not going to the studies that you actually want to do and follow your own heart and what your own Yeah, spirit desires instead of what other people are telling you, or giving an opinion that might disrupt social cohesion, but maintains your integrity. All of this stuff is born out of genuine self-compassion.