Defining Ego Games

Ascended Master Jesus through Kim Michaels.

In this book I will focus on what I call ego games and in the following book I will focus on what I call ego dramas. The distinction between the two is somewhat artificial because the ego often uses ego dramas to justify ego games, and it uses ego games to create ego dramas. For many people the two are intertwined in a very tangled web. My reason for making the distinction is to describe two levels of how you rise above the ego, namely the personal and the supra-personal level.

An ego game is directly related to you and what you do as an individual whereas an ego drama relates to what you do in relation to some greater – seemingly impersonal – consideration. We might say that an ego game is what people normally see as egotistical behavior, namely what revolves around your personal desires or needs. An ego drama goes beyond your personal level and relates to a greater cause. A drama is something you pretend to do for others or even for God, yet it is simply a camouflaged offspring of the ego. An ego game is often obvious selfish behavior whereas an ego drama is selfish behavior camouflaged as unselfish behavior. An ego game is what you do in relation to other people who are also focused on themselves. An ego drama is what you do in relation to a greater cause, even to God or to other people who are also pretending that their selfish behavior serves an altruistic cause.

Let me make this less abstract through a concrete example. Throughout history and even today you can find many people who have taken great personal pride in being good warriors or soldiers. They enjoy having a weapon and the training and skills for how to use it better than others. They take pride in going into combat and being able to kill the enemy. These are often the people who serve as soldiers or lower ranking officers in an army. They see themselves as being soldiers who do not make the decision to go to war and do not necessarily need a justification for doing so. They will fight any enemy that their leaders command them to fight because they enjoy the fighting.

You will also see that throughout history there have been an elite of people who rarely go to war themselves but who either make the decision to go to war or who command the soldiers from relative safety behind the front lines. There are cases where leaders have decided to go to war out of purely personal motives. As an example, consider the many times where groups of people or even armies have attacked others purely for plunder. Examples are the Vikings and the Huns who had no motive other than enriching themselves.

Beyond this you will see that in many cases nations have gone to war with what they saw as a higher motive or justification. An example is the Crusades where many people who enjoyed being warriors found a justification for ignoring their religious teachings about not killing under the pretense of liberating Jerusalem for the only true faith. The Muslims who fought the crusaders likewise felt justified in killing in the name of their God.

There are those who are warriors and who take pride in being better in combat than others. They kill, but they need no particular justification for doing so. They do not necessarily enjoy killing, but they have accepted it as part of being a warrior and they often barely reflect upon it. This is an ego game. These people are clearly focused on themselves and doing what they want to do. They are not actually reflecting on whether killing is right or wrong. If you are a warrior, you kill your opponents as a lion kills its prey.

Then there are those who see themselves as leaders who are serving some greater cause. These people rarely if ever do the actual killing, and the main reason is that they have actually come to the realization that killing is not right. In many cases such leaders would find it very difficult to directly kill another human being, yet these same leaders find it relatively easy to make decisions that result in the killing of millions of people. How can you explain that a person can know that personally killing others is wrong but can still justify decisions that lead to the killing of millions of people? It is because these people have risen above the ego games but are now trapped in the ego dramas. They have used some philosophy to define that killing certain groups of people is necessary for a greater cause.

The first group of people are in a sense honest and simply do what they want to do. The second group are dishonest because they pretend that what they do is not something they want to do but something they are doing for a greater cause—or because circumstances are forcing them to do so. In reality, those trapped in ego dramas are still doing what they want to do, but they need a justification that this is not ego-based behavior but is sanctioned by a greater authority, such as fate, necessity or God. This is why I called the Jewish religious leaders hypocrites and accused them of putting burdens upon the people that they were not willing to bear.

The levels of spiritual growth

The importance of the distinction becomes clear when you consider that the spiritual path has levels. In the previous book [Freedom From Ego Illusions] we discussed the fact that it is possible for a human being to be at 144 different levels of consciousness. The spiritual path can be described as a process where you rise towards the 144th level until you are ready to leave the earth behind permanently and ascend.

We described that there are three main levels of the spiritual path, namely from the first to the 48th level, from the 48th to the 96th level and from the 96th to the 144th level. A new lifestream will take embodiment on earth at the 48th level and this lifestream has not yet created an ego. In an ideal scenario, it is possible for a lifestream to maintain its contact with its spiritual teacher and work its way up towards the 144th level without ever going into the consciousness of separation and duality. The earth is not an ideal scenario so all people currently in embodiment did at some point create an ego.

There are two main reasons for creating an ego and they relate to the two main purposes for which the Conscious You descended into embodiment:

The Conscious You wanted to experience the material world from the inside.

The Conscious You wanted to help co-create the world from the inside.

When a lifestream is climbing from the 48th to the 96th level it is going through the seven spiritual rays, learning to use its co-creative powers through the qualities of each ray [For more about this, see The Power of Self.]. There is a temptation related to each level, namely that you can decide that you want the experience of using your co-creative abilities as a separate being. For example, the first ray is the ray of power and some lifestreams decide that they want the experience of being able to express personal power. This might cause them to create an ego that makes them see themselves as warriors who have the ultimate power to defeat an opponent in hand-to-hand combat. Others might have taken the initiations of the second ray of wisdom and decide they want to experience what it is like to be smarter than others intellectually. The colleges and scientific institutions of the world are full of such lifestreams.

We might say that between the 48th and the 96th level you are raising yourself as an individual being, seeking to expand your individual abilities. Your temptation is to avoid going into the ego games and if you have done so, your task is to rise above these games. When you rise above the 96th level, you start using your co-creative abilities for the good of others, even the All. This is when you must face the more subtle temptations represented by the desire to work for the good of the whole by forcing other individuals. This is what gives rise to the ego dramas, namely that you use some greater cause to justify what is truly ego-based behavior. As I hope you can see, the ego dramas are far more subtle and difficult to expose than the ego games. However, we will leave the subtlety of the ego dramas for the following book and here we will focus on the ego games.

Quite frankly, many spiritual seekers have risen above the most primitive or obvious ego games. Yet do not let your ego talk you into believing that you can skip this book or ignore its points. An ego drama is often a disguised ego game, and until you have fully seen the ego game at the personal level, it can be virtually impossible to expose the fallacy of the corresponding ego drama.

Realizing that you have risen above the more primitive ego games should be a source of encouragement because you can realize that you can surely rise above the rest as well. Take care to realize that rising above the more obvious and primitive behaviors related to an ego game does not necessarily mean you have completely risen above it. As mentioned in the previous book, it is quite possible for the ego to use a spiritual teaching to camouflage itself, meaning you can still be playing an ego game, only it is now camouflaged as spiritual behavior. For most spiritual people their egos would love to make them think they do not need to study this book or can ignore some of its points. This would be highly unfortunate for those who want to make true spiritual progress.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Freedom from Ego Games.

 

Copyright © 2007 Kim Michaels