What do you think is the biggest fault in human nature?
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The big “I” (EGO)
What Is the Ego? Human nature is a desire to enjoy, and the ego is the intention to enjoy at others’ expense. Our desire to enjoy is divided into three main parts, individual, social and spiritual desires.
Individual desires are food, sex, family and shelter.
Social desires are desire for money, honor, control and knowledge
Spiritual desire — or more accurately, the nucleus of a spiritual desire (called a “point in the heart”) that questions life’s meaning and purpose. It starts emerging when we start feeling less and less fulfilled in our individual and social desires, and it can be developed into a full spiritual desire of love and bestowed.
The ego, i.e., the intention to enjoy at the expense of others, does not relate to our individual desires for food, sex, family and shelter. These are purely animalistic desires that operate on us in order for us to preserve our survival as individuals and as a human species. It is similar to how there is a force working on inanimate objects to hold their form.
The ego becomes activated at the level of our social desires. Starting with the desire for money, it is a desire that fundamentally wants what the other has.
If we look at human evolution as a succession of the above-mentioned desires, then we can see how in early days of human evolution, i.e., our “caveman days,” we lived and worked only to satisfy our individual desires for food, sex, family and shelter.
After a certain period, we started wanting what others had. The desire for money urged us to fence off from each other, differentiating our property from the property of others, and developing systems of exchange between us. This is the start of the expression of the ego in human society.
The more the ego grows, the more we want to enjoy at the expense of others.
Therefore, the more humanity developed, the more people assumed positions of power, honor and fame and excelled in science, philosophies and the arts.
Today, we’ve reached a point where our individual and social desires are satiated. We’re feeling less and less fulfillment in operating according to the ego. It is due to the next level of spiritual desire starting to awaken in us.
