Imagine you go to a classy restaurant and you order yourself the most expensive dish. After you devoured seven courses followed by a delicious dessert, the waitress brings you the bill. You see her coming in slow motion, the bill in her hand and a smile on her face. You expect the worst. You brace yourself and try to hide an upcoming panic attack. With a trembling hand you pick up the bill from the table. You only open one eye to read the tiny piece of paper, hoping you will only be shocked half bad.
To your uttermost surprise, you notice they only charged you for the little salad you had on the side. They have forgotten about all the rest which is currently residing in your completely maxed out stomach. When you saw the lady coming from the counter, you were holding your breath and now you finally feel a huge relief while breathing out all this tension.
A heart of gold
But a new problem arises. You have a heart of gold and unfortunately, honesty is in your nature. It doesn’t even come to your mind to pay this underpriced bill and just walk away happily whistling a tune. You don’t even have a choice to be a freeloading profiteer. Goodness comes automatically, Poor you!
Without hesitation, you call the waitress back and explain to her there must be a mistake on their part. Of course, she thanks you for your genuine kindness and a few moments later she brings you the right note. You turn completely red, followed by white and blue while squeezing out your wallet to the last coin… of course not forgetting the tip. As always you were doing the right thing, fully aligned with your innocence, your soul. You are truly blessed following this big heart of yours blindly. But what a pity no evil thoughts, no vicious schemes to take advantage of the situation, infiltrated your ingenious mind.
Our survival instincts
If you would have handled this situation using your ego, things might have turned out a little different. The ego is your ultimate advanced weapon to survive in any situation. But not only in matters of life and death… no, certainly not! Allowing your ego to take control in matters of survival was merely the initial plan.
The truth is, you can let your ego take the lead in any type of situation in your life. For example, when some waitress made a huge mistake forgetting to add on the bill that bottle of the most expensive champagne you drank. This is a perfect occasion for your ego to thrive! The egoic mind has a whole arsenal of plans it can come up with to take advantage of the situation, based on your survival instincts.
The power of our egoic mind
In the past when we were still hairy apes we couldn’t afford to say no to some free food. It is our instinct to make sure the body you identify yourself with makes it through the day with a full belly, no matter what we need to do for it. If we needed to steal some food from a bodybuilding Ursus spelaeus to keep us and our families alive, we would. Because we survived the wrath of this cave bear we previously stole food from, we could evolve into the hairless apes we currently are. Simultaneously, we traded our natural instincts a bit with our powerful rational mind. From then on, our minds became our most strong weapon to get things done around here.
Our egoic mind is perfectly capable of creating the most cunning schemes to get personal advantages, even on behalf of others. In need of survival, these plans are more than welcome. But when our life’s are not at stake, isn’t it better to follow our heart and do the right thing?
Using our scheming mind and keeping a clean conscience
Thanks to your ego, a whole list of possible schemes are coming to your mind together with the necessary beliefs to justify each of every naughty action. The most evident scheme coming to mind in our example of the restaurant is just pretending nothing is going on when you received that cheap bill from the waitress. Your mind is whispering in your ear you can get a great advantage here, so it’s important to keep your cool. You better act as normal as possible and pay the underpriced bill like nothing is going on.
The mind is also helping you to justify yourself and keep a clean conscience with bringing up the necessary beliefs: ‘It is not my fault if they made a mistake’, ‘I paid the bill they gave me, so what did I do wrong?’, ‘it’s a good lesson for them so they pay more attention next time’, and so on. ‘Wow!’, in the last example you even believe you are doing the restaurant a favor by teaching them a lesson!
Thanks to your egoic mind you have a choice
The mind can pull really anything off! It would be such a pity to ignore or miss out on this great intelligence we have and just blindly follow our heart. Doing the right thing becomes much more meaningful if we also have the choice to profiteer or trick. If we are completely free of the possibility of doing wrong, there is no challenge… no victory over evil. That’s so boring!
Also, it is very interesting to learn how your own mind works. It is fascinating to observe how egoic thoughts automatically enter the space of the mind and how you interact with them. Can we merely observe them or do we easily dive into them and consciously refine and perfect our cunning schemes as the certified supervillain we are? Maybe you can ask the waitress for an extra discount if you pretend it’s your birthday. I must admit, I’m really good at scheming, ‘Muhahahaha!’
Enjoy consciously doing the right thing
Before you become an enlightened master or saint, completely free of the ego’s schemes or before you follow your heart blindly and become this innocent little lamb,… I advise you sincerely to enjoy the possibility of choice, at least for a while. Enjoy observing your mind creating all these clever plans to get undeserved benefits and even get away with it without remorse. And if you already succeeded a few times in taking advantage and felt the gratification of winning on behalf of the ‘stupidity of others’… there is even a bigger feeling of satisfaction you can experience!
You can nicely allow all the vicious schemes to enter your mind and then ‘BAM!’, you put your attention towards your heart. Feel your goodness and innocence there and have the courage to act upon it and do the right thing! That is truly empowering, don’t you agree? Now you can feel the satisfaction of being a good person. You could have gotten away easily paying the wrong bill, but instead, you chose to be just! You had the courage to ignore all these seductive ideas and made the effort to hear out the heart’s gently whispering and even to follow it’s righteous advice. My sincere compliments to you!
It would be such a pity if you would miss out on all those juicy evil options you can possibly choose from and feeling the power of whether acting upon them or not! If you would do automatically the right thing all the time without giving your ego the fair chance of convincing you to do otherwise, you would miss out of a great feeling: the feeling of being a good person, the feeling of doing the right thing and to be aligned with the vibration of the heart. Without the possibility to do bad, being good becomes meaningless. So thank you wicked mind for playing the antagonist in this theatrical play we call life! Let it be a comedy with here and there some instructive elements.
Don’t let your mind bring you down
But wait a bit, not so fast! Before we conclude this article… I guess it should be mentioned downloading automatically all these sinister schemes in our mind also has plenty of disadvantages. Maybe the title I chose for this lecture is good clickbait but also a little short-sighted. We are ignoring here all the pain and suffering the mind creates for us. It is really quite innocent to freeload a little here and there, we are humans after all. So let’s forgive the rascals who paid but a fraction of their restaurant notes and even got the special birthday discount!
However, let us not forget how much real pain we can cause others if we follow our egoic mind constantly and are not capable of merely observing our thoughts without acting upon them. Let us realize how much evil in the world has happened (so far) because all of us couldn’t resist thinking about ourselves first! Let us also not ignore how hard it can be for an individual to be constantly confronted with their own bad thoughts. Maybe we want to do the right thing, but we just can’t anymore. We can’t hear the voice of our heart anymore because of our overwhelming thoughts. Our mind can really tear us apart and drive us crazy. Our thoughts can come with so many of them and with such strong negative messages, we can develop serious conditions like anxiety, depression, guilt, shame, feelings of unworthiness and so on.
Your evil thoughts are there to help you
Never mind the downsides of our egoic mind, let us wrap it up with a positive perspective on these matters. Like everything in our being, it is there to help us. Your cunning thoughts are also there to be of service. The schemes your egoic mind daily produce in every possible situation are exactly what you need to find the way to your heart. Thanks to the realization of what is bad, we can find out what is good. Only at night, we can see the stars. Only in the darkness, we can see the light. Let us embrace our bad thoughts and acknowledge them for what they are. Observe them and allow them in your consciousness without repressing them, because when the door is closed, they’ll wait.
Our egoic mind is the perfect antagonist for making our heart thrive. A hero can only rise if there is a mischievous villain challenging him or her to come out and do the right thing. Every time you become aware of a fresh idea seducing you to be selfish, to get advantage on behalf of others… it is a polite invitation to be courageous and to make the choice of your heart even in difficult situations.
And let us certainly not degrade the mind to a source of bad and nasty thoughts. Only our egoic mind creates the kind of schemes we are talking about. The general mind is a vast empty space where truly amazing and genius thoughts of all sorts can warp in. Especially when our mind is aligned with our heart, we are capable of the greatest heroic acts and the most intelligent and profound insights and inventions.
