Letting ourselves be fooled by our ego is forgetting that it is a story that only seeks to justify our worst mistakes, defend us from our fears and put us on false pedestals to appease our emotion of inferiority. The ego always lies. If he is the one who drives us to relate, we will end up doing it from arrogance and the belief that we should feel better than everyone.
Behind every manifestation of the ego there is an expression of feeling threatened by our own limits from the opinion we have of ourselves. That is why spiritual experiences are necessary, because they make us meet our own reality. Spirituality frees us from fears and inferiority complexes compared to what we are. Being spiritual is understanding our essence, with our qualities, limitations, potentialities and shortcomings. We are neither good nor bad, we are simply finite beings with much to improve and much to celebrate. When we connect with our essence, we discover that we cannot allow ourselves to be determined by those negative opinions that we have taken from the outside world. The way is always to give us a good opinion to be better every day.
Spirituality also reminds us that we are unique and unrepeatable and that we do not have to compare ourselves with anyone. The spiritual human being understands that happiness is in the realization of singularity and not that we all have the same characteristics. Spiritual practices do not have to celebrate differences as opportunities. Loving each other implies not being afraid of being different and knowing how to relate to each other from the solidary decision to help others.
All spiritual experience must seek communion. Not uniformity or homologation of everything, but fairness, real possibilities of happiness, and solidarity as a bond that guarantees human survival. Respect for the other and the construction of better life contexts is the great spiritual indicator. You have to be careful, because the ego also seeks to express itself in religious practices. Many times the one who goes to religious spaces is the ego in any of the functions of the cult. He is the greatest source of obstruction in the relationship with the sublime. The healthier the spirituality, the less the damaging ego.
One of the traps is to make us believe that sacrifices and deprivation make us better than others or allow us to earn “salvation”. The religious ego can confront us with God and even make us challenge him. Spirituality as a praxis of love makes us be open from our “I” to work firmly to be happier every day and live fully. I propose that in my book “Spirituality for Humans”, with the concern of causing questions and decisions that help us to be happier. I do not seek to convince anyone of anything, nor do I want to proselytize; I want to propose ways of developing our spiritual abilities.
To be happy we have to enjoy life from what we are, being aware that we always have to grow and improve in each of our dimensions. That is where Jesus of Nazareth in the theological testimony that the gospels bring fascinates me, because I find him as the lord of food and drinks (Matthew 11, 19), as the one who knows how to find his Father God in everyday life, the one who breaks discriminatory schemes to find humans in need of love. Too bad that later some raised barriers again to celebrate the ego and be able to despise other humans.