Everyday Canvas

Ego

Prompt: "The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention." Alan Watts
What is your take on this?

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From birth on, we construct the ego ourselves as some kind of an identity, but if we are smart enough, we turn it into the dynamic part of our personalities. This is because the ego becomes a mixture of all our suspicions and beliefs about ourselves that may usually stay hidden inside our subconscious but always ready to pop up and create strong emotional reactions. It may show up as being fake and artificial or as a personal strength, depending on how we treat it and look at it.

For the same token, the ego is not necessarily negative, although most people think it so. It is, in fact, made up of positive and negative parts, the positive part being self-esteem and the negative arrogance. There is a huge difference between arrogance and self-confidence.

I am not sure which part of the ego Alan Watts is talking about here. Possibly, as most people do, he considers the ego as being only the negative part. The ego is not the real self, but the learned/artificial self mostly with the real self attaching itself to it. Who we are is who we are whether we focus our attention on it or not. The negative part of the ego, on the other hand, requires great attention to itself.

This is why it is so difficult to figure out if a person is confident of his skills and who he is or else, who he is and what he can do has gone to his head.