A Simple Way to Undo the ego

Q: Is there a simple way to undo the ego?

A: Yes. By commitment to inner honesty, it will become apparent that the underpinning of the ego’s responses is the pleasure that is derived from them. There is an inner satisfaction that is the payoff of self-pity, anger, rage, hate, pride guilt, fear, etc. This inner pleasure, as morbid as it may sound, energizes and propagates all these emotions. To undo their influence, it is merely necessary to be willing to forego and surrender these questionable inner secret pleasures to God and look only to
God for joy, pleasure, and happiness.

Everyone gets a secret pleasure from resentments, from being the martyr or the victim, and from feeling misunderstood, unappreciated, etc. Society and the law even reinforce these benefits with legal and monetary rewards so that one can be compensated for ‘having their feelings hurt’, for being ‘slighted’ on the job, for enduring ‘stress’, for ‘feeling uncomfortable’, etc.

When the payoff is no longer valued, these feelings disappear. They persist only so long as they serve a purpose. When this ‘ego juice’ is abandoned, it is replaced with inner peace.

from I: Reality and Subjectivity, ch. 18, pg. 417-418