feeling something is wrong

In the last few episodes we have been looking at self doubt: negative beliefs about oneself. And we have looked at various flavours or variations of self doubt. But perhaps all of these self doubts really boil down to a deep feeling that there’s something wrong about me, there’s something fundamentally wrong about who I am, about me. And this sense that there is something wrong gives us a deep-rooted unease in life. There is always something in the background niggling: a barely tangible feeling that something is wrong, that it is not right, even if we are not sure what ‘it’ is.

And from this comes a deep undercurrent of discontentment, of unhappiness. We may run from it, hide from it, cover it up in innumerable ways. We may try to escape from it through idle entertainment, or through being busy the whole time, but we can’t get rid of it so easily. It is always there in the background, ruining the enjoyment of life. This is self doubt and it is the ego: it is held in place by the ego and it sustains the ego.

The ego is our sense of self, and perhaps strangely the ego does not care whether we have a sense of self which is positive or negative. And actually, these positive and negative feelings arise together, so whilst we have any sense of self at all, there will be a negative component to it, and the trouble is guaranteed to follow. So that is why these self doubts form a whole layer in the house of cards which is the ego. But as with all of the aspects of the ego, if we can manage to really rip out one of these cards, then the whole house will come tumbling down and the ego will be finished.

Enough for now.