The ego operates in many ways; it can make us believe we are superior to others, thereby creating the belief that we are the best and that everyone else is nothing, or it can make us believe we are worthless, that we cannot move forward; it can lead us to self-sabotage and even to thinking we are unsuitable for this or that task. The ego is that voice in our head that wants to tell us who we are, but in reality, that is known in the heart.
Sometimes I say that people shouldn’t have a head, in the sense that it often seems like a bird that constantly pecks away, saying things that aren’t true; it stresses us out, creates fear, blocks us, or, conversely, tells us that we are the best and others are inferior. The ego can destroy lives, creates division between human beings and can even kill.
The ego is a very dangerous weapon and stems from the mind. In contrast, the heart is the wisest thing in the world; that is where purity and truth reside. Often the two come into conflict; the problem is which one we let win.
For a long time, until I was about 35, the ego ran my life—an ego that had fed on beliefs that were destroying me. Everything is very difficult, everything is complicated; there were things I would never achieve, beliefs of scarcity, an ego formed before I was even born, passed on and then shaped during childhood.
An ego that said anyone with money must surely have cheated or done something wrong. So what does the mind say? To be good, you have to be poor. That’s how it works. There are many things, more than 90 per cent, that are unconscious; we don’t think about them; they stem from things we’ve heard repeated, traumas, and much more.
That nagging voice in my head, even unconsciously, told me that things were difficult to achieve or that if I followed a certain path I would fail; that governed my life, from the simplest things to the biggest. I myself, and no one else but me, was sabotaging myself. Until I learnt how to break free from that.
I was a very good student, excellent; I lived to study. It was my duty, it was what I had to do, and I did it well, but with a great deal of effort, because the way I learnt was to memorise and memorise, even though I was better at making connections between things. But at school, the method was memorisation and more memorisation: saying and repeating things exactly as they were in a book, and there was no room for creativity. So studying was a terrible struggle for me.
Repeating and repeating until the content stuck in my head. Later I learnt that doesn’t work and that way everything is forgotten in no time. The same thing happened to me at university. Studying was a struggle, because I think the method was wrong, at least for me. But my ego told me it had to be that way and I had to do it that way, even if it destroyed me.
I had excellent grades; in fact, my average over the five years of secondary school was 9.48. And you might wonder… why it wasn’t 10. Because of one subject, and many of you will surely laugh. I came to hate that subject.
When the appointed hour came, I’d dig my nails into the chair, feeling a terrible fear. I’d learn everything by heart, and that didn’t help, but I didn’t know how to learn that subject; everyone taught me in the same way. And I couldn’t understand it, to the point that it traumatised me. I passed that subject with the minimum mark, which was a 7, but I never managed to get past that, and I only reached a 7 with an enormous amount of effort, an excessive amount of effort. The subject was English. Yes, English.
So those five years were pure torture, and the problem was the teaching method, but I didn’t realise that at the time. It created a total mental block for me, and every time I tried to learn it, I only managed to get through a few sentences. I wanted to make sense of it and couldn’t, and my ego told me… you can’t, it’s difficult, you can’t and you won’t be able to because it’s difficult.
I recently found a new method that I think might suit me; I’ll try again, but this time, I know it will work because I’ve changed; it’s up to me and only me to remove this mental block or trauma. My ego has never done me any good, never.
But I’d like to tell you which subjects I was really good at. In all the others, I got top marks or nearly top marks. In subjects like maths, physics and chemistry, I got top marks, but only through a lot of practice. On the other hand, in subjects like logic, psychology, history, literature, biology and art, I got top marks because I was passionate about them. I enjoyed them; in art, I even helped all my classmates. And I was a huge fan of logic and reasoning exercises.
In fact, when I took the career aptitude test, I scored 80% for reasoning-based courses, 80% for art, and just 1% for exact sciences like engineering, for example. That surprised me, but the arts and humanities were ideal for me.
These topics have taken me on quite a journey down memory lane, and going back to those years and remembering myself in the classroom at that fateful moment gave me goosebumps. But it’s good to share experiences; perhaps it might help someone. Thank you 
Thank you all so much for joining me today; I wish you all a wonderful weekend. See you soon.
Amonet.
All the photographs are mine.
Used translator Deepl.com free version.