My ego always wants to be in on the act. “Hey”, it says, “This is all about me!” No matter what happens my ego always says this. It always wants to be in on the act – it just has to involve itself one way or another. That’s just the way it is. I’m trying not to blame it for this. I don’t condone its behaviour, obviously, but neither do I want to try to take the moral high ground and act like I’m superior to my ego, that I know better, that I myself am not like that. I don’t want to go around saying that I’m  I’m better than it is. I do want to know what the ego’s game is though. I’m trying to figure it out. What’s the story? I really do want to know. Help me out here, would you?

I know I want to know what the story is with my ego and its constant embarrassing behaviour but do I really want to know? That’s the question I’m worrying about. Somehow I doubt this. Somehow I doubt that I actually genuinely really do want to know. Somehow I don’t think I do. Of course I bloody don’t! It’s all such a joke, isn’t it? Not that I’m doing much laughing. I’m stretched too thin to be laughing. I’m doing stuff but at the same time I don’t want to know that I’m doing it and yet also at the same time I want to pretend to myself that I actually do want to know what’s going on.

So of course I’m stretched pretty thin with all this self-deception. There’s not much flexibility there. There’s no flexibility there. My ego wants to be in on the act with everything that’s going on and it also wants to be in on the act with regard to knowing what’s going on. Of course it does – it doesn’t want to be left out of the loop. It wants to be ‘the one who knows what’s going on’, and yet at the same time it really doesn’t want to know at all. Pretty stupid stuff, huh? Can you blame me for being so embarrassed by its ridiculous carry-on?

At the same time as saying this however I also can’t help realizing – and this isn’t at all pleasant for me – that it’s actually my ego saying all this! My ego wants to outsmart itself. It wants to be the one saying all the stuff about ‘the ego’ and all of the ego’s creepy self-deceiving strategies. It wants to be the one saying all this stuff, pontificating knowledgeably about how the ego operates and so on but this is all just another of its tricks. The ego wants to denounce itself. Of course it does! You bet it does. It wants to be in on the act. It wants to be the ring-master in whatever circus is in town.

This is typical of it – it just can’t help itself. That’s just typical of the bloody old ego – forever shooting its mouth off, acting like it knows everything, being the bloody know-it-all expert. Trying to pretend that it isn’t the ego because it’s the one who’s talking about the ego. Trying to pretend that it isn’t the ego because it’s somehow better than the ego, because it’s not as fucked-up as the ego. That’s just its little trick, though. That’s just one of its sneaky old strategies. It’s forever trying to leap-frog itself…