Why People Need to Be Right
Is your spiritual awareness stronger than your need to be right? Can you relate with times when you work hard to be right, and equally hard to keep from being proven wrong? Or, do you know someone who acts as if he or she needs to be right all the time? This compulsion to be right cuts across all individuals, families, groups, organizations, communities, races, cultures, and levels of economic status.
The cause of it all is the fact that everyone has an ego. Ego is how one defines oneself as a being. It develops early in our lives based on the feeling of separateness and isolation when we discover that we have our own name and our own body. Ego by definition is the feeling that we are separate beings in a large and impersonal world.
The feeling of being separate and disconnected entities is frightening. Unconsciously, it makes us feel small, insignificant, insecure, unimportant, and inferior. To cope with these dreadful feelings, we compensate, which means we behave in precisely the opposite ways. We act big, overly significant, self-important, and superior. These behaviors are all acts of ego, and as such, they represent a deficit in spiritual awareness.
One of the primary ways ego accomplishes this sense of self-importance and superiority is by striving to be right. Ego feeds on being right and making others wrong. The need to be right is the grand master of ego consciousness. Being right makes us feel empowered; when wrong, we feel weak and vulnerable.
The More the Spiritual Awareness
the Less the Need to Be Right
The need to be right is always about achieving the feeling of being superior to another. It creates arguments, enemies, and on a grand scale, even war. The battle of right versus wrong can be fought over opinions on any issue—religious, moral, social, political, legal, or whatever else. It doesn’t matter what the subject is: at the end of the day, all that matters to ego is being right.
The need to be right is so powerful that it often masquerades in other forms, for example: being judgmental and critical of other people, acting as an authority on just about any subject, blaming others for things that go wrong, acting from a sense of entitlement, holding other people to unrealistic expectations, and needing to be in control. The bottom line is that the need to be right causes considerable hurt and suffering. Only spiritual awareness can change this.
How to Become More Spiritually Aware
Spiritual awareness is to be conscious or one’s own ego. Just as mold shrivels up and dies in the presence of sunshine, so ego withers in the presence of awareness. The challenge is that ego is cunning and slippery, so for one to become conscious of ego requires a commitment to look for it, watching it in action, gathering as much information about it as possible, scouting out its wily ways. In this sense, one must become an ego “scout” to achieve spiritual awareness. As ego shrinks under the watchful eye of your awareness, the gifts of Spirit that you were born with return: love, joy, and peace of mind. And the need to be right vanishes from your life.
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