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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How to Wake Up the World

Until recent years, human consciousness has focused on the world “outside” our own center of being. We’ve become vastly aware of external reality: astronomy, ecology, thermodynamics, physics, meteorology, pharmacology, geology, chemistry, medicine—where does the list of sciences end? These disciplines have guided us through three periods in human history: the agricultural, industrial, and information ages. We have become experts extraordinaire in the development of consciousness about things outside ourselves.

In recent times, thankfully, the consciousness movement is leading us to truths about the world “inside” where we discover that ultimate reality lies in our innermost core. But journeying inward soon leads us face to face with the single biggest obstacle to reaching that core, which is ego—the separate self.

The positive news is that becoming conscious of ego neutralizes its hurtful influence and causes it to shrink. And, as it dissipates, we become increasingly more peaceful and joyful individuals, in turn spreading peace and happiness in the world.

Hug Ego — Don’t Slug It

Ego is an unconscious phenomenon. It is the result of how you unknowingly defined yourself when you were in emotional pain as a child. It is the conclusion you drew at that time about “who I am.” Perhaps as the result of harsh criticism, abuse, or neglect—whether real or perceived—you concluded that “I am unlovable,” or “I am worthless,” or “I am helpless,” or “I am unwanted.” There’s a long list of possible ways you might have defined yourself, and no two children in the same situation define themselves in exactly the same way.

As an adult, that conclusion you reached about “you” drives your feelings and behaviors in hurtful ways so long as it escapes your awareness. For example, if you decided—unconsciously, of course—that “I am unwanted,” you may live your life in ways that keep others from wanting to be with you, or you may live with feelings of loneliness or depression. Or, you may overcompensate by constantly trying to demonstrate that you are, indeed, “want-able”—for instance, by acting in extreme ways that attract the attention of others.

Awaken to Ego

It is generally accepted that Eckhart Tolle is the most spiritually influential person in the United States, if not in the world. Of the books he’s written, over 6 million copies of The Power of Now and an estimated 15 – 20 million copies of A New Earth have sold. In addition, tens of millions of people worldwide have viewed his webinars.

I, too, have been a student of Mr. Tolle’s work, with a particular passion for his book A New Earth. While discussing the concepts embedded in it with others, I began to hear a pattern, which in summary sounded something like this:

I’m deeply interested in what Mr. Tolle had to say. It really spoke to me. I recognize now what a destructive force the ego is. I understand that awakening to ego neutralizes its power over us. I want to become more conscious of my own ego so I can find more peace. But (and here’s the most common recurring theme), “I don’t know how to do it (meaning, I don’t know how to become more conscious of my ego).”