The body wants to do what feels good.
The ego wants to do what looks good.
The soul wants to do what is good.
If you have ever
felt like you were being pulled in several directions now you know why.
That the neshama
wants to do what is good should come as no surprise. After all, it’s part and parcel of the
Ribbono shel Olam, so what should it want to do if not good, as that
term is generally understood by those who don’t believe that the concept of good
is relative?
And it’s also
not what one would call a shocker to posit that the body wants to do what feels
good. Are not the cravings of the body the
clock by which most of us mark our time in this world? We want to eat, sleep, bathe, and indulge our
eyes and ears now or at the earliest possible convenience
for one reason and one reason only. The
myriad of sensations that come to us by way of our five senses on our terms
make us feel good.
But when it
comes to the ego it’s somewhat of a different story, and we would do well to
let Dr. Dovid Lieberman tell it.
For starters he
lets us know, as was mentioned above, that the ego wants to do what looks
good, and then hits us with the fact that the ego is no less than the Yetzer
Hora. We are to understand from this
that just as it would be risky to sit with our back to the door if the doorman
was the Yetzer Hora, any aspect of our life that is driven by form as opposed
to substance is being driven recklessly with the Yetzer Hora in the driver’s
seat, or as Dovid Lieberman puts it, when we are motivated by ego we do
things that we believe project the right image of ourselves. These choices are not based on what is good
but on what makes us look good.
For our
purposes, the essential importance of the ego is in the context of the self-esteem/ego
continuum.
The vast
majority of us have internalized a distorted image of what the ego is all
about. We tend to think that a person
with a healthy ego who projects an aurora of confidence is a poster boy for
self-esteem. As Dovid Lieberman tells
us, nothing could be further from the truth.
We only gain
self-esteem when we are able to make responsible choices and do what is right
regardless of what we feel like doing or how it appears to others. This is a soul choice. In turn we rise
to a higher and healthier perspective, because self-esteem and the ego are
inversely related; like a see-saw, when one goes up the other goes down.
In case you
missed that, the point being made was that self-esteem comes from making good
choices which by definition are soul choices because the soul, not so
incidentally, is the Yetzer Tov.
Logic
therefore dictates that if we are in control of ourselves and act responsibly,
we can never be deeply bothered by anyone or anything (which translates into a healthy sense of
self-esteem). And then Dovid
Lieberman adds that we are not a casualty of anyone or anything other than
our own behavior because nothing affects us; we affect everything by virtue
of our soul choices.
