Society's Conditioning: Why Do We Develop an Ego in the First Place? - The Little Prince Series

Daily Insight from the Story of The Little Prince

Have you ever considered just how much energy, whether mental, emotional, or physical, you put into trying to impress other people?

I grew up with my entire self-concept oriented to what others wanted me to be. I so wanted the approval of my parents, my teachers, and my friends that I really had little idea of what I wanted for myself.

While I was still in elementary school, I remember for a long time thinking that I wanted to be a brain surgeon or a heart surgeon. These days I can hardly imagine anything I’d be less suited for! So why did I imagine myself in such a role? Simply to impress.

It's like people who want to marry a doctor, lawyer, sports figure, or star because of the prestige it gives them to be associated with someone society looks up to.

The Little Prince has been paying close attention to the emergence of a new kind of flower on his planet. The thing that strikes him about her is all the trouble she goes to in order to impress. She takes days and days to get herself ready for the moment when she will display her beauty.

The flower also wants to impress by associating herself with the Sun, pointing out that she was born at the same moment the Sun arose above the horizon. She is borrowing a sense of identity.

When we come into the world, our essence, which is part of the universal divine consciousness since we are created in the image and likeness of God, is not yet developed.

This essence is intended to become our sense of self—not a sense of self that we sit around thinking about or carry with us as a picture in our head, but an experience of life that simply flows without our having to think about it.

In order for us to get to the place this essence is who we are in everyday existence, we have to first put a shell around our essence to protect it from the onslaught of family and society who want to shape us in their own image instead of allowing us to be our unique expression of the divine image.

This shell is what Eckhart Tolle calls the ego. It's an imaginary self constructed largely out of our response to the opinions of others, the borrowed sense of self we receive as a social transfusion, and the reaction we have to the hurt that is inflicted on us as we grow up.

This egoic sense of self is never who we actually are. It’s only a shell that in due course is simply discarded. It’s a big mistake to identify with it, as if everything that happened to us actually happen to who we essentially are.

When the flower on the planet from which the Little Prince comes first emerges in her glory, what we see is her ego, the shell she has built around her essentially fabulous self.

The flower is beautiful in and of herself, because she is fundamentally magnificent. But she doesn't know this and so she has to put on her protective egoic shell.

Coming from her egoic shell, the flower will wreak havoc in her relationship. She will lead the Little Prince in a pretense of a dance with which he can't keep up. This is why he eventually leaves.

Pretty much all relationships begin when two egos connect. There is little real self in evidence initially. Each is trying to please the other, each trying to impress the other, each borrowing a sense of self from the other—like getting a transfusion of personhood.

But life isn’t about to leave us here. Which is why the Little Prince isn’t on his planet right now—and why the airman has crashed in the desert.