She wanted to be free,  to be able to live the life she felt was calling to her.

Each time she tried to move toward this, she found she compared herself to others, and something got in the way.

Sometimes she felt better than others; other times she felt not as good at all.

Eckhart Tolle writes, ‘whenever you feel superior or inferior to anyone, that’s the ego in you.’*

The ego feeds on important cravings or needs each of us finds within us as a developed species: autonomy and mastery and significance.  All of these can be really good, rather than bad:

Autonomy to live as we believe we must.
Mastery of skills through which we can express ourselves through and contribute to others with.
Significance in living for some purpose greater than ourselves.

Sometime our hero struggles with pride, greed, and foolishness in her life; at other time the struggles are with unworthiness, asceticism, and cautiousness.

The ego plays games without us realising, but when we identify and embrace who we are without comparison, satisfied and giving,we free ourselves from the gravitational pull of the “more-than” and “less-than” pull of the ego and we can fly ego-free towards the future working in a complementary rather than comparative way with others.

‘The revolutionary force in this century is the awakening of a deep generative human capacity – the I-in-Now.’**

There’s quite an experiment to be lived out.

(*From Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth.)
(**From Otto Scharmer’s Theory U.)