What is the difference between excessive pride and ego?

You and pride or ego are not different, separate entities. What makes you, you, are the characteristics you portray, which is shaped by your conditioning, your traditions, your cultures, your past experiences, your upbringing, your education, your circumstances, your prejudices, your perceptions etc. In the absence of these, you live with no definitions, you are free. There is no distortion or neurotic behavior in one who doesn’t confine and cage himself within set parameters of definitions. Such a person is unfettered, unencumbered, orderly.

But what you have asked is, the difference between two adjectives here, and by excessive ego, I presume, you are referring to arrogance. Well, what is the difference? Both these qualities add to you and gives continuity to you, as a being, as an ego, the I, the same way, to classify yourself, as humble, noble etc, are equally qualities that simply keeps giving continuity to you, as an ego, I. You are the ego, you and ego are not two different things. You follow? Whether you are arrogant or humble, they are both, what keeps you, the “I”, continuing. Just the same way, a rainbow is the result of a reflection and dispersion of light in water droplets, that appears as a multi-colored arc in the sky, the ego is the result of reflection of all that which makes up one’s consciousness. Neither, the water droplets have a color, nor, do the rainbows actually exist, as an entity. Like so, the ego, which is only a reflection of the contents of your consciousness in thought, that is, when I think, I am this or that, there is the “me”, but, the “me” isn’t an actual entity. It has no existence in isolation from thought. And, if the ego doesn’t actually exist, what meaning have those ingredient qualities, such as, pride or humility, that make up one’s ego, the “I”?

One who is truly free from all definitions of humility, nobility, arrogance, pride etc., will never know himself to be this or that. Such a one operates from intelligence which is not derived from any knowledge.

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