Personalization on the Ego Journey

Also applies to suicide and depression

The single most important concept that you need to understand in order to start understanding Ego, is personalization.

But personalization is a massively difficult concept to understand when you are still doing it to yourself, so I’m always looking for the simplest analogies and verbalization in order to be explain it and try to relay the concept.

And yesterday, I happened onto a humdinger of an analogy for this…

Fighting Ego, or being suicidal and depressed (these are not separate concepts - suicide and depression is the Ego battle actually), is like being caught in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.

So what do you do when you’re being chased by zombies?

You run - you flee for your life. And you hope you’ll soon find a safe place of shelter, where you can be secure for a while and rest.

When you personalize however, it’s like you’re sitting down in the middle of the main stampede to have a cry and a moan about the fact that the zombies are chasing you - and why it’s so damn unfair that the zombies are chasing you.

Yes, it’s unfair that the zombies are chasing you, but guess what? The zombies are chasing everyone else too. It’s also unfair for the zombies to be chasing them.

All you’ve achieved now is to make yourself an easy target, because you’re not running away anymore.

If you keep sitting there in the middle of the road, crying and moaning, first of all the zombies will see you, second of all the zombies will hear you, and thirdly, you become an easy target: you aren’t paying attention, you’re taking no steps to save yourself, and the zombies have to put in very little effort to reach you.

So, in order to save yourself, you have to stop crying about the fact that it’s so UNFAIR that you’re being chased by zombies, and deal with the actual fact that you’re being CHASED by zombies.

So you have to stop crying and get up and run.

And even if you do that, you have no guarantees...

You don’t know what hordes of zombies are waiting around the next corner for you, you don’t know when, or even if, you will find shelter and safety, you have no guarantee of food, and you have no guarantee that the zombies won’t find you in the middle of the night, or sometime the next day.

You have no guarantees at all in fact.

Even if you get up and run and fight as hard as you can, it just takes one mistake for it to all fall apart for you.

You have no guarantees.

And if you are going to get up, you need to get up IMMEDIATELY.

You don’t sit there and plan where you’re going to go, and how you’re going to get there, because the zombie horde is bearing down on you quickly and you need every second to escape.

You DON’T HAVE five minutes to sit and formulate a foolproof plan before they get to you.

It’s really not personally aimed at you….

Source didn’t trigger a zombie apocalypse just to screw with your day personally.

It’s also unfair that some people have to be zombies and never even get a chance to fight - because someone has to turn into a zombie so that others can be heroes.

You have to have a villain first before you can have a hero. Patient zero never got any chance to be a hero at all.

What is happening in your life sucks. What is happening in most of our lives sucks.

But if you don’t get up and start running, and STOP feeling sorry for yourself that this is happening to you, you will never get a chance to be a hero, because you’ll be part of the zombie horde.

The ONLY thing required to turn personalization, depression and suicide around is YOUR WILLINGNESS - YOUR CHOICE.

Make the choice to get up, dry your tears and start running. And do it now - immediately - straight away.

And then be prepared that you have to keep making that commitment every moment of every day, for as long as you are alive.

And there are still no guarantees, even if you put in all this effort.

But at least you will have given yourself a running chance.