Our friend, our body, and our enemy

 

 

In other words, within us we have three operating systems:

 

Our friend

 

Our body

 

Our enemy

 

Although we are many different people, depending on which part we are considering (so on one level we are God, on another flesh and blood etc.) fundamentally, as the Alter Rebbe clarifies in Tanya, we are the part of us whom we consider ourselves to be (which is why a Chinaman is a Chinaman, because he considers himself a Chinaman; but if he considered himself to be, say, an American, he would disavow his Chinese identity etc.)

 

Now whether we like it or not, the part we are most closely related to, is our body, its pleasure reward system (say food, love, sleep etc.) and its fear of pain (all very neatly stored in our memory bank.) The reason we identify primarily with these really animalistic instinctual reactions, is because, when we formed our identity, we were primarily in the animalistic reaction mode (we form our identity at around the age of two.)

 

Now obviously, our friend is our mind – our mind is a good friend, for it doesn’t have the instinctual needs, rather in an unemotional unbiased fashion it can observe reality and say to us, “You know, based on research, eating too much may be harmful.” Now as we are primarily our body, we usually ignore our mind, but that’s why the challenge of life is to a. listen to it (and use it) and b. discipline our body through it (for as the Alter Rebbe says, every individual has the capacity to control themselves through demanding of their body to follow their mind’s instruction – unless someone is truly animalistic and evil and has lost this capacity and must first realize how low and debased they are, before they can regain it.)

 

Now the trouble is, we also have an enemy – this is our ego – for within us is this insane predilection to desire power – I remember as a little boy pinning down my younger sister and saying, “Say I am stronger than you” which she always refused.

 

This retarded vile evil predilection is so closely associated to our instincts, that though they are in fact unrelated, for instincts are desires for pleasure/ not to have pain; nonetheless, like a glue trap it will immediately attach itself to anything that it presupposes may actually confirm our superiority.

 

Hence ironically, though the mind is the furthest thing from the ego, for one is rational, the other irrational; in fact, it will even use the fact, say of having a good mind, to prove its superiority, and like Einstein said, “The more accolades I get, the dumber I become,” for he realized, that the ego renders a person into the infantile delusional state.

 

Nowhere do we see more raw, the ego’s insanity, than actually in a two year old; for, used to receiving his or her needs when it was for food, changing a diaper etc. (through that quite useful technique, called crying) the ego creates the delusion within the child of his superiority (as children do not think they are being helped rather served – at least in the infantile age) as such, what a “terrible two’s tantrum” is, in essence, the ego’s incense that someone of its stature should be denied say, driving the car.

 

There is no rational thought process to the ego rather an irrational desire that its premise – namely, “I am greater than others” should be manifested (and unfortunately, all the evil in the world comes from the ego – which animals having no ego, only work on instincts, and are not sadistic – for when the ego feels another is, “Denying my superiority” this causes bullying, terrorism, anti-Semitism, which is why the blacks of Africa, generally not thinking so highly of themselves – hence their ego not overtaking their identities – historically were never anti-Semitic.)