I took the excerpt from “The Great Awakening: Our Prophesized Transformation and the Attainment of Embodied Enlightenment”, a question from Mike Dooley to Matt Kahn:
and continued to simplify it.
The goal is to be able to explain ego to a child!
After consulting with Google’s Gemini AI, I have come up with this analogy:
The ego is like a space suit, only let’s call it an “earth suit”
Just like an astronaut needs a heavy, pressurized space suit to walk on the moon - without it they couldn’t survive the environment.
The Ego is like that suit. It’s the part of you that remembers to put on a coat when it’s freezing or remembers your name so you can answer the teacher when you are at school. It helps you “function” and stay safe on Earth.
When the Suit Gets Too Heavy (Density)
Sometimes, we start to think we ARE the suit. If the suit gets covered in mud or starts to feel really heavy, we might feel grumpy or scared.
“Psychological density” just means the suit feels heavy and stiff. This happens when we are upset or hurt. Instead of being a light, flexible suit that helps us move, it becomes a clunky, heavy ARMOUR that makes us want to hide or fight.
The “Pedestal” Game
When the suit is too heavy, we start comparing our suit to everyone else’s.
When our suit feels heavy and clunky, we start looking at other people’s suits.
The High Pedestal: We might think, “My suit is cooler than yours, so I’m the boss!”
The Low Pedestal: Or we think, “Your suit is way better than mine, I’m a loser.”
The Takedown: If we think someone else is “better” than us, it makes us feel small. Eventually, we might try to trip them up or say something mean just to make their suit look as messy as ours. This is just the “ARMOUR” or the EGO talking - not the real you! It forgets that underneath every suit, there is a “Presence” - a bright light that is the same in everyone.
Presence refers to the quiet 'Inner You' that stays calm and stays the same, whether you are wearing a heavy suit of grumpiness or a light suit of happiness.
The Ebbing and Flowing (Leads to transformation, or changing your Suit)
Like a river or ocean, sometimes the water is deep and rough (high tide), at other times it’s shallow and calm (low tide), so too is our psychological density. Don’t be mad at yourself if your suit feels heavy sometimes. In these situations, think of the suit as a caterpillar’s cocoon.
The caterpillar builds a Cocoon (which is a bit like a dense, heavy suit) because it needs a safe place to change. The caterpillar doesn’t hate the cocoon; it just uses it until it’s ready to fly as a butterfly. The butterfly doesn't say, "Ugh, I'm so a bad at being a butterfly because I'm stuck in this brown shell!" It knows the shell is exactly what it needs to grow its wings.
Your “heavy” feelings are just a sign that you are growing. Eventually you get tire of feeling “heavy” and let go of trying to control the situation and the moment. In other words you stop judging your experiences.
The Big Question
Instead of comparing your suit to your friend’s suit, just ask yourself one thing:
“Can I be kind to myself while I’m learning? Can I love the ‘me’ inside the suit, even when the suit feels heavy and grumpy?”
The “learning” here is simply practicing how to be the boss of your Suit, instead of letting your Suit be the boss of You. It refers to the lifelong practice of noticing your own reactions and choosing a better way to respond, and is a process of emotional maturity.
In Closing
The idea or goal here is to use simple language and common analogies to define the nature of the ego. A diving suit or a space suit analogy aptly convey the nature of the ego - especially to an adolescent. The ego is our earth suit.
