Ricardo Pereira argues the ego isn't the enemy during a dark night of the soul. He frames it as a neutral navigation system that can be reprogrammed, not destroyed, drawing on NLP and psychedelic research. What matters is building a healthy ego aligned with your soul's purpose, not eliminating it.
Chapters
Hello, my name is Ricardo Pereira. I am the creator of the Dark Knight monthly oxygen tank where I assist as your revival mentor and artist from the Dark Knight. You to more powerfully learn your lessons and enhance your healing throughout the dark night. And today I'll be helping you bust a myth for someone who is going through a dark night of the soul, a limiting belief. So let's get down into it. So myth number 1. And that would be kind of called like this: ego is bad, or I should shut down or kill my ego during the dark night. So let's explore a bit this myth. Warning! Warning! I started this learning about the ego mind, what some, what people call the ego mind, which, let's face it, it's just a word. And the trap here is to become attached to ideas in rigid ways, including words. So a lot of people think in the personal development world or the spiritually evolving world, whatever we want to call it, that ego is bad or ego is the enemy and you gotta kind of shut it down, you have to shut down the voice inside of you and there's a way for doing that. You put a bag around your head and you really do this and then you give yourself a few minutes and you stop breathing. But this is not really a meditation technique, it's called dying. And that's the only way that I've known of killing the ego or of shutting down the ego. So I often say that one of the greatest disservices that I observe the personal development world still spreading is the myth or belief that ego is bad. So I'm gonna give you a different view because as I was saying, when I started working with my mentor in Canada, Dov Baron, I started by reading his book called "Don't Read This, Your Ego Won't Like It." And on that book, He talked a lot about the unconscious programming. For me, that was back in 2010, and I started realizing why I was not being able to do what I said I wanted to do, why I was not being able to accomplish or create what I said I wanted to, even though I said I want to, I will, and why I didn't. So he brought for me basically the distinction between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. Usually an iceberg is used as an image for our mind, and the conscious mind is the tip of the iceberg on top of the water or above the line of the water, what you see, and the unconscious is what is beneath to the depths of the ocean. And for me, in my own experience and learning, the ego can be oftentimes compared to the conscious mind, as in the ego is the part of ourselves that we are more familiar with. It may involve what we call call the persona or our identities. And the trick here, and I want to bring today this as simpler as possible because I will be nurturing some of these topics in really bringing you the distinctions that make the difference and also strategies for you to do so. So I see the ego as It's kind of the navigation system of a vehicle or a spaceship, let's call it. I bet some of you like spaceships. I have a feeling. I know things. So, a navigation system or let's call it a computer if we see it as that analogy or as that metaphor. Isn't good or bad. It's about the directions that you put it. It's about the programming that you instruct it with, that you learn to reprogram it, that you learn to put new programs, new softwares. And people can easily say, "Oh, you have to strip all of your identities." and you have to strip down everything, and that is okay, but then you have to put something in there. So, wrapping up this first myth, it's not about killing or shutting down your ego from my own experience. One of the experiences that I'm familiar with that can temporarily kind of bring the ego really backstage or sometimes kind of almost nonexistence is using psychedelics. I've studied a lot and I've experienced quite a little bit with some different psychedelics and some different dosages. And indeed, in some of those moments, you realize that there's kind of this connection that comes when we lower our barriers. And having said that, even in some of those experiences, it comes back up. So, I'm wondering what makes you believe that a dark night will help you get rid of your ego? And I'm really curious, ask yourself, because again, what we're talking about here are ideas that may not correspond to what actually is happening. And sure, some of the literature says that you shouldn't do this or you shouldn't do that, but think about it this this way, when psychiatry and when psychology started being spread or taught to others and researched, there were a lot of things that were done in the beginning that I would now consider, and many people as well, torture, including psychiatric wards. When the co-founder of NLP, Richard Bandler, started working with schizophrenics or people that had phobias, he started realizing that sometimes in half an hour or 1 hour individually face-to-face with that person, he was able to assist them in a way that they would be re— re-educated mentally to be able to overcome their main challenges. Sometimes someone who had been seeing a psychiatrist or a psychotherapist or psychologist for years in a row without any palpable results, he would be close to them and he was able to assist them in thinking differently and sometimes in half an hour or 1 hour they would be able to overcome most of their dysfunctions. And most people around them told them, "That cannot be done! It's not the way it works!" And they were right in their own minds, but that didn't really prevent him from actually doing it. So, the fact that you believe that you shouldn't do or that you must do something in order to heal or in order to come out of a dark night doesn't necessarily mean that that is so. So the trick here in myth number 1 is from my experience and my observation, what you need is a healthy ego or what I've heard recently called, and it sounded really good, a functional ego. Ego, because the problem is when the ego is on steroids and the ego is running the show all of the time. Because what you want is flexibility, what you want is teamwork, what you want is to create a relationship with that part of yourself in a way that both conscious and unconscious minds are aligned in the same direction. So, in other words, aligning your ego with your heart or with your soul's purpose. What we're talking here is about creating some shape of relationship, is about creating some state of teamwork, is about putting all of these resources in alignment. It's not about making one the enemy or one bad and obliterating. God knows that we've already had a lot in our own human race of trying to extinguish or colonize other people, other groups of people, because of simply not understanding and
