177: The Egoic Mind

Written March 3, 2026

Photo by mariel reiser on Unsplash

Hi everyone. Welcome to March. This month, we’re continuing the Becoming We series and exploring the three parts that make us human: body, egoic mind, and soul. In February, we focused on the body. Now we turn our attention to the egoic mind.

Naming the Narrator

The grammar software does not approve of this month.

Every time I type egoic, it throws a tiny digital tantrum. A red squiggly line appears under the word, quietly judging my life choices. It wants me to pick one: ego or mind. As if I accidentally smashed two perfectly respectable words together in a moment of recklessness. It keeps asking, “Are you sure you want to say that?”

Yes, robot. I am.

Because “ego” alone isn’t quite right, and “mind” alone isn’t either.

So what is the egoic mind?

It is the ego, but it lives in a very specific place, and its location matters. The ego does not reside in your heart, your hips, or your toes. It does not live in your breath or your nervous system.

It lives in your mind.

It is our human operating system, the narrator inside our heads interpreting, commenting, evaluating, and trying to make sense of the world around us.

And it never really stops talking.

So for the rest of this series, I will continue to politely defy the computer grammar police and refer to it as the egoic mind. Red squiggly line and all.

The Origins of the Ego

Before we start blaming the egoic mind for everything from political division to two o’clock in the morning overthinking, it helps to understand where this idea even came from.

The word ego is simply Latin for “I.” But the story of that “I,” what it is, what it does, and whether it is trustworthy, has been debated for thousands of years.

Long before modern psychology, ancient philosophers wrestled with the problem of the self. Plato described the human soul as having three parts: reason, spirit, and appetite. Even then, there was an understanding that we are not just one unified thing. There are competing forces inside us, desires pulling one way, logic pulling another, willpower attempting to referee.

We have always sensed we are divided.

Centuries later, Sigmund Freud gave us the framework most people now associate with the word ego. He divided the psyche into the id, the superego, and the ego. The ego was not arrogance. It was the mediator. The manager. The part negotiating between impulse and reality.

Then Carl Jung expanded the conversation. He agreed that the ego is the center of conscious awareness, but insisted it is not the center of the whole psyche. For Jung, the ego is one part of a much larger Self.

Necessary.

But partial.

In many Eastern traditions, the conversation moves further still. In Buddhism, the teaching of anatta suggests there is no fixed, permanent “I” at all. The sense of a separate self is something the mind constructs and then clings to.

Across cultures and centuries, one theme keeps emerging:

The “I” is not the whole story.

Sometimes it functions as a mediator. Sometimes as a protector. Sometimes it is seen as an illusion. Sometimes, as a necessary organizer. But rarely is it considered the entirety of who we are.

And yet in modern Western culture, the egoic mind has quietly become the loudest voice in the room. It narrates our lives, defends our positions, builds identities, keeps score, scans for threats, and seeks certainty. It tells us who we are, who others are, and how the world works.

Most of the time, we believe it.

If the ego is only one part of the human system, then perhaps the work is not to eliminate it.

Perhaps the work is to see it clearly.

The Mechanical “I”

For the past several months, I’ve been studying the work of an early twentieth-century mystic and spiritual teacher named George Gurdjieff.

He was a very weird dude.

To be honest, I still can’t quite decide whether he was a profound spiritual guide or a historical cult leader. Depending on who you read, he was either a genius of consciousness or an authoritarian manipulator. Possibly both. He gathered devoted followers, demanded intense discipline, staged strange exercises, contradicted himself frequently, and seemed to delight in destabilizing certainty.

He was not subtle.

But he was also deeply influential. Among other things, he is the person who introduced the Enneagram symbol to Western audiences in the early 1900s. So whether we feel comfortable with him or not, he is worth paying attention to.

At the core of his teaching was a claim that still feels uncomfortable today: most human beings are not as awake as they think they are.

Not physically asleep.

Psychologically asleep.

Gurdjieff challenged the assumption that we possess one unified, consistent self. We speak as though there is a stable “I” inside us directing our lives. But he observed something far more fragmented. What we call “I” shifts constantly. The part of us that resolves in the morning is not the same part that abandons it by evening. The “I” that wants to be kind is not the same “I” that reacts defensively. The “I” that longs for rest gives way to the “I” that insists on productivity.

Rather than one solid self, he believed we are composed of many small, competing “I’s.” Each one is shaped by habit, fear, desire, and conditioning. Each one is temporarily convinced that it is the whole.

Each one saying, “This is me.”

According to Gurdjieff, this is what creates the illusion of a fixed identity. We experience these shifting impulses and call them “me,” but much of the time, they are patterned responses operating automatically. We react. We justify. We defend. We narrate. And rarely do we question the narrator itself.

Seen this way, the egoic mind is less a villain and more a collection of survival strategies. It learned what gained approval, what avoided rejection, and what created safety. Those strategies hardened into habits. The habits began to feel like personality. And eventually, we forgot they were learned at all.

If Gurdjieff was even partially right, then what we call “I” may be far less solid than we assume.

And that realization is not meant to shame us.

It is meant to wake us up.

But waking up is only the first step. Once we begin to see that the “I” is patterned, mechanical, and conditioned, a practical question emerges: How do we understand those patterns? How do we observe them without immediately getting swept back into them?

This is where the Enneagram becomes helpful.

A Guiding Map

In the early 1900s, George Gurdjieff introduced Western students to a nine-pointed symbol called the Enneagram. He did not present it as a personality system. For him, it was a sacred diagram representing universal laws, recurring processes, and the movement of transformation. It illustrated how patterns repeat and how conscious awareness can interrupt automatic cycles.

Decades later, other teachers applied the Enneagram symbol to human personality. What emerged was a framework describing nine core ego strategies, nine patterned ways the egoic mind organizes experience to feel safe, secure, and significant.

In that sense, the modern Enneagram can be understood as a map of the mechanical “I” Gurdjieff described. It offers language for the strategies we developed long ago and now mistake for identity. It helps us see the shape of our conditioning.

It is less a personality test and more a blueprint of our human operating system.

It does not tell us who we are at our core.

It shows us how our narrator works.

And when we can see the narrator clearly, something subtle begins to shift. The “I” loosens. Space opens between stimulus and story. We become less controlled by the pattern and more capable of choice.

The Work Ahead

In February, we learned to listen to the body.

In March, we will learn to observe the mind.

Over the next few weeks, we will explore the egoic mind, the operating system that narrates our lives. We will look at how it forms, how it protects, and how it shapes the way we relate to ourselves and to one another. We will use the Enneagram as a map and practice noticing the mechanical “I” at work.

Not to get rid of it.

But to understand it.

Because before we can become we in the world, we have to gently examine the “I” within.

And that is the work of this month. I hope you’ll join me.

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