1. Resistance to the present moment. If you are busy thinking of the past or a future moment to bring you happiness, your ego is engaged.It is trying to deny you of living in the only moment we have which is the now. Resistance to what is, is perceived by the ego as strength. Resistance is really only weakness and fear that masks itself as strength.
2. Fear. Fear of loss, fear of failure,fear of being hurt. All fear is the egos fear of death or annihilation. It is there because the ego feeds off of it. It is meant to keep you in the place of ego.
3. Feeling of being incomplete, or sense of lack. The ego only identifies with the external. If you feel you are lacking or incomplete without the attainment of something, the ego is engaged.
4. Identification with external things. The ego wants you to believe that you are only something based on a value put on the external. Your possessions, job, social status. It wants you to identify yourself with these things in order to feel whole.
5. Need to be right or wrong. If you are identified by your mind, the ego will feel the need to prove itself right or wrong.If you take yourself out of the mind, your need to be right or wrong will no longer exist, and it will not make a difference to your sense of self if you are or are not. Watch for being defensive, because the only reason you are defensive is because you are identifying with an illusory sense of self that is formulated by your mind.
6. Value if Time. The ego wants you to believe that all we have is time. Time is an illusion. The only thing we really have is the present moment. The more you focus on the past and the future,the more you are taken away from the present.
7.Emotional Pain. The ego wants you to experience pain and suffering. The ego then can become you in that identification of pain. It creates an energy that will then only look to create more of it's like kind. The ego thrives off of this identification with pain and looks for the pain to become who you are.
8.Reactivity. The ego wants you to only be very reactive. It opposes stillness.It is in the stillness that we access our spirit, who we really are.The one thing that the ego does not want us to identify with. If we identify with that the ego dies.
9. Needs. The ego has endless needs.It feels very vulnerable and easily threatened.It wants and needs things to keep and uphold itself, in order to maintain it's strength.It is always looking for to want in order to identify itself by. The falsity in this is simply that if those things are lost, you have lost yourself because of the mere identification with them. You true self is much deeper than that.
10. Means to an end. The ego is constantly trying to create actions that only have and end result. It allows itself then to only derive pleasure at the end result. It is a way to keep you from being happy with only the action at the time, and unhappy with the present moment unless that end is met. It is a trap. If you are not attached to the results then neither failure or success can change your inner state of being.It is at that time that you will have been able to live life without attachment, and to it's fullest.
