Our greatest challenge to overcoming Ego.

okay i was just asked a question by one of the people who are here uh about what perhaps one of the main barriers for us is in coming to grips with our egotism and our self-centeredness in this life and there could be a number of answers to it of course and a number of solutions but one of the main barriers we have to come into grips with our egotism is that we're so dishonest with ourselves about ourselves that we never we we hide from ourselves you know human beings are a great mystery and above all

we're a mystery to our own selves and uh we don't really examine ourselves carefully and know ourselves well enough and when we see something perhaps a bit unpleasant in ourselves we try to hide from it we try to pretend it isn't there or we try to just gloss over it and being dishonest with ourselves and hiding from ourselves within ourselves is one of the great barriers to our coming to grips with our egotism and also with coming to grips with the fact that we need to grow and develop spiritually if we really do not come

to an honest and sincere understanding of ourselves but we're always deceiving ourselves about ourselves we have no firm foundation upon which to build and upon which to grow and develop spiritually of course among the solutions to some of these things a marriage is one and uh i'd like to remind married people that after you've been married for a few years your spouse always knows more about you than you know about yourself and if you have an argument they're bound to tell you uh so one should sometimes pay attention and see what your spouse is telling

you but we're very often noticing what's wrong with other people and it's not so much noticing what's wrong with ourselves as being honest about our vulnerabilities and being honest about our own weaknesses and perhaps this is why apostle paul said if i must needs boast i'll boast in the things of my weakness because by boasting in the things of his weakness he exalted the grace of our lord jesus christ in his life and realized his dependence on that grace to help him over deal with live with his weaknesses not not always to overcome them we

don't always but we do learn to live with them but during fasting periods you know keeping the fast is not about rules laws and regulations keeping the fast is about exercising ourselves in self-control and self-discipline and while we're exercising ourselves in self-control and self-discipline we come to realize that how can we discipline ourselves or control ourselves when we don't even know ourselves but when we know so little about ourselves and it's important during the lenten period to examine our own hearts and our own minds i think also it's valuable and i'll ask everyone who watches

this video on youtube or elsewhere after you finish watching it go take paper and pen and in one column write down all the people you think you hate and another one write down all the people you're sincerely prejudiced against in another one write down all the people that you think will probably go to hell and afterwards try to think up a good reason why you believe that way a good reason why you hate those people of those groups a good reason sound solid reason why your prejudice against those people are those groups and a good

reason why you think these people might go to hell or most people might go to hell you don't have to include yourself in that ladder list but you you will find out a great deal about yourself by seeing who you hate by seeing what kind of people you think you hate because the kind of people that we think we hate and there were prejudice against are almost always a reflection of something within us that disturbs us and that we're not willing to come to grips with or to face uh you know how many times i've

said that moral outrage is a form of confession because we hate most in others what we fear most in ourselves and so much of that so many of the hatreds that we have are really reflections of ourselves that we see in others and it's the reflection of ourselves that we hate in others because hatred of others is generally a form of self-hatred and that's we we need to discover ourselves and find ourselves more completely this way in order to really struggle against the egotism that causes us to hide from ourselves so that we don't face

ourselves the egotism that keeps us from understanding our own vulnerabilities and weaknesses are in our own needs and uh the cover-up that we do within ourselves about ourselves so dishonesty with ourselves about ourselves is one of the main barriers to our accomplishing our struggle against egotism and self-centeredness and self-love because self-love and self-centeredness are very often based on covering up for our weaknesses and shortcomings and we go to an extreme about that and this is what gives us this so many people we think are they're very arrogant but in probably most of the cases arrogance

is a cover-up for insecurities personal insecurities for our own feeling of vulnerability and for our own uncertainty and responding with arrogance is a way we hide the fact from ourselves that we're unsure of ourselves how we have these uncertainties and vulnerabilities so many of the things that pertain to our egotism are really uh based on our own inner weaknesses and marriage of course is the solution not the only solution because marriage leads us toward an unselfish love for another person and when we have children probably the greatest expression of unselfish love is toward our own

children but also toward friends because friendship can't exist in the face of pure egotism and without some kind of relationship with the other person that subdues our egotism and looks to their welfare and to the benefits of the friendship as well and monasticism can serve for the same purpose because when we give ourselves over to the welfare of the community and set up to our own egotism and self-centeredness it also helps to bridle these problems that created with the fall of mankind and so this is our great struggle first of all that asceticism does not

mean flogging yourself starving yourself to death or not going to sleep at night and doing thousands of prostrations or something asceticism simply means training and training ourselves in self-discipline and self-control is through fasting and examining ourselves to see who and what we actually are so that we know ourselves well enough to have a foundation upon which to build our spiritual growth and development is a great part of it and this is so much a part of the orthodox christian life that is actually missed because there's so many times when people know so much about the

orthodox faith they have hip knowledge but don't ever develop heart knowledge and when we have had knowledge that doesn't enter into the heart it's a kind of spiritual schizophrenia where we have a break between the brain and the heart and they don't communicate properly so we need to move our head knowledge into our heart so that it transforms our heart and this is really a part of the path toward a genuinely orthodox mentality in life