The Hidden Enemy Part III: Irrationality How It Works It's Way.

Continued from part-II

We start this article with an example from a regular daily life.

Suppose you are passing through your neighbourhood and suddenly a couple of stray dogs start barking at you.

What will you do?

You will probably try to scare them off by pelting stones at them or maybe, at best, ignore them.  

How will you react?

You will probably be scared yourself and feel adrenaline getting pumped into your body or you might get irritated. Or maybe you will try to avoid them.

And in any case you will definitely make a mental note of the stray dogs in this part of the town.

Now imagine another scenario. Suppose that you are passing through the same neighbourhood and this time the couple of barking dogs happen to be owned by someone and are not stray dogs.

You will notice that this time your action and reaction will not be the same. Instead of taking the very logical course that you took in the former case, you are more likely to take the issue to your heart and fret and fume about it. You will take the matter to a different level and will end up feeling hurt after hurting the feelings of the dog owner. You will be emotionally bruised.

As you can now see for yourself, in the latter case your ego came to the forefront engulfing all the rational thinking part of you which made you behave in a very illogical way.

If you happen to see a monkey just outside your door, you will be too careful to avoid looking into its eyes and will slowly move out after locking your door without disturbing it. Or you might feign picking up a rock and throw it at it in order to scare it away.

However, if the monkey were owned by your next door neighbour, you will start monkeying around with the person.
This is how ego surfaces and you do not realize that you are under the spell of your ego. Now it is controlling you like a master controls a slave. You have been enslaved.

The ego takes charge in the very moment when one realizes that there is someone around in proximity. The self image that one has of oneself takes precedence immediately. It assumes full control.
Then ensues a period of illogical course of actions and reactions whereby one drags oneself into a spiralling vacuum of despair and anxiety. 
It may be noted that the same thing happens in happy kind of situations too and this is precisely why the sages of ancient India had reiterated that happiness is transient and momentary in nature. It does not last for long. How can it, when it is based on a false concept of you on yourself. 

Through continued meditation and careful analysis over the lost centuries, the sages of ancient world also discovered that when one is not alone, the ego takes over one's psyche through the first thought that pops up in one's mind.
The first thought occurs so rapidly in a fraction of a second that one is hardly even aware of it. It creeps in without one's being aware of it and soon after a chain of thoughts gets triggered by the ego, which has assumed full control, engaging the person and propelling him into the next moment. Your self image, the ego, is there inside you all the time, albeit dormant, and with the first thought that occurs when someone is around, it takes over.
The foremost point to be noted here is that ego is born with society, it comes to fore only when there is someone around, someone near you or in your thoughts. It also implies that ego disappears when there is no one around you, neither physically nor in thoughts.
The second point is that ego takes control of you through the first thought that flashes in your mind soon as you realize that you are not alone, ie there is someone/are people around you. But this first thought is so short lived that one hardly becomes aware of it.
The third point is that a chain of thoughts gets triggered by the ego engaging oneself to make it easy for ego to take full control propelling oneself into an irrational continuum.
                                                
                                                         continued into Part IV...