This is an excerpt of a response I wrote to someone who asked me a query about inner conflict:
Hi (name omitted),
In your life you will find that there are certain motivations which are highly attractive to you and there will be some that cause a strong sense of repulsion in you. These motivations which manifest in various forms as thoughts, feelings, events, circumstances are essentially the course-syllabus of your life lesson. Each one's syllabus is unique to them. What is a strong attracting influence or repelling influence in one may have absolutely no effect, either positive or negative, on another person i.e. they are neutral in their response. But it is these attracting/repelling urges which set up the polarizations that then feed the energies of your ego.
For example, you may not be a very materially motivated person by nature and so material success and acquiring things may not be something that particularly interests you. In other words, you may have a naturally neutral attitude towards it, whereas for someone else it may be an aspect of their lives that consumes them and defines how their life will progress. On these so called neutral issues, you will find that there is not much ego momentum that can build up around it because there is no magnetic pull towards the issue. On the other hand, you may be someone who cares very deeply about the state of the world's affairs, about injustice and attrocity. On these issues you may find yourself having strong opinions, judgments and identities about things. And here your attractions and repulsions will be palpable - and this is the kind of arena in which the ego loves to play.
However, the point is not to be completely neutral. The point is to get a deeper understanding of what polarizes you.
Think of yourself as a battery, where the positive pole corresponds to all the light-natured aspects of yourself and the negative pole corresponds to all the dark-natured aspects. As long as these two poles exist the current of life will continue to flow, animating your body-mind.
Now I'll extend this analogy one step further. In physics, the voltage of a battery is defined as the potential distance between the two poles. As you polarize more and more strongly towards your attractions and against your repulsions, the voltage (polarization) of your self increases. From your school physics you may recall the formula for Ohm's Law V=IR where V is the voltage, I the current and R the resistance. If the current (ie the life energy stays the same) an increase in voltage implies an increase in the resistance you experience. There is a quote that goes "Ego is the resistance to what is." This resistance is essentially what the ego feeds on.
In other words, the more identified you are with your mental positions, the more polarized you are, the more resistance you will experience. And vice versa, any resistance you feel from external sources will polarize you further. It is also true that every electrical current generates a magnetic field around it. This is what attracts/repels other egos around you and you to them.
In response to you regarding my comment about "immersing yourself in the illusion" - this is the natural progression of life. At first, it is only through experiencing great resistance within ourselves that we become aware of how polarized we are and more importantly about the need to understand that polarity. This can only be done through a process of allowing the experience of these polarities. As we begin to understand, our understanding has a sort of balancing effect, a bringing together in a sense of the positive and the negative. This decreases the potential difference (the voltage) between the poles and hence so does the resistance. As the resistance frees up, the current flows more freely, the poles come into a balance and the magnetic field around the wire no longer magnetizes other egos in the way it once did.
There is no way around this process. any attempt to be only postive by avoidance of negative only polarizes further. Any over indulgence in the negative while losing perspective of the positive only polarizes further. If you shift your focus from attempting to contrive a more positive/negative scenario towards reconnecting with that current that animates you in every moment, you will have a stronger and stronger sense of the wholeness that is essentially at the root of all of it.
