Focusing
Questions:
How did ego manifest in the world?
What is its job or function? What would humans’ lives be like
without it? And how is it all possibly an illusion as many eastern
philosophies assert? And if so, what is it that asks the question
of its own experience? Why is there conflict and evil when, in
the West, we define our creator as wholly good and positive? And
how can something that is supposed to be the highest level of
intelligence on Earth be as constantly narrow, repressed,
inflated, and unruly as humans certainly exhibit being?
These are the questions that led me
to wrestle with this enormous topic. I think of little that is as
important for us as therapists and non-therapists alike to grapple
with and come to an understanding of the relationship between the
earthly, pluralistic and the universal, mystical. Until recently,
the discussion of any spiritual or numinal processes in the human
being was considered, by mainline psychology, to be wholly
unsubstantiated and therefore irrelevant. But we have seen in our
life times a growing emergence and acceptance of this topic in
professional psychological literature. Scott Peck has declared
that if you go all the way into psychology, you will emerge into
spirituality. This is my personal experience and the reason for
this article. Since both ends of this spectrum exist, all of us
are contained somewhere in this dynamic crucible. The more we know
about it, the more evolved or differentiated we can become.
The Problem and The
Issue:
Since our western culture is based
on a Judaic-Christian world-view, the quotation from A Course In
Miracles, calls into question two distinct and massive cultural
icons. The first is that what we call the deity may not be as
omnipotent as we mortals tend to think we must believe. To imagine
that an external Creator can have any limitations at all runs
counter to this hierarchal model depicting a supreme being that is
nothing like us. The second icon that goes down in this plucky
statement is that the ego, so bent on superiority and dominance,
emerges as quite limited and is shocked at being so. Ego,
therefore, gets a bad reputation from lay and professional alike
by how it handles this indignity. The ego always seems to get
miffed as it strives for survival and prominence and never quite
making it. And in a three-level cosmos, the ego leads us to
believe that it, itself, is the deity. So, it seems we have a
limited deity that cannot make anything inferior and an individual
selfhood that is appalled at not being superior.
Function of the Ego
In Relation To Consciousness:
In Jungian terms, the ego is the
seat of consciousness and is made of the same basic fabric as all
consciousness. Hence, the notion of the “Imago Dei”can make sense.
But the individual ego is actually only a small fraction of all
the available consciousness in the whole Self, just as the waves
of the ocean are also made up of the same water but each wave is
not the whole ocean. The main reason ego gets a bad reputation is
because it has a tendency for hubris, that is, of inflating itself
beyond the scope of its basic function, that of individual
awareness in a basically “I-It” physically dualistic world. In
Greek mythology, hubris, was described as “rivaling the gods” for
which the individual always paid a price in karma-like fashion,
not as punishment but as a reality lesson. It seems exquisitely
clear that no individual human being could ever come up with what
the Cosmos has created for itself much less even understand it
all, but that does not stop ego from feeling it must ascend in
order to be safe. Ego is quintessentially all about fear-based
safety seeking and justifiably so, since all of us, on any planet,
experience what Adler called “cosmic inferiority”.
It seems that the ego itself is the
last to know that it was not made for the eternal task of
transcendence and creation in the first place. Being thus abashed,
we need to stop and see our egos as possessing a different, and
quite necessary, set of functions than our egos can understand at
the outset. This is one entry place for effective therapy. As
troublesome as egos are, they seem to belong. And if they belong,
maybe we need to understand and therefore “design” their scope of
practice so that they don’t bound out, over, and into what they
cannot do because the were not so destined. But what are they for?
Maybe if we could discover why they are so prevalent and so
prominent, we could also discover why they are so necessary. It is
obvious that egos proliferate, or, at least the illusion of ego.
And so it behooves those of us in leadership capacities, whether
as therapists, healers, parents, grandparents, teachers etc. to
have a sturdy, workable concept of ego so that we do not douse it
and rob our children and clients of such an obvious and valuable
resource. But playing creator, which ego typically thinks it is,
is not one of the reasons we have or are one!
Maybe we should start by asking the
question what human life would be like if there were no such thing
as what we identify as ego. The Genesis account of creation would
have us think that we would be better off without such
consciousness, remaining totally innocent and devoid of
existential and ethical discretion. Anthropology suggests that
this is the way our earliest, animistic progenitors lived. Jung,
borrowing from anthropologist Levy-Bruhl, referred to them as
“participation mystics”. This is when there is no apparent
difference between self and other and where meaning has not yet
been questioned, as in newborn infants’ experience. Self, as ego
self, comes into being when such discretion is called for and
always with safety as its backdrop. As soon as the “I-It”
perception comes into view, the developing person comes out of
Eden and faces this new and troubling reality in such a way as to
maintain a sense of belonging and, therefore, security. This is
always done at the expense of the fundamentally true self and
brings on the development of a pseudo-self, otherwise known as
personality. Discovering just how clients have come to hold the
beliefs they do is an extremely important part of the therapeutic
process. It is their story and it is our grist for ongoing
sessions. Ego, then, seems to be the “sine qua non” of human
experience. Whether we call it personality, typology, identity, or
common sense, we all have a kind of self-consciousness that
separates us from all others. We all know that we are not someone
else and therefore” I must be myself”! Yet, this is also where the
problem lies, i.e. the thinking that we are separate from each
other and from Creation itself and yet, ironically always seeking
intimate relationships to compensate. In transpersonal thinking,
this separation is absurd. But through an existential lens, which
is where the young ego starts out, nothing could be truer. No
discretionary center means no self. No self is a major threat to
the personal consciousness and is always met with, at least, a
defensive tack, if not a full blown attack. It is in this sense
that ego may just be the same as memory! New brain research shows
the brain to be a conservative organ not expending more energy
than it needs to. It registers that what happened before is what
is happening now even though that “now” is past. The mind is slow
to update and defaults to past protocol. We are prone to Daniel
Goleman’s “amygdala hijacking” and are certain of the need for ego
defenses to rise to the threat. It’s all about fear of loss.
For those of us with a slight or
markedly Eastern philosophic bent, talk of ego is either
unnecessary, since the self is seen as all illusion, or
reprehensible to consider something so troublesome as being
necessary and trustworthy. But let us look through the eyes of
therapists and teachers, people who rely upon the capacities of
their client recipients for the forward motion of growth to occur. I
find that the hardest process I face in my forty-some years of
private practice working with change and growth is the overly
defended client. There isn’t enough of something to have the person
present as confident, whole, solid, courageous, flexible, open, and
expansive. These are the hardest types who are rigid, frightened,
closed, paranoid, uncertain, and dysthymic, not because they have
these traits, per se, but because they lack a core of resiliency and
reflectivity, without which keeps them narrow, stuck, and
unimaginative. It’s not what diagnosis they have but what capacity
they lack. And this element of what is or isn’t there is what I am
referring to as ego, the operating system of the personality, the
executive function, the manager, the circumspect overseer whose job
it is to be vigilant by addressing the external world in such a way
as to become a recipient of all that Life has to offer. It is the
general manager with a team full of prima donnas trying to
coordinate a winning season. To this end, we need to treat it with
respect and care, as well as with pity and compassion, for its job
is massive. Jung says that “all the greatest and most important
problems of life are fundamentally unsolvable......They can never be
solved, but only outgrown”. Think of ego, then, as an overly
responsible self-agency which must needs be on top of everything in
order to, well, be on top of everything. Upon not being up for life
in the physical and emotional dualism in which it lives, it falters
and compensates by “acting as if” it is competent and confident,
i.e. inflated. By way of further definition, I am proffering ego as
an element on the front line of both the external world that comes
at it and the internal world out of which flows one’s perceptions
of knowing what to do here in life. As above, little is as hard as
doing therapy with an adult who has not accomplished much or
anything in their lives, not only because they actually haven’t but
because, through trauma, they did not have the necessary developed
self-capacity in the first place to meet the needs of the world.
They offer us very little to grab on to for growth and development
to take place. The newest study out now regarding the elements of
successful therapy states that whereas the relationship between
client and therapist is vital, equal to this process is the
self-capacity of the client. What do they bring for us to use to
help them realize their actual, but now cryptic, destinies? Denial
systems are hard enough to work with, but worse is a client so
frightened of and defended against the world they cannot perceive
the possibility of any potential. This is what happens in clients
diagnosed in the Axis II category. It’s not that they have defenses
but that that is all they have and, therefore, lack cohesion and
flexibility.
Possible Answers:
Let us then consider that there is not
really only one ego but rather two, the one we most speak of in
common parlance being the most suspect. It may be better understood
as the Shadow Self rather than the ego, per se, because it is
chiefly composed of repressed and disowned unconscious material. The
other ego, the executive function, as I am offering here, is a quite
positive element without which we would surely perish on this Earth.
Aside from the mythology, perhaps Adam and Eve were just hungry! In
common conversation, when we come upon an insecure person who uses
excessive energy to prove themselves worthy, we often speak of that
person as having a “big ego”. The implication here is that, by
definition, ego is bad, as in narcissistic selfishness. And while
this kind of behavior can certainly be troublesome, think of ego
here as like halitosis, that is, that it is better than no breath at
all! It’s not that ego, per se, is bad, but that the expression of
itself is compensatory and emerges to have others fill the void for
them. It compensates for some real or imagined flaw not even
consciously recognized in the individual “ego”consciousness. When
questioned by the outside, defensiveness emerges and sometimes even
explodes upon those who ask about it. But this is a good thing, for
it at least indicates an intentionality to be something more than it
is. Angry defensiveness indicates a drive toward something held as
valuable even if only the most basic kind of survival, for anger is
not so much a feeling as it is a strategy. So, embedded in this kind
of behavioral dynamic is evidence of both the basest and best of
what ego is. It is the manager of the separate self as well as the
major block to ultimate connection with the Higher Self, humanity at
large, and Cosmic Oneness overall. Without this manager function,
one would not survive. We would remain totally dependent throughout
our “mean, small, nasty, brutish and short” lives, quoting Hume.
There would be no intentionality, no drive, no impetus to acquire
and attain, no interest in pleasure-seeking, and no sense of any
purpose. In short, an egoless person would be totally depressed,
unable to move about their world with any conscious possibility and
would be worse off than animals because at least animals have a
vivid intentionality to survive.
We all persist for something greater
than what we experience in any moment. And while this egoic state,
per se, is not the problem, it becomes problematic for two distinct
reasons. One is that, in its fear, ego stops developing in any fully
human, destined way. It gets stuck and digs in for safety. And
secondly, it sets up shop by creating clever ways of compensating
for rather than growing through its real and imagined flaws. This is
where ego turns sour, for it is so afraid of being incomplete and
inadequate, that it erects defenses to stay alive and by so doing
creates barriers to its own selfhood. Adler referred to this process
as the Law of Overcoming, translated as the means of compensating
and over-compensating for these “feelings of inferiority”that we
have come to think of as our very lives. So, paradoxically and
tragically, we try to save ourselves by strangling our potential!
Better to stagnate into our comfortable middle than to walk to our
edges and fail, we reason, being thoroughly immersed in our
smaller-self egos. Do therapists need a better explanation as to why
our work is so difficult and why we need extensive training to lead
clients to their edges for self-discovery? In this sense, the larger
the executive-type egos, the easier our work is because this kind of
ego is able to self-assess, innovate, generalize, and stay in tact
in the face of sometimes horrendous personal regrets, dark memories,
and cruel criticisms.
It has been stated over and over that
power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But what is
really happening is that it is not power or intentionality, per se,
that corrupts, but rather the absence of it and the drive to get it.
This is Jung’s basic theory as to the presence of evil. It is also
Adler’s idea that a sense of failure, as an inferiority complex,
makes people compensate in ways that injure other people, as
Nietzsche states so emphatically. It is in this very chasm of
self-limiting beliefs based on fear that ego is led, Faust-like,
down the road of ego-only existence. Freud has helped us understand
what happens here, for in his system, there are really only two, not
three, parts to the self, these being the super-ego and the id.
According to him, the ego simply developed not at all to be the
chariot that could lead us to our spiritual destinies, a la Jung,
but rather as a means of protecting our selfish, boundless ids from
scrutiny and punishment by the super-parent. As such, there is no
genuine independent ego-process in Freudian psychology.
But ever since Freud, the history of psychology has all been about
the entry of a genuine, non-contingent, independent personal element
that allows for tension and conflict to exist along with its
capacity to derive some meaning out of the chaos. It has moved from
a basic morality system to a functional one, one that calls for
courage and resiliency, the very qualities lacking in people with
little or no ego executive function. Freud’s system is an
adjustment-focused process where symptoms (anxiety) are to be
recognized as the presence of pathology and is, at base, a
behavioral model resting on unconscious material. Jung’s system is a
developmental, evolutionary process where symptoms are seen as an
incompleteness in the personality structure based on a lack of
awareness of anything beyond egoic consciousness. To Freud, the
purpose of therapy is “to bring people to normal misery”, whereas in
Jung, the focus of therapy is on digging deep enough to see that all
Life is spiritual in nature and that there is no real end to what
can be apprehended. This is where the ego as executive simply runs
out of fuel and where the ego as commander-in-chief gets rowdy. Care
must be taken by therapists and parents alike not to overwhelm the
individual’s egoic level, and certainly not to undershoot it. This
is a focus of another paper, but suffice to say here that amongst
the best material on this topic is the early research on
ego-development by Judith Loevinger. I highly recommend this
approach which underlies the field of ego psychology.
People having grown up under the
watchful eye of superego, and this would includes all of us,
typically abort the very experience for which we are destined merely
by defending their selves. The ego thinks the defense of self leads
to prominence and safety. Redoing Descartes, “I am safe now,
therefore I must be right”! But people having grown up with
sufficiency of inclusion, potency, and attachment are actually able
to move beyond this basic motive of safety. They are able to look
beyond their egoic constructs of uniqueness, specialness, and
superiority as mere compensations, but usually only, alas, after
hitting bottom somehow. The dark side of ego is so powerful that it
convinces the self of its ultimate legitimacy as is, without any
transformation that lifts people into states of new awakenings. It
is like enlightenment is seen by the ego as a major threat, the very
thing the ego-self is destined to accomplish, but not as ego. It is
in this paradoxical crucible all of us as individuals find ourselves
and, as puppies inside a paper bag, try exhaustively to extricate
ourselves from this confusing dualism. But doing so only with the
ego only tightens the bag around us and has us act even more
foolishly. As Emerson wrote, “the soul is lost mimicking the soul”!
It is not by ego strength or
development alone that the soul will find its true destiny as
co-creators and collaborators of the Universe. Yet, without the
original ego self construct, we can never arrive at any meaning that
can sufficiently disturb us into seeking other paths. When in
therapy, clients with enough ego to know something is not right but
not enough to be able to look beyond ego for answers need a guiding
light. Ego is a one-dimensional tool operating in a three
dimensional environment and is not aware of there being a fourth,
this being the numinal world of the spirit. How does ego-bound self
then learn about this fourth dimension if it is so tied into itself?
Since ego is a windowless room, how does it begin to see through the
density it has developed? How does it extricate itself from
identifying with ego-only constructs? The answer to these questions
lies in a totally non-Western world-view, one asserting that humans
contain a natural, a priori, internal, and intrinsic capacity for
Oneness. This departs from a rational, three-level western universe
with its emphasis upon an external godhead unlike anything in the
individual person. It is best summarized in the three laws of Dharma
which posits that the Spirit, the Buddha-Nature, the Imago Dei is
imprinted into all sentient Life and that it constantly draws us to
this reality. It is, in short, a Living Universe where all creation
is shared by all creation. It counters the notion of a three-story
universe of heaven, earth, and hell and instead preserves the idea
of a cooperative co-creatorship. This was the “aha experience” Edgar
Mitchell underwent on his return from the moon and seeing and
shooting “Earth-Rise”, the most copied photograph in human history.
It occurred to him that we are all made of star-dust, that is, that
we are all One. Upon returning, he founded IONS, the Institute of
Noetic Science, in an attempt to blend science and spirit. Dharma
states that although we are physical beings seeking personal meaning
and safety, we are first and foremost spiritual beings having a
physical experience! This turning of reality on to its head can be
rather, well, heady! The dualistic physical reality of our world and
our bodies have sucked so much of our latent energy into mere
survival-searching that we have little energy or desire left over to
imagine anything other than personal security, thus never getting
beyond Maslow’s first two layers of his need hierarchy. This is
where we must honor ego by having the intellectual and emotive
capacities to keep our bodies safe from danger so that we can live
long enough to perhaps realize the basic, constitutional nature of
our selves, that being that we are spirit-in-a-body entities rather
than bodies only seeking spiritual meaning. This is all ego is
supposed to do, i.e. keep us safe, alive and striving. Its job is
not transcendence. And any time the ego thinks it is transcending,
it is really undergoing a severe bout of ego-inflation, usually the
result of not having been acknowledged and included enough in the
early years. The other two laws of Dharma, simply put, are to
discover who and really what we are and then to use that in the
service of others. But without the first law active within our
larger selves, any service to others will be self-serving, not a bad
thing, per se, but just so incomplete that no eternal satisfaction
comes from it. This is what leads to compensation and
over-compensation, i.e. fear wrapped in bravado.
Until we run the ego’s course, we will
never realize our true potential and that of human Life overall. We
need to start thinking of ego as necessary but not sufficient. We
need to see is as a scared child in a supermarket trying its best to
find its parent and, upon failing, getting ugly, i.e. desperate. We
need to think of ego as the shuttlebus that takes us to the airport
but not as the airplane that is to fly us to our ultimate
destination. We need to be able to stay in tact as we face our
personal set backs before we can muster the energy to hang in with
our selves even when they look so foreign to us. This is the aim of
therapy.
General Therapeutic
Considerations:
Therapy is where we have permission to
be limited, even weird, since our collective egos do not permit this
elsewhere. Somewhere we need to see our selves as loveable and
worthwhile even in the face of our distorted egoic errors of
perception and behavior and be understood and accepted. Life
invites us to our basic destiny of realizing our co-operative place
as individuals in the cosmic panoply of Oneness. In this way, we can
experience a sense of participation and completion in the flow of
Life. But relying on ego to make sense of this is futile, like
thinking the shuttlebus is the airplane and then driving off the
end of the runway only to blame the airport.
When Jung states that “knowledge is
the specific nature of the psyche”, he is not talking about
intellectual or even cognitive information gathering. He is
referring to the organic connection of the cosmos and all that is in
it, including human beings. He is alluding to a Oneness model of
ontology where everything and every person is composed of the same
basic substance, that substance being consciousness, the prima
materia of awakening, enlightenment, and individuation.
If only ego would know this. This is
the problem with ego as shadow. It still maintains its centrality
even in the face of obvious limitedness. There is no humility. It
pushes its way into the center of everything in order to prove its
worth, usually to itself, first. Jung goes on to say, “One does not
become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the
darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable
and therefore not popular”. Adler, Jung and Freud all had one major
thing somewhat in common, that being the apparent nature of the
personal unconscious. Both saw it as containing material of which
the ego had no knowledge. But here the similarity ends, for in
Freud, the unconscious was seen as “the boiling cauldron”, filled as
it was with guilt over sexual desires. Jung, more consistent with
Adler’s view who saw it as “the unadmitted”, refers to the shadow as
a place where “everything that I don’t want to be” is relegated.
Inside Jung’s shadow, or, personal unconscious, ( as distinct from
the Archetypal Unconscious), then, is a lot of fine human qualities
that simply don’t jibe with the individual’s self image. And for the
individual to realize their total potential, they would have to walk
into and through their personal shadow because the repressed
material in there is as much a part of the Self as what ego sees in
its own consciousness. We must become open to our whole potential.
Jung said that the purpose of life” is not to be good, but to be
whole”. His was not a moralistic approach, but an ontological one in
which the cosmos was a beckoning entity that made Itself fully
available for anyone who had the courage to look, first, into their
shadow and then choose increased, integrated consciousness over
safety. As he said, “I had to wrench myself free of god, so to
speak, in order to find that unity in myself which god seeks through
man”. It was an inevitably natural way to live. And ego-centered
living is only natural up to the point where it can escape the
gravitational pull of the dualistic need for security. Beyond this
point, it is unnatural. It is a mangled Mephistophelian
manipulation.
Specific Therapeutic
Considerations:
The ego, being necessary but not
sufficient, needs to soften and allow for the inclusion of its basic
nature to develop. But before it can do that, it has to have a
discrete life of its own, no matter how problematic it is before it
individuates, or, becomes awake. In keeping with sound therapeutic
considerations about entering a client’s story only at the ego level
in which they operate, when a therapist encounters an ego deficit,
the job is to help build the ego through what I call “self claim”.
For, it is only through a person’s daring to move past their pseudo
self and into their darkness that they can just begin to see through
the density of ego consciousness and peer into the light of their
inherent spiritual nature. People must know that they are choosing,
and why, before there is any chance of transformation or even
paradigm shift. Of course, clients don’t usually enter therapy for
this purpose. They come because their egos have run them into the
ground and they are in pain. Further, they want simultaneously to
not hurt any more and also to not have to change. This is classic
ego unconsciousness, hubris at its worst and we have all been there.
As such, therapists cannot judge their clients but rather sit with
their egoic pain and understand the developmental nature of
consciousness. Adler asserted that everybody is doing the most they
can at any point in time and that if they could do more, they would.
But ego puts the brakes on any such thing, and to the demise of
itself because it is the best ego can do!. Not to be outdone, the
ego simply fabricates the story to maintain its
exoneration..........and starts the atrophy of
consciousness.......and relationships.
Ego maintains an ideal sense of self
and arranges its life around the establishment of that personal
desire. But if you take the Ideal Self and subtract the Actual Self,
it equals the individual’s “Shoulds”. At this point, the less
developed the ego is, the more it will opt to exercise its Shoulds
in the direction of bolstering its Ideal Image. The stronger,
larger, more developed ego will opt in the opposite direction of
looking at and accepting its Actual Self, that which came into being
as a result of the choices it made while inside the ego-trance. It
will then approach the shadow, enter it slowly, begin integrating
the dark material in there, and then and only then stand at the
threshold of the numinal, the Archetypal Collective where Oneness
can start emerging into view.
There is a saying attributed to Will
Rogers: “good judgment comes from experience and a lot of that comes
from bad judgment”. But the bad judgment is like the halitosis
mentioned earlier. The problem is that ego always interprets its
actions as necessary and positive and therefore cannot learn from
its own experience. It sees itself as separate. It does not know
that it is encircled in a oneness relationship with the eternal. It
is bent on survival and will always have to be right in order to
feel the safety it craves. Rumi said that “Perfection is not for the
pure of soul; there may be virtue in sin”. The Dharmic principle
rests on the notion of a living, beckoning universe that calls for
authenticity and will allow us to suffer over and over again until
we learn something. After all, how many times does something have to
happen before it occurs to us! Karma is an opportunity put before us
by an actively-seeking, eternal cosmos. And to interpret suffering
as singly onerous is to miss the point of the Life process. It’s not
about safety anymore but rather about the development and evolution
of the soul-Self.
Karma is simply unlearned lessons.
Therapists need to continually reflect with clients, and parents
with children, as to how they think what they are doing is going to
work. There is no morality in this approach, only function. And
truly, neurosis has been rightly defined as doing the same thing
over and over and expecting different results. This is the little
“s” self bereft of its beginnings, its composition, and its destiny.
It’s like the angry carpenter who exclaimed, “Damn it; I’ve cut this
board THREE times and it is STILL too short”. How the ego softens
and opens is not the mystery it appears when you think in terms of
Dharmic process where we are seen as intrinsically spiritual and
needing to learn Oneness while first here in the form of” Twoness”,
that is, dualistic matter. Life, as such, is way too important to
take seriously, to see Life only as matter. This is the way of the
ego, trying its best to make sense of life while wearing blinders,
blinders it does not know it is wearing, but blinders nonetheless.
It was Keats who said that “when you know Earth is the vale of
soul-making, you will know what to do here”. Ego must take itself
off the hook and allow for earth-only efficiency. This can only be
done in conjunction with the Deep Self. Ego is not Ultimate yet it
is an eternal and important instrument to develop and move through,
so that we can hear the beckoning of the Eternal Ultimate. In this
sense, ego is the gateway to the Eternal. It was Ram Dass who said
that we have to have an ego first in order to move beyond it. The
only way to discover what this ultimacy is and how we stand within
it rather than under or against it is to have had, first, a sense of
ego-self and all the limitations and trials commensurate with it.
For it is only through these trials that the ego can learn that it
is not ultimate. It takes real strength to rise up out of one’s
demise in the hopes of discovering something more durable than ego.
James Hillman is quoted as saying “troubles are calls from the
gods”. They are opportunities for the individual to grow beyond its
own safety oriented life style and into something more closely
aligned with completion, as Jung put it. He said “that if you do not
follow your destiny, you will meet your fate”. Ego knows nothing of
this destiny until it is on its back looking up, at which time it
either softens or hardens. Both responses are geared for surviving,
but only the first one is focused on thriving. As it enters this
vast arena of unknown entities, the urge is to rush back to the
familiar. Here is where we must support the ego-self to continue
moving to its edges to discover more about one’s self, and in so
doing developing empathy for others. For once we begin seeing our
selves as having been distorted and how we built a life style on
these limiting beliefs, we can no longer judge others. We have
finally entered into the realm of the authentic human being, a place
where the focus is no longer on being right or good but upon
becoming whole and therefore connected to the working of the eternal
cosmos.
I like considering that we were all
just born too young! And this is why we need sound, spiritually
based parenting so children can grow up with as much sense of self
as they can, given Life’s vicissitudes. Life would be hard even
with perfect parenting. It is the nature of Life to have us all
enter it with an a priori comprehension of growth as our first and
final destiny and not safety. But this reality is not apparent to us
until we eventually include ego-consciousness as necessary. Yet,
without sufficient safety, none of us would ever survive at all.
With only safety, however, we never come into our fullness and then
die “Waiting for Godot”, never venturing beyond the narrow,
confining security of the windowless room we call ego.
From Here, Where?
The issue is not with ego, as such,
but identification with it. In its fear, ego lures us into thinking
that what it knows is all there is to know. And when you have six
billion people all doing this, it’s a wonder we are surviving at
all. Thanks only to our objective, intrinsic god-consciousness, we
actually might! Thinking of ego not as an entity in itself but only
as one phase of whole long line of developmental tasks may be one
way to tolerate it in one’s self and in others. It’s job is
basically regressive, that is, to once again return to a place of
Eden-like safety and ease. But with innocense, there is no
awareness. And without awareness, there is no egoic self
consciousness to understand greater realities. And without an egoic
self consciousness seeking to understand greater realities, there
can be no courage to face the shadow. And without that courage to
face the shadow, there would be no openness to the holy spirit. And
without this holy spirit, there would be no entry or awakening into
an enlightened non-dual existence. This last piece is the destiny of
all of us in order to move beyond living lives of quiet desperation
. Consider these immortal words from Longfellow who wrote, “Life is
long and life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal. Dust to
dust and ashes to ashes were words not written for the soul”.
Life
satisfaction, then, becomes a matter of the alignment of these two
significant entities (the ego and the eternal) rather than the
elimination or annihilation of one or the other. As long as we live
on this physical planet, replete with dualistic realities, we need a
manager of sorts (the ego), but one tuned in to its overall purpose,
function, and place within and as determined by the greater wisdom
of the Unconscious Psyche (the eternal). There can be no materialism
vs. spiritual argument. Both, the ego and the eternal, are real
in their own ways and in need of acknowledgment. For as Carl Jung
has said, If we do not find our destiny, we will meet our fate.".
This is the fundamental cooperation.