Ego

There is some confusion, I think, about the definition of “ego”. Psychology, as a field, has stressed for some time the need to develop a strong ego – a sense of self identification – as a major component for a healthy psyche. The ability to define self as separate from others is seen as essential to keep from falling into abusive or otherwise unhealthy relationships in which our ability to make healthy choices for ourselves is deficient.

In apparent contrast, spiritual circles of all stripes tend to urge their followers to reduce the demands of ego, to think of others before oneself, or even instead of oneself.

How to sort all of this out?

I’ve come to see the topic of “ego” as less important than the awareness of how one sees oneself in relation to others and the world. This may be more a topic of self image, as it were. If we embrace the notion that we are all interconnected with one another and with a common origin of Life Itself (by whatever name we call it), we glimpse the truest meaning of being free of ego. Meaning, we realize that no action or thought we have is devoid of impact of/on the whole, because we are never really separate.

Having said that, we do have some square inches of territory we call the “self” over which we seem to have some unique control and choice. This, by definition, we could call “ego”. That sense of ourselves as separate enough from the whole that we can exert some choice and direction.

Herein we begin to run into the arena of how we deal with this “self-who-is-separate”. Do we berate her? Support her? Make healthy or unhealthy choices for her? And, all these decision points seem to revolve around those aforementioned messages we’ve absorbed about “self” in the first place.

To the extent that we extend kindness, compassion and gentle regard for the one we call self, we give ourselves a chance to succeed in a good way on this planet, Earth. If, instead, we feel it our obligation to “keep ourselves in line”, to punish ourselves for every little perceived transgression (as defined, usually, by some outside authority), we will be running scared and deficient from every opportunity as victims of our own minds. We are often taught to do this in the name of helping us be “better” people.

When we think about it, it is a form of hypocrisy to treat others better than we treat ourselves. It is just as odious as thinking of ourselves as the ONLY ones who matter. If we, in contrasting notion, think of ourselves as the only one who doesn’t matter – we’ve committed the same “crime” against humanity.

What one person can we consider as “less than” in our regard for health and wellbeing? If we make our one being that exception, we have still harmed a part of life.

Psychology

We’ve come a long way in our practice of psychology. Our understanding has traversed the field of Freudian analysis, based on the premise of the psyche’s neuroses, and through Skinner’s behaviorism, nested in the notion that we all function as instinct-driven animals. Trainable but dumb. Jung, a protégé of Freud, introduced mysticism by way of archetypal characterizations. All of this was pretty heady stuff, though – oriented to and for the intellect and the intellectual.

Emotive-based therapies – think the primal scream – landed us squarely into the realm of the emotions, themselves, as that with which we need to deal. The notion was that by “releasing” emotions by “expressing” them we could empty the tank of the toxin. Now we understand, via such fields as psychoneuroimmunology and neuroplasticity, that neurons that fire together fuse in their synergy. Parts of the brain, such as the amygdala, map to certain high octane emotions of a negative nature, and the more of a workout they get, the more robust they become.

Enter meditation and mindfulness – the stuff of the ancient mystical traditions – and we finally have a formula that blends all of the above bodies of wisdom. By recognizing our thoughts and emotions, and observing them as passing phenomena, we employ the wisdom gleaned from Freud’s day when the inner landscape first became palpable as a place to work. We embrace the archetypal energy patterns unveiled and elucidated by Jung. We acknowledge and allow for the full panoply of the emotional field uncovered and portrayed by the emotives – without burning them into ever more deeply etched grooves in our neuronal systems by continually expressing that which we least want, as recent scientific explorations have discovered to be relevant.

We allow. We admit. We become curious as to the inner self and the possibilities there. We embrace what we find. We repress nothing, suppress nothing, and give expression to that which we wish to grow.

It is the wisdom of the time. For a practical method that uses this wisdom in day-to-day life, see: http://www.maryanniyer.com/articlesbydr.wal.html, and scroll down to the FEAD Yourself a Different Way article.