 Ego, the Navigator.
Principles:
- The ego comes here in our DNA--the source of all elements of our personality.
- Our ego strengths help us find our way through life.
- The ego, without a spiritual balance, is the source of all of our harmful behaviors.
What is the ego?
The first Latin words Sir Hayes
taught us in sixth grade were ego sum, meaning I am.
Later, I discovered I had an ego.
Looking back on my life, I have become aware that my ego was
certainly not the who of my life but the what of it:
what others felt about me, what I had, and
what I could achieve. My ego had physical properties of size
and strength, as I might have heard a family member say: “Toby (my
childhood nickname), you have a strong ego,” or “Your Uncle Alex
certainly had a big ego!”
Medical school taught me to define
ego as “that portion of the human personality experienced as the
‘self’ or ‘I’ which perceives, remembers, evaluates, plans, and in
other ways is responsive to and acts in the surrounding physical
and social world.
Britannica CD 98 Multimedia Edition © 1994-1998 by Encyclopćdia
Britannica, Inc.” The root
word for personality is Latin persona, which means mask
and a mask is a cover-up. If the ego’s work is to
respond to the immediate, surrounding world, then what could it
cover up than the opposite—the eternal, infinite universe. Ego is not the essential self; rather, it is something
temporary — a transient construct that creates the mask which covers
up who we really are.
We usually think that the
personality comprises only the intellectual, emotional,
and moral aspects of our life. The mask consists of much
more than these three mental aspects; it must also include
the three physical assets with which we meet life—our
body, our talents and intelligence(s), and our temperament. The
latter three aspects have profound influences on the first three,
and all six qualities belong to our genes. In other words, they
comprise our form.
The ego’s job is to create an
individual.
It
works with these assets.
The finite ego focuses on that life which
exists between birth and death —
between dust and ashes. There can be no doubt that the ego
is extremely valuable. Sigmund Freud recognized the value
of the ego for each person, and I believe that he looked at ego as
the navigator of the ship of life — I certainly do. It may help to
look at these three aspects of self in terms of human development:
the id is ancient history, the ego is modern history, and the
superego is postmodern history.
Our egos have responded to stress
for a long time, and each one of us follows the course of human
history in our own ego development—we wrote the program.
Where does the ego live?
Our life force gathers in
seven specific centers of the body called, in Sanskrit, chakras
(wheels). The third lies in the solar plexus—the sun
center—the center of control and the home of the ego,
the mistress of control. Ego has its home in our energy system, my
friends; one perfectly suited to its need for control. In short,
its focus is on its physical world, just as science focuses on the
physical universe.
How does the ego develop?
Ego must figure out how to use
these assets to shape our personalities and survive. Ego
development begins in our childhood homes, continues in our
schools, and moves on into our workplaces, adult homes, and
families. You can understand that, with but rare exception, our
ego’s encounters shape our personalities. Survival is indeed the ego’s
game.
Individuation
From our earliest beginnings, ego,
our judging, differentiating function, learns the difference
between “me” and “you.” This is individuation.
Individuation is the goal of a healthy personality that naturally
and comfortably brings together ego and higher parts of self.
Individuation applies to all personalities. It is a learning
process. A learning process has no limit. We all have
different life experiences and knowledge, and wonderfully unique
ways of responding to them…there can be no true clones. Though we
can clone bodies in this dynamic, constantly changing world and
its universe, we cannot clone knowledge and experience.
The Western World does little to
nurture connectedness, so the ego comes to believe that it is the only
navigator of the ship of life. The ego keeps an inventory of that
which it has condemned to these shadows, framing all in the
judging attitude of fear. Following the law of
attraction—like-seeks-like—ego will seek out others with whom it
shares similar qualities of temperament
and talents. Nurturing is essential
for life and growth; without it we wither and die.
When I tried to dig clams with a
garden rake at high tide, my aunt “rescued” me from what looked to
her like my impending drowning, shaking me and hollering, “You
stupid little boy!” In this way, my ego withdrew from my aunt, and our
relationship was scarred for the rest of her life. In consequence,
my ego came to consider itself an expert in deciding what
comprises a “stupid” behavior. I also became skilled in creating
stupid behaviors that I could not seem to fix. Surgery may fix
physical trauma caused by stupid behaviors, but it doesn’t fix the
behaviors. Ego remembers. Ego always works to correct the painful
happenings of its early experience because it wants to feel
better. My experience tells me that we must stop accusing
people of being stupid. Calling a person “stupid” does not
make anyone intelligent.
It doesn’t work. Insulting others,
especially children, never works; it marginalizes them.
Naturally, that part of them that is concerned with survival leads
them to create a new society of similarly marginalized people who
can support each other’s egos.
Dissing
Today’s high school students are
acutely aware of the harmfulness of disrespect and dismissal,
which they call “dissing.” In some juvenile societies, when a
person is “dissed,” s/he is considered justified in taking extreme
measures, up to and including murder. The more we find it
unacceptable to subject another person to dismissal or disrespect,
the more we must direct ourselves to find another, more
acceptable, behavior, lest the old one return, for nature abhors
all vacuums. We must realize that everyone tries his or her best
to learn how to get along with others. We all need encouragement
rather than dismissal. The ego finds this hard work, but help can
come from many sources.
How
the ego works:
The “survival response”
and the ego:
We shall always need the
“fight-or-flight” survival response that we used but seldom in our
primitive years, but because of our high speed, high stress life,
we use it every day, often several times a day, and often
inappropriately. Because of its reflexive, life-saving nature, our
survival response is set up to fire off after only a superficial
evaluation of the life-threat of any given situation. Once
activated, the response goes on afterburners; after all, its
purpose is life-saving.
The code in our genes tells our bodies to
respond to life threats with two powerful chemicals, adrenaline
and cortisol. Our problems with the survival response grow first
out of ego’s undying commitment to survival and second out of
today’s social environment replacing yesterday’s natural
environment. Humans rather than predatory animals have become the
trigger of the survival response.
Ego uses memory and judgment to
keep an inventory of everything it feels ever harmed it. This
inventory enables the constant reappearance of life threat in our
day-to-day living. The results are dangerous and all too often
lethal.
Memory and judgment
The traumatic childhood
clam-digging incident
from
my childhood
demonstrates how ego uses its
experience to help it respond to new circumstances.
Subsequent to this episode, I had a
terrible
fear of water
that my mother attributed to the near drowning.
Fifty years
later, in a workshop on healing the "inner child," by
recovering repressed childhood memories, I remembered. In that
fifty years, my life had had a distinct, powerfully judgmental
focus on a “stupid” behavior and the person who committed it,
especially if I was that person. On recovering the memory, I was
no longer “stupid”
Now I became a defender of those
who would suffer emotional abuse from being called “stupid.” It
developed a set of rules of safe behavior based entirely on its
perceptions of that clam-digging incident: Rule one, withdraw from
people, and row your own boat, it’s safer; Rule two, be
judgmental, it’ll protect you; and Rule three, dissociate when
another person’s anger gets unbearable. My ego had tried always to
make those rules work for every threatening situation, but not all
threatening situations were like my terrified and terrifying aunt
accusing me of being “stupid.”
Ego needs to judge itself and its
performance, too. As we shall see later, the need to judge grows
out of fear, and this, in turn, causes ego to choose either
defensive or aggressive behaviors (both of which are angry) in
order to control the situation.
How does
the ego get us in trouble?
Through its misperceptions,
separation, temporo-spatial projections, and judgment.
The ego's awareness of life is
tragically, desperately finite….
It is
destined
to begin in dust and end
in ashes. Once the ego learns to take the measure of the world
with its physical and emotional senses, it sets up a courtroom in
the mind to cope with every life situation it meets. It plays
every role in the courtroom from police detective to judge. It
even plays the role of the accused! That unfortunate role
predominates in the lives of many, revealing itself in the
expression, "how could I be so stupid?" Have you ever called
yourself "stupid"? Guilty! You are now sentenced and committed to
a life of punishment for your sin of stupidity. In the present,
the ego maintains an image of an equally punishing, fearful
future. All of these ego functions arise from misperceptions of
the truth... the simple truth that tells us there are no mistakes,
only lessons.
Healing
the ego’s mistakes:
Superego
We have spent the better part of
one hundred years recognizing and defining our ego, as defined by
Sigmund Freud. Today, we are seriously trying to define the
“self,” part of which is the ego. Another “part of self,” the
superego, comes out of our recognition of our ego’s potential for
destructive, rapacious behavior. It is a group of egos working
together with collective memories to find those patterns of social
behavior that work better than others. The judging, perceiving
egos that create a superego can also subject its truth to terrible
distortions in exactly the same way that an individual ego can
distort individual truth. We use the superego to control harmful
behaviors in socially approved ways. When we choose a destructive
force to limit the ego’s destructive power, we challenge the ego
in its home territory, and stacked the results in favor of the
ego.
We shall have to learn to love our
ego. With ego’s ability to do harm where it feels fear, loving ego
seems risky. The ego's ability to come together with other egos
and create the superego reduces this risk. Superego, always
reflecting society’s wishes, continually seeks the better way, and
creates safe environments like support groups for such loving
meetings.
Loving the ego
Some spiritual practices disparage
ego by describing it as fearful, judgmental, guilt-ridden, and
subject to repeated misperceptions of reality. In doing so, they
judge the judge. I see value in my ego—and in the egos of others.
Ego has valuable qualities, even though it has limited
perceptions.
The two most powerful attitudes are
love and fear.
The
ego, devoted to its own survival, naturally does its best with
whatever resources it has. Ego is our
worldly navigator, wily and resourceful in its ability to respond
to these actions. In order to develop its navigational skills, ego
must first come to know itself as an individual. Separation is the
way of ego, believing it has to figure life out by and for itself.
Remember, ego “evaluates, plans, and in other ways is responsive
to and acts in the surrounding physical and social world.” Even
though the word, ego, can be used as an acronym for “easing god
out,” we may do well to consider that God had something to do with
the creation of ego. If It didn’t, then ego is an accident. That
finite part of self that uses the qualities of personality to
navigate the ocean of life cannot be an accident; it can only be a
product of Divine Intention, and the ego deserves to be held in that
divine light. Consider, then, that ego is that part of self which
seeks God.
Acknowledging that survival is
always in the ego’s best interests, and that the projective nature of
fear and anger have been an essential part of its methods of
survival, we would do well by looking at the dark side of these
two feelings—the harm that comes from them. Harm returns harm, and
we are beginning to discover how damaging that can be. We can
spare our selves a lot of grief by learning to red-flag every
impending action that could harm self or others. When ego is about
to make a crucial decision, recalling this directive helps keep us
out of harm’s way.
It helps to remember that harm
never comes from hope and love, only from fear and anger, ego’s
attitudes that created separation. Fear’s defensive,
fight-or-flight survival-based attitudes fade now, replaced by the
empowering, creative embrace of love. Love comes to us from a
different part of self — soul — the captain of our ship. Let us go
to the captain’s quarters and the life that changes our focus from
surviving to thriving. |
