© 2009 Max Masotti
© 2009 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
| Personal Growth - Arrival Mansion Worlds | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 46 — Spring 2009 | Guten Tag Urantia! |
EGO is a noun taken from the Latin personal pronoun “ego” which means “me”. It generally designates the representation and awareness that one has of oneself. It is sometimes considered as the foundation of personality (in psychology), sometimes considered as an obstacle to our personal development (in spirituality).
The human ego has three components: the physical or animal ego (ego of earthly desires, the need to possess), the mental ego or sense of separate self, opposed to others, and the spiritual ego of the one who is aware of his divine belonging. It is difficult to detect because we hide it from ourselves. The dominating ego is the dark side of the entity “SELF” and the misuse of one’s own intention. The ego is a state of the soul and it differs from one person to another. We speak of alter ego to refer to this entity which makes up the other, but which is similar to the self.
From a Buddhist point of view, the ego is a mental construct that does not correspond to a tangible reality. Where can it be located? Neither in the arms nor in the legs. We realize that it is not in the body, but only in the mind. The ego is a false representation that an individual has of himself. Some speak of a “false personality” where memories and experiences have agglutinated, but it differs from the original personality and this illusion deprives people who are prisoners of their ego of true freedom and chains them to patterns of suffering (egocentrism, pride, vanity).
In these conceptions, a person who has freed himself from his ego (dominator) is on the right track to achieving his spiritual awakening and even if the total extinction of the ego is an ambition bordering on utopia, it remains nonetheless true that any appeasement is welcome. Any individual, man or woman, who has achieved a certain mastery of his ego and necessarily someone kind and gentle, a humble being filled with compassion, (hum, hum, humor), and it is only from this stage that he will be able to deploy an opening of his intelligence and his conscience towards this fabulous eternal destiny reserved for men and women, (of course).
This idea-ideal of doing good to others—the impulse to deny the ego something for the benefit of one’s neighbor—is very circumscribed at first. Primitive man regards as neighbor only those very close to him, those who treat him neighborly; as religious civilization advances, one’s neighbor expands in concept to embrace the clan, the tribe, the nation. And then Jesus enlarged the neighbor scope to embrace the whole of humanity, even that we should love our enemies. And there is something inside of every normal human being that tells him this teaching is moral—right. Even those who practice this ideal least, admit that it is right in theory. (UB 103:5.2)
The way consists, among other things, in freeing ourselves from this vision which places us at the center of everything.
Man tends to identify the urge to be self-serving with his ego—himself. In contrast he is inclined to identify the will to be altruistic with some influence outside himself—God. And indeed is such a judgment right, for all such nonself desires do actually have their origin in the leadings of the indwelling Thought Adjuster, and this Adjuster is a fragment of God. The impulse of the spirit Monitor is realized in human consciousness as the urge to be altruistic, fellow-creature minded. At least this is the early and fundamental experience of the child mind. When the growing child fails of personality unification, the altruistic drive may become so overdeveloped as to work serious injury to the welfare of the self. A misguided conscience can become responsible for much conflict, worry, sorrow, and no end of human unhappiness. (UB 103:2.10)
The greatest obstacle in the evolution of man, in our evolution, is the ego, the wounds and vexations that our personality undergoes. Some cannot forgive these wounds, these vexations, because they give rise in them to a deep feeling of resentment, and this must be absolutely avoided. Whatever our brother may do to us, just or unjust, let us try never to harbor resentment towards him. The brother is the craftsman who makes us evolve, he is the one who allows us to see what must be transformed in ourselves. When we manage to no longer be hurt by all the words that we may hear about us, against us, when we manage to have compassion for those who hurt us, to not let ourselves be destabilized, we will be infinitely happy because we will have taken a big step on the path of our evolution. What essentially slows us down is our human susceptibility, it is our ego.
When we understand that all the differences that exist in this world are essentially only wounds of the ego, of self-esteem, of vexations, we will understand that it is essential to work on ourselves to achieve peace.
If we are not able to see the experiences that our Adjuster puts on our path so that our advancement can be done much more quickly, he will put so many on us that we will be forced to overcome them and he will ensure that we are confronted with more or less difficult situations. To experience life, we need instruments. We ourselves do experiments of all kinds. Our human personality has been endowed with a divine fragment which helps us to experiment and through these experiences our soul is built. The Father has given us all utensils to experience life.
But then, why does the ego exist? The ego is in fact the active side of the personality, the one that reacts to a desire, to a will, also the one that allows us to move forward. It is a driving force. It is a necessary tool. Without ego, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to function. Our personality needs to rely on this powerful driving force. However, the greatest obstacle to our evolution is the dominating ego. It is very active. It is essential to work on the ego, to work on fears, to work on a new awareness of ourselves, to know ourselves. The follower who walks on this path of light must cultivate humility. Humility is a formidable weapon against the dominating ego. The dominating ego can transform love in its favor, but it has no hold over humility.
Envy is a deep-seated human trait; therefore did primitive man ascribe it to his early gods. And since man had once practiced deception upon the ghosts, he soon began to deceive the spirits. Said he, “If the spirits are jealous of our beauty and prosperity, we will disfigure ourselves and speak lightly of our success.” Early humility was not, therefore, debasement of ego but rather an attempt to foil and deceive the envious spirits. (UB 87:5.6)
The Master many times, both privately and publicly, had warned Judas that he was slipping, but divine warnings are usually useless in dealing with embittered human nature. Jesus did everything possible, consistent with man’s moral freedom, to prevent Judas’s choosing to go the wrong way. The great test finally came. The son of resentment failed; he yielded to the sour and sordid dictates of a proud and vengeful mind of exaggerated self-importance and swiftly plunged on down into confusion, despair, and depravity. (UB 139:12.11)
“Humility, indeed, becomes mortal man who receives all these gifts from the Father in heaven, albeit there is a divine dignity attached to all such faith candidates for the eternal ascent of the heavenly kingdom. The meaningless and menial practices of an ostentatious and false humility are incompatible with the appreciation of the source of your salvation and the recognition of the destiny of your spirit-born souls. Humility before God is altogether appropriate in the depths of your hearts; meekness before men is commendable; but the hypocrisy of self-conscious and attention-craving humility is childish and unworthy of the enlightened sons of the kingdom. (UB 149:6.10)
The ego in the West originates with Descartes. I is eminently more central than me. And it is this center that Descartes finds again, but I is ultimately devoid of qualities, those qualities that belong to me. Spirituality tends above all to highlight the importance of working on the ego. But what does it mean to work on the ego? Why should we work on the ego? I am not the ego on which I work, and yet, me also remains my intimate territory. The ego is inseparable from thought, more precisely, from thought bending over itself to assert itself as a separate entity: “me!” Me, me, … and the others. The ego is nothing more than a thought. It is only in the absence of a self-image that the freedom to be can truly be tasted. It is an important element on the emotional level, as well as intellectually, the awakening of the spirit depends on the abandonment of the ego but attachment to the dominating ego is an error. The work on oneself begins with this discovery. It is a discovery, because in the natural attitude, an identification with the ego occurs which is never perceived as such. It is as fast as thought, so that we are used to taking on the ego, without even realizing it. It requires great attention and great promptness of intelligence to become aware of it.
In deep sleep, when thought disappears, there is no more ego. This absence of the ego coincides with the peace of the face of the one who sleeps, freed from this burden of the self. In the dream state; the ego is only half manifested, it does not have the support of the body that it possesses in the waking state. It is struggling with its own subconscious contents. It is only in the waking state that the ego gives itself free rein, when the self is in struggle against the external world and defends its identity tooth and nail. We can also observe that there are sometimes moments in our life in which there is a suspension of the sense of the ego. Musical delight in beauty, for example, is one of them. Like direct contact with nature. The ego arises particularly in emotional reactions. It feeds on frustrations and is exacerbated by will.
Living under the influence of the ego, we do not notice it. Me means: what is mine. First my own thought and everything that is mine. The ego is possessive, because it is the seat of belonging. The ego is always worrying, because it is a compulsive thought that never stops thinking of itself. Life under the influence of the ego is a constant worry. We must use the ego to overcome it. It is the good side of the ego that we must use and not the dominating ego. Everyone has an ego and this is necessary. The ego is powerful. When it comes before the eyes of the mind, it covers everything. It is so powerful and so subtle that it can deceive the sharpest intellect. If we are troubled, let us be certain that the ego has intervened.
We spend our time pampering our little self against the wounds of its self-esteem! We are obsessed with the idea that I must situate myself in relation to others. We live with a sense of personal identity, of which we constantly seek affirmation, which is an apprehension of our self. It is not difficult since this self constantly puts itself forward. It does so in speech through opinion: “I think that…” “I believe that we should…” “I possess…” etc.
To each object in my world is connected a thread that constitutes my attachment to this object. Me is therefore also: my house, my books, my wife and my dog! It is also my convictions, my beliefs, my aspirations, my regrets, my memories, in short, everything that I consider to be mine, what is personal to me, as contributing closely to the very acute sense that I can have of my particular identity. This is what makes the self also the seat of self-esteem. What is wounded is the self-esteem of the self from which time or circumstances remove a link. The one who is offended by a remark, who falls from the pedestal on which he had placed himself, is still the self.
The ego gives itself a valorizing self-image and desires to be recognized in this image. The ego is unjust in itself, in that it makes itself the center of everything; it is inconvenient to others, in that it wants to enslave them.
The almost desperate need of the self to see itself recognized in front of others in order to have importance is pathetically weak, but there is also something pathetic in the opposite of proud sufficiency, the feeling or desire for helplessness which makes the self feel so small that the mind retracts, denies itself and shrinks in on itself.
Self-hatred directed at the ego is as destructive as the delusional self-importance of self-love. Like the ego, we are as one self completely different from another. We are a parade of characters in time, from child, adolescent to adult. Change means that the self cannot remain constant, cannot remain the same. Time means that the self is always different from what it was. The self of yesterday is no longer the self of today. It’s curious. How can I remain the same if I change all the time? What remains constant in change, I think, is the self, it is the diversity of inner change. I am aware that I am and not of what I am, this implies that consciousness has within it a unity which is not empirical (which is based solely on experience and not on a theory), but transcendental.
All that can be inferred from this is that the I am is consciousness. I am consciousness, this is my true identity and perhaps the highest knowledge that I can have. The self wants to persevere in being in a constant process of acquisition, in the order of having; more power, more wealth, more affection, more fame: in short, more recognition towards other selves. This is also what makes the self the seat of self-esteem.
Now, self-love is part of a characteristic of the dominating ego which consists of bringing everything back to itself. Pascal in a famous text of the Pensées saw this with great relevance. “The nature of self-love and of this human self is to love only oneself and to consider only oneself.”
The ego is the individual consciousness attentive to its interests and biased in its favor. The ego is like a snowball rolling down the side of a mountain. The more it rolls, the more snow it accumulates, the more time passes, the more the ego accumulates experience, the more this past weighs on the present. The past of the ego is one with its present.
Cicero considers self-love as an example and model for friendship, which he defines as a commerce with another self (alter idem). There is no shame in having an ego: it is not an incurable disease. Trying to flee from the ego because we consider it negative would only harden it. Agreeing to face it is the way to recognize it and create the possibility of breaking its mechanism. It is very important to understand the mechanisms of the ego.
Thus we will learn how to behave on the spiritual path… Spirituality is not some kind of fantastic journey into which we throw ourselves blindly. It is the fact of understanding in a concrete way what reality is that allows the spiritual journey to begin. Spirituality begins or ends the dominating ego.
It is difficult to identify and analyze the factors of a religious experience, but it is not difficult to observe that such religious practitioners live and carry on as if already in the presence of the Eternal. Believers react to this temporal life as if immortality already were within their grasp. In the lives of such mortals there is a valid originality and a spontaneity of expression that forever segregate them from those of their fellows who have imbibed only the wisdom of the world. Religionists seem to live in effective emancipation from harrying haste and the painful stress of the vicissitudes inherent in the temporal currents of time; they exhibit a stabilization of personality and a tranquillity of character not explained by the laws of physiology, psychology, and sociology. (UB 102:2.3)
A new dawn rises when a human being understands the importance of working on oneself and it is in this light that the seeker of truth is born. It is he who will feel attracted to books dealing with spirituality, for example the Urantia Book… The condition of seeker of truth is perilous. It is a conversion of existence in a quest oriented by the fundamental question: “Who am I?”. We enter here on the spiritual ego which is a sublimated energy of the ego. This ego which acts in a disinterested manner has the secret intention of seeing its own disinterested value recognized under the judgment of others! Altruism is the last mask. Ethical culture provides means to disguise in altruism the desire for recognition that the ego needs to endure unchanged. In truth, authentic love does not expect recognition and true help does not expect to be paid with praise and thanks.
Which is a subtle way of reinforcing the ego. The terrain is therefore delicate and it is of the utmost importance not to relax one’s lucidity. In any conscious initiative the question arises: “in what state of mind am I doing this?”
If compassion prevails, there will be no response, no waiting and the only fact of giving of oneself, without reason, will be present. And we will leave on tiptoe without waiting for thanks. Only free, spontaneous action, without reason, is freed in advance from the grip of the ego. If there is an insistent why and a strong sense of identity attached to the act, it is a safe bet that the dominating ego is still there, in which case, again and again, it must be spotted and brought to light.
Aristotle said: “The friend is another self (heteros autos), and the friendship we have for him has no other reference than that which we have for ourselves”. But the total rejection of the ego can also lead us to self-hatred and self-hatred leads to hatred of others and has nothing spiritual about it. It is the love of the Self that leads to the love of others.
Whatever we may say about the ego, let us not forget that: “To know oneself is to forget oneself. To forget oneself is to open oneself to all things”; “The ego of man and woman are equal”; “The ego is a child’s self”; “Love is empty of ego and the ego is empty of love and that loving others is the true defense of the ego and therefore true strength.”
See also in UB: UB 91:3.5 + UB 91:2.2 + UB 48:6.37 + UB 48:4.15
I don’t want to talk about ME or EGO anymore. It’s stupid, I had nothing else to say, and for a long time. So I’ll keep quiet.
“Dominus sit in corde tuo et in labiis”. May the Lord be in your heart and on your lips.
Max Masotti
| Personal Growth - Arrival Mansion Worlds | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 46 — Spring 2009 | Guten Tag Urantia! |