Into The Mystery Podcast Ep. 6: Ego 101

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38:20

Into The Mystery Podcast Ep. 6: Ego 101

by Rishika Kathleen Stebbins

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In yoga and spiritual practice, we speak often of “dissolving the ego,” but what exactly is it? Contrary to popular usage, it’s not simply having an inflated opinion of oneself. Ego is instead a stealthy opponent whose goal is to outmaneuver us on the path and preserve itself at all costs. We take a look at its components, drives, and eventual resolution.

Meet your Teacher

Rishika Kathleen Stebbins

El Sargento, B.C.S., Mexico

Meet your Teacher

Rishika Kathleen Stebbins

El Sargento, B.C.S., Mexico

Transcript

You're listening to Into the Mystery. Today we're exploring that nemesis of spiritual practitioners everywhere, The ego. What is it? What does it want? And what is it like to begin to experience ourselves without it? We hope you enjoy. So what should we talk about? We're going to try and talk about ego again today. Alright, That pesky little critter. Well, I think we were going to start perhaps talking about the fact that so many people misunderstand what ego actually is. Well, There's so many things that the ego is. It's understandable because our mind tends to seek one good solid definition and talking about the ego involves a lot of different aspects such as in one sense the ego is made up of defenses. In one sense the ego is made up of that basic I sense or identification with the body or identification with one's belief systems. I think we typically use ego more in the sense of … Well, I think we tend to equate narcissism with ego and in my experience and view they're not the same thing at all. The ego to me is much more basic than our narcissistic or lack of narcissistic activities. Like a lot of people will say so and so has such a big ego. Well, Usually what that means is that the person is narcissistic but each and every individual has an ego and if it's examined I don't know that it has any size big or small at all. Right. I mean to be fair all of us are narcissistic to some degree. Absolutely. Because when we're talking about the ego that it is that I sense, Fundamentally the I sense that we've been building since birth since we first began to perceive ourselves as a separate quote unquote individual in a separate body and then began to add the layers of definitions that we typically think of when the mind needs to relate to a sense of me or a sense of I. So that in a fundamental sense is what the ego structure is but there are many, Many layers to that and many definitions that we pull in relationship to the dynamics and the people and society that surrounds us as well. Well, You know Freud was the one who really made the usage of the term ego so prominent and in his vernacular and in – was it German? It must have been German. I think so. It simply means I or the I sense but what Freud described the ego as, He described it as the bridge between the conscious and the unconscious and if we start to examine the ego as that, The link between our conscious experience of self and our unconscious, The way that we play out certain patterning unconsciously, Then the notion of ego becomes a very dead dynamic and vast subject to explore. Yeah, It almost becomes this sort of template in which you can impose whatever happens to be bubbling up from the unconscious and allow that to interact with what's coming in from the outside as well. That's funny you would bring up Freud because I was thinking about Freud this morning as I was preparing for this talk. Well in that he had divided self I guess into three levels which were the superego, The ego and the id and in spiritual speak you could kind of equate the id with I suppose the shadow self and the ego as the I sense, Superego as the higher self. That may be an oversimplification but that's kind of the way I think of it. Yeah, I would make one clarification on that in that the id is more representative of our instinctual animal self as opposed to our shadow self and the reason I make that distinction is because the shadowy parts of the human being can exist at any of the levels, Our instinctual, Our emotional, Our mental. Well the id itself is a massive subject but if you look at the ego as what tries to navigate between the instinctive, Impulsive, Animalistic self and the societally structured self in the superego then the ego is sort of that it's what tries to navigate the position between what my desires are, What my impulses are, What I want, What I need and what the greater sense of humanity or society needs and so the ego is always trying to monitor, It's always trying to navigate that difficult dichotomy. Yeah, Because there's always a tension there and the ego is kind of refereeing this and that tension is palpable in the body at times when you find yourself in a position where the id wants something, The instinctual drives and we were going to talk about drives too, The instinctual drives are pushing us in one direction and whether it's a societal norm that's being challenged or some other rule that we may have made for ourselves or some kind of expectation of behavior in our family or tribal structures, There can be that enormous inner war going on that's being navigated. You named it. That would be maybe the easiest way to actually articulate what the ego is. It's a tension. It's tension. Interesting. Yeah, It's the sense of tension, It's the sense of contraction into a separate distinct entity that has to preserve itself. Yeah, That's exactly what it feels like. Yep, In deep stages of spiritual work, At a certain point the ego is encountered as just that, A certain kind of muscular or even a tension on the skin, The surface of the skin, A sense of boundaries and containment. Oh, That's interesting because that calls in the sense of an inner pressure that I think often leads to or precedes a great leap in spiritual growth because there's the inner force in us, The Shakti, That always wants to expand and that can feel like it wants to go in a lot of different directions. And the ego kind of has to step in and control that power in some way. Tries to, Yep. Tries to, Yeah, Tries to manage it because it's a huge power. I mean, When you really get in touch with that inner furnace of creativity, I guess might be one way to describe it, But it could be all kinds of things. It could be anger, It could be whatever dynamic you're working with, With the shadow self, Etc. Well, And therein lies that tension around controlling the impulses of the instinctual self. It's not only this tension, But it's a very specific attempt at control, Controlling the life force, Controlling energy. Or Freud would have spoken of it as controlling the libido. Yeah. If I find myself in a situation where my higher self or my natural ego or my natural self-expression wants to take me in a way that's in conflict there, It's almost as though I'm battling against an entity within myself or maybe even outside of myself, Depending on how you perceive that. So, I don't know, I guess I'm thinking in terms of the context of religious practice and so forth, That the more forcefully you hold to an idea of yourself as someone who presents in a certain way according to the rules of your religion or whatever your ethical practice happens to be, The tighter that tension and the more explosive the consequences if there's a deviation from this sense of self. Does that make sense? Yeah. And so, Why spiritual practices rarely work, Because the ego in its employment of spiritual practices only seeks to achieve its own aims. And so, There's an intrinsic frustration built right into spiritual practice, Which is you're trying to get something, You have a motivation to achieve certain desires, Specifically the desires for preserving yourself and enhancing yourself with pleasure and comfort and approval and status and all of those things. And so, Built right into the spiritual practices, If they're good, Is something which will innately defeat the ego, Because its aims will never be met. So everyone who enters spirituality enters with a cloak of spirituality which disguises their egoic agendas. And until those egoic agendas become revealed through spiritual practice, There's very little actual maturing or development that goes on. Right. Because the ego cannot see itself from its own self. Well, Let's talk about for a moment the drive for enlightenment, Just because it's the sort of the blanket term associated with spiritual practice. What does the ego want enlightenment for? Why? Why should one want enlightenment? What's the benefit of that? Because there appears to be a personal advantage of some sort for the ego to be able to think of itself as superior in some way to someone who's not in a state of enlightenment. I think that's where it starts. That would be the drive for status. The other would be that it's going to provide you with this constantly good feeling of pleasure and comfort all the time. Yeah, And a relief from that very tension that we've been talking about. Being freed from this need to navigate all those internal conflicts. Right. Well, And the difficulty in it is that we can't be free of them until we understand them. Right. And the ego hates that. Right. Because it just wants … It's a sneaky little entity, Because on one hand it's trying to get rid of itself by trying to accomplish the impossible. Right, Right. It's trying to like pretend … Well, Yeah, You're right. Sneaky is a really good word, Because it's trying to do an end run around itself to enlightenment, And it simply can't be done that way. Right, Right. And there's always some ego motivation or ego ideal or goal that is hidden there within its gestures, Within its … Even just taking it outside the work of spirituality, Just self-improvement. What do you want to improve yourself for? For what? For what reason? You know, And if you boil those down, Often you will find that those motivations are simply concealed forms of id-like behaviors. Yeah, I think there's a couple of things going on there as far as self-improvement goes. I mean, On the one hand, You know, We're trying to … You know, If we're talking about physical fitness, For example, We're trying to improve the physical form in order to be more attractive maybe, Which is trying to pursue that need for physical pleasure, Et cetera. But I also find that that's a real sneaky way that the ego anchors itself in time because it's always deferring itself into the future. Like I'll deal with you after I've dealt with all these other things, And you can like go your whole lifetime putting things off and waiting to get to that place where, Okay, Now I'll finally deal with my inner self and my inner issues because there's always something else you can fix in the meantime. Yeah, And exactly. It gets at, If you play out the whole spectrum of your desires, Aims, Goals and motivations, What's the final result that you're after? What is it you're really after? What do you really want? And if we can get honest with ourselves about that, We have a chance of understanding what drives this thing we call ego. Well, Let's talk about what the ego wants then. I mean, Ultimately, Just the primal drives or is there something specific that ego is after? If we speak of it in a more metaphysical tone, We could say that the ego is trying to achieve realness. Because on some level, The ego is aware that it's not real. Yes, Hence the defenses. Yeah. So if the defense is against the ego feeling like it or discovering that it does not in fact exist. Exactly. Silence is the result. There's really nothing that follows that, Is there? I remember this terror though. I remember in my own practice, I remember coming up against this over and over again, Especially when the dark night of the soul stuff began to arise, Was this feeling that I have been in service to this non-existent entity for my entire life. I have been finding ways to support it, To enhance it, To defend it from other people or forces that I felt were threatening, And it's not even there. That was such a profound disillusionment, I guess is the best word. I just felt so duped by that. Because society is built to support the things that the ego wants. The entire advertising industry is an ego support and in fact, Seems to increase what the ego wants or thinks it needs. Right. Well, One of the things that advertising specialists know well is they know what desires the ego has specifically. Much of marketing and advertising in general is based on just the amplification of those desires. Yeah. Right? With the hope and the promise that if you can achieve these desires, You will find the golden life you're looking for. Yeah. And then there's that moment of hope when you buy something or you buy into some new concept and you're like, Okay, This is going to be the thing. Maybe this time. Maybe this time. I'll be on the real side. In our previous conversation, You and I talked about the ego as an arrested development. If you look at the egos within the ego structure, This desire to be real, There's something about it. That's quite well articulated in the story of Pinocchio. There's a desire to become real and that is genuine, But the desire to become real is very different than the motivation to preserve oneself or enhance one's pleasure or to become well accepted or approved of amongst one's peers. That's a very different drive because to be real, It's a whole different kind of motivation than the motivations that run our lower drives. The desire to be real is a desire to experience oneself authentically from the inside, Whereas the desire to look for approval from outside is ultimately going to disappoint because you can accumulate all the wealth and status and whatever else you value or your social circle values and you can have all that. We can point to plenty of examples in entertainment or politics or anywhere else of people who seem to have achieved everything the ego wants and yet you can see that there's an emptiness there and there's a huge … Exactly. It's a lie. That emptiness is what our lower motivational factors keep us from experiencing and so they keep us chasing after things that we think will fulfill us. There's a great little book by Tolstoy, I think it's called Confessions. Have you heard of that one? No, I haven't. Well, He wrote it at the height of his fame where he was basically the wealthiest man in Russia. He was well known pretty much throughout the world or at least through all of Europe and he was absolutely miserable. What made it unique is he articulated that he basically had gotten everything he possibly could have wanted and yet he was absolutely miserable. I think it's only then in the dissatisfaction which we could probably associate for most individuals with middle age, The dissatisfaction of those motivations when they come to a peak that we begin to realize, Oh, I've been living a false life. I've been chasing false desires and they haven't provided the promise that I was told existed in those pursuits is simply not true. It's not real. So at that point, A person has this choice to devote themselves to becoming real in some way. I think there's also when you come to that point, Whether it's articulated to oneself or not, But there's the underlying acknowledgement that death is coming. That death is something that we – as long as we're pursuing all those other things, We're not really seeing or admitting to ourselves that everything is temporary. This body is temporary and it really doesn't matter what we add to it. It's all going to come to an end. But once you come to that sort of disillusionment and a midlife crisis or whatever happens to come along with that, Then you're forced to really look at the fact that the body is temporary, That my accomplishments will ultimately vanish. Boy, That's a stark moment. Sobering. It's sobering. If we use that sobering moment well, It will lead us to the – basically it leads us to something like this – pursuing all these temporary things is a waste of my life force and I'm here to accomplish within myself something real and good and true. If we use that disillusionment well, It will lead us on a path to seek the truth within ourselves which ultimately leads us to universal truths. And that is what you could say is that's the potential within the ego. That's where its development could go if it were supported properly, If it were encouraged in the right direction. Right. Which would require a completely different societal setup than what we currently experience in Western culture. If an individual is interested in being real and true, Since we don't have the societal structure that supports and encourages that, One will have to find an individual or a group that is going to foster that and help cultivate that realness within oneself. Right. Because we don't really have any good examples, Hardly any, When we look at our society or what we can find through media and such to say, Oh, That's an example of what's real. That's an example of what's true. That's an excellent point. Yeah, We don't have the role models for that. Most of our role models are long dead. So the ego basically, This is why I say it's an agent of society because it's simply replicating everything it sees around it and not only replicating it but trying to win the game of it. So it resorts to violence, It resorts to competition. I'm not even against competition but the way in which it utilizes it to try to make itself real is problematic. So as we begin to dismantle the ego, As we begin to see all of its distortions and misconceptions about what we truly are, Those features of ego sort of pile up for a while. You were talking about the momentum of personality one time and I had this image of a freight train that kind of followed you through your life of all these ideas that you've drug around about yourself and suddenly maybe we have an awakening or we have some kind of an essential experience that interrupts that. And all that wreckage kind of piles up all of a sudden and we have to spend some time sorting through it. And when you get to the bottom of that pile and there's nothing left but space and awareness and if we're lucky, Love, There ceases to be a quote unquote I that the mind can relate to. Like when I try to think about myself, I don't have anything to point to anymore. And this is a very, At least in the beginning, A very strange place to be. To me it feels kind of floaty, Kind of, And I'm not saying I feel this way all the time, I mean when I function in the world I still kind of have a quote unquote me but there are times when I feel like, You know, I don't even exist. There's just this sense of there are pictures and there are sensations and impressions that come through the sensory apparatus but you know the me that is experiencing this is in a way not even here. Now whether that's the same thing as identifying with essence, I'm not entirely sure. It feels like almost a kind of a mental purgatory to me. A sense of being in between the two. Well there's two parts that I see where one is yes, As the dismantling. Okay so let's go back to your original statement, The pile up. If we've spent our whole life moving in this particular momentum, The moment that one decides to stop that momentum, All the thrust of that energy forward, All the inertia will be felt within one's being and that can be overwhelming if you have a lot of freight behind you. But it is the beginning of something significant which is the dismantling. I won't even say the dismantling of the ego. Let's call it the dismantling of the false self which will reveal eventually exactly what you're talking about. That there's this centerless existence where all sense of false self has simply vanished and yet there is still something which you accurately called essence that is here even when that center has dissolved. Now the piece that I think is missing and this is often missing in spiritual literature too and most spiritual paths is that there's actually a development that follows that where essence can be recognized as an incarnated. What we idealize in someone like the Christ or the Buddha is somebody who has realized themselves as pure being, Pure essence and yet manifests that in individuated expression. That's why we have this sense of purgatory because we've undone the false center within ourselves but we haven't quite established that individuated expression of being yet. That's a difficult transition, One that takes most individuals, I would guess it takes the average individual 10 years if they're sincere, 20 years if they're average, 30 years if they're a little lackluster and it never happens at all for most people. Because it's a development to, There's a lot of subtle processes that we just simply don't have time to speak of here in this conversation but there are ways in which when the ego is allowed to dismantle, It does reveal as you said space, It does reveal awareness, It does reveal love and those core attributes of our being become the new structures that replace the old fearful structures and they become the very incarnation of being. That's what's pointed to by Christ's resurrection is he's resurrected in full accord. Yeah, Well that'll be something for a future episode I think because yeah, I've wanted to talk about how the resurrection has been misinterpreted. But staying on the track of ego, That's such a subtle thing you just said. So incredibly fine in terms of the idea of essence then beginning to create structures of its own or manifest as its own expression in the place of the ego? Yes. Okay. Yes, Which is totally, You can see that that is, I'm sure you're already sensing that, It's completely outside the motivations of ego. It has no such motivations of any kind that way but it does have its own manner of motivation such as, One way to look at it is the motivation to serve, The motivation to express, The motivation to create, The motivation to share, The motivation to forgive, To love, To empower. Ah, I had not seen that before, Thank you. We had initially intended to talk about motivation today and where motivation can come from when it's not coming from ego. So that was a nice segue and that is something that people ask me frequently if I'm talking about ego in a class or something is, Well what do you do without an ego? How do you get anything done? Why would you want to get anything done? Don't you just end up sitting on the couch and I don't know. And such people, They're asking the wrong questions. The question isn't why or the question is how you get things done because when you get things done in presence and with the full magnitude of your being behind them, It doesn't matter whether you're planning a trip, Doing your work at the office, Washing the dishes, You have this sense of connectedness and profoundness with whatever you happen to be engaged with. And I think that that's the thing that's invisible from the point of view of the ego's motivations because it's only after self-preservation, Pleasure and status. It doesn't understand that there's a whole realm or region of motivation outside of those immature drives. Or let's say, I don't want to call them immature, Those undeveloped drives. That would be like saying, Well, Once Buddha got enlightened, There was no point in him living anymore. And that represents this kind of nihilistic thinking that goes along, Especially in Buddhism, Where the idea is that when I dismantle my ego, There will be no further reason to live at all. It's just all pointless. Well, You know, And you can certainly point to people who have just given up worldly life entirely and sit around stirring at flowers growing or things like that. And an ego that has not dissolved completely yet is going to look at things like that and say, Well, That's unacceptable. Well, There's some hint of truth in that too. I would say that those who end up simply removed from the world staring at flowers, Living in caves, They've only partially developed themselves. And the Sufis refer to that latter development as the pearl. And they refer to it as something that is developed by your rigorous and conflicting contact with the world, That you need that rigorous and conflicting contact in order to develop yourself all the way. I think there's something even intuitive when we look at the person staring at the flower and say, Hmm, Doesn't seem to be quite right. Yeah. Okay. Well, That's fair. I mean, I was kind of thinking of it from a different angle, Which is, You know, That is still attached to that idea that the ego exists purely to serve its traditional needs. Well, It does. Yeah. And then without that, Then we'll just simply be blobs of consciousness floating through this. Right. And if you look at that mindset, It is the ace card of the ego. It basically says, Without me and my motivations, Your life will become empty, Meaningless and hollow. And most people just simply buy into that bluff. But it's a bluff. Yeah, It is. You're right. That is, It's ace in the hole is just to say that, You know, You need me, You think you don't, And it will express itself in innumerable sneaky ways to convince you of this that you may not even be consciously aware of. Yes, Indeed. You know, Such as just a sense of pointlessness. Well, Nihilism, I guess, Is the word you used, And that's accurate. Why do anything? Right. From its point of view, It's kind of correct, And there doesn't seem to be a point to any of it. And what it doesn't realize, Though, Is what it doesn't know. And that's where the juice is. That's where the meaning and purpose of life are, Is beyond where the ego can see. It's like beyond the horizon. Do you think there's a point where the ego, And I mean, We need our practices to find that point beyond the horizon, To get through the purgatory and find ourselves in the place where essence can then take over? Well, I would say that the practices are more for exhausting the ego motivations. That's how I would describe them. That they're actually to facilitate a quickening of the dismantling process, As opposed to bringing us somewhere. I guess what I was trying to say is there's an element of, We could call it faith, That needs to be invoked until we can experience the other way of being in the world. Because the ego, Or the mind can't quite believe in it until it's been experienced. I once heard a statement that I think fits in really well here. It said, You have to believe in order to see, And you also have to see in order to believe. And it's a perfectly paradoxical statement because it describes, It's an answer to what you're saying. You don't get the glimpse of what lies beyond the ego without some kind of belief or faith, Or maybe a better word is trust. And yet you can't really trust without a glimpse. And so there's this instantaneousness about your trust and your glimpse that they actually occur within the same, I can't even say at the same moment because that would imply time. They happen in the same moment outside of time. Not to be too esoteric in saying such. No, No, Absolutely. I totally get that actually. And this is perhaps why the mind has such a hard time because the mind is built to separate them, Separate the seeing from the believing and vice versa. But when we can allow that openness of thinking or maybe an absence of thinking so that those two can be the same thing, Then that opens up the space for that experience. That would be one way of another way of putting this is that what we're trying to cultivate is a truly, Truly, I want to qualify that, Truly open mind. And that's what you see in the shamans, The mystics, Those who do glimpse truth is they have an extraordinarily high degree of openness or open mind. And I don't mean that in the usual way that that phrase is used, But it also represents this capacity in some sense for observing abstractly. In other words, That the more a person is attached to their facts and the reliance on material reality, The harder time they will have in trusting this glimpse of something that can't be categorized by the mind. Words necessarily condense meaning into these very kind of rough approximations of reality. And so to the extent that we're even relying on words to describe this experience, We're going to fail. Exactly. Well, And you can see from that point of view why people would be interested in trying psychedelics or would want to receive Shaktipat from a guru because if we haven't gone through the work of cultivating a truly open mind, Which takes really hard work, There's the sense of needing something that will do it for you, Something that will open your mind for you, Something that will dissolve your defenses for you. Now, Of course, Shaktipat or psychedelics, They're only a temporary solution to that. One still has to develop one's true openness and availability to truth. Yeah, In a sense. I mean, We were talking earlier about the ego trying to do an end run around itself to get to enlightenment, But in a sense you have to do an end run around the ego and then come back and confront it head on to see where it's been lying to you. And that takes a great degree of self-confidence to understand that that's not going to be a harmful thing to your sense of self, Ultimately. I mean, It can be threatening in the moment, I guess, But you have to understand that this is why people adhere so rigidly to their opinions of what reality is. Because that's where our sense of security for our sense of self is rooted. And so to actually begin to dig into those things, Question them, Uproot them, Whatever it needs to be, All of our inner work that needs to be pulled up and our thinking style, That is a leap in cognitive operations that's kind of quantum. And this is why we have, Especially the Course in Miracles articulates this well, But this is why we have the notion of surrendering to God. Because the ego can't find a way to destroy itself. Everything it does to undo itself simply creates more of itself. It's the, What's it called, The Ouroboros? It just creates more of itself. And if we, You know, That's the snake eating its tail for those who don't know that term. So the ego arrives at that moment of irrational trust and radical truth seeking where it's very gestures to give itself up. Yeah, To give itself up. And that's the irrational leap into truth or into God. You know, I once used it, It's a terrible analogy, But I think I'll share it here. We were talking in Course in Miracles one time about ego dissolution and dismantling the ego. And we were talking about it as truth being a kind of bathtub full of hydrochloric acid. So the ego starts on the journey. It puts its hand in, It puts its arm in, It puts its other arm in, It puts its head in, Puts its torso in. And what you're left with in the end is a foot that can't get itself in. It can't take that final step. So in other words, We can dismantle ourselves in lots of conscious ways, But there's a way in which we can't finish it off. And so there's that, I call it irrational trust. There's that irrational trust in something which will perform that for you, Something which will come as that final kiss goodbye. And I don't mean that final kiss as some event in time as much as a finishing gesture which allows the ego to realize finally that it is impotent, That it has no power of its own. So this poem is by Mary Oliver and I think that it's called The Journey. And I think what it describes well is this period that we all have an opportunity to encounter in our lives where we realize that a transformation, A transmutation is needed and speaks to this humbling and exalting experience that happens as we confront our egoic limitations and endeavor to, Well as she says, Save our life. Again it's called The Journey. One day you finally knew what you had to do and began. Though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice, Though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. Mend my life, Each voice cried, But you didn't stop. You knew what you had to do, Though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, Though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough and a wild night and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, As you left their voices behind, The stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds and there was a new voice, Which you slowly recognized as your own, That kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, Determined to do the only thing you could do, Determined to save the only life that you could save. Mmm, That's lovely. That's good. Powerful. Thanks for listening to this episode of Into the Mystery. We hope you gained something useful. If you'd like to learn more about our work, You can go to our websites. Mine is at adivadra. Org, A-D-I-V-A-J-R-A dot org, Or visit rishikas at interdimensionalyoga. Com. If you have questions or topics you'd like to hear about in future episodes, Be sure to drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks for listening.