In previous writings, I’ve referred to the ego many times and in various ways. I’ve defined it as an identity, an illusion, a mental construct, and an organizing principle. I’ve described it as the gatekeeper of the subconscious, the wielder of defense mechanisms, and the source of all suffering. I’ve also declared that it’s rooted in fear, and that it’s a veil superimposed on our consciousness, which obscures the recognition of our divine essence and the true nature of all things. And these statements are all accurate. Here-now, I’d like to expand on these points by delving deeper into the ego’s origin and purpose, its stages of development across a human lifespan, and its core attributes. I’ll conclude with a look at how we can win release from its hold.
The Beginning
To fully comprehend the ego, we’ve got to start at the very beginning. At the dawn of existence, there’s no time, no space, no experience, no thing. There is only formless void, an unlimited plenum of pure potentiality, out of which each being and possibility will eventually appear. This source is pure consciousness – infinite, eternal, indescribable, imperturbable spirit – One without a second. In this Oneness, the unblemished spirit has no awareness of otherness, and therefore no awareness of selfness. For spirit to know itself, it requires contrast – awareness of something beyond itself. As Lao-Tzu expressed in the Tao Te Ching, opposites are essential for understanding. This means that, in its primordial existence, spirit is pure awareness unaware of itself.
Then, from the pristine void of unaware awareness arises a most peculiar thing: an impulse to know itself. In God Speaks (which inspired much of this writing), Indian Avatar Meher Baba coined the term “original infinite whim” to describe this event. Such impulse, or urge, he said, is the ultimate paradox, the mystery of mysteries. How can unaware awareness be aware of its unawareness? How can something that is whole, complete, and unmoving have any impulse or urge at all? And yet, this unfathomable whim is what surfaces from within absolute consciousness. Why? There’s no satisfying answer, only that it’s its nature to do so.
But there is a caveat. Being perfect consciousness without any awareness of otherness, there is no ability for spirit to know itself; no objects to compare or contrast with, no faculties to reflect through, no experiences to absorb. So, it devises an ingenious solution. It creates the illusion of many so that it can experience being the One, it creates the sense of separateness so that it can see its own inherent unity, it creates the impression of form so that it may comprehend its formlessness, and it creates the concept of limitation so that it might discover its limitlessness. Effectively, through the idea of pairs of opposites, spirit forgets so that it can remember. In other words, consciousness veils its true nature to facilitate its own realization.
The Evolution of Form
And so begins the journey of Self-realization. Splitting itself off into myriad sparks, or souls, each with the full power and potential of the whole, consciousness-spirit condenses into thought, then energy, and then matter, which is the furthest it can possibly get from its source. In truth, the soul never leaves home, it only appears to do so. Nevertheless, each spark begins its voyage as a seemingly most-separate, most-limited, first-conscious physical form – forgetting that it’s the cause of its own amnesia.
Starting from this ontological primitive, each soul-spark evolves across aeons of time through successively advanced physical forms, slowly approximating its return to the source. To give a rough sense of just how long this is, spiritual teacher Ram Dass illustrated:
Do you know how many times we have been born and died? Remember that story, Buddha says: If you take a mountain six miles long and six miles wide and six miles high, that’s the distance a bullock walks in a day. And a bird flies over the mountain once every hundred years with a silk scarf in its beak and brushes the tip of the mountain. In the length of time it takes the scarf to wear away the mountain, that’s how long you have been doing this.
With each distinct manifestation, the dissociated, finite consciousness gathers an infinitesimal unit more of awareness and experience, providing an incrementally cumulative glimpse of its intrinsic being. Beginning with the most rudimentary, minimally conscious material forms, the soul makes its way into the mineral kingdom, where it experiences itself as solid and inanimate. Then it enters the plant kingdom, where it expands its self-knowledge to include both inanimate and animate experience. Next it joins the animal kingdom, expanding its self-awareness as a fully animate being, steadily increasing in voluntary movement, sensation, feeling, creative survival strategies, and cognition.
Eventually, the soul becomes human, inheriting and inhabiting a psychosomatic apparatus that significantly increases its self-awareness through the introduction of meta-cognition and additional powers of perception. Equipped with a mind, heart, and body, as well as a subtle body furnished with a fully-formed chakra system, the soul now has the proper instrumentation to experience its divine Self on all four dimensions – spiritual, mental, energetic, physical – which together comprise the entire spectrum of vibratory reality.
To poetically summarize this, Sufi Mystic ‘Ibn Arabi said: “God sleeps in the rock, dreams in the plant, stirs in the animal, and awakens in man.”
The Emergence of Ego
However, while the soul in human form now has the potential to realize its true nature, it cannot do so at first. With each passing moment, the soul gathers innumerable diverse experiences and impressions from daily life, always with the unseen goal of knowing itself in its full glory. But being new to the human body and with limited awareness, the soul struggles to handle the full energetic impact of powerful thoughts, feelings, sensations, and perceptions. Put simply, it’s not able to fully acclimate to its new form.
In response to these highly variable and overwhelming experiences, the ego emerges as a natural development from the organism’s innate survival impulse. Said another way, the ego is formed to help stabilize the fluctuating and immature self-reflective awareness, and can be likened to a protective shell. Just as a seed’s shell shields it during its early stages of growth, the ego helps stabilize our awareness in the chaotic early phases of spiritual development. Out of necessity, the ego materializes as an outward-facing organizing principle within the psychosomatic structure to help maintain equilibrium and balance in the system.
For the first time in the soul’s long and arduous travail of Self-discovery, here is a sophisticated operating system that can process and categorize the influx of sensory information, leading to a more centered and steadied experience of life. Now, instead of stimuli flooding the nervous system without any instrumentation for assimilation, the ego program – through the inventive formulation of a magnetic ‘I’ mental idea – can integrate the vast quantities of sensory input and organize it around a single nucleus: a sense of self. This results in the creation of psychological defense mechanisms, which allows the fragile psyche to filter out what is inappropriate, unimportant, and intolerable. Consequently, this sifting capability divides the mind into two components – conscious and subconscious – the latter being where the ego stores uncomfortable and unprocessed information. This new ego begins to label objects and divide reality as it is perceived through the five senses, which assists in the decision-making process. By helping the soul-consciousness comprehend its environment in a new way, the ego makes living much simpler and easier.
Yet, due to the power and effectiveness of the egoic mechanism coupled with the shallow capacity of awareness from being a young human soul, the spirit-spark unknowingly becomes identified with the ego – hooked by its hypnotic conceptual web – convinced that this is its core being. Basically, the ego becomes an inverted facsimile of consciousness, or as Spiritual Master Paramahansa Yogananda put it: “Ego is the pseudosoul, described also as the shadow of the soul.” Said another way, the pure spark of awareness comes to falsely believe that it is a distinctive mental entity with likes, dislikes, desires, aversions, beliefs, labels, judgments, and a host of unique experiences, the memories and energies of which become stored in both the conscious and subconscious minds, all revolving around the illusion of a limited ‘I’ and its mirrored counterpart, ‘not I.’ From this division arises the delusion of separateness, from this separateness arises fear, and from this fear arises suffering. Through the formation and employment of defense mechanisms, the ego becomes the gatekeeper of the subconscious mind, utilizing fear and suffering as a motivator to preserve the internal division. And in a cycle of both creating and dispelling suffering, the ego keeps itself relevant and intact.
Thus, the ego materializes out of a basic need for solidity and reference points in an unpredictable world, which is inherent in the soul’s original whim to know itself. The ego emerges as a critical scaffolding for the young consciousness so that it can anchor in four-dimensional reality, experience itself in a digestible manner, increase its self-awareness to the extent that it can handle, and succeed at the game of life.
The Wheel of Reincarnation
And on and on it goes… The division created by the egoic center perpetuates, and the subconscious mind continues collecting unprocessed mental and emotional impressions, which become lodged in the soul’s subtle body and are carried after death into the next incarnation.
From here onward, the soul is trapped indefinitely on the wheel of reincarnation, ensnared by its identification with the egoic construct and its subsequent attachments to objects of perception. Its only way out is to work backward (that is, inward) to unravel the egoic epicenter, first by dismantling the defense mechanisms, then by processing the unresolved subconscious karmic impressions. Once these impressions are resolved, and the soul’s awareness capacity has increased to the proper extent, the individualized ‘I’ artifact spontaneously dissolves into the universal ‘I’ and the soul-spark triumphantly returns to its source, merging like a wave into the ocean of all-encompassing consciousness, knowing that it never left.
…continued in Part 2…