Free your Ego

Vader: the Shadow within, the masks we use, fear

This post was inspired by this very interesting podcast:

Spirit Science Podcast, Episode 1: The Ego… Friend or Foe??

You can't play your Playstation game without a control pad. In the same way you can't experience life without an ego. You may starve it, flat it, try to kill it, but it will remain until the day we die.

To me it is much more relevant and interesting the fact that most people in general are still holding on to an old paradigm that has brought a lot of suffering and injustice. Why do we continue the harmful behaviour towards others, nature and ourselves? Why the passivity, submission, acceptance of so much corruption and stupidity?

I feel that looking objectively at the nature of the ego, we might get an answer to that. What I mean is, the question should not be:

"What to do with the Ego?" or "Should it be there or not?"

But rather:

"What effect is the ego having in the world?" and "How can it be changed?"

The human being when is born develops a dependant ego in order to survive and learn the rules of the game through interaction with mom and tribe. At some point it was supposed for this ego to "transform" from dependant ego to independent (mature, connected to source/heart/consciousness) ego.

This is a natural process recognised intuitively by some tribes as Joseph Campbell pointed out:

http://soundcloud.com/dreaminginthevoid/joseph-campbell-on-maturity

The death of dependant ego and resurrection of independent ego (connected to source) brings about a reorganisation of the whole human vehicle, most importantly the brain and emotional system. This is Nature answering. This is what is known in some traditions as enlightenment or awakening. If a dependant ego asks questions about existence and cosmos etc, when it transforms into the independent ego, it will get the answer (the language of Nature is intuition, vision, madness, weirdness, emotion) from within. This provides meaning to one's existence, and freedom to engage with life and embrace a path of true learning.

To me it becomes interesting to recognise the pattern, to identify the culprits. The culprits are ignorance of this natural process (resulting from the ignorance of who we really are) and the shadow we have developed as a consequence.

The shadow is a kind of energetic tumour (made up of trauma, fear, repressed memories and feelings, and mainly the pain of self-betrayal) that serves as a substitute for the connection between independent ego and source (higher self, true self, spiritual heart, no-self, the Being, Soul). The shadow forces the dependant ego to maintain it's ignorance and dependency on the connection to the dependant super ego (matrix, society) thus remaining ignorant and a slave to others.

The dependant super-ego (society) is a cluster of dependent egos, and a pattern of human behaviour and ideology which is characterised by it's psychology of dependence, attachment, fear. Thus resulting in the most absurd and contradictory behaviours: consumerism, shallowness, anxiety, stress, violence, obsession with the source of reality, hunger for power, corruption and so on.

Map to Self-Realisation

So the family/society instead of helping the child to become independent and free (connected to source) it will force an artificial process of programming, which consists also in maintaining the child disconnected from source and thus dependant. This I think is when the Shadow starts to take form. Arno Gruen called this process The Betrayal of the Self.

This dependency attitude is transferred from parents to society, the system, ideology, attachment to form, words, concepts, theories. In other words people tend to take refuge in that which is not source: theories, words, desires, addictions, entertainment, speculations, views, violence, in other words everything external to source, the outside world of appearences.

I think this process of transformation of the ego from dependent to independent is of extreme importance for us. But it is not totally recognised and is certainly not incorporated in modern society and its educational system. We have created a society and system that depend on the dependant ego to survive (think of consumerism). But it's a house of cards ready to crumble at any time. And this is what will happen when/if people start to wake up.

All concepts are empty, all words irrelevant in the sense that they can only bring about irrelevancy, speculation and confusion if used mindlessly. Words, language and thought are tools that should be used as skillful and practical means to recognise disharmonised patterns, to reorganise and heal them. Or to be used as means of self-expression (source expression, speaking the God within outrageously) such as art, poetry etc, which in it's own way it is also positive.