What do you think when you read the word ‘ego’?
The ego is often seen through the eyes of judgment, whether it’s perceived in psychological terms as meaning ‘bigheaded’ eg having a ‘big ego’, or seen in many spiritual communities as something that is the cause of all our problems as humans, something to be blamed, judged or transcended.
When I typed “why is the ego” into a search engine, the first three options that showed up were:
why is the ego bad
why is the ego evil
why is the ego negative.
The commonality of this belief speaks for itself, doesn’t it?
Here’s the way I see the ego:
(As a given, I respect your perspective if it is different to mine! As with all my posts about language, I value each person’s history and experience with language, and what we each choose to speak.)
The ego is the identity that develops as our Soul comes into relationship with the family, culture and time we are born into. It is like a vehicle for the Soul in the world.
The way I see it, so many of the things that are deemed ’negative’ (I would say ‘unhelpful’) are not inherently caused by the ego, but rather are the result of particular cultural beliefs and experiences that the Soul comes into relationship with. Cultural beliefs of the Disconnected Domination Culture (DDC).
It’s not the ego that creates all the pain that people to ascribe to the ego. That is caused by the DDC that the Soul grows up within.
Not everyone with an ego has a fundamental belief in, and experience of, separation.
There are many indigenous peoples who lived, and live, within a deep embedded sense of interconnectedness.
Belief in right and wrong, good and bad, is also not a fundamental aspect of the ego.
Jeremy Lent, in his book, “The Patterning instinct” talks about the original perception of the split between spirit and matter, and the belief in ‘good’ and ‘bad’ that happened about 3.5k years ago.
There are cultures in the world who do not perceive people in this way.
Some cultures developed a belief more akin to yin/yang rather than good/bad.
Marshall Rosenberg, founder of Nonviolent Communication shares about this;
“The tribe I have had some contact with is Orang Asilie tribe in Malaysia….my translator … pointed out his language has no verb to be, like [you are] good, bad, wrong, right. You can’t classified people if you take away the verb to be. How are you going to insult people? You take away ninety percent of my vocabulary! So I say what are you going to say if I say “You’re selfish”?
He responded, “It’s going to be hard. I’d translate it like this: Marshall says he sees you are taking care of your needs but not the needs of others.” He says, “In my language, you tell people what they are doing and what you like them to do differently, it would not occur to us to tell people what they are.” He then paused and he looked at me in all sincerity and said, “Why would you ever call a person a name?”
I said you have to know who to punish. Punishment is a totally foreign concept in these …. cultures. He looked at me and said, “If you have a plant and it isn’t growing the way you would like, do you punish it?” The whole idea of punishment is so ingrained in us that it is hard for us to imagine other options. It is totally foreign to people who haven’t been educated in domination systems culture. In many of these cultures they look at people who hurt others this way: they are not bad, they’ve just forgotten their nature. They put them in a circle and they remind them of their true nature, what it’s like to be real human beings. They’ve gotten alienated and they bring them back to life.”
To me, so much of what is blamed on the ego is actually the result of the key beliefs of the DDC.
Why is this an important distinction?
If we believe our ego is somehow ‘bad,’ then, since the majority of us develop an ego, then, we are saying as human beings we are ‘bad.’ And that really is the foundation of so many religious and spiritual beliefs – that our true nature is ‘evil,’ our bodies are ‘bad’ and that ’spirit’ is somewhere else than here, in our bodies, in ourselves, on this planet.
I prefer to see that human beings are innately loving and willing beings.
We may believe we are separate, we may act in ways that are hurtful, we may learn to judge, but in my way of seeing things, these are caused by love-hurts and will-hurts which are created from growing up in the DDC.
Love-hurts are where our innate interconnectedness isn’t honoured, where our love-needs such as closeness, connection, attunement, belonging and compassion aren’t met and where our feelings of grief and loss in response to those are not lovingly heard.
Will-hurts are where our uniqueness isn’t honoured, and where our will-needs such as choice, autonomy, agency, respect for our noes and our yeses, and encouragement aren’t met and where our feelings of frustration and outrage in response to that aren’t lovingly listened to.
The more we receive accurate attunement for our Soul as a baby and child, the more that the personality or ego that we develop is an accurate reflection of our Soul.
The less accurately our Soul is seen, because of the conditioned and hurt filters of our parents and our culture, including separation, judgment, shaming, coercion, and all the other things that are a part of the DDC, the less our personality/ego is a clear reflection of our Soul.
The more there is a gap, the less we we feel a sense of authenticity, interconnectedness and agency in the world (Soul, Love and Will).
The wonderful thing is, that we can support our personality/ego to become a clearer reflection of our Soul; a less opaque and more transparent vehicle.
When we are truly seen by others who are less conditioned by the DDC, our love-hurts are heard and we develop an increasingly accurate perception of ourselves, an increasingly compassionate inner dialogue, and we release the shaming and judgment we internalised growing up in this culture.
We still have an ego, but we feel more deeply interconnected with others and with all of life, and more compassionate with ourselves and others.
As our will-hurts are heard and our yeses and noes are supported, we increasingly free up our willingness channel, which means we can make increasing choices and action based on our innate knowing rather than conditioning around ’should’ and ‘have to.”
We still have an ego, but we have less and less willingness to coerce ourselves or others.
In this process, the ego/personality becomes a clearer reflection of the Soul, and we become more identified with love, we feel an increasing sense of compassion, interconnectedness and belonging.
We haven’t transcended our personality; we’ve supported it to reshape so it more accurately reflects who we really are.
As we increasingly identify with our Soul, with love and will, we can increasingly love all the parts of our personality, including the hurt younger parts, the parts that needed to internalise harsh ways of thinking and the processes that needed to happen so that we could belong, be safe and be loved.
As we become more identified with our Soul, we become more and more compassionate and grateful towards our personality, and all that it did for us as we were growing up in the family and culture that we did, rather than something that was ever ‘wrong’ or ‘bad.’
This process continues, as the locus of identity becomes increasingly based in the Soul (love and will), whilst we are able to function lovingly and powerfully in the world, thanks to our personality/ego.
Over time, we become more and more loving, more present, more compassionate. We judge ourselves and others less and less. All the qualities ascribed to the ego lessen, yet we still have an ego, a sense of our unique and separate self, whilst also feeling increasingly interconnected with all that is. We haven’t got rid of our ego. We’ve simply experienced reparenting and reculturing.
I wonder if this resonates with you?
xoxo