Today I’ve come across a few posts about the ego. I think the ego gets a bad rap. For me it is simply an interface between the self and the world. Patched together from innate tendencies and our response to experiences in the world as a child.
I frankly find all the talk about dismantling the ego or even ‘annihilating’ the ego tiresome and really quite destructive.
In my view most of us reach a stage in life, if we are lucky, where we have the capacity for reflection which allows us to then actively choose our outward response rather than be purely reactive from outmoded belief systems or pain.
I see this as an expansion which encompasses the ‘ego’ not destroying it.
Part of what we may see as the ego is the survival patterns which have enabled us to survive thus far.
The annihilation or transcendence model has always seemed to me rather violent. And with a danger of spiritual or emotional bypassing. In other words simply pushing aside that which we reject in ourselves
as incongruent with an ‘enlightened’ life which inevitably ends in its being projected onto others.
Or emerging in rather more monstrous form having been consigned to the stinky cellars of our being and locked down there without sanitary facilities for a decade or two.
Those monsters, when fed and watered properly and given a bath or two in some loving awareness can bring beauty and riches to our lives.
A dear friend of mine, whom I still miss, used to recite a poem. I can only remember a line or two. And even with the mighty aid of Internet I cannot seem to find it.
Spare a thought for the monster, for who he might have been.
But for the price of a shower, a haircut and a shave.
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