The Evolution of Ego

 

A French man by the name of Piaget was very much interested in the evolution of children. He did a great study on children for a number of decades. One of the aspects he discovered that I thought would be apropos for where we are is the following.

 

“The infant believes that the existence of physical objects is contingent upon his motor activity or his perception. Only at the end of this stage does the child undergo a miniature Copernican evolution and conceive of himself as merely one entity in the universe of permanent objects. Egocentricism marks the child’s early transactions with the social world as well. He cannot conceive of other persons holding viewpoints different from his own.”

 

So, Piaget claims the child is about seven years of age before he is capable of having a true discussion with other children thereby indicating that he has grasped the idea that there are other points of view.

 

Another interesting gentleman that I’d like to connect these two with is a man by the name of Eric Fromm. I stumbled upon Fromm when I was in college. I was pretty much enthralled with a book he wrote called The Art of Loving. This is taken from it.

 

“The experience of separateness arouses anxiety. It is indeed the source of all anxiety. The deepest need in someone then is the need to overcome separateness, to leave the prison of aloneness. Every one of all ages and cultures is confronted with the solution to one and the same question. The question of how to overcome separateness, how to achieve union, how to transcend one’s own individual life and find at one-ment.”

 

I think those two are connected. The ego by its very nature loves to seek and attach itself to what it finds. Don’t blame it. It has to do it by its very nature because when it comes into the world, it is empty. You’ve got to fill it up. Nature abhors a vacuum and the ego surely does. And so you see the child reaching out into life, testing, tasting, touching and the child builds a relationship with objects and people and thus when that object is moved away from his perception, he doesn’t think it exists and that’s painful. So, the attention the child displays towards the world at large is very important because it says this is who I am. And you know when you take the food away, the toy away, the person away that the child wants, boom, he’s in a fit of distress.

 

And then as Piaget points out the child begins to realize I’m not the causation of things out there. They exist independent of me. Now that’s a major growth advance to recognize that things are there whether I acknowledge them or not. That means the child has to now revise in consciousness his whole concept of personal identity. Because personal identity was in direct relationship to everything around and now while they’re still there and I’m still here I recognize that thing out there doesn’t depend upon my acknowledgement.

 

Then there must be the advancement that, you don’t agree with me. You see it from a different angle. Suddenly this is an enormous expansion, a generosity in a sense, where the mind recognizes that I can hold a point of view, but it may not be exhaustive. It may not be comprehensive. It may overlook other dimensions, aspects, not that I’m deliberately ignoring them, I just didn’t perceive them. And this is also part of the excitement for the child because now the child is on the path of education. To learn that there could be more than one point of view that doesn’t abolish the one I hold nor diminish it in any way. It doesn’t mean that there is no such thing as truth. It means that I can be holding truth from my perspective, but another perspective could be equally holding truth, and this also can be a fascinating inquiry by the child. And then you begin to understand the manifold display of sciences. How the mathematician, the chemist, the physicist all looks at the same reality from different points of view and they’re all equally true within the borders of that perspective.

 

But as we grow up, we tend to forget that. Because in our enhancement, discovering who we are, we tend to hold very tightly to our opinions, to our judgments, our point of view and instead of seeing the possibility that someone could disagree validly, we assume that our point of view, like the child before he reaches seven, that’s not possible. Only my point of view is supreme. Others just don’t exist. And that’s always the danger. That is the biggest danger in meditation.

 

Typically, when one learns meditation they are an adult. They tend to be probably about three decades in this global universe, thirty or more, that’s been my experience. Now you’ve been building up and filling in that ego, you’ve learned to get experiences in the everyday world, and you’re reasonably confident in how to carry yourself out and you’ve managed to survive and perhaps profit a little bit and then you meditate. The ego has a puzzlement here because the ego can’t follow you into meditation. The ego has to as it were step aside and it doesn’t want to. So, it will keep throwing things up at you. Heh, remember this? Remember me? Because everything that flickers up in meditation has got the ego logo on it. That’s part of you and in the act of meditation you have to renounce, you have to let go. You are very much like the child who has finally reached seven and recognizes that there is more than just the realm that I have investigated with my adult ego.

 

At the same time you’ve been filling up this space called, ‘I want to be not separate.’ So, you’ve built up a whole series of relationships family wise, career wise, individual hobbies, pursuits, aspirations to constantly show yourself that you can preserve yourself by fostering these relationships in the world to prevent feeling separate. You seem to always discover that there is never enough. No matter how much I establish my identity in the world, there is always more I can go and develop, I can learn, I can experience, I can try this out. Again, that’s fine but down deep for some people it begins to be a very anguished pursuit because they begin to see that they are only temporary because that’s what the world is. There is nothing out there that is permanent. It’s only temporary. It eventually fades. And so by the ego establishing itself in terms of what surrounds it, it begins to recognize me too. I’m temporary. That creates that terrible distress inside that Fromm talks about, this existential anxiety. Nothing can fill it in because nothing can last. I am impermanent too. Well, if I’m impermanent, I’d better get everything I can while it lasts. That same ego now walks into meditation. In the act of meditation you are asked to renounce. You’re fundamentally saying I am not the ego. You are not condemning it. No, you don’t do that. You are simple saying I am not the ego.

 

And so we begin to enter this next experience as mentioned here. The author’s name is Patanjali. Yoga is the control of the thought waves of the mind and then one can abide in his or her true nature. At other times when you are not in the state of yoga you remain identified with the thought waves in the mind. And if you put a substitute for thought waves as ego, you’ve got it.

 

We are all pilgrims on a journey. We keep running in and bumping up against the instinctive reaction of the ego to say, “This is it. This is mine.” And so there is friction right away. We catch ourselves in the act. We must learn to kind of dance with that. At first people want to abandon everything and go off to the real estate of the Himalayas. I’m going to be a great yogi, take my money, take my chocolate. Take everything. I mean how extreme can you be? Then you get, “Oh, that’s not quite right because yoga says middle path. Good I can hang on to some of that Nestle.” So, then you realize that it’s not the abandonment of what attracts the ego, it’s not the abolishment of these engagements with the world, it’s learning to control it. So, the act of controlling the thought waves literally means the control of your actions too, the fruit of the thought wave. So then in my effort to reorder my life as a meditator I begin to exert this flexible, intelligent, control over my entire lifestyle. Then my life in the external world balances with my internal aspiration of meditation. They are not in conflict. The ego is still preserved but gradually I recognize that its function, although exceedingly important in the world, steps aside when I explore my inner life. And that takes a while to get used to and it’s not easy. Because you will be testing in different directions, usually going too far or too little and finally finding a rhythm in which you can maintain a very strong ego, and I mean that, a very strong one, but not one that just, as it were, falls in love with itself. If you don’t have a strong ego, the world will overrun you. That’s not being yogic. So, you need that strength, that three-dimensional sense of identity in the world to deal with the world. We live in a very, very competitive, consumer-oriented world. It would just love for you to surrender everything to it. That’s not the way you grow. So, you must balance that. Each one of you so it in your own inevitable way, how to maintain the nature of the ego in an orientation that recognizes there’s something more important beyond it. Your tools are there to help you in that, especially meditation.

 

The ego is very strong in focusing on what it wants. That’s one of its values and that’s what you need. Meditation while it also will present to you what you want, takes a slightly different focus. There’s an expansion of awareness that occurs rather than a narrowing of awareness. You need both so that you can eventually bring into the realm of the ego in the external world, that breadth of perception that meditation engenders in you. Now you’ve got the two coming together and that’s called yoga. They join. So, no matter what mystical visions you may have one day, however many realms of transcendence you may acquire, you still need an ego. As long as you’ve got this body, as long as you’re on this plane, you’ve got to have an ego.

 

There are some spiritualities that go too far in trying to extinguish the ego. They will talk that way. Be careful. See them in the context that they are written in. You have to recognize what you are in this embodied energy. To put it down in some way lessons who you are. Your full nature requires the presence of that ego in good operational activity. So, it’s a balanced approach. It’s learning to keep all the components that keep our person functioning.

 

That’s the way you finally overcome the sense of separateness that Fromm talked about. You connect with the very source which provides all the vitality, the intelligence, the aspirations and in connecting with that inner source all the loneliness, the separateness fades because you are home. You have joined now to that everlasting, unblemishable resource within, the very core of your being. That is a very gradual inkling that opens up. It comes and goes at first. But gradually it starts to stabilize however faintly. So, there’s a stability that’s rendered now to the individual and their actions become more and more consistent with that inner union and stability that’s starting to be an abiding experience. In our tradition it’s a growth process that you slowly work through by bumping up against the world not by withdrawing from it.

 

And there is a gradual then acceptance of all the unevenness of the world, instead of a fighting it and wishing it wasn’t this way. I’m not saying you put up with unfairness. That’s not what I’m saying. But the unpredictable-ness of daily life, the unexpected, it doesn’t take you down anymore. I’m ready for the full catastrophe. It comes and you’re ready to run with it. In this way then you keep your course. You’re not forced to veer off by unexpected turmoil. You know there is something in you that can never be disturbed no matter what chaos is going on around me. And it’s that sense that starts to grow through the fostering of meditation. And that’s what can get you through the dark moments. We’re all going to have them.

 

What is very helpful is that as you get more and more united to the inner life that you have always and never lose it, there is a tendency to be more spontaneous with life because you put down your guard. You know you are getting stronger. You don’t create folly. You just don’t need to be concerned with such a threatening way. You realize, “Whoa, I can handle myself. I don’t have to be crazy about risking everything. But I can handle myself.” As a result, you are going to respond more to life instead of screening it through your defensiveness. When the good ideas come, it is very important, very important for you to act upon them. That’s why they came. Freud saw the unconscious as a cauldron of danger. Yogis see the unconscious as an opportunity to grow. So, the thoughts that come up will bubble up in you that makes sense, act upon them. See where that takes you.

 

I was at a Christmas party in England some years ago and I was unique because I was the only Yankee in the room. That’s always fun with a bunch of Britishers. I had recently been interviewed, and my picture was in the paper because of the holistic health center we had was the first one they had in London. We got all the notoriety, Prince Charles endorsed us so we were the cat’s meow. So, at the Christmas party a young man came up to me. He had recognized me from the picture in the paper. He said, “Boy, I would love to do what you do. I really want to take my career and go that way.” I swung around to him and said, “Well, why don’t you?” I’ll never forget his reaction. He stepped back like this. “Oh no, oh no.” So, I called him on it. Look at that tug. He had a great idea, he recognized and no doubt he had talent, yet he backed away. And so he stays in that kind of tug. “I’d love to do it, but…” Where is the ‘but’ coming from?

 

So, in learning to grow into that inner union, examine your ‘buts’. Find out why they’re there. If you’ve got a really good idea and suddenly there’s something that putting the brakes on. Why? Is it really coming from common sense or is it coming from another direction? Because remember the force of the ego, the first law of the ego is protection, meaning don’t change. Stay the way you are. Whereas the force of the spirit is expanded. Swami Rama said, “You are a nucleus and the universe is your expansion.” It doesn’t have time to put up with the petty ego.

 

Whereas the spirit says what else can we do? What else is there to explore? So that little tug in you will be there. That’s what meditation is for, to give you that strength to move with the idea that you have, the aspiration that is rising up and coming back and saying, “Why don’t you try this?” So, this is an ongoing adventure; this is the ongoing drama of all meditators. We all have to do this in varying stages, and it keeps on going.