For the love of egos
How many New Ager’s did I encounter who said,
oh that’s just your ego, or, oh psychology is useless, it’s just focused on the mind, or, that one guy talking to Oprah who said - the ego has no point and is a barrier that must be overcome to evolve.
I mean, it wasn’t very many because I don’t go around meeting people all the time.
But maybe more than I realize because I did listen to people talking about spirituality almost incessantly, as I obsessively do sometimes with things.
However many people it was, it was a big enough number for me to get very perplexed and keep thinking, huh?
And by the time I came on the scene of an amorphous spirituality that was probably mainly in the camp of New Age, there were already people calling bullshit and writing books about it and pulllling and steeeering the ship back to something more, what shall I call it? I’m not trying to be insulting, but reasonable comes to mind, as well as grounded, as well as sane.
Maybe this is the gift -
I’m calling it a gift because, clearly I’ve already shown I have opinions on the matter, and also because I already went through one harmful indoctrination and the horrible getting out and am so relieved I didn’t have to work my way out of another one, or at least a spiritual one -
of starting with psychology?
Of, for reasons totally outside of my conscious self, waiting to come on the spiritual scene when I did? I’ve often felt like I was kinda slow and dense but in this moment, I’m pondering the fortune of it.
Now when someone says something dismissive about the ego, which is starting to be less and less of the time, I just kinda smile at the thought that you can simply wave away an entire complex system of yourself. It doesn’t matter if you consider the ego the “small self” or the “lower self” or wherever it fits down there in your hierarchy, the ego is a significant part of us. In order to move “beyond” our ego - to grow into a mature spirituality where our spiritual and human realities collaborate more and more intimately - we have to be well in our ego. Since I don’t really even use the language of ego, I would say it this way - that to embody a really expansive spirituality, we have to be well in our humanity. In our psyches, in our bodies, in our relationality with other humans.
Direct the flow both ways - spiritual wisdom supporting your trauma recovery or work on your relational style or whatever, and your human container supporting your fuller and fuller spiritual expression - and I think you’re headed somewhere really great.