This is an AI transcript of an interview by Lawrence Castilia with George A. Boyd, founder of the Mudrashram Institute for Spiritual Studies on how the ego functions and why it is so misunderstood.
Lawrence: The Conscious mind is one of the four primary areas of consciousness you've mapped, and these include the Conscious mind, the Subconscious mind, the Metaconscious mind, and the Superconscious mind, which is where things get especially interesting. Before we go through each level of the Conscious mind, however, I think we should begin by discussing the ego, which you identify as the integration centre of the Conscious mind.
In an article that appeared in Psychology Today titled, ‘What is the Ego and Why is it So Involved in My Life’, by Dr. Mark Leary, he states, “The term ego is as confusing as any in psychology. Not only is the word itself used to refer to several distinct psychological constructs and processes, but the psychological landscape is littered with concepts that include ego in one way or another. Egotism, ego defence, egocentrism, superego, ego involved, and so on. But what does ego actually mean? What are we talking about when we refer to the ego? What is the difference among all of the terms in which the term ego is embedded? Put simply, the English word ego is the Latin word for I. Literally translated, ego means I. If you were writing I love you in Latin, for example, you would write ego amo te.”
In modern spiritual discussion, ego is usually not used as a neutral word to describe the I. That is, ourselves as individuals. The ego is generally described in negative terms, primarily as a barrier or obstacle to overcome. Here are a few quotes that illustrate this.
"You can either be a host to God or a hostage to your ego. It's your call." - Wayne Dyer
"The ego is not who you really are. The ego is your self-image. It is your social mask. It is the role you are playing. Your social mask thrives on approval. It wants control and it is sustained by power because it lives in fear.’" - Ram Dass
"There is inside all our heads the ego's rabid attack dog. It is purely vicious toward others and toward ourselves as well. Learning to control that dog and ultimately to end its life is the process and purpose of enlightened relationships." - Marianne Williamson
"More the knowledge, lesser the ego. Lesser the knowledge, more the ego." - Albert Einstein
Lawrence: That's an interesting one for me because he's essentially looking at knowledge as the path to higher consciousness…or maybe he's just saying that smarter people have less of an ego.
"When every thought absorbs your attention completely, when you are so identified with the voice in your head and the emotions that accompany it, you lose yourself in every thought and every emotion, then you are totally identified with form and therefore in the grip of ego. Ego is a conglomeration of recurring thought forms and conditioned mental, emotional patterns that are invested with a sense of I, a sense of self." - Eckhart Tolle
"Complaining is one of the ego's favourite strategies for strengthening itself."" - Eckhart Tolle
"When the ego dies, the soul awakes." - Mahatma Gandhi
Lawrence: The ego is discussed in less than complimentary terms in most cases and in others people are basically saying it has to die. Why is there such a negative perception of the ego? What is making people so upset about this thing we call the ego?
George: Well, the first thing we need to understand is that the ego is a complex. The ego isn't like a little entity or something, it's a complex. It has several different functions. The first function of the ego is an integrating centre of the Conscious mind.
Imagine the hub of a wheel. This aspect of the ego integrates your experience of the waking state of consciousness, your grounded state. It integrates what's going on in your movement and body position awareness. It brings together your awareness of what's going on in your senses. It brings together your awareness of what goes on in the deep body awareness centre, feeling centre, mental centre. It also ties in your life experience, it ties all these together.
It also has the function of what we call the egoic octave of the will, which governs individual behaviour. Whereas the aspect of will that's in the Metaconscious mind, can look forward many, many steps in the future, you can make a long-term plan. ‘I want to get a degree in accounting in college.’ ‘I have to take all these classes.’ ‘I have to make all these steps that are required for me to do that.’ Whereas the ego is in the present time and it is aware of one individual behaviour, pick up the pen, put down the pen.
The next layer of the ego has to do with the different areas in your life. This is the way you project your desires and you say, this is what I'm doing in these different areas of my life. I might have certain desires for my career and certain desires for my finances, certain desires for my relationship. There's an organizing function of the ego. We tap into that level when you start monitoring the ‘I am’ statements that come up within your consciousness. I think one of your quotes was a reference to these ‘I’ statements.
We talk about where people have these desires, these expectations in 12 different areas of their life. You're continually processing, thinking and processing about these different areas. I guess people divide these 12 areas in different ways. I've written a lot about this in my book, The Primer on Practical Meditation in Daily Life and Education.
A person might be processing about, how do I make a little more money this month? How do I manage my budget this month? How do I communicate better with my spouse or partner? How do I help improve my health? You have certain desires that you want to do. Another aspect of the ego might be, well, I really want to travel and I want to see Germany. I want to go to Germany and travel throughout Europe. You have these desires that the ego is thinking about and certain things might remind it of that. This aspect of the ego is a functional part, just as the integration centre is a functional part.
Another aspect of the ego, which also is functional, is ‘life remembrance’ or your ‘life narrative’, which is your experiences about your life. You think back and say, ‘well, five years ago, I did this and I did that and I had this bad thing happen to me. But you maintain a narrative of your life. We often say self-esteem is based upon whether that life narrative is generally positive as opposed to, I have a lot of bad things that happen to me. I don't feel real good about myself because, I didn't accomplish a lot. I didn't do things that I'm really proud of. I had these bad things happen to me. I got sick.’ This life narrative is your story, it's your story of your life.
We all tell a certain story. What we tend to do, something psychologists have noted, is that we tend to emphasize the positive and kind of minimize the negative. We don't really talk about our failures. We don't talk about, stuff that happens to us that isn't flattering. It's like a resume, right? You don't say, Ok, my boss chewed me out because I did this in the job. No, you say ‘I implemented a solution that allowed us to sell, $300,000 worth of new widgets’. We talk about the good stuff, not the bad stuff. We do tend to filter what we disclose to other people through this life narrative.
These three are, for the most part, positive aspects of the ego. They're not negative aspects. We might emphasize certain aspects of our life, to say, oh, I'm so successful and I'm doing really well. It's like when people go to a high school reunion, they're always going to say, oh, I'm so successful. I'm happily married, even though you argue with your wife every night. That is an aspect that you notice in this positive aspect of the ego. But it's not it's not negative. It isn't harmful.
It's this fourth level that a lot of the ego psychologists and the psychodynamic psychologists talk about, this layer of defences. The defences are there to distract people from painful issues. Beneath these layers of defences (and if you read the diagnostic and statistical manual, they actually itemize these layers of defences), some layers are functional. Like humour as being a defence, or altruism, helping other people. Below these are the really primitive ones, like denial and projection on other people.
These defences are trying to keep you away from areas of pain, which brings us to the next level of the ego, which Carl Jung called ‘The Shadow’. This is typically the level that most people are raging against. In it, you have your issues of anger, your issues of depression, your issues of blaming other people. These issues can entify; they can become sub-personalities. And using specific techniques and certain types of meditation, you can actually interface with them.
There are techniques from psychology and also techniques from meditation that we introduce in our classes where you can actually work with these issues that are in the Unconscious mind. This is a very different way of looking at this dark side of the ego than they might look at it from a religions perspective. For example, in the Christian church, they say, ‘human beings are sinners’. They don't see that the ego has functional, beneficial elements. Instead of saying ‘you have a lustful sub-personality’, they say “you're filled with anger and hatred”. They're pointing out this dark side. And a lot of spiritual groups, they only point out this dark side of the egoic nature, which is this shadow.
In the spiritual teachings of the Western esoteric schools, they speak of the ego as being the ogre on the threshold, which means that you have to guide your attention through this gauntlet of all these sub-personalities that are pressing to have their desires fulfilled, to take out their anger on somebody, that think that life is not worth living. It's this aspect of the mind that a lot of spiritual groups tend to target. That's the way they're seeing the ego. They're not seeing the functional parts of it. They're not seeing the whole thing.
Lawrence: Aren't people simply using the word ego or identifying the word ego with parts of themselves that they don't like, and then compartmentalizing the stuff within the word ego so they can then dissociate with that part of themselves? ‘Well, that's not who I really am. that's my ego. And of course, I'm working on that. I'm going to destroy that part eventually and get to the good stuff’.
George: You can put it that way. That kind of looks like what they're doing. They're trying to dis-identify from those aspects of their nature.
Lawrence: It seems like these noted people, these spiritual teachers that I just quoted, they're describing the ego as something that's entirely separate from anything positive. Where are the boundaries?
George: Transcending this zone of darkness and pain and all those negative things is an aspect of the ego that we call the egoic seed atom. Now, a gentleman by the name of John Bradshaw, who did a lot of work in recovery, talked about something he called the wonder child. And despite all the trauma and the pain and the anger and the unfulfilled desire that's in the shadow, transcending this is this very joyful aspect of your nature where, you just live in a world of beauty. That’s part of the ego too.
Jesus said, ‘those that enter the kingdom of heaven become like a little child’. This is a very childlike aspect of your nature. It delights in squirrels and the birds and seeing the rivers and looking at the beauty of people, it's a very beautiful state of consciousness, it's just one step beyond this area of pain.
Finally, the deepest layer of the ego is what I term the spiritual ego. This is a big one because what happens is that people will identify with a particular essence. That essence might be what we call the moon soul or Christ child, which is the state of identity that people experience when they're focused in the level of the higher mind we call the first initiation. But what can accompany this is a very subtle aspect of the ego that goes along and says, ‘well, I'm so much better and purer, and those sinful people, they're all going to go to hell, but I've been saved and I'm so much better than other people. I'm part of an elect group and I'm just so wonderful’.
Whereas a lot of spiritual traditions talk about humility, recognizing your place before the infinitude of the divine, this subtle aspect of the ego makes people feel superior than others. Or in the other case, especially if it's let's say that it's a spiritual group in which people are doing transformation and one person moves ahead on the path before you, so you start feeling jealous of that other person and you say, ‘well, there's something wrong with them because, there's no way they could gain those powers and those abilities and that knowledge and they get the special favor of the guru and I don't get that’.
It's very subtle, you see it in a lot of spiritual traditions, even people who are supposedly very, very advanced on the path, you see this subtle egotism at work. In some ways, it's a pernicious aspect of the ego, part of the dark side, because it tends to inflate, your perception of yourself. This moon soul or nucleus of identity, as we call it, is really a neutral aspect of your being. It acts as a place where you can commune with the Holy Spirit. It's a place where you come to pray - like an inner altar.
Lawrence: People don't understand that there's more than one aspect to the ego. I'm going to refer here to an article of yours. You have an article, "Reflections on Eckhart Tolle", and you write, "When Tolle speaks of the ego, he paints a picture of this essence as malevolent, devious, manipulative, and the source of all human ignorance, misery, and pain. This is an accurate portrayal of the ego, as many people experience it in one of its postures, the shadow, but does not capture the other six postures of the ego, which are not entirely evil, as Tolle depicts." You then go through these levels, which you call ‘postures’. The seven postures of the ego which you identify include:
the embodied ego,
the operational ego,
the developmental ego,
the defensive ego,
the shadow,
the egoic seed atom,
and egoic subtle identification.
I'd like to go through the seven postures of the ego, which you've mapped using your descriptions.
Let's start with the first one, which you call the ‘embodied ego’. This is the structure or chakra system of the ego in expression. These chakras include the waking state of awareness, that's the feet centre, movement awareness, that's the base of the spine, sensory awareness, that's the navel, deep body awareness, that's the solar plexus, emotional awareness, that's the heart, rational mind awareness, that's the throat, egoic will, that's the point between the eyebrows, and the sense of identity surrounded by the 12 areas of human life, and that's the brain centre.
"The egoic will in this context is the ability to initiate individual units of behaviour. For example, tie your shoes, stand up straight, walk over to the counter, and pour a glass of water. The 12 areas of human life comprise the zone of the operational ego, which is the second posture of the ego. At the level of the embodied ego, you intuitively experience the present time at each of these centres."
Is this the chakra system that you've identified here as the structure or the body of the ego, the same or different than the chakra system most people are familiar with, which is depicted in spiritual art?
George: One of the things that we teach is that for each form or vehicle of consciousness there is an individual chakra system. The chakra system that is portrayed in the yogic tradition, are the chakras of the Cosmic man or woman, and these correspond to the reflection of the physical body, physical universe, astral body, astral universe, individual causal body, causal universe, the ideational plane (which appears to be the source of creation for all the other six levels), and then the seventh chakra, the brain chakra, is the state of God realization, or as they call it, supreme self-realization, which they call Brahman.
Lawrence: The context you identify for this posture, which you call the embodied ego. Is this chakra system, which you're calling the embodied ego, the true nexus of the ego, is this essentially the centre of the Conscious mind?
George: There are multiple centres that comprise the ego, it's not just this one thing. It is your ability to take in sensory information and then to perform behaviour.
If you see a dog running at you that looks like it's very upset, you take in that information through your sensory field and you say, ‘run!’. You make the decision, I need to run, because I don't want to get bit by that dog. This is kind of the viewpoint that is an analogy for the model of the central nervous system that basically takes in sensory information and then performs behaviour. Something takes place in that intervening space within the central nervous system that allows us to make decisions about what we need to do. This is analogous to that. The physiological-psychological model is the correlate to that.
Lawrence: Do the other functions of the ego hang on this structure?
George: They utilize it, they're focused on something else. It's the foundation, without an embodied ego, you would just sit there and you would be a thought machine and you wouldn't be able to move, you wouldn't be able to feel, you wouldn't be able to think, you wouldn't be able to perform behaviour. they could use you for statuary in your garden. It's a foundation. It's like, we talked about the chariot. It's a thing you ride, a thing you drive, to move in the physical world.
Because the conscious mind is in the present time, then you're relating to what's going on in the present time at the level of this embodied ego or integration centre. If you notice that, ‘oh, I didn't turn off the faucet’, you say, ‘oh, I need to, you go over and you turn it off’. You react to things that are going on in the environment at the current time.
Lawrence: It's kind of sensing, viewing what's going on and then reacting accordingly.
George: That's the behavioural aspect of our will. It just does one thing at a time. You learn a behaviour and you're able to do that. Unlike the Metaconscious mind, it doesn't plan things out to reach a goal. For example, in your career you do a lot of behaviour over many years. You do a lot of behaviour to get a college degree, to marry someone and raise a family. There's a lot of behaviour in that. You have to plan out the different aspects of it and then react to the changes that happen. That's at a higher level of consciousness, a higher level of mind.
I want to make a distinction between that because the ego per se doesn't make plans. It simply says, okay, I'm going to do this behaviour, that's what it does. When it decides, okay, I need to do this. Sometimes if the ego gets a crazy idea and says, I need to do this, then that deeper level of the mind, the self and the conscience will say, that's not a good idea. Stop.
Lawrence: Regarding the second posture of the ego that you've mapped, the operational ego, you write, "this is the constellation of identity that captures the roles the ego plays in your life. These are mapped into 12 different areas, which while each individual may label these categories and organize their contents differently, the general structure of 12 areas appears to be a stable component of the operational ego"
The 12 areas are:
1. the physical body,
2. vitality and health,
3. emotions and relationships,
4. home and family,
5. education and mental development,
6. career and avocation,
7. finances,
8. social life, such as recreation and social activities with friends and family,
9. civic engagement and community involvement,
10. cultural experiences and travel,
11. ethical foundation and values,
12, spiritual, religious or philosophical life.
You write "in the operational ego, you experience the ambition to improve yourself and to attain what you desire and to strive for what you want". Essentially you have described the majority, if not all aspects of human life in this list of 12 areas. Would you say that without the ego, none of these core activities of human expression can occur?
George: If you don't have a desire, you're happy to sit like a pot. People can plant flowers in you. Desire is the motivating function. Your desire forms the core of motivation.
"I desire to make enough money so I can keep a home over my head and take care of my family". That's a desire that motivates you to go and work. If you don't have that desire, you can be completely happy being a homeless wanderer, receiving whatever food that somebody wants to bestow on you.
Lawrence: The context you're describing for the operational ego is motivation and desire and you're stating that the ego's nexus of desires is arranged in these 12 areas through this operational posture of the ego. When we talk about our various desires, to eat at a certain fine restaurant in Paris, to go on safari, to find our soulmate, to be successful, to have children, are these desires all focused through this centre?
George: In other words, this is what you experience in your life as to what you want to do with your life. If you have no desire, essentially, you've abandoned your life. You probably live in an altered state of consciousness.
Lawrence: If we have these type of desires, essentially, they're found within the ego and specifically through this posture of the ego.
George: This is where you're able to operate and say, ‘okay, this is what I want. You do thinking and processing at this level and when the intensity is enough, the deeper aspect of your nature, which is the self, can plan the steps to actually achieve that, take hold of it, and then you're able to actually make that real in your life.
Lawrence: in some spiritual writings they say the ego is filled with desire and now you're saying, yes, the ego is filled with desire. Now, is this a bad thing?
George: Well, it depends on what you want in your life. if you don't want anything in your life and you just want to dwell in the higher realms and be in a state of bliss all the time and be desireless and basically, sit under a tree, you don't need desires, but if you're planning to achieve something in your life, you want your life to mean something, if you want your life to produce something, to achieve something, then you need some desires.
If you look at desires, some of them are just frivolous kind of things, and some of them are, important things, and some of them are really core things. We often say, identify what are your core desires. What are the things that really animate your life? Give your focus to that, work on those core things. For many people, that might be, ‘I want to find a partner and I want to get married and have children’. ‘I want to study and move into my career and, make enough money to take care of myself, but then to save for my retirement’.
These core desires are the things that animate your life. If you don't have core desires, you are an empty, hollow shell.
Lawrence: Regarding the third posture, the developmental ego, you write, "this is the state of identity that develops over time and progressively integrates and identifies with a broader range of capabilities and abilities. These range from the highly dependent infant to the capable independent adult, to the caring parent, to the individual who can look out for the welfare and issues of the entire world. This is the experience of where you are in your life in your life right now and the capabilities you have developed. For example, you draw upon this level when you summarize your education, your work experiences on a resume."
It sounds like this aspect of the ego maps and records how we change and mature through our human life, is that correct?
George: The more experience you have, the greater the additional abilities. When you're maybe five years old, you learn to ride a bike. By the time you've finished elementary school, grade six, you have a grasp of mathematics, have some knowledge about the world, you're becoming a better reader, you understand language better. As you continue to grow and develop, you gain additional skills that you have available to you. This gets to the point where you could use those skills ultimately to be a great force for change in the world. You look at a lot of the people who are movers and shakers in the world, they've gone through this process of development and they reach these levels.
I also talk about this level in that this is also our life narrative, the way we tell our story of our life. Sometimes people will tend to emphasize the positive and minimize the negative because they want to show themselves in a good light. This being said, it's a mirror of the skills you learn. The skills, the knowledge, the ways of learning to relate to other people.
Lawrence: This basically forms our life story, which is part of our identity, the experiences that shaped who we are today. Why would you want to kill our identification with the things we've done, our accomplishments, our most memorable experiences? Isn't this what the people who say the ego must die are advocating? They essentially are looking at our identification with our past as a hindrance or evil.
George: What you see in a lot of spiritual groups is they will give a person a spiritual name and they say the ego is false, it's illusory, it's a hindrance. You need to keep your attention focused on this higher aspect of your mind all the time and be this holy and virtuous being that is a vessel of love and is able to talk about the spiritual path that you're on and might have certain spiritual abilities. They tend to emphasize that, they focus on that. But when you're totally focused on that other level, you're not functional. You have to be able to use your experiences, your abilities, your understanding of social relations to function in the world. If you're totally focused all the time on that spiritual essence, your ability to function in the world atrophies.
Some of the bad stuff that happens with this, and we see this all the time because I've been working with people since 2006 who start messing with spiritual techniques that change their awareness and they have these strange energetic phenomena that happen to them and they're not able to function. What we see happens when you do that is you start to experience what's called depersonalization. You don't have a sense of any personal identity. Your life seems unreal, which we call derealization. Then the other aspect is disidentification where you're no longer identified with your life. It's just kind of happening like a phenomena, somewhere far away from who you really are.
What we see is that for the most part, people who get into that state of consciousness are not able to fulfil their desires. They're not able to achieve things in their life. Maybe they're making progress as they unfold towards the inner spiritual horizon, move closer to it using transformational methods, but they're abandoning their life. When I used to work as a drug counsellor, I worked with heroin addicts. I remember one of the counsellors, would be sitting with a heroin addict who would be basically, lying to him and telling him all kind of strange stories. This counsellor would look at him and say, "get a life!"
If you indeed are incarnate, if your soul is incarnate, you should have a life. The objective is not to abandon your life. Your objective is to make your life as productive, effective, helpful, revolutionary, if necessary, as possible to change the world. Because you have lived, the world becomes a better place. Please don't abandon your life.
Lawrence: The spiritual teachers that are calling the ego an illusion, they're asking people to abandon their ego. They are telling people to abandon their life story. How else are we going to measure our growth as people, as individuals, except by looking at the past? The past is a really important piece, the past is embedded in our life, in our life story. We say, okay, this was a good experience, I learned from this, this was a harsh experience, but, this is how it changed me. Even though it's centred around this ‘I’, this ego, it does have inherent value.
George: Yes, indeed. Well, I often tell my students that if the ego was not supposed to be there, the creator, you believe in a creator, would not have put it within the layers of your mind. It has a purpose. you have an organ in your body, you have a spleen, okay? If there was not a purpose for the spleen, it would not be there. The ego is supposed to be there to help you live in this world.
Lawrence: Do you think that the new age teachers that are vilifying the ego, basically miss the boat?
George: You have to think about what their objective is. They want to get people out of the Conscious mind, they want to get people up into the state of consciousness that they're advocating that people dwell in. It might be the soul, it might be the moon soul or Christ child nucleus of identity, cosmic consciousness, the seed atom of a of a super cosmic path, the spirit on a transcendental path.
Their objective in doing this is to try to break people out of attachment to the ego so they can ascend as their attention and awareness to gain union with that higher spiritual essence. That's the reason they're doing it, but in doing that, by vilifying the ego, by making people hate their own ego, reject their own ego, they're not doing people a service, you know.
I often say the ego is like a puppy, it's got to be trained, it's got to be domesticated. Now if it's not trained and domesticated, then it creates problems. But if you have a highly functional ego, you can be a positive influence, not only in your own life, but in the life of your family, your community, your nation, and the world, and the planet. You can be a positive influence if you train and cultivate the ego to be the instrument it was made to be.
Lawrence: For the fourth posture, the defensive ego, you write, ‘at this level you attempt to maintain a positive image of yourself. This might be construed as keeping up a positive self-concept to preserve your reputation and honour, or to adhere to an ideal image of yourself, your ego ideal. When you are criticized, attacked, or belittled, this defensive ego generates excuses, rationalizations, arguments, and a series of defences to protect your self-concept. This defensive armor can be stirred to protect any area in which you feel weak or vulnerable, and may be extended to defend not only your reputation, but also to your possessions, your family, your job, your membership in different groups, and your values and faith.
This ego posture could easily be cast as negative. However, in war, defence is pretty important to keep from losing what you have. Is that what is happening here?
George: The defensive mechanism, the mind, is protective. It depends on what you are identified with. If you're identified just with your own individuality, your own body and ego, your conscious mind construct of you and your life, if you're just defending that, then you have defences that are protecting your reputation.
If your footprint is larger, you're taking care of a family, then you're protecting your family. If you're identified with a larger group, you're protecting your group. If you're identified, with the community of the city, you're protecting your city. Ultimately, that goes to protecting your nation. Think about those who dedicate their lives to serve in the military. They're saying, I'm not only going to protect my own skin, but I'm going to protect the people of the nation.
This protective mechanism can be positive, it's appropriate to attempt to protect the possessions you need to do your work and to take care of your family. We take out insurance to try to protect from financial loss. There are positive aspects to protection and then there are the negative aspects of protection that we typically associate with the negative balance of the ego.
Lawrence: So, the context of this posture of the ego, you describe as psychological armouring. These are the layers of defence that protect you from experiencing painful or shameful memories. Many therapy practices seem to be targeting this defence mechanism and trying to get past this armouring to a deeper, more truthful perception of our actions, events, and character. Would you say that that's the case? They are targeting this aspect of the ego?
George: That's correct. Especially the psychodynamic schools of therapy, ego psychology, they want to get down and take on these defences until they get down to the core issues or pain or wounds that are in the shadow.
Lawrence: You have to move through this posture, which you call the defensive ego, in therapy to get to the next posture, which is number five, the shadow. That's the posture you say Eckhart Tolle is keyed into, and you write:
“The shadow is the unconscious level of the ego and comprises the unconscious defences that keep these painful and shameful aspects of the mind out of awareness’. These unconscious mental patterns drive human obsession, craving, and suffering, and may appear to act autonomously outside the control of your volition and intention. Many spiritual teachers, Tolle included, target this aspect of the ego and promote spiritual practices such as mindfulness, being present, and remaining in the present time to overcome the suffering. When you tap this level, you experience identification with your suffering, fear, shame, anxiety, or depression.”
You describe the context of our shadow as our core psychic wounds, and these are the painful and shameful unresolved issues that form the content of our shadow. Can this material ever be completely resolved, or are we always going to have a shadow whether we choose to acknowledge or deny its existence?
George: It is possible to resolve issues that are in this shadow. In our tradition, we refer to these elements of the mind that operate autonomously from will and intention. We refer to them as destiny karma, or we also use the Sanskrit term pralabda karma. It is possible over time to work out these issues. We can say that the relative shadowing in your life decreases as that occurs.
Let's use the example of a person who is addicted to cigarettes, and they spend many years of their life having to spend their money on cigarettes. They're having health problems, they're pretty much having to spend extra money because their clothes smell like cigarette smoke, and they have to do extra laundry, etc., etc., all the negative things that come along with the cigarette smoking. They get down to the bottom of, ‘why am I smoking cigarettes?’ They resolve it. That goes away. Suddenly, they have more money, they have, a little more positive view of themselves. They might have felt a little bit ashamed that they were addicted to cigarettes. They didn't have control over it. You see the change in the egoic structure when you actually finish and integrate these aspects.
Is it possible to integrate all the aspects of the shadow? Theoretically it is possible, as to whether or not most people in the world are able to do that, probably most people have some elements of the shadow remaining, although they may make progress with working out some of those issues that are in there.
I often say that when all the issues in your shadow have been completed, when you've finished your pralabd karma, then your life, as we know it, is pretty much complete. You finish the issues you come here to resolve, and, at that time you often see people, passing away because they don't have any more issues to deal with. They finish what they've come here to do, and then they terminate their lives. They pass away.
Lawrence: Is this shadow referred to in Eastern traditions in relation to karma?
George: In my reading of different traditions, it seems they associate that actions that come out of this shadow create new karmic patterns. In the Christian tradition, they talk about when we act out of this ‘sinful’ nature or carnal nature, then we create sins. If you drill down and you say, where exactly is this coming from? Typically, it's when you are acting from these patterns in the unconscious mind, acting out your anger, acting out your lust, acting out your greed, acting out your desire to be, greater or more powerful than somebody else, which come out of the issues that are in this unconscious zone of the mind.
Lawrence: You have identified the Conscious mind, the Subconscious mind, the Metaconscious mind, and the Superconscious mind as the four main aspects of mind. Is the unconscious a fifth aspect of mind or something else altogether?
George: If you look at the element of the mind, there's an area that is conscious and integrated, and then an area that has not yet been awakened, it's not integrated, it's often not under the control of the Conscious mind. Sometimes that material begins to interact with the Conscious mind and or it actually begins to generate behaviour. It kind of bypasses your Conscious mind.
Think about a person who is addicted. At the level of the conscious part of the mind they are saying, “I don't want to use drugs anymore”. Then they find themselves acting out that pattern beyond their control. This unconscious mind is the part that we redeem. We work with the issues in it, we turn it into light. The unconscious mind essentially is our potential. When you're able to transform different aspects of the unconscious mind, then you have a greater amount of your ability, knowledge, your positive character virtues that can be expressed in your life.
We often talk about three levels of the unconscious mind. We talk about the lower unconscious or the shadow, which is these issues that are playing out in your life. Then we talk about the middle unconscious. The middle unconscious is that potential that is within the zone of the self and the Metaconscious mind that hasn't yet been brought into expression. Finally, we talk about the higher unconscious, which is in the Superconscious mind, and that represents your spiritual potential that you've not yet actualized.
Lawrence: The sixth posture is what you call the egoic seed atom. You write, "this aspect of the human mind is tuned up as the soul evolves. It is a state of wonder, of delight, of a joyful inner child that sees the beauty of everything around you. Perhaps Jesus was referring to the state when he said, the kingdom of heaven is within you and you must become as a little child to enter the kingdom of heaven. You experience a heavenly world of magic and wonder when you're in this state of awareness."
Here you're really throwing a curve ball at the standard common belief that the ego is purely negative. Are you saying that without this aspect of the ego, we can't touch our soul and be filled with a sense of wonder?
George: As the soul evolves, it brings along with it, it's a sentient vehicle. That's the vehicle by which the soul interacts with all of its other forms on the different planes of light. It brings, it moves all the forms along with it and it also tunes up certain centres in the Metaconscious, Subconscious, and Conscious mind. And one of the centres that it tunes up is this egoic seed atom.
When you have worked out your issues or you transcended your issues in the shadow, you get in touch with this joyful aspect, you kind of feel that you're connected with the soul. You feel this connection, you feel the joy and it's a state of beauty and delight. When I go out walking, and I see the ducks and I see the goats and I see the birds and the beauty of the lake near where I live, I get in touch with this aspect of myself.
Lawrence: As a parent, when your child has a win, they move forward in their development and they're doing something that maybe they were dependent on you before or was just something they weren't really mature enough to handle and now you see them doing this independently, that's kind of how I relate to this. It's like a win. It's like a real feeling of upliftment. Is that what I'm tuning into, the egoic seed atom when I'm seeing a child have a win in that fashion?
George: When a child has a win, it's typically experienced at the level of the life narrative or the life story. So, that becomes something that builds your positive self-esteem. This is more of an experiential state where you're just noticing the beauty of everything around you. in the state of consciousness, you can find the light in a spider, you're not afraid of it. You see what a beautiful creature it is.
Lawrence: It does feel existential in that experience. I don't feel as like it's part of my personal self-esteem. It's amazing growth to witness. Would that possibly be part of the egoic seed atom?
George: The egoic seed atom is in some ways detached from the suffering of the shadow. In some ways, it's detached even from the life narrative. It's very much the present-time experience of just the beauty that's all around us, the beauty and the wonder.
Lawrence: We're talking about a whole different state of awareness that's really not even attached to your life narrative.
George: It's the experience that, okay, I'm walking right now around the lake, but, I'm feeling the joy and the wonder. I'm seeing the beauty of the plants and the birds and hearing their song and looking at the ducks on the lake and, saying, hello to all the ducks. Yeah, it's a very joyful, blissful state of consciousness. Right at the core, beyond the suffering.
Lawrence: So, like I said before, you're really throwing a curve ball here at the standard common belief that the ego is just this negative illusion, basically. Your saying no, it’s the opposite. It can be a source of bliss.
George: Yeah, because there's an aspect of your ego that is in tune with the soul. The nature of the soul is joy and bliss, and part of that is experience in this ego. It's not, a negative thing. The ego is not just this demon, it has positive and negative aspects.
Lawrence: Is that felt in a particular part of the body, like a chakra system?
George: I think that a lot of people kind of feel that aspect when they're in touch with their heart. There's a saying, ‘follow your heart, follow your bliss’. Right? Follow your joy. That saying kind of focuses people on that centre where they're in touch with this greater life within them.
Lawrence: That's very important. So, the seventh and final posture of the ego that you've identified is what you call the egoic subtle identification. You write:
“This aspect of the ego enables you to identify with a spiritual essence and then to form certain beliefs, attitudes, and judgments about self and others when you're in this state of identification. For some, it gives them a sense of superiority, of specialness, of being a member of an elite group. For others, this takes the form of comparing their progress with others and being dissatisfied with the rate and quality of their spiritual progress. For others, it is a belief that they are flawed, that they are demented, and blind worms that can never gain enlightenment or receive the blessing of God. For others, it can become a sense of narcissism and grandiosity that they are a divine being incarnate and they are entitled to special treatment and the worship and obedience of others.”
This aspect of the ego sounds like a really double-edged sword. On the one hand, it's valuing spirituality and recognizing the spiritual life is vital. On the other hand, it can develop what seem flawed judgments and extreme thinking. I suppose in some instances this posture might have even led to a religious war in the past. How do you bring balance and perspective to this aspect of the ego?
George: Part of it is becoming aware that you're engaging in this. One of the distinctions that I think is valuable for people to make is that if you focus on a spiritual essence, you see, well, what are my abilities here? What's the love and the virtue and the compassion that comes from the centre? What's the knowledge that comes from the centre? The compassion that comes from the centre? what's the knowledge that I have at this level? And how can I use this to serve? It's a matter of recognizing that it is there to serve what we call the soul, the aspect of your nature that is the integrating centre of your Superconscious mind. Versus feeding the ego with it to say, well, I, I'm so high. I'm so blissful. I am just so superior to other people.
To understand what it is, it is a tool, it is a vessel. For example, if I have developed my abilities in the form that I have in the psychic realm, well, then my job is that I'm going to use those abilities to assist others. I might use it also, to work with issues within myself, but it's there for service. It's not there for to, to exclaim how great you are, and it has nothing to do with your egoic identity.
As you begin to disabuse yourself of these notions, you begin to let go of that. Okay, my turf is I need to take care of this life, this world, and I'll let the soul take care of its world and its functions. Ideally, something of the functionality of the soul will be able to be expressed through my life and I'll become a blessing for other people.
Lawrence: Through your model of the seven postures of the ego, I think you've shown us a larger scope than most people have presented as to the qualities and boundaries of the ego. You've written the following:
"Transcending the ego allows you to view it from a detached viewpoint and to disidentify with it. This shift is from being the actor in your life to a passive spectator of your life. Like a trance state in hypnosis, when you enter these internal focal points, you passively view the content of the mind that makes up the ego, but you don't interact with it. You retain the ability to objectively observe your ego from this detached standpoint. As long as you remain in this altered state of awareness, when you return your attention to its ground state in the waking state of awareness, your experience of the ego returns".
It sounds like the ego never goes away, which is contrary to what some spiritual systems say. But that meditation and spiritual practice help one live in a larger way, than merely from the limitations and boundaries that the ego inherently possesses.
George: When you transcend the ego, let's say you go up and you merge your attention and cosmic consciousness, you disidentify with the ego and then you sense that you're this spiritual being, and then you try to express that as best you can in your life. You get the sense of rebellion when the ego says, ‘well hold it, what about my college education? what about my career?’ That's where you get the conflict taking place, because the ego has certain desires that it wants to fulfil, and then all of a sudden you go in this altered state of consciousness and you start living another agenda. now you are there to serve your guru or your minister or your spiritual teacher and to follow and obey them and to do whatever they tell you to do, you're not living your life anymore, you're living another agenda.
Lawrence: Would you say that the ego was a hindrance or obstacle in your personal spiritual journey?
George: The ego is a functional aspect of your nature. What the issue is, is that you don't want to have the ego be a barrier for you to go deeper into meditation, but at the same time you don't want to shut down the ego so you're totally non-functional. If you're totally non-functional, we can put you out in the garden, put a pot on your head and we can use you for statuary.
You need to be functional, and the ego is part of your ability to be functional in this world.
Lawrence: Through your spiritual journey, how did you encounter the ego in a way that made it possible for you to map the ego In this uniquely wholistic way?
George: Between 1997 and 2006, I embarked upon a project in which I mapped each of the levels of the mind. As we studied each level of the mind, we gained certain insights about what's actually there, and what's not there.
It's like if I am on a journey, if this is the early 1800s, and I'm going out and I'm exploring the West, and I'm taking notes, okay, at this location there's a mountain there, and also there's a lot of prairie, and I notice over here, I notice that there's buffalo, and then you move along to another area and say, okay, there's a river that runs here, there's some mountains over there that have ice on top of them, and they appear to be the source of the river. You move a little further, and you say, okay, well, here are these very rocky areas, and it looks like these are the foothills of another set of mountains.
You're mapping what you actually see there. You're taking notes regarding what's actually there, and then once you are able to look at the whole picture, then you say, well, these look like they're a similar structure, okay, these are all part of what we call the ego. These aspects are part of the mental function of the mind. These are the parts that are aspects of the feeling aspect of the Conscious mind. You're able to learn about the actual functioning as opposed to simply labeling some part of this egoic complex as being, what the ego is. You have to understand it as a whole. That's the aspect of my spiritual journey that enabled me to be able to formulate this model of the ego.
One of the things that I looked at when I was doing my master's degree was I wanted to look at what happens in religious cults? What's actually happening to their awareness? Where is their attention focused? How has that changed their identity? How does that change their beliefs, their values, their behaviour? I also looked at the role of dysfunctional families and how that can influence people in negative aspects in their life. As I looked at these, I also looked at the negative impact these cultic groups have on family upbringing, and how that influences the ego.
I think that if we have a more comprehensive understanding of the ego, we're not going to demonize it. We're going to recognize its functioning as it is. And note that there are certain aspects of the ego that we need to tame. If you have a garden and your plants are growing wild all over the place, you have to go in there from time to time. You have to prune your plants. If you've developed the ego in a positive way, it can be a real tool for you to function in the world.
If you don't develop it in a positive way, if you get involved in religious cults or strange religions and political parties or hate groups. If you come from a background of being abused or troubled in your family, if you're associated with people who are implanting negative ideas in your mind and urging you to adopt criminal behaviour. These are things that are going to bring out these negative aspects of the ego. But if we carefully cultivate it, then it's going to become a tool for us. It's going to become something which enables us to function in a positive way in the world.
Let's think about what your life would be like if you didn’t know how to drive and then you gain that behaviour, you learn how to do that, then that opens up whole new horizons for you. You want to equip your ego with the particular skills that it needs to fulfil your worthy desires and not to demonize the ego and try and destroy the ego.
The ego's supposed to be here. Bottom line, it's supposed to be here. Let's make our ego a positive expression, as opposed to the negative expression we see so often when people are acting out their issues from their anger, their rage, their unfulfilled desires, taking things out on other people, etc. We see too much of that in the world today.
Lawrence: The Conscious mind is one of the four primary areas of consciousness you've mapped, and these include the Conscious mind, the Subconscious mind, the Metaconscious mind, and the Superconscious mind, which is where things get especially interesting. Before we go through each level of the Conscious mind, however, I think we should begin by discussing the ego, which you identify as the integration centre of the Conscious mind.
In an article that appeared in Psychology Today titled, ‘What is the Ego and Why is it So Involved in My Life’, by Dr. Mark Leary, he states, “The term ego is as confusing as any in psychology. Not only is the word itself used to refer to several distinct psychological constructs and processes, but the psychological landscape is littered with concepts that include ego in one way or another. Egotism, ego defence, egocentrism, superego, ego involved, and so on. But what does ego actually mean? What are we talking about when we refer to the ego? What is the difference among all of the terms in which the term ego is embedded? Put simply, the English word ego is the Latin word for I. Literally translated, ego means I. If you were writing I love you in Latin, for example, you would write ego amo te.”
In modern spiritual discussion, ego is usually not used as a neutral word to describe the I. That is, ourselves as individuals. The ego is generally described in negative terms, primarily as a barrier or obstacle to overcome. Here are a few quotes that illustrate this.
"You can either be a host to God or a hostage to your ego. It's your call." - Wayne Dyer
"The ego is not who you really are. The ego is your self-image. It is your social mask. It is the role you are playing. Your social mask thrives on approval. It wants control and it is sustained by power because it lives in fear.’" - Ram Dass
"There is inside all our heads the ego's rabid attack dog. It is purely vicious toward others and toward ourselves as well. Learning to control that dog and ultimately to end its life is the process and purpose of enlightened relationships." - Marianne Williamson
"More the knowledge, lesser the ego. Lesser the knowledge, more the ego." - Albert Einstein
Lawrence: That's an interesting one for me because he's essentially looking at knowledge as the path to higher consciousness…or maybe he's just saying that smarter people have less of an ego.
"When every thought absorbs your attention completely, when you are so identified with the voice in your head and the emotions that accompany it, you lose yourself in every thought and every emotion, then you are totally identified with form and therefore in the grip of ego. Ego is a conglomeration of recurring thought forms and conditioned mental, emotional patterns that are invested with a sense of I, a sense of self." - Eckhart Tolle
"Complaining is one of the ego's favourite strategies for strengthening itself."" - Eckhart Tolle
"When the ego dies, the soul awakes." - Mahatma Gandhi
Lawrence: The ego is discussed in less than complimentary terms in most cases and in others people are basically saying it has to die. Why is there such a negative perception of the ego? What is making people so upset about this thing we call the ego?
George: Well, the first thing we need to understand is that the ego is a complex. The ego isn't like a little entity or something, it's a complex. It has several different functions. The first function of the ego is an integrating centre of the Conscious mind.
Imagine the hub of a wheel. This aspect of the ego integrates your experience of the waking state of consciousness, your grounded state. It integrates what's going on in your movement and body position awareness. It brings together your awareness of what's going on in your senses. It brings together your awareness of what goes on in the deep body awareness centre, feeling centre, mental centre. It also ties in your life experience, it ties all these together.
It also has the function of what we call the egoic octave of the will, which governs individual behaviour. Whereas the aspect of will that's in the Metaconscious mind, can look forward many, many steps in the future, you can make a long-term plan. ‘I want to get a degree in accounting in college.’ ‘I have to take all these classes.’ ‘I have to make all these steps that are required for me to do that.’ Whereas the ego is in the present time and it is aware of one individual behaviour, pick up the pen, put down the pen.
The next layer of the ego has to do with the different areas in your life. This is the way you project your desires and you say, this is what I'm doing in these different areas of my life. I might have certain desires for my career and certain desires for my finances, certain desires for my relationship. There's an organizing function of the ego. We tap into that level when you start monitoring the ‘I am’ statements that come up within your consciousness. I think one of your quotes was a reference to these ‘I’ statements.
We talk about where people have these desires, these expectations in 12 different areas of their life. You're continually processing, thinking and processing about these different areas. I guess people divide these 12 areas in different ways. I've written a lot about this in my book, The Primer on Practical Meditation in Daily Life and Education.
A person might be processing about, how do I make a little more money this month? How do I manage my budget this month? How do I communicate better with my spouse or partner? How do I help improve my health? You have certain desires that you want to do. Another aspect of the ego might be, well, I really want to travel and I want to see Germany. I want to go to Germany and travel throughout Europe. You have these desires that the ego is thinking about and certain things might remind it of that. This aspect of the ego is a functional part, just as the integration centre is a functional part.
Another aspect of the ego, which also is functional, is ‘life remembrance’ or your ‘life narrative’, which is your experiences about your life. You think back and say, ‘well, five years ago, I did this and I did that and I had this bad thing happen to me. But you maintain a narrative of your life. We often say self-esteem is based upon whether that life narrative is generally positive as opposed to, I have a lot of bad things that happen to me. I don't feel real good about myself because, I didn't accomplish a lot. I didn't do things that I'm really proud of. I had these bad things happen to me. I got sick.’ This life narrative is your story, it's your story of your life.
We all tell a certain story. What we tend to do, something psychologists have noted, is that we tend to emphasize the positive and kind of minimize the negative. We don't really talk about our failures. We don't talk about, stuff that happens to us that isn't flattering. It's like a resume, right? You don't say, Ok, my boss chewed me out because I did this in the job. No, you say ‘I implemented a solution that allowed us to sell, $300,000 worth of new widgets’. We talk about the good stuff, not the bad stuff. We do tend to filter what we disclose to other people through this life narrative.
These three are, for the most part, positive aspects of the ego. They're not negative aspects. We might emphasize certain aspects of our life, to say, oh, I'm so successful and I'm doing really well. It's like when people go to a high school reunion, they're always going to say, oh, I'm so successful. I'm happily married, even though you argue with your wife every night. That is an aspect that you notice in this positive aspect of the ego. But it's not it's not negative. It isn't harmful.
It's this fourth level that a lot of the ego psychologists and the psychodynamic psychologists talk about, this layer of defences. The defences are there to distract people from painful issues. Beneath these layers of defences (and if you read the diagnostic and statistical manual, they actually itemize these layers of defences), some layers are functional. Like humour as being a defence, or altruism, helping other people. Below these are the really primitive ones, like denial and projection on other people.
These defences are trying to keep you away from areas of pain, which brings us to the next level of the ego, which Carl Jung called ‘The Shadow’. This is typically the level that most people are raging against. In it, you have your issues of anger, your issues of depression, your issues of blaming other people. These issues can entify; they can become sub-personalities. And using specific techniques and certain types of meditation, you can actually interface with them.
There are techniques from psychology and also techniques from meditation that we introduce in our classes where you can actually work with these issues that are in the Unconscious mind. This is a very different way of looking at this dark side of the ego than they might look at it from a religions perspective. For example, in the Christian church, they say, ‘human beings are sinners’. They don't see that the ego has functional, beneficial elements. Instead of saying ‘you have a lustful sub-personality’, they say “you're filled with anger and hatred”. They're pointing out this dark side. And a lot of spiritual groups, they only point out this dark side of the egoic nature, which is this shadow.
In the spiritual teachings of the Western esoteric schools, they speak of the ego as being the ogre on the threshold, which means that you have to guide your attention through this gauntlet of all these sub-personalities that are pressing to have their desires fulfilled, to take out their anger on somebody, that think that life is not worth living. It's this aspect of the mind that a lot of spiritual groups tend to target. That's the way they're seeing the ego. They're not seeing the functional parts of it. They're not seeing the whole thing.
Lawrence: Aren't people simply using the word ego or identifying the word ego with parts of themselves that they don't like, and then compartmentalizing the stuff within the word ego so they can then dissociate with that part of themselves? ‘Well, that's not who I really am. that's my ego. And of course, I'm working on that. I'm going to destroy that part eventually and get to the good stuff’.
George: You can put it that way. That kind of looks like what they're doing. They're trying to dis-identify from those aspects of their nature.
Lawrence: It seems like these noted people, these spiritual teachers that I just quoted, they're describing the ego as something that's entirely separate from anything positive. Where are the boundaries?
George: Transcending this zone of darkness and pain and all those negative things is an aspect of the ego that we call the egoic seed atom. Now, a gentleman by the name of John Bradshaw, who did a lot of work in recovery, talked about something he called the wonder child. And despite all the trauma and the pain and the anger and the unfulfilled desire that's in the shadow, transcending this is this very joyful aspect of your nature where, you just live in a world of beauty. That’s part of the ego too.
Jesus said, ‘those that enter the kingdom of heaven become like a little child’. This is a very childlike aspect of your nature. It delights in squirrels and the birds and seeing the rivers and looking at the beauty of people, it's a very beautiful state of consciousness, it's just one step beyond this area of pain.
Finally, the deepest layer of the ego is what I term the spiritual ego. This is a big one because what happens is that people will identify with a particular essence. That essence might be what we call the moon soul or Christ child, which is the state of identity that people experience when they're focused in the level of the higher mind we call the first initiation. But what can accompany this is a very subtle aspect of the ego that goes along and says, ‘well, I'm so much better and purer, and those sinful people, they're all going to go to hell, but I've been saved and I'm so much better than other people. I'm part of an elect group and I'm just so wonderful’.
Whereas a lot of spiritual traditions talk about humility, recognizing your place before the infinitude of the divine, this subtle aspect of the ego makes people feel superior than others. Or in the other case, especially if it's let's say that it's a spiritual group in which people are doing transformation and one person moves ahead on the path before you, so you start feeling jealous of that other person and you say, ‘well, there's something wrong with them because, there's no way they could gain those powers and those abilities and that knowledge and they get the special favor of the guru and I don't get that’.
It's very subtle, you see it in a lot of spiritual traditions, even people who are supposedly very, very advanced on the path, you see this subtle egotism at work. In some ways, it's a pernicious aspect of the ego, part of the dark side, because it tends to inflate, your perception of yourself. This moon soul or nucleus of identity, as we call it, is really a neutral aspect of your being. It acts as a place where you can commune with the Holy Spirit. It's a place where you come to pray - like an inner altar.
Lawrence: People don't understand that there's more than one aspect to the ego. I'm going to refer here to an article of yours. You have an article, "Reflections on Eckhart Tolle", and you write, "When Tolle speaks of the ego, he paints a picture of this essence as malevolent, devious, manipulative, and the source of all human ignorance, misery, and pain. This is an accurate portrayal of the ego, as many people experience it in one of its postures, the shadow, but does not capture the other six postures of the ego, which are not entirely evil, as Tolle depicts." You then go through these levels, which you call ‘postures’. The seven postures of the ego which you identify include:
the embodied ego,
the operational ego,
the developmental ego,
the defensive ego,
the shadow,
the egoic seed atom,
and egoic subtle identification.
I'd like to go through the seven postures of the ego, which you've mapped using your descriptions.
Let's start with the first one, which you call the ‘embodied ego’. This is the structure or chakra system of the ego in expression. These chakras include the waking state of awareness, that's the feet centre, movement awareness, that's the base of the spine, sensory awareness, that's the navel, deep body awareness, that's the solar plexus, emotional awareness, that's the heart, rational mind awareness, that's the throat, egoic will, that's the point between the eyebrows, and the sense of identity surrounded by the 12 areas of human life, and that's the brain centre.
"The egoic will in this context is the ability to initiate individual units of behaviour. For example, tie your shoes, stand up straight, walk over to the counter, and pour a glass of water. The 12 areas of human life comprise the zone of the operational ego, which is the second posture of the ego. At the level of the embodied ego, you intuitively experience the present time at each of these centres."
Is this the chakra system that you've identified here as the structure or the body of the ego, the same or different than the chakra system most people are familiar with, which is depicted in spiritual art?
George: One of the things that we teach is that for each form or vehicle of consciousness there is an individual chakra system. The chakra system that is portrayed in the yogic tradition, are the chakras of the Cosmic man or woman, and these correspond to the reflection of the physical body, physical universe, astral body, astral universe, individual causal body, causal universe, the ideational plane (which appears to be the source of creation for all the other six levels), and then the seventh chakra, the brain chakra, is the state of God realization, or as they call it, supreme self-realization, which they call Brahman.
Lawrence: The context you identify for this posture, which you call the embodied ego. Is this chakra system, which you're calling the embodied ego, the true nexus of the ego, is this essentially the centre of the Conscious mind?
George: There are multiple centres that comprise the ego, it's not just this one thing. It is your ability to take in sensory information and then to perform behaviour.
If you see a dog running at you that looks like it's very upset, you take in that information through your sensory field and you say, ‘run!’. You make the decision, I need to run, because I don't want to get bit by that dog. This is kind of the viewpoint that is an analogy for the model of the central nervous system that basically takes in sensory information and then performs behaviour. Something takes place in that intervening space within the central nervous system that allows us to make decisions about what we need to do. This is analogous to that. The physiological-psychological model is the correlate to that.
Lawrence: Do the other functions of the ego hang on this structure?
George: They utilize it, they're focused on something else. It's the foundation, without an embodied ego, you would just sit there and you would be a thought machine and you wouldn't be able to move, you wouldn't be able to feel, you wouldn't be able to think, you wouldn't be able to perform behaviour. they could use you for statuary in your garden. It's a foundation. It's like, we talked about the chariot. It's a thing you ride, a thing you drive, to move in the physical world.
Because the conscious mind is in the present time, then you're relating to what's going on in the present time at the level of this embodied ego or integration centre. If you notice that, ‘oh, I didn't turn off the faucet’, you say, ‘oh, I need to, you go over and you turn it off’. You react to things that are going on in the environment at the current time.
Lawrence: It's kind of sensing, viewing what's going on and then reacting accordingly.
George: That's the behavioural aspect of our will. It just does one thing at a time. You learn a behaviour and you're able to do that. Unlike the Metaconscious mind, it doesn't plan things out to reach a goal. For example, in your career you do a lot of behaviour over many years. You do a lot of behaviour to get a college degree, to marry someone and raise a family. There's a lot of behaviour in that. You have to plan out the different aspects of it and then react to the changes that happen. That's at a higher level of consciousness, a higher level of mind.
I want to make a distinction between that because the ego per se doesn't make plans. It simply says, okay, I'm going to do this behaviour, that's what it does. When it decides, okay, I need to do this. Sometimes if the ego gets a crazy idea and says, I need to do this, then that deeper level of the mind, the self and the conscience will say, that's not a good idea. Stop.
Lawrence: Regarding the second posture of the ego that you've mapped, the operational ego, you write, "this is the constellation of identity that captures the roles the ego plays in your life. These are mapped into 12 different areas, which while each individual may label these categories and organize their contents differently, the general structure of 12 areas appears to be a stable component of the operational ego"
The 12 areas are:
1. the physical body,
2. vitality and health,
3. emotions and relationships,
4. home and family,
5. education and mental development,
6. career and avocation,
7. finances,
8. social life, such as recreation and social activities with friends and family,
9. civic engagement and community involvement,
10. cultural experiences and travel,
11. ethical foundation and values,
12, spiritual, religious or philosophical life.
You write "in the operational ego, you experience the ambition to improve yourself and to attain what you desire and to strive for what you want". Essentially you have described the majority, if not all aspects of human life in this list of 12 areas. Would you say that without the ego, none of these core activities of human expression can occur?
George: If you don't have a desire, you're happy to sit like a pot. People can plant flowers in you. Desire is the motivating function. Your desire forms the core of motivation.
"I desire to make enough money so I can keep a home over my head and take care of my family". That's a desire that motivates you to go and work. If you don't have that desire, you can be completely happy being a homeless wanderer, receiving whatever food that somebody wants to bestow on you.
Lawrence: The context you're describing for the operational ego is motivation and desire and you're stating that the ego's nexus of desires is arranged in these 12 areas through this operational posture of the ego. When we talk about our various desires, to eat at a certain fine restaurant in Paris, to go on safari, to find our soulmate, to be successful, to have children, are these desires all focused through this centre?
George: In other words, this is what you experience in your life as to what you want to do with your life. If you have no desire, essentially, you've abandoned your life. You probably live in an altered state of consciousness.
Lawrence: If we have these type of desires, essentially, they're found within the ego and specifically through this posture of the ego.
George: This is where you're able to operate and say, ‘okay, this is what I want. You do thinking and processing at this level and when the intensity is enough, the deeper aspect of your nature, which is the self, can plan the steps to actually achieve that, take hold of it, and then you're able to actually make that real in your life.
Lawrence: in some spiritual writings they say the ego is filled with desire and now you're saying, yes, the ego is filled with desire. Now, is this a bad thing?
George: Well, it depends on what you want in your life. if you don't want anything in your life and you just want to dwell in the higher realms and be in a state of bliss all the time and be desireless and basically, sit under a tree, you don't need desires, but if you're planning to achieve something in your life, you want your life to mean something, if you want your life to produce something, to achieve something, then you need some desires.
If you look at desires, some of them are just frivolous kind of things, and some of them are, important things, and some of them are really core things. We often say, identify what are your core desires. What are the things that really animate your life? Give your focus to that, work on those core things. For many people, that might be, ‘I want to find a partner and I want to get married and have children’. ‘I want to study and move into my career and, make enough money to take care of myself, but then to save for my retirement’.
These core desires are the things that animate your life. If you don't have core desires, you are an empty, hollow shell.
Lawrence: Regarding the third posture, the developmental ego, you write, "this is the state of identity that develops over time and progressively integrates and identifies with a broader range of capabilities and abilities. These range from the highly dependent infant to the capable independent adult, to the caring parent, to the individual who can look out for the welfare and issues of the entire world. This is the experience of where you are in your life in your life right now and the capabilities you have developed. For example, you draw upon this level when you summarize your education, your work experiences on a resume."
It sounds like this aspect of the ego maps and records how we change and mature through our human life, is that correct?
George: The more experience you have, the greater the additional abilities. When you're maybe five years old, you learn to ride a bike. By the time you've finished elementary school, grade six, you have a grasp of mathematics, have some knowledge about the world, you're becoming a better reader, you understand language better. As you continue to grow and develop, you gain additional skills that you have available to you. This gets to the point where you could use those skills ultimately to be a great force for change in the world. You look at a lot of the people who are movers and shakers in the world, they've gone through this process of development and they reach these levels.
I also talk about this level in that this is also our life narrative, the way we tell our story of our life. Sometimes people will tend to emphasize the positive and minimize the negative because they want to show themselves in a good light. This being said, it's a mirror of the skills you learn. The skills, the knowledge, the ways of learning to relate to other people.
Lawrence: This basically forms our life story, which is part of our identity, the experiences that shaped who we are today. Why would you want to kill our identification with the things we've done, our accomplishments, our most memorable experiences? Isn't this what the people who say the ego must die are advocating? They essentially are looking at our identification with our past as a hindrance or evil.
George: What you see in a lot of spiritual groups is they will give a person a spiritual name and they say the ego is false, it's illusory, it's a hindrance. You need to keep your attention focused on this higher aspect of your mind all the time and be this holy and virtuous being that is a vessel of love and is able to talk about the spiritual path that you're on and might have certain spiritual abilities. They tend to emphasize that, they focus on that. But when you're totally focused on that other level, you're not functional. You have to be able to use your experiences, your abilities, your understanding of social relations to function in the world. If you're totally focused all the time on that spiritual essence, your ability to function in the world atrophies.
Some of the bad stuff that happens with this, and we see this all the time because I've been working with people since 2006 who start messing with spiritual techniques that change their awareness and they have these strange energetic phenomena that happen to them and they're not able to function. What we see happens when you do that is you start to experience what's called depersonalization. You don't have a sense of any personal identity. Your life seems unreal, which we call derealization. Then the other aspect is disidentification where you're no longer identified with your life. It's just kind of happening like a phenomena, somewhere far away from who you really are.
What we see is that for the most part, people who get into that state of consciousness are not able to fulfil their desires. They're not able to achieve things in their life. Maybe they're making progress as they unfold towards the inner spiritual horizon, move closer to it using transformational methods, but they're abandoning their life. When I used to work as a drug counsellor, I worked with heroin addicts. I remember one of the counsellors, would be sitting with a heroin addict who would be basically, lying to him and telling him all kind of strange stories. This counsellor would look at him and say, "get a life!"
If you indeed are incarnate, if your soul is incarnate, you should have a life. The objective is not to abandon your life. Your objective is to make your life as productive, effective, helpful, revolutionary, if necessary, as possible to change the world. Because you have lived, the world becomes a better place. Please don't abandon your life.
Lawrence: The spiritual teachers that are calling the ego an illusion, they're asking people to abandon their ego. They are telling people to abandon their life story. How else are we going to measure our growth as people, as individuals, except by looking at the past? The past is a really important piece, the past is embedded in our life, in our life story. We say, okay, this was a good experience, I learned from this, this was a harsh experience, but, this is how it changed me. Even though it's centred around this ‘I’, this ego, it does have inherent value.
George: Yes, indeed. Well, I often tell my students that if the ego was not supposed to be there, the creator, you believe in a creator, would not have put it within the layers of your mind. It has a purpose. you have an organ in your body, you have a spleen, okay? If there was not a purpose for the spleen, it would not be there. The ego is supposed to be there to help you live in this world.
Lawrence: Do you think that the new age teachers that are vilifying the ego, basically miss the boat?
George: You have to think about what their objective is. They want to get people out of the Conscious mind, they want to get people up into the state of consciousness that they're advocating that people dwell in. It might be the soul, it might be the moon soul or Christ child nucleus of identity, cosmic consciousness, the seed atom of a of a super cosmic path, the spirit on a transcendental path.
Their objective in doing this is to try to break people out of attachment to the ego so they can ascend as their attention and awareness to gain union with that higher spiritual essence. That's the reason they're doing it, but in doing that, by vilifying the ego, by making people hate their own ego, reject their own ego, they're not doing people a service, you know.
I often say the ego is like a puppy, it's got to be trained, it's got to be domesticated. Now if it's not trained and domesticated, then it creates problems. But if you have a highly functional ego, you can be a positive influence, not only in your own life, but in the life of your family, your community, your nation, and the world, and the planet. You can be a positive influence if you train and cultivate the ego to be the instrument it was made to be.
Lawrence: For the fourth posture, the defensive ego, you write, ‘at this level you attempt to maintain a positive image of yourself. This might be construed as keeping up a positive self-concept to preserve your reputation and honour, or to adhere to an ideal image of yourself, your ego ideal. When you are criticized, attacked, or belittled, this defensive ego generates excuses, rationalizations, arguments, and a series of defences to protect your self-concept. This defensive armor can be stirred to protect any area in which you feel weak or vulnerable, and may be extended to defend not only your reputation, but also to your possessions, your family, your job, your membership in different groups, and your values and faith.
This ego posture could easily be cast as negative. However, in war, defence is pretty important to keep from losing what you have. Is that what is happening here?
George: The defensive mechanism, the mind, is protective. It depends on what you are identified with. If you're identified just with your own individuality, your own body and ego, your conscious mind construct of you and your life, if you're just defending that, then you have defences that are protecting your reputation.
If your footprint is larger, you're taking care of a family, then you're protecting your family. If you're identified with a larger group, you're protecting your group. If you're identified, with the community of the city, you're protecting your city. Ultimately, that goes to protecting your nation. Think about those who dedicate their lives to serve in the military. They're saying, I'm not only going to protect my own skin, but I'm going to protect the people of the nation.
This protective mechanism can be positive, it's appropriate to attempt to protect the possessions you need to do your work and to take care of your family. We take out insurance to try to protect from financial loss. There are positive aspects to protection and then there are the negative aspects of protection that we typically associate with the negative balance of the ego.
Lawrence: So, the context of this posture of the ego, you describe as psychological armouring. These are the layers of defence that protect you from experiencing painful or shameful memories. Many therapy practices seem to be targeting this defence mechanism and trying to get past this armouring to a deeper, more truthful perception of our actions, events, and character. Would you say that that's the case? They are targeting this aspect of the ego?
George: That's correct. Especially the psychodynamic schools of therapy, ego psychology, they want to get down and take on these defences until they get down to the core issues or pain or wounds that are in the shadow.
Lawrence: You have to move through this posture, which you call the defensive ego, in therapy to get to the next posture, which is number five, the shadow. That's the posture you say Eckhart Tolle is keyed into, and you write:
“The shadow is the unconscious level of the ego and comprises the unconscious defences that keep these painful and shameful aspects of the mind out of awareness’. These unconscious mental patterns drive human obsession, craving, and suffering, and may appear to act autonomously outside the control of your volition and intention. Many spiritual teachers, Tolle included, target this aspect of the ego and promote spiritual practices such as mindfulness, being present, and remaining in the present time to overcome the suffering. When you tap this level, you experience identification with your suffering, fear, shame, anxiety, or depression.”
You describe the context of our shadow as our core psychic wounds, and these are the painful and shameful unresolved issues that form the content of our shadow. Can this material ever be completely resolved, or are we always going to have a shadow whether we choose to acknowledge or deny its existence?
George: It is possible to resolve issues that are in this shadow. In our tradition, we refer to these elements of the mind that operate autonomously from will and intention. We refer to them as destiny karma, or we also use the Sanskrit term pralabda karma. It is possible over time to work out these issues. We can say that the relative shadowing in your life decreases as that occurs.
Let's use the example of a person who is addicted to cigarettes, and they spend many years of their life having to spend their money on cigarettes. They're having health problems, they're pretty much having to spend extra money because their clothes smell like cigarette smoke, and they have to do extra laundry, etc., etc., all the negative things that come along with the cigarette smoking. They get down to the bottom of, ‘why am I smoking cigarettes?’ They resolve it. That goes away. Suddenly, they have more money, they have, a little more positive view of themselves. They might have felt a little bit ashamed that they were addicted to cigarettes. They didn't have control over it. You see the change in the egoic structure when you actually finish and integrate these aspects.
Is it possible to integrate all the aspects of the shadow? Theoretically it is possible, as to whether or not most people in the world are able to do that, probably most people have some elements of the shadow remaining, although they may make progress with working out some of those issues that are in there.
I often say that when all the issues in your shadow have been completed, when you've finished your pralabd karma, then your life, as we know it, is pretty much complete. You finish the issues you come here to resolve, and, at that time you often see people, passing away because they don't have any more issues to deal with. They finish what they've come here to do, and then they terminate their lives. They pass away.
Lawrence: Is this shadow referred to in Eastern traditions in relation to karma?
George: In my reading of different traditions, it seems they associate that actions that come out of this shadow create new karmic patterns. In the Christian tradition, they talk about when we act out of this ‘sinful’ nature or carnal nature, then we create sins. If you drill down and you say, where exactly is this coming from? Typically, it's when you are acting from these patterns in the unconscious mind, acting out your anger, acting out your lust, acting out your greed, acting out your desire to be, greater or more powerful than somebody else, which come out of the issues that are in this unconscious zone of the mind.
Lawrence: You have identified the Conscious mind, the Subconscious mind, the Metaconscious mind, and the Superconscious mind as the four main aspects of mind. Is the unconscious a fifth aspect of mind or something else altogether?
George: If you look at the element of the mind, there's an area that is conscious and integrated, and then an area that has not yet been awakened, it's not integrated, it's often not under the control of the Conscious mind. Sometimes that material begins to interact with the Conscious mind and or it actually begins to generate behaviour. It kind of bypasses your Conscious mind.
Think about a person who is addicted. At the level of the conscious part of the mind they are saying, “I don't want to use drugs anymore”. Then they find themselves acting out that pattern beyond their control. This unconscious mind is the part that we redeem. We work with the issues in it, we turn it into light. The unconscious mind essentially is our potential. When you're able to transform different aspects of the unconscious mind, then you have a greater amount of your ability, knowledge, your positive character virtues that can be expressed in your life.
We often talk about three levels of the unconscious mind. We talk about the lower unconscious or the shadow, which is these issues that are playing out in your life. Then we talk about the middle unconscious. The middle unconscious is that potential that is within the zone of the self and the Metaconscious mind that hasn't yet been brought into expression. Finally, we talk about the higher unconscious, which is in the Superconscious mind, and that represents your spiritual potential that you've not yet actualized.
Lawrence: The sixth posture is what you call the egoic seed atom. You write, "this aspect of the human mind is tuned up as the soul evolves. It is a state of wonder, of delight, of a joyful inner child that sees the beauty of everything around you. Perhaps Jesus was referring to the state when he said, the kingdom of heaven is within you and you must become as a little child to enter the kingdom of heaven. You experience a heavenly world of magic and wonder when you're in this state of awareness."
Here you're really throwing a curve ball at the standard common belief that the ego is purely negative. Are you saying that without this aspect of the ego, we can't touch our soul and be filled with a sense of wonder?
George: As the soul evolves, it brings along with it, it's a sentient vehicle. That's the vehicle by which the soul interacts with all of its other forms on the different planes of light. It brings, it moves all the forms along with it and it also tunes up certain centres in the Metaconscious, Subconscious, and Conscious mind. And one of the centres that it tunes up is this egoic seed atom.
When you have worked out your issues or you transcended your issues in the shadow, you get in touch with this joyful aspect, you kind of feel that you're connected with the soul. You feel this connection, you feel the joy and it's a state of beauty and delight. When I go out walking, and I see the ducks and I see the goats and I see the birds and the beauty of the lake near where I live, I get in touch with this aspect of myself.
Lawrence: As a parent, when your child has a win, they move forward in their development and they're doing something that maybe they were dependent on you before or was just something they weren't really mature enough to handle and now you see them doing this independently, that's kind of how I relate to this. It's like a win. It's like a real feeling of upliftment. Is that what I'm tuning into, the egoic seed atom when I'm seeing a child have a win in that fashion?
George: When a child has a win, it's typically experienced at the level of the life narrative or the life story. So, that becomes something that builds your positive self-esteem. This is more of an experiential state where you're just noticing the beauty of everything around you. in the state of consciousness, you can find the light in a spider, you're not afraid of it. You see what a beautiful creature it is.
Lawrence: It does feel existential in that experience. I don't feel as like it's part of my personal self-esteem. It's amazing growth to witness. Would that possibly be part of the egoic seed atom?
George: The egoic seed atom is in some ways detached from the suffering of the shadow. In some ways, it's detached even from the life narrative. It's very much the present-time experience of just the beauty that's all around us, the beauty and the wonder.
Lawrence: We're talking about a whole different state of awareness that's really not even attached to your life narrative.
George: It's the experience that, okay, I'm walking right now around the lake, but, I'm feeling the joy and the wonder. I'm seeing the beauty of the plants and the birds and hearing their song and looking at the ducks on the lake and, saying, hello to all the ducks. Yeah, it's a very joyful, blissful state of consciousness. Right at the core, beyond the suffering.
Lawrence: So, like I said before, you're really throwing a curve ball here at the standard common belief that the ego is just this negative illusion, basically. Your saying no, it’s the opposite. It can be a source of bliss.
George: Yeah, because there's an aspect of your ego that is in tune with the soul. The nature of the soul is joy and bliss, and part of that is experience in this ego. It's not, a negative thing. The ego is not just this demon, it has positive and negative aspects.
Lawrence: Is that felt in a particular part of the body, like a chakra system?
George: I think that a lot of people kind of feel that aspect when they're in touch with their heart. There's a saying, ‘follow your heart, follow your bliss’. Right? Follow your joy. That saying kind of focuses people on that centre where they're in touch with this greater life within them.
Lawrence: That's very important. So, the seventh and final posture of the ego that you've identified is what you call the egoic subtle identification. You write:
“This aspect of the ego enables you to identify with a spiritual essence and then to form certain beliefs, attitudes, and judgments about self and others when you're in this state of identification. For some, it gives them a sense of superiority, of specialness, of being a member of an elite group. For others, this takes the form of comparing their progress with others and being dissatisfied with the rate and quality of their spiritual progress. For others, it is a belief that they are flawed, that they are demented, and blind worms that can never gain enlightenment or receive the blessing of God. For others, it can become a sense of narcissism and grandiosity that they are a divine being incarnate and they are entitled to special treatment and the worship and obedience of others.”
This aspect of the ego sounds like a really double-edged sword. On the one hand, it's valuing spirituality and recognizing the spiritual life is vital. On the other hand, it can develop what seem flawed judgments and extreme thinking. I suppose in some instances this posture might have even led to a religious war in the past. How do you bring balance and perspective to this aspect of the ego?
George: Part of it is becoming aware that you're engaging in this. One of the distinctions that I think is valuable for people to make is that if you focus on a spiritual essence, you see, well, what are my abilities here? What's the love and the virtue and the compassion that comes from the centre? What's the knowledge that comes from the centre? The compassion that comes from the centre? what's the knowledge that I have at this level? And how can I use this to serve? It's a matter of recognizing that it is there to serve what we call the soul, the aspect of your nature that is the integrating centre of your Superconscious mind. Versus feeding the ego with it to say, well, I, I'm so high. I'm so blissful. I am just so superior to other people.
To understand what it is, it is a tool, it is a vessel. For example, if I have developed my abilities in the form that I have in the psychic realm, well, then my job is that I'm going to use those abilities to assist others. I might use it also, to work with issues within myself, but it's there for service. It's not there for to, to exclaim how great you are, and it has nothing to do with your egoic identity.
As you begin to disabuse yourself of these notions, you begin to let go of that. Okay, my turf is I need to take care of this life, this world, and I'll let the soul take care of its world and its functions. Ideally, something of the functionality of the soul will be able to be expressed through my life and I'll become a blessing for other people.
Lawrence: Through your model of the seven postures of the ego, I think you've shown us a larger scope than most people have presented as to the qualities and boundaries of the ego. You've written the following:
"Transcending the ego allows you to view it from a detached viewpoint and to disidentify with it. This shift is from being the actor in your life to a passive spectator of your life. Like a trance state in hypnosis, when you enter these internal focal points, you passively view the content of the mind that makes up the ego, but you don't interact with it. You retain the ability to objectively observe your ego from this detached standpoint. As long as you remain in this altered state of awareness, when you return your attention to its ground state in the waking state of awareness, your experience of the ego returns".
It sounds like the ego never goes away, which is contrary to what some spiritual systems say. But that meditation and spiritual practice help one live in a larger way, than merely from the limitations and boundaries that the ego inherently possesses.
George: When you transcend the ego, let's say you go up and you merge your attention and cosmic consciousness, you disidentify with the ego and then you sense that you're this spiritual being, and then you try to express that as best you can in your life. You get the sense of rebellion when the ego says, ‘well hold it, what about my college education? what about my career?’ That's where you get the conflict taking place, because the ego has certain desires that it wants to fulfil, and then all of a sudden you go in this altered state of consciousness and you start living another agenda. now you are there to serve your guru or your minister or your spiritual teacher and to follow and obey them and to do whatever they tell you to do, you're not living your life anymore, you're living another agenda.
Lawrence: Would you say that the ego was a hindrance or obstacle in your personal spiritual journey?
George: The ego is a functional aspect of your nature. What the issue is, is that you don't want to have the ego be a barrier for you to go deeper into meditation, but at the same time you don't want to shut down the ego so you're totally non-functional. If you're totally non-functional, we can put you out in the garden, put a pot on your head and we can use you for statuary.
You need to be functional, and the ego is part of your ability to be functional in this world.
Lawrence: Through your spiritual journey, how did you encounter the ego in a way that made it possible for you to map the ego In this uniquely wholistic way?
George: Between 1997 and 2006, I embarked upon a project in which I mapped each of the levels of the mind. As we studied each level of the mind, we gained certain insights about what's actually there, and what's not there.
It's like if I am on a journey, if this is the early 1800s, and I'm going out and I'm exploring the West, and I'm taking notes, okay, at this location there's a mountain there, and also there's a lot of prairie, and I notice over here, I notice that there's buffalo, and then you move along to another area and say, okay, there's a river that runs here, there's some mountains over there that have ice on top of them, and they appear to be the source of the river. You move a little further, and you say, okay, well, here are these very rocky areas, and it looks like these are the foothills of another set of mountains.
You're mapping what you actually see there. You're taking notes regarding what's actually there, and then once you are able to look at the whole picture, then you say, well, these look like they're a similar structure, okay, these are all part of what we call the ego. These aspects are part of the mental function of the mind. These are the parts that are aspects of the feeling aspect of the Conscious mind. You're able to learn about the actual functioning as opposed to simply labeling some part of this egoic complex as being, what the ego is. You have to understand it as a whole. That's the aspect of my spiritual journey that enabled me to be able to formulate this model of the ego.
One of the things that I looked at when I was doing my master's degree was I wanted to look at what happens in religious cults? What's actually happening to their awareness? Where is their attention focused? How has that changed their identity? How does that change their beliefs, their values, their behaviour? I also looked at the role of dysfunctional families and how that can influence people in negative aspects in their life. As I looked at these, I also looked at the negative impact these cultic groups have on family upbringing, and how that influences the ego.
I think that if we have a more comprehensive understanding of the ego, we're not going to demonize it. We're going to recognize its functioning as it is. And note that there are certain aspects of the ego that we need to tame. If you have a garden and your plants are growing wild all over the place, you have to go in there from time to time. You have to prune your plants. If you've developed the ego in a positive way, it can be a real tool for you to function in the world.
If you don't develop it in a positive way, if you get involved in religious cults or strange religions and political parties or hate groups. If you come from a background of being abused or troubled in your family, if you're associated with people who are implanting negative ideas in your mind and urging you to adopt criminal behaviour. These are things that are going to bring out these negative aspects of the ego. But if we carefully cultivate it, then it's going to become a tool for us. It's going to become something which enables us to function in a positive way in the world.
Let's think about what your life would be like if you didn’t know how to drive and then you gain that behaviour, you learn how to do that, then that opens up whole new horizons for you. You want to equip your ego with the particular skills that it needs to fulfil your worthy desires and not to demonize the ego and try and destroy the ego.
The ego's supposed to be here. Bottom line, it's supposed to be here. Let's make our ego a positive expression, as opposed to the negative expression we see so often when people are acting out their issues from their anger, their rage, their unfulfilled desires, taking things out on other people, etc. We see too much of that in the world today.
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