“One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'”
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ego. The word itself is the essence of conflict. Team "e" pitted against team "o" colliding at a hard "g", the toughest most guttural sound in the English language.
I can just picture the battlefield... at "g" the swords clash and the blood spills. Compare this word to words like "peace" or "breathe" that glide seamlessly. Language seems to contain a wisdom much like that of our dreams. Both are direct products of the mind, made up of components it readily recognizes and can assign meaning to, yet they communicate far beyond those meanings. This implies that we instruct and guide ourselves unknowingly - or better yet - that there are different kinds of knowing within us and the one we commonly consider "real" is not telling the whole story. If that isn't another argument for our inherent divinity, then I don't know what is. But I digress - back to my opening image, teams "e" and "o" duking it out...
Many contemporary spiritual thinkers believe the phenomenon of "ego" is what cripples our self-understanding and that this misunderstanding is the source of human suffering. Ego is the part of us all that needs to classify, enumerate, divide, rank, distinguish, define and discriminate. It likes to judge, strive, compete, to make us & them distinctions. It is one kind of knowing (the conscious mind) that has managed to convince the whole being that it is the only kind of knowing. It creates the illusion that our conscious thoughts and our sense perceptions are the limit of reality - the entire scope - and that nothing beyond that is possible. It tells us that the Self is finite and contained within that limited reality. Thus all ego actions are fear-based - all of its anxieties are fueled by a terror of death. But to think of the Self in this way is analogous to thinking of science as the only eye, of minds as brains, and people as bodies. Science is very good at observing, predicting and labeling, but never bothers to address how it all happens in the first place. Why and how are still giant question marks, no matter how impressively technical we get with descriptions of physical phenomenon. So, philosophy asks, why Self?
The ego conception of self must maintain its "separateness" from everything else. In ego's view, to fail to do so is to vanish or to no longer exist. This capacity is a survival tool for us, a species that must navigate through time and space for food and mates, etc. How would we function if we could not categorize and differentiate and organize great volumes of incoming sensory information? The important thing though, is that this way of seeing does not map total reality. We forget that no such categories exist in nature and just because we think and perceive in a certain fashion does not mean that this is how the world works - or more simply - just because the world passes through our minds and senses in a certain way it doesn't then follow that the world is that way. A grasshopper sees reality through a very different ocular structure and so it looks totally different than what we see, but is it any more real? Is one version more true? In the human mind, ego says its version of reality is the true one. Yet the very acts of human perception and thought filter out an enormous percentage of what is actually going on in our bodies, our minds, our surroundings. Ego can be construed as very important evolutionary functions - perception, classification and differentiation of the physical world - that have gone haywire and taken over, convincing its owner that its mode of being is all there is, and moreover, that IT is the arbiter of what is real - its methods/perspective are the only ways to assess what is true and what is not true. This is an illusion of such psychological strength that it has effectively transfixed the entire human race. Eckhart Tolle and Wayne Dyer have written extensively on this subject, and the Eastern thought traditions from which it springs explain it very elegantly.
Given that this impoverished conception of a Self offers no peace or certainty, we are constantly compelled to gather evidence for its claim of "separateness" out there in the world - a process that includes not only labeling and acquiring (agnostic, Muslim, feminist, yuppie, sculptor, in a certain income bracket, divorced, heterosexual, forty-something, Liberal, blah blah blah) but also identifying enemies, "othernesses," or "that which is not us or opposed to us." Therefore it is Ego at work in emotions like defensiveness, bigotry, greed, racial/national hatred, jealousy. There is a panic to protect such a narrow, fragile, time-bound definition of who we are. No wonder we have such a hunger for a more expansive sense of reality! The external chase is inevitably fruitless and can't even come close to describing what, in essence, a person is. So we must look in the last place ego would have us look - within.
Our intuitions - our mysterious kinds of "knowing" - are certain there is another plane, we feel it - that there is more to a human than just how he/she's measured in years, accomplishments, labels, and the long list of categories we put them into. When you wonder at the miraculous workings of your own body, don't you feel like the chatter in your mind is just a small sliver of the universe that is inside you? Or as Nisargadatta points out, what within you is noticing your thoughts? Who is the noticer?
While I was reading the other day, I was struck by something that made the entire maze of this concept come clear for me. The whole truth seems to be that there is no otherness. That's what we can hear the natural world saying to us in times of clarity. It says, with peace and ease, that all one and all is infinite. This is what I think that mournful forgetfulness is in the work of Levinas. When we are confronted with the face of another, some other, eternal timeless face stares out at us, begging to be remembered and recognized. This is why humans experience compassion, an emotion that seems to offer no evolutionary advantage whatsoever. Ego is standing in the way of truly understanding ourselves, of the world, each other. We mistake the shadows on the wall for the actual things, to borrow from Plato. We forget that we are the same substance that flows through the tulip, the fish, the elk, the ant. We have the same power that lies within an ancient rock. Nothing is really solid or separate - physics states that it all matter is mostly energy and empty space. Yet we come to believe that we get one chance and that we must frantically construct a describable identity, often fighting each other in the process, so that perhaps we will be written about or remembered. Is it so necessary for me to compare and compete with my fellow humans if I feel as though they ARE me? Is it so necessary for me to draw a fence around myself if I understand that it's actually impossible to do?
Hmmm. How love explodes within me when I put down my weapons, so to speak. The Buddhist will say that a small bowl-sized heart can be ruined by just a drop of poison, but a limitless ocean can't ever be, no matter how much you dump in. This little image moves me greatly. In that chaos of wanting to help the world but not knowing how to, I feel that if I trust in this image and in the part of me that is beyond ego, I will know what to do, I will be guided.
I'll leave you with one of my favourite Krishnamurti quotes: "What we are inwardly exposes itself outwardly."