Tag Archives: Ego

The Trumpian Ego at Work Again Today

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The collective ego of our government faces another challenge today when the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to release undisclosed sections of the Mueller report. The request for this release is lawfully valid. But,Trump now having taken over much of our legal system has asked the Supremes to protect the House from this information, apparently knowing there is “material” there that would be dangerous for the President.

I described this as a machination of our government’s collective ego, for it functions like any ego—it does not want to let us know things that are painful to know.  My ego has done a marvelous job of doing this for myself, allowing me to live in denial until very recent decades. And now I know why; for it is painful to have the long-denied “light of day” to penetrate one’s conscious awareness. Furthermore, this “secrecy” on this matter and others is imperative for Trump and his minions.  Otherwise, we might even learn more about his infamous decisions to walk into the dressing room of teen-age beauty queens, when they were in various stages of undress.  He later explained, “Well, I own this pageant. I have the freedom of doing this.” AND, the beauty pageant debauchery I anecdotally shared here is child’s play to what he and his minions are overtly hiding. See below for Washington Post’s for initial paragraphs of this story.

Trump administration asks Supreme Court to temporarily block Congress from seeing Mueller’s secret grand jury evidence
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in March cleared the way for Congress to access certain secret evidence from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election in one of a set of separation-of-powers lawsuits between House Democrats and the Trump administration.

Solicitor General Noel Francisco told the Supreme Court on Thursday that if it does not put the order on hold, the government will have to disclose those materials Monday, “which would irrevocably lift their secrecy and possibly frustrate the government’s ability to seek further review.”

 

Reality, God, and Boundaries

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The “judgement of god” is to me a literary construct, thus amenable to a personal application rather to a rhetorical one.  In my youth, as a fledgling Baptist preacher, it was sermon fodder, stem-winder material, for an “hell-fire-and-damnation” sermon in which I could hold forth about the impending judgement of God.  I put myself in this position because this “judgement of God” was heavily upon myself and one of the most effective ways of dealing with the gut-wrenching exposure of this experience is to attempt to deflect it to other people.

For, from a literary and more personal perspective, this “judgement of God” is when reality sets in and stings us with the realization that, “Uh oh!  I’ve been found out!”  In that moment we are naked and vulnerable to varying degrees and it is an humbling moment.  It is a moment when the ego harnesses all of its resources and almost always it will aim these resources in the form of projection upon someone else.  That is the reason that my fragile teen-age identity needed the position of “Baptist preacher.”

Biblical terminology like this “judgement” and even “God” are terms I’m a bit hesitant to use; for the Bible and its terminology are highly suspicious given the history of Christianity and its present day expression.  However, now having the ability to de-contextualize the Bible from how it was presented to me in my youth as well as “de-contextualizing” even myself from my youth, I have a deeper appreciation for it as Holy Writ.  Yes, I would even deign to describe it as the work of the “Holy Spirit” expressed through ancient humankind and if approached with a degree of humility has value for this present moment.

With this in mind, this “Reality Check” is upon us and “heavily” or “grievously” so.  I am going to take this approach for a few days as I apply it to issues that are present in our world today.  “Reality” is speaking to us as a species just as it is speaking to each of us personally…at least it is to me “personally.”  Limits are painful to the ego which always sees itself as without any, especially for those of us who have lived our lives in the illusion of certainty, and its twin–piety.

 

My Name is Mud…And I’m Kinda “Proud” of It

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One of the earliest stories I heard in my life was that God created us by digging into the earth and creating our progenitor, Adam.  I later learned that the name “Adam” meant “earth.”  And increasingly I realize just how much we are but “dust of the earth” and are destined to return to that dust. Shakespeare in “Hamlet” so pithily noted that we will ultimately become “food for worms.”

But from this humble origin we can become what Shakespeare described as “the quintessence of dust.”  However, achieving any degree of this quintessential…requires a lot of work, a lot of soul work, and there our dusty origins fights us tooth-and-toenail.  For one of the fundamental dimensions of our earthy, dusty origins is the constellation of the ego and that “beastly little treasure” has an intrinsic desire to never relinquish its “beastly” dimension.  Mine certainly does not! This ego is the “will of the species” and its willfulness if not mitigated by a concern for the “species” at-large will become self-destructive and that destructive energy will seek to wreak havoc on the species.  This is relevant to the Apostle Paul’s declaration, “I will to do good, but evil is present with me.” He knew the grandiosity of his spirituality…among other things!  I just visited our present day “holy ghost” (Google) and learned that 1 Corinthians 15:46-48 is very relevant to this vein of thought, Paul noting that “the first man” (i.e. “the ego”) is of the dust of the earth but the “second man” is spiritual, “of heaven.”

I want to close with a poem by the man I shared from yesterday, Samuel Menashe, who daunted my ego with the notion that my, even my name, “is mud.”  Humility is good.  It takes all the pressure off!

 

 

ADAM MEANS EARTH

 

I am the man

Whose name is mud

But what’s in a name

To shame one who knows

Mud does not stain

Clay he’s made of

Dust Adam became—

The dust he was—

Was he his name

Samuel Menashe

My Personal Struggle With the Ego

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I write about the ego a lot here and elsewhere.  Yes, I’m critical of its role in others but often admit it is very much a personal problem.  It always is if one is a human.  But only with the acquisition of the “ego integrity” I wrote about last time can one begin to recognize just how big a role it plays in his life.

When the ego is “hitting on all eight-cylinders” it is impenetrable.  I can remember pretty well in my youth when I was very insulated with a full panoply of the ego’s machinations, including hyper religiosity.  And religion is fertile ground for the ego as it offers a haven where one can be protected with the self-delusion that “the Spirit of God is leading me and therefore I see things correctly.  My judgment is sound.”  I well recall a moment when I was 18 years of age when this impenetrable religious veneer of mine was challenged in high school.  A girl I knew very well, and still know very well today, challenged the false piety I had just demonstrated in a school assembly.  I’ll never forget being taken aback, my “cage” rattled…but only briefly!  For the ego, when threatened is so adept at just sloughing off the criticism and retreating to the cacophony of internal reassurances, “No, this is not so.  This is a bit awkward, but just go away.  This is not so.”  And with that internal litany I resumed my performance art of a fundamentalist faith and fledgling ministry. But not for long!!!  In less than a year my tenuous, extremely impoverished identity would begin to submit to the “Divine threat” of Light and an adventure that continues now a half a century later.

My defensive retreat at age 18, essentially a “doubling down” inside an internal fortress is very human.  I continue this today, utilizing one of the many Divine adaptations available when the going gets too rough, relying on literature, music, philosophy, spiritual teachers, mantra’s and such.  Oh, I must not forget gardening, in season, and my marvelous canine son, Petey, two of the best “adaptations.” The God I believe in today gives us these adaptations, these “fig leaves” to cover up the existential nakedness when it becomes too much.

One source of my literary adaptations is the wisdom of poet T.S. Eliot who declared, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.”  My country right now is getting an industrial-strength dose of “reality” that we’ve been avoiding, possibly since our beginning.  This reality is trying to tell us that something is amiss and now we must find the courage to let “reality” do its work, bringing to the table the harsh rebuke of Eliot, “Oh the shame of motives late revealed, and the awareness of things ill done and done to others harm which once we took for exercise of virtue”

Ash Wednesday Thoughts: “Dust Balls” Are We.

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In my youth, Catholicism was the epitome of “them.”  It was a given that Catholics were not even Christian for they “believed in Mary.”  But as I’ve aged I have increasing respect for them, not unrelated to my discovery of a Franciscan priest in Albuquerque, NM, Richard Rohr.  I received via email yesterday an email from a blogging friend in Australia which included a powerful poem about “Ash Wednesday” which I will share at the end of this post.

I have faint memories of the term “Ash Wednesday” from my youth and young adulthood but these memories were tainted by the anti-Catholicism.   This brings to mind another blogging friend who I kidded with the label “Dust ball” in reference to her interest in “Mother Earth” and the biblical notion of us being “dust of the earth.”  For we are all “dust balls” bouncing around on this granite “dust ball” for a few decades with the innate, egoic tendency to take ourselves more seriously than we are.  This absence of humility fails to appreciate the emphasis that the Catholics offer with this Lent season event, symbolized with a smudge of ash on the forehead.

Humility is often confused with cravenness.  But this is related to what Carl Jung noted as two extremes of the same human egoic complex—ego inflation and ego deflation.  The “inflation” is taking our selves too seriously, but the “deflation” is not taking ourselves seriously enough, failing to respect the glory of just “being” here.  But in each instance the emphasis is on our “self” as in our ego.  The alternative would be true humility, “a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.”  Human nature is prone to focus on what we know to be reality, always a self-serving endeavor, failing to recognize that this “knowing” usually excludes so many who lie beyond that culturally contrived pale.  Humility involves letting that “pale,” i.e. “boundary,” dissolve a bit so that we can include some of those that we have heretofore excluded.  Sounds a bit like Jesus, huh?

Blessing the Dust
A Blessing for Ash Wednesday

All those days
you felt like dust,
like dirt,
as if all you had to do
was turn your face
toward the wind
and be scattered
to the four corners

or swept away
by the smallest breath
as insubstantial—

Did you not know
what the Holy One
can do with dust?

This is the day
we freely say
we are scorched.

This is the hour
we are marked
by what has made it
through the burning.

This is the moment
we ask for the blessing
that lives within
the ancient ashes,
that makes its home
inside the soil of
this sacred earth.

So let us be marked
not for sorrow.
And let us be marked
not for shame.
Let us be marked
not for false humility
or for thinking
we are less
than we are

but for claiming
what God can do
within the dust,
within the dirt,
within the stuff
of which the world
is made,
and the stars that blaze
in our bones,
and the galaxies that spiral
inside the smudge
we bear.

–Jan Richardson

Emily Dickinson and the Unconscious

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Today I am following up with further thoughts on a little Emily Dickinson poem that I explored yesterday:

‘Twas such a little—little boat 
That toddled down the bay!
‘Twas such a gallant—gallant sea
That beckoned it away!

‘Twas such a greedy, greedy wave
That licked it from the Coast—
Nor ever guessed the stately sails
My little craft was lost! 

The little boat being swept out to sea is the fragile human ego, always adrift upon the unconscious wash that carries us along, individually and collectively.  The persona that our ego has crafted, i.e. “the boat,” is very fragile and susceptible to being “carried away” too far from the shore and “lost” or even being “sunk” into the abyss of despair.  Our unconscious fears tend to keep us tethered tightly to the comfortable shore which, should we never find the courage to lose sight of for a moment, Jesus posed the famous question, “What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?”  For if we never venture from the shore, we will remain bound to the tribal conventions in which we were born and never discover the Divine potential that was given us at birth, we will never discover the Christ child that lives within.

Canned Religion and Conspicuous Piety

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“When love begins to sicken and decay
It useth an enforced ceremony.
There are no tricks in plain and simple faith:
But hollow men, like horses hot at hand,
Make gallant show, and promise of their mettle.”

This Shakespearean wisdom from Julius Caesar has gotten a lot of play in my blogs the past year as I witnessed evangelical Christians utilize their canned faith to help elect Donald Trump to the Presidency. But I am such a keen observer of this hypocrisy because I’ve spent most of my life there.  And “canned faith,” steeped in the letter of the law, always thrives on the ego’s demand for “strutting and fretting” like the aforementioned “horses hot at hand.”

Plain and simple faith, huh?  Conspicuous piety always takes a lot of effort genuine human goodness requires simple presence in life, paying attention to this beautiful world and gazing attentively on the flow of life taking place around you.  It is amazing how much life one can miss when he is immersed in the self-imposed illusion of piety.

ADDENDUM–I have diversified this literary effort of mine.  In this blog I plan to focus more on poetry and prose.  Below you will see two other blogs of mine relevant to spirituality and politics which have lain dormant for most of the past five years.  I hope some of you will check them out.  However, the boundaries will not be clear as my focus is very broad and my view of life is very eclectic/inclusive/broad-based.  Yes, at times too much so!

https://wordpress.com/posts/anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com

https://wordpress.com/posts/theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com

Weighed in the Balances & Found Wanting

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King Belshazzar, the king of Babylon in the 6th century B.C, saw a writing on the wall one morning and eventually called the Hebrew prophet Daniel to interpret.  He must have been stung to hear Daniel announce his interpretation, “Thou art weighed in the balances and found wanting.”  This scripture is often used sermon material in evangelical circles to remind us that we have “been weighed” and found wanting.  And I think this is a useful thing to remember, for all of us from time to time feel the sting from reality which brings us face to face with our inconsistencies and duplicities, giving us the opportunity to humbly acknowledge that we were “posing” a little more than we thought.  And, speaking from experience, those who have a spiritual focus in their lives often need to endure this sting of, “The Spirit of God” and thus find the opportunity to acknowledge a dimension of what the Apostle Paul called, “the flesh” in our spiritual practice.  In modern parlance, we would call this the ego.  Of course, we also have at our disposal a contrivance I’ve used often, “Oh no.  I am right” and remain stuck in our self-serving view of the world; for, “How could it be wrong?  I’m a Christian.”  John Paul Sartre called this “bad faith.”

The Christian faith, especially those in the evangelical fold, are now staring face to face an opportunity to experience this “sting” as Donald Trump represents the phenomena of them being “weighed in the balances and found wanting.”  Never has a political leader embodied more fully the very antitheses of the teachings of Jesus than does Donald J. Trump, yet evangelical Christians have pledged their troth to him and one of their leaders, Jerry Falwell Jr, even likened him unto “King David.”  This support of Trump is an egregious illustration of the specious and hypocritical dimension that is often present in faith.

But a caveat is in order.  There is nothing that should be surprising to learn from time to time that our faith is “specious and hypocritical.”  For, “we hold this treasure in earthen vessels” as we are all very human regardless of how sincere we are in our spiritual commitment and therefore from time to time we must feel this “sting” and see how we have been deceived.  It is so easy to piously announce “The Lord has raised Trump up” or “the Lord is leading me to vote for him” but I have found personally that so many times when I’ve felt strongly that “the Lord is leading me” I would have to shortly thereafter realize—“Oh, that was only my ego leading me, not God.”   But it is really hard to admit “I am wrong” in our faith for our ego often is much more present than we care to admit. This duplicity that I have been, and am given to does not make me a “bad” human being but it does reveal just how human I am, just how much “the flesh” is present in my spirituality.  But it is so much easier to just brazenly continue on one’s path, refusing to admit having made a mistake, basking smugly in the delusion that “the Lord is leading.”  And it is no accident that the evangelicals have opted to cast their vote for a man who is characterologically incapable of admitting he made a mistake.

But the Christian tradition that I have lived in most of my life facilitated a simple “Christian persona” and when one’s identity is hidden beneath an ego-ridden persona, there is tremendous resistance to acknowledging this.  This persona is largely a fictional creation we have subscribed to about ourselves and about the world itself, a fictional creation comprised of conceptual formulations and ideas.  When one is only a persona, even if a “Christian” persona, he/she is an ideologue and is easy prey for a demonic figure like Trump who is keenly in touch with the dark side of the American psyche.  When one is an ideological Christian, he/she will be a slave to the “letter of the law” and not open to the nuances of life and scripture.  This facilitates succumbing to the clarion call of “Let’s Make American Great Again” which is merely code for, “Let’s turn back the clock to a time when ‘everything is done decently and in order.’”  In other words, to turn the clock back to a time when everything is static and nuance is verboten. And if you want to see where this phenomenon will lead to in the extreme, just Google the term, “Isis.”

This ideological faith brings to my mind a sonnet by John Masefield describing how the “tiger mind” so desperately contrives to create a world that is consistent with its world-view, an endeavor which in the area of faith leads ultimately to the discovery that the God one is worshipping is only a projection of his/her own ego.  Now let me confess.  When this dawns on you, it will rattle your cage; and even worse, it will make you aware that you will be subject to “cage rattling” for the rest of your life!

How many ways, how many different times
The tiger mind has clutched at what it sought,
Only to prove supposed virtues crimes,
The imagined godhead but a form of thought.
How many restless brains have wrought and schemed,
Padding their cage, or built, or brought to law,
Made in outlasting brass the something dreamed,
Only to prove themselves the things held in awe.

 

 

 

The Tyranny of Labels in Video

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This video brilliantly illustrates everything I have been obsessing about with my emphasis on “distinction-drawing” and actually everything I’ve been trying to say for the past five years on this blog.  If we live our life in the tyranny of the narrowly defined world our ego has carved out for us, individually and collectively, we will always have conflict for there is no end to the need to draw distinctions between “us” and “them.”  Here again we see here the curse of religion…all religions…the ego always tends to take the spiritual wisdom provided there and turn it into a weapon under the name of whatever god we worship.  And, of course, there is the temptation to make this point accusatorily, “You do this but I do not” but the luxury of this self-deception is no longer mine. Losing that “luxury” is relevant to something said this morning in The Guardian about Donald Trump’s narcissism, “Trump does not have an interior life.  He ‘had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury…an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul.’”  This “rumbling” is what my spiritual tradition calls “the Spirit of God” and if there is no “rumbling” there is only ego-ridden certainty which is devoid of any Spirit.

And when the ego’s tyranny metastasizes to a certain point, there will always be violence.  For the ego’s need to know that we are “right” can reach the point where we will to express with action the repressed experience of being “wrong,” a feeling that cannot help but arise when we are introduced to a world which is based on the tyranny of labels.  I do think that religion often offers the opportunity to dive into the depths of our heart and acknowledge this feeling of “wrongness” but it entails the willingness to face the pain of disillusionment, in Christian doctrine described as “being lost.”  This is why Aeschylus described the grace of god as “awful” centuries ago for he knew the agony of being disillusioned of the unquestioned certainties of our ego-constructed world.

“And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”  Aeschylus

 

The Ego and “Distinction Drawing”

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Fr. Richard Rohr today offered observations about the ego which are relevant to my present focus on the “distinction drawing” that is an essential part of our identity.  He pointed out how the ego is concerned only about itself which is just a basic dimension of being human and only becomes toxic when it metastasizes and begins to project its shadow outside onto “them” and in extreme attempts to obliterate “them.”  The best example is Isis but the same phenomena is found with any extremist group.

Ordinary ego functioning is, yes, “egotistic” but it is usually benign and helps provide group/tribal coherence.  It provides an identity which always sets one apart from “them.”  I shared recently about my upbringing in a conservative Landmark Baptist Church and it does provide an example of an inordinate need to “draw distinctions” and thus overly emphasized the biblical admonishment, “Come out ye from among them and be ye separate” and “Be ye a peculiar people.”  I often facetiously note to friends that my little church clearly succeeded in this endeavor and, with chagrin, admit I won the prize for “peculiar”!  But let me assure you that in my little central Arkansas community these people were not toxic, were very good people, and did a great job in providing me the social and educational structure that would allow me to now be able to “discourse” about them.  Conservative groups, with non-toxic ego needs, are the backbone of any tribe and even of the entire world.

But when the toxicity metastasizes, we find phenomena like Isis and Westboro Baptist Church, the latter of which is a caricature of Baptist churches.  In these groups the “distinction drawer” has become so powerful due to repressed fears and anxieties from the reptilian brain that there is a need to strike out at somebody.  In a way they are so much under the grip of the unconsciousness that they are powerless which is how Rohr interprets Jesus’ dying words on the Cross, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”  Jesus knew that those who hated him to the point of wanting to kill him merely were not conscious of what they were doing.

When distinction drawing becomes too rigid, when the need for boundaries becomes paramount, it always leads to an over emphasis of what sets the group apart rather seeking for common denominators with others. It is not accidental that one of the most appealing dimensions of Donald Trump is his promise to “Build that wall” to keep out the Mexicans.  And it is not often remembered now but not long after he started this emphasis one of his competitors went to the absurd extreme of proposing to build a wall between our country and Canada also!  Trump’s message appeals to frightened people who see their out dated certainties threatened.  The message of “building a wall” is a symbol that resonates with the need to “set boundaries” and keep change from happening, not recognizing that “change” is an essential dynamic of life and must be embraced rather than opposed.  Otherwise we would still be living in the Stone Age.