Tag Archives: Ego integrity

My Personal Struggle With the Ego

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”

Obama’s, “Clinging to Guns and Religion.”

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In 2008 Barack Obama was overheard dismissively speaking of people who, “cling to their guns and religion” which immediately provided fodder for the base of the Republican Party who didn’t really understand what he was saying. Sure, it was impolitic for him to say that where it might be misunderstood but it was a valid and important observation about the ideologically-oriented base of the Republican Party who “cling” to ideas rather than have a complicated and subtle interior life so that ideas are not taken to be the “thing in itself.”

Guns are fine. The problem arises when the “clinging” function of the ego gets involved as an innocent device is given an inordinate investment of energy so that “guns plus the emotional energy” becomes another matter all together. The “guns + emotional valence” takes on a life of its own, becoming a core identity issue to the point where it is no longer about “guns” but is about the individual’s grasp of who he is, of his definition of, “who I am.” The more tenuous is the grasp of one’s, “who I am” the more desperate will he cling to some idea or group of ideas that he has invested in to keep him from being devoured by an existential anxiety that lies at the root of all cultures. This abyss of meaningless will destroy one if his spirituality has not equipped him with the ego-integrity to address this spirit of negativity which is an intrinsic dimension of human experience and needs to be acknowledged, not denied. This “ego integrity” is a spiritual capacity which allows confronting the hidden depths of one’s heart and integrating them into conscious experience and finding empowerment as a result. Without this acknowledgement and integration, the energy that could be available for deliberate, focused, conscious attention outside of oneself will be turned inward to keep those “demons at bay.” This is a “divided heart” or the “divided house” which Abraham Lincoln famously noted cannot stand.

But this hopelessness does not have to destroy one if he finds the courage to slowly, gradually, patiently, and humbly confront it and in so doing discover that he can find increasingly an indomitable core beneath this hopelessness…if he is willing to give up the contrivance that his ego has tricked him into relying upon, whatever that contrivance/s might be. The spiritual impoverishment of our culture is now egregiously before us. Beneath the various contrivances it offers us, guns being but one of them, lurks the abyss of hopelessness which can be addressed if we are willing to acknowledge our “willful ignorance”, an ego driven self-deception who has convinced us that a life of illusion is preferable to a life in which we live as a fully functioning, integrated human being.

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Here is a list of my blogs. I invite you to check out the other two sometime.

https://anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com/

https://literarylew.wordpress.com/

https://theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com/

Ego Integrity Amidst Constant Change

Donald Trump and his Shame-Based Psyche

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If we don’t know already enough about the character of Donald Trump, we now have another glimpse into the dark recesses of his heart with a new book, “The Truth about Trump” by Michael D’Antonio. The author uses Trump’s own words from an interview two years ago to show us just how extensive is the shame-base that governs this man who could soon be the next President of the United States. This shame-base is so deep-seated and pervasive that he cannot acknowledge any wrong or having lost in anything. It boils down to an inability to admit, “I am wrong” about even the simplest matter. Often when it would have been politically prudent to have acknowledged that “I misspoke” or “I now regret having said that” or some other euphemistic say of acknowledging he had made a mistake, he will merely double-down on the matter. At times it has been comical.

All of us have a shame base and it serves a purpose, forcing us to “join the human race” and play by its rules…more or less…even when at times these rules seem to be more than we can bear. But if we cannot play by the rules we will be an “out-lier” and possibly become the bully on the playground who fails to regard common civilities and perfunctory kindnesses necessary to “join in the reindeer games,” those from which Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer was excluded. The playground bully is comfortable with the disruptive influence he has on the play-ground, and even thrives on it in some perverted manner. Those that carry this impudence to an extreme and cross a certain boundary at some point will end up in the principal’s office and face frequent suspension from school. For the “play-ground” must have rules as otherwise the “civilization” that it represents will disintegrate into complete chaos.

In any ordinary “play-ground” Trump would have already been suspended or institutionalized in one of the facilities at which I used to practice counseling for incorrigible teen-age offenders. But Trump stumbled onto a “playground” that was amenable to his excesses, allowing him to reach a point at which he could not be stopped. Oh, sure now his Republican Party is greatly troubled by his presence and by his power but most of them still will not acknowledge that they created an atmosphere in their Party the past few decades that would permit him to climb to power by fostering a culture of dishonesty and hypocrisy which would make someone like Trump viable. If they’d have maintained some basic sense of moral and spiritual integrity, the resulting structure, i.e “boundaries”, would have made it impossible for demagoguery to gain traction. To illustrate, for the past eight years of the Obama presidency they have been passive in response to members of its constituency that insinuated and declared that Obama was not an actual citizen of the United States, was actually a Muslim,. Often I watched the GOP leadership sidestep opportunities to quash this type of non-sense but they would always equivocate on the matter, not wanting to alienate their base who thrives on hysterical non-sense.

But my main concern today is, “Why do intelligent citizens continue to support him when reports such as the D’Antonio book clearly reveal that Trump is mentally unstable?” And furthermore just yesterday a Conservative firebrand, Glenn Beck, described Trump as a “psychopath” about whom he was frightened. Trump’s instability is so egregious that it is commonly accepted but many conservatives sheeplishly declare they are standing firm in support of him, lest Hillary Clinton be elected.. So, where is reason in my country today? Have we lost our mind? Are we crazy?

Well, no. The problem is that “reason” is not the guiding force in our lives and never has been. Our reason is but the surface dimension of life and is always subservient to subterranean dimensions of the heart that we do not wish to acknowledge. As Woody Allen once said about marrying his step-daughter, “The heart wants what it wants.” Or as someone else once put it, “Our thinking is the belated rationalization of conclusions to which we have already been led by our desires.” To put it still another way, our reasoning which purportedly governs our life is always governed by the unconscious. But for many people the notion of being influenced by unconscious motivations jeopardizes their ego-driven belief that they are totally in control of their lives, that they “know” what they are doing, and are “right” about what they are doing and believing. To recognize this hidden dimension of their heart would jeopardize their illusion of being in control. And control is the core issue in this political campaign. It is a battle between people who are firmly entrenched in a now-threatened view of the world that we are in control of our lives and those of us that have imbibed of what I think can best be described as post-modern thought. This modern view of the world recognizes that we only have a perspective on the world and do not see things objectively, making it necessary to lighten-up a bit with our view of the world and allow more diversity that we used to think was necessary or even possible.

And this, my friend, is scary! What makes it so frightening is that the ego can no longer reign in our hearts and lives, forcing us to humble ourselves a bit and see, understand, and experience that our view of the world is very finite and given to being very self-serving. By nature we see and believe only what we want to see and believe. Or, in the famous words of Jesus, we “have eyes to see but see not, ears to hear but hear not.”

NYT book review of D’Antonio book: (See NYT review of the D’Antonio book–http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/us/politics/donald-trump-interviews.html?_r=0)

Waging the War I Am

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I quote W. H. Auden’s observation “We wage the war we are” so often that I think it should be the name of my blog. And, it is so readily available for my “usage” because it is so relevant to me personally, revealing to you and the millions who read this blather each day that my heart is a war zone. (Oh, well…hell…let me be truthful, the number is far less than “millions”.!)

My heart has always been a war zone, a battle field where conflicting impulses sought for primacy and dominance in my life. But I could not handle that duress, the “duress” of being an “alive” human being, and solved it very early in my life when I adopted the stance that I now refer to as “literal lew.” “Literal lew” allowed me to live above the fray, ensconced in my analytical cocoon, obsessively “standing in the rear of my affection, out of the shot and danger of desire.” (Hamlet) But even then, looking back on my life, the underlying tension and duress was trying to seep through, just as it did with Macbeth who lamented, “my dull brain is (was) racked by things forgotten.”

But in my mid-thirties, “literal lew” began his “Damascus road” conversion, a process which is still underway and will always be underway; for spirituality is not an accomplished fact but a process, the “process” of being human. So now I am very conscious of this duress that I earlier could not handle and it comes to me in the form of…for want of a better term…anxiety. Rollo May called this “existential anxiety” and said it is the experience that we “feel” when the battle between a basic drive in the heart comes to the surface—“to be” or “not to be.” This is the conflict between the Spirit of God leading us to authenticity, i.e. “be-ing” and the antithetical drive to remain inauthentic, desperately clutching our fig leaf and trying to cover our nakedness.

I just recently realized that what is happening is that my ego, that part of our heart which I so often castigate, is gaining maturity. With this maturity, my ego is not so “full of itself” and can be a bit more humble, allowing the experience of reality to seep in. (I like to think of this as “the Spirit of God” seeping in.) My ego can now handle this duress which used to scare the hell out of me though as I make this assertion, I’ve given pause and want to add, “Knock on wood!” Another dimension of this ego maturity is that my mind can now more or less comfortably live with contradictions, realizing that in my heart diametrically opposite things are present; such as, I am “good” and “bad” at the same time, ultimately meaning that I simply “am.”

The most important dimension of this ego maturity which I purport to be finding is that I can now handle the tension and at the same time realize that what is most important is not my internal tension, not the “war” inside, but what I do in the outside “real” world which always leads me to the wisdom of the Buddhist notion of “chopping wood, carrying water.” Though the internal machinations of the heart are powerful and important, I find that I can remember to focus most of the time on the mundane responsibilities of day to day life, tending hearth and home– loving my wife, doggies, friends, and family–and hoping that my feeble efforts each day will make the world a bit more hospitable for others.

We Are “Needful Things” at Heart

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Jenny Kissed Me is an excellent blog featuring a steady array of very thoughtful poetry. (http://jeglatter.wordpress.com/2013/06/20/let-go-of-everything-that-does-not-serve-you/) In the poem linked here, she describes emptiness as a place of fulfillment and strength and uses the image of the mother’s breast as the model of need fulfillment. “Dear One, Let go of everything/That does not/Serve you/Then lay, rest//And suckle here,/Until your emptiness/Becomes/A strong new you.”

Clinical theory offers object-relations theory to explain the “needfulness” of the human heart, suggesting as the subject begins to formulate it “needs” objects with which to constitute itself. Or, better stated, it needs objects against which to define itself, this process of definition often described as “object separateness.” The mother, according to this theory is the first object, the “primary object”, and her breasts are the “primary” part of her as they are quickly learned to be satisfaction for a primary need, physical hunger.

But a primary dimension of the human experience will always be “emptiness” or an “object hunger” which we will return to if we do anything meaningful in life. If our ego is mature…if we have “ego integrity”…we will be able to let down our boundaries here and there and step into that “neediness” and there find a Strength that we will not find otherwise.

Marilynne Robinson wrote a marvelous novel entitled Housekeeping about twenty years ago, a novel that was turned into an excellent movie by the same name. In the novel she noted something that grabbed me even before I knew why, “Need can blossom into all the compensations it requires.” Robinson knew that need, though a very scary dimension of the heart, is fertile territory if we dare to go there. And, by describing it as “fertile” I am assigning it femininity and I do so deliberately; for, there in the maw of primordial hunger is our Source and it/He/She is the Ultimate compensation that can be found there. But, unfortunately, addiction of all varieties is always a ready temptation when we visit that matrix of life.

However, emptiness is antithetical to everything we are taught in Western culture and this is not unrelated to the misogyny that we making inroads into in the past 100 years. Our culture emphasizes “be strong” in an ego-maniacal way, not realizing that real strength is found in weakness. Sounds a whole lot like the teachings of Jesus, doesn’t it? Hmm.

And let me close with a facetious note. Stephen King wrote a short story entitled “Needful Things.” I sometimes like to think that this is a good description of the human race.

Ego Integrity and Humility

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