Tag Archives: Ego

My “Querencia” Exposed.

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I posted last week about being confined in my version of Shakespeare’s “pauser reason” which I explained is a detached observer stance in life. One of my readers responded with a stunningly insightful response, “Is it a pause or is it a querencia?”

Well, I had to Wikipedia the term “querencia” but what I found out really gave me “pause.” It is a Spanish term for the “haunt of an animal, a favorite spot, the area of a bull-ring where the bull makes its stand.” The cartoon image immediately came to my mind of the beleaguered bull hunkered down, digging in at the heels, angry as hell, ready to wreak havoc on the taunting matador.”

“What an image!” I thought.   I knew that my “observer stance” served an ego function but I had not seen this dimension of it. I had not seen it as that extreme of a defensive stance one which included very definite aggressive intentions. I could see the “bull” in me ready to wreak havoc on the matador “out there” who has been taunting me all of these years!  So once again I receivedanother lesson in the Auden wisdom, “We wage the war we are.”

(See “Inthegazeoftheother” blog here in wordpress for the source of the feedback re “querencia.”)

 

 

Glen Beck and Neurophysiology

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Glenn Beck is one of the arch villains for we American liberals, a daily font of conservative blather of the darkest vein. But two days ago on his tv show he tearfully acknowledged that he has been battling for years a serious neurological illness that will shut him down in only a few years.

I guess in the deepest recesses of the fatally ill “literallew” there was a want to go “tee-hee” and I fear there will be a lot of that brutal, heartless immaturity from other of my liberal brothers and cisterns….I mean sisters. But I’m deeply sorry for this brother of ours….for we are all brothers and sisters regardless of our different perspectives on life—we are all made from the same “stuff,” we are all the “quintessence of dust” as Shakespeare understood so well.

However, I do think that the vitriolic blather of Glen Beck and others does have a neurological sub-strata. But, alas and alack, I also feel strongly that this “enlightened” perspective you are now reading has a “neurological sub-strata” and coming to understand this years ago has helped me to take myself less seriously than I have done for most of my life. Modern neurological science has taught us so much about ourselves that if we would humble ourselves and pay attention we eventually find ourselves overwhelmed with the simple but profound mystery of life, including the mystery of our very being.

In the past three years plus some of your have witnessed my “tippy-toeing” into this mystery as my awareness of it began to blossom. Awareness of this mystery…cognitively and emotionally…always evokes a feeling of finitude and frailty and at times is overwhelming. It is an humbling experience. It always brings to my mind the image that Shakespeare offered with King Lear, out on the heath of the kingdom he had forfeited, “pelted by a pitiless storm,” bereft of all the accouterments of his power, “naked as a jay-bird”, noting of an animal nearby, “we are all but poor, bare forked creatures as thou art.”

This “nakedness” that Shakespeare so eloquently grasped in his plays is what Glenn Beck is now feeling. It is what I am now feeling. And according to the teachings of Jesus…and countless other spiritual teachers over the eons…this nakedness is something we can experience any time in our life and can therein find redemption. This nakedness is “death” and out of it can come “life.” This nakedness is death of the ego, a relaxing of its tenacious grip on our consciousness allowing us to see that our life and the whole of life is much more than we can comprehend, an incomprehensible mystery before which we can only “glory, bow, and tremble.” (Poet, Edgar Simmons)

 

My “Call to Preach”

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I recently started a second blog in which i am deigning to “preach”, explaining in my prefatory remarks that the notion of “preaching” brings to my mind the popular expression of the Valley Girl days, “Barf me with a spoon.” Though I have tried to avoid it, I’m sure that here from time to time as I’ve “held forth” I have ventured into a “preachy” mode in spite of myself. It is just part of who I am; and, fortunately, I approach the subject now with more humility have no pretensions to have any ultimate truth to offer, only my feeble, often self-centered, interpretation of Ultimate Truth.

In my youth, I got the “call” to preach when I was sixteen years of age. Now, of course, this was no surprise to anyone, including myself, as everyone knew that it was in my future. It was a role that had been proffered to me from early on…even from before my birth…as I learned that my mother had promised God that if only He would give her a boy, she would give him to God. Those of you who are clinically minded can immediately see the overwhelming issues that I was presented with even before I had any awareness of what was going on in this bewildering world.

This is such a complicated story but I will be brief. When I “surrendered to the call” at age 16, it really was good for me in some way as finally I had an identity. For, I was not a jock, not even close to being a “BMOC” (Big Man on Campus), and had my hands full carrying myself with the dignity that I did manage to muster forth. But, suddenly I was a “preacher” and I knew who I was. But now, looking back, I see so clearly the problem that I was dealing with on some level in my heart though not consciously at all. For, with this “surrender” I had addressed an ego need but spirituality and spiritual leadership is not about fulfilling our ego needs. I was the “Hollow Man” that T. S. Eliot wrote about though at that age only a “Hollow Boy” who would eventually grow into a “Hollow Man” and spent most of my life in that empty house.

In my early twenties, especially after a year in a hyper-conservative cemetery…I mean, seminary…I knew I had to listen to the tumult in my heart and quit this ersatz ministry. But, at that time, I had no awareness of just how ersatz the whole of my spiritual life was, only that I was very unhappy with it, and needed to escape. So, with great shame and even humiliation, I “renounced” my call to the ministry.

Forty years later, this “call” is still present as in some fashion it was my lot in life. But it no longer is the immature “call” of my youth and I’m not even for sure that “call” is the right term. That ego-laden spirituality of that era of my life is maturing and I’m so delighted that it leaves me with no need to “convert” anyone or to argue with them about spirituality. There is a Presence in this world that I like to call “God” and it/He/She is quite capable of doing any “converting” without any help of my manipulation or intimidation. God is a personal phenomena and if we do the bidding of the Apostle Paul and focus on “working out our own salvation with fear and trembling” we will have our hands full and not have to project out on others our own spiritual inadequacies.

 

A “Fig Leaf” for Existential Anxiety

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We are such vulnerable little creatures, described by W. H. Auden as “clinging to the granite skirts of our sensible old planet.” I think we are acutely aware of this vulnerability which is why God gave us a “fig leaf” to hide ourselves from our existential anxiety This “fig leaf” we know as our “ego” and if it does its job, we will be mercifully unaware of our vulnerability, assuming (i.e. “pretending”) that we will live forever. But, alas and alack, some of us were issued defective “fig leaves” and have been cursed with existential anxiety. One way we have to cope with this distress is poetry and I will now share a wonderful poem on the subject of vulnerability:

Edge

by Eamon Grennan

When I’d walked out to the sea surfing and spuming
into meerschaum heaps of lettuce-tinted gauze —
breakers becoming light then noise, the ocean raging
and rearranging this long spit of sand like a life
at the mercy of circumstance — I saw the north wind

drive trillions of sandgrains to scour every last trace
of what the previous tide had done, and gulls snatch
huge clamshells from the swirl and smash them
to get at and gobble each salt, soft-bodied helplessness
at the heart of its own broken home, and I felt caught

between water-violence and the gulls’ patience,
between shifting ground I stood on and the thunder-
turbulence of water, between a slowly disappearing
ceiling of cloud and the blue sky-cupola it leaves
behind, between titanic ocean-roar and the ticking heart.

 

 

The Great Round of Life

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“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” (Anais Nin, quoted in http://juliegreenart.com/)

This was a stunning line by Anais Nin. And, though I have not read much of her work, I have read enough to know she was full of “stunning” lines. And I also know she battled her demons throughout her life; it is only as we “battle our demons” that wisdom comes to us.

Remaining in a “bud” is to not live. For the blossoming to occur, the “bud” has to break apart and even disintegrate so that “purpose” might be achieved. This is the wisdom that Jesus had in mind when he reminded us that unless a grain of corn fall into the earth and die, it could not bring forth life. And this is the meaning of the Crucifixion. Ranier Rilke approached the same life-out-of-death theme with these words, “Daily he takes himself off and steps into the changing constellation of his own everlasting risk.” (Duino Elegies)

Shakespeare also knew this essential truth of life, using the “bud” image himself in his first sonnet. In this lovely sonnet The Bard described a young man who balked at commitment to marriage, holding onto his heart’s “bud” and being unwilling to participate in the Great Round:

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding:
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.

Heaven on Earth

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Here is a poem by W. R. Rodgers, an Irish poet from the 20th century.  He describes a beautiful world that we all long for, a world which can basically be described as Eden or Heaven.  It is a dream we all have and one to which we are all working but one which I don’t think we will ever realize literally.  But we need to seek it, especially to seek it in our own personal life.  I think the opening line is most important, describing a land where all “Is, and nothing’s Ought.”  The tyranny of the “oughts” is the ego run amok.

 

Neither Here Nor There

by W. R. Rodgers

In that land all Is, and nothing’s Ought;
No owners or notices, only birds;
No walls anywhere, only lean wire of words
Worming brokenly out from eaten thought;
No oats growing, only ankle-lace grass
Easing and not resenting the feet that pass;
No enormous beasts, only names of them;
No bones made, bans laid, or boons expected,
No contracts, entails, or hereditaments,
Anything at all that might tie or hem.

In that land, all’s lackadaisical;
No lakes of coddled spawn, and no locked ponds
Of settled purpose, no netted fishes;
But only inkling streams and running fronds,
Fritillaried with dreams, weedy with wishes;
Nor arrogant talk is heard, haggling phrase,
But undertones, and hesitance, and haze;
On clear days mountains of meaning are seen
Humped high on the horizon; no one goes
To con their meaning, no one cares or knows.

In that land all’s flat, indifferent; there
Is neither springing house nor hanging tent,
No aims are entertained, and nothing is meant,
For there are no ends, and no trends, no roads,
Only follow your nose to anywhere.
No one is born there, no one stays or dies,
For it is a timeless land, it lies
Between the act and the attrition, it
Marks off bound from rebound, make from break, tit
From tat, also today from tomorrow.
No Cause there comes to term, but each departs
Elsewhere to whelp its deeds, expel its darts;
There are no homecomings, of course, no goodbyes
In that land, neither yearning nor scorning,
Though at night there is the smell of morning.

W. R. Rodgers
Irish poet 1909-1969

A Poem about the Ego

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I love you poets and creative writers. You so elegantly capture glimpses of reality which otherwise might go unnoticed by prosaic minds such as mine. This poem entitled “Ego” is a delightful approach to the subject.

 

EGO

(By Denise Duhamel)

 

I just didn’t get it—

even with the teacher holding an orange (the earth) in one hand

and a lemon (the moon) in the other,

her favorite student (the sun) standing behind her with a flashlight.

I just couldn’t grasp it—

this whole citrus universe, these bumpy planets revolving so slowly

no one could even see themselves moving.

I used to think if I could only concentrate hard enough

I could be the one person to feel what no one else could,

sense a small tug from the ground, a sky shift, the earth changing gears.

Even though I was only one mini-speck on a speck,

even though I was merely a pinprick in one goosebump on the orange,

I was sure then I was the most specially perceptive, perceptively sensitive.

I was sure then my mother was the only mother to snap,

“The world doesn’t revolve around you!”

The earth was fragile and mostly water,

just the way the orange was mostly water if you peeled it,

just the way I was mostly water if you peeled me.

Looking back on that third grade science demonstration,

I can understand why some people gave up on fame or religion or cures—

especially people who have an understanding

of the excruciating crawl of the world,

who have a well-developed sense of spatial reasoning

and the tininess that it is to be one of us.

But not me—even now I wouldn’t mind being god, the force

who spins the planets the way I spin a globe, a basketball, a yoyo.

I wouldn’t mind being that teacher who chooses the fruit,

or that favorite kid who gives the moon its glow.

 

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Here is more wisdom to share from my dear friend Emily. You know her as Emily Dickinson. Her poetry is so unusual, reflecting such an interesting and complicated mind which was so adept at addressing spiritual intricacies.

The following poem addresses the role of the ego in spiritual formulation as well as the need to let that ego go at some point. She described this “letting go” as “letting the scaffolding drop” at which point the soul is discovered. In another poem of hers she described this moment in these words, “And then a plank in reason broke…” Emily was addressing loss; or, in terms of object-relations theory, the “lost object.”

And of course, this experience does not destroy the ego, it merely humbles it and opens it up to another dimension of life. It gives the ego meaning. But often it does feel like destruction and in spiritual teachings indeed is presented as death.

 

THE PROPS ASSIST THE HOUSE

By Dickinson, Emily

 

The Props assist the House

Until the House is built

And then the Props withdraw

And adequate, erect,

The House support itself

And cease to recollect

The Augur and the Carpenter –

Just such a retrospect

Hath the perfected Life –

A Past of Plank and Nail

And slowness – then the scaffolds drop

Affirming it a Soul –

Rumi and Barriers to God

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Your task is not to seek for love but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. Rumi

Something similar can be said about the love of God and even God Himself. Our task is merely to “get out of the way” and the love of God will abound, indeed God Himself will abound. But the challenge is finding the gift of discernment which allows these barriers to become conscious; and this step alone is often all it takes to allow the barrier to fall.

These barriers are always some form of ego, some insidious self-aggrandizement which has ensconced itself as an essential part of our identity.

Get Over Yourself!

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Jesus spent thirty years roaming around the little corner of the globe he happened upon, noting the complete insanity of its inhabitants, and then spent three years admonishing them…and I summarize (and use my “literary” license)…to “get over yourself!” And then he provided specifics about how to accomplish this self-abnegation, which are eloquently described in the New Testament and then later summarized by W. H. Auden (or was it Leonard Cohen?), “Climb the rugged cross of the moment and let your illusions die.” Yes, dying to self ultimately means being disillusioned and seeing yourself as you really are, just a “poor bare forked creature” (King Lear) “pelted” by the same “pitiless storm” that has pelted us for eons.

In that moment of humility, i.e. humiliation, one can then choose to affirm with belief/action what his/her ultimate value is and then be guided toward that end. But one is then shorn of his/her grandiosity and realizes that he/she is a mere human, a human be-ing, and has that station by virtue of the simple but illimitable and marvelous grace of God. For, “by him all things cohere”; yes, even the simple be-ing of my day to day life exists and “coheres” by the grace of God. Therefore, I don’t have anything to prove, I don’t have to persuade you to subscribe to my creed, I merely have to be. And as I “be”, the Grace of God will flow through me; and the universe…and His will…will unfold. But if I stubbornly adhere to my own agenda, to my own ego-driven demands….”enlightened” and “Christian” as I might assume them to be…then the “flow” cannot take place, at least through me.

Yes, the meaning of the Cross is to “get over yourself.” It is easier to invest in the gore of the Cross and to self-flagellate with an emotional anguish. It is much more difficult to “get over yourself”, to die to the ego and do so daily as Paul admonished, and then engage more fully and maturely in the human enterprise.