Tag Archives: internal dialogue

The Ego and Its Recalcitrance

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Two days ago I shared re the need of change and the great pain that can be entailed.  Why is change so challenging and often gut-wrenchingly painful?  It has to do with the ego which is resistant to becoming other than a citadel for self-interest.  When we came into this world we found ourselves in a “world that is always already underway.”  Our family was a context, a “milieu” which was rigidly structured by the emotional and, therefore, unconscious assumptions of the parents and any child that had preceded us.  My research has suggested that our fragile ego responds with a salvivic capability of “assessing” this milieu and formulating its response.  Our “response”, however, will quickly become rigid also which is part of our neurological wiring.  But that rigid structure, regardless of how open-minded we might be, will always be resistant to change.  This rigidity is also “hard-wired” as we need to filter-out much of the “stuff” that comes our way to maintain ego-integrity  If we had no filter…or one that is wired….maladaptively…we would submit to every demand of change that comes our way and our life would look like a “sheet in the wind,.”  

This is where the Pauline “discerning spirit” is applicable.  This quip from the Apostle Paul is an admonishment to employ what Hannah Arendt has described as an, “internal dialogue,” which iis to have  second-thoughts about what we are most sure…especially those “noble-sounding” bromides that we religious people are want to cling to.  Let me paraphrase the wisdom of Paul into a modern bumper-sticker, “Don’t believe everything you think.”

Julian Jaynes, Consciousness, and Meaning

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Julian Jaynes published a very controversial book in 1976 entitled, “The Origin of Consciousness in the Break-down of the Bicameral Mind.” I bought the book back then, delved into a mite, and then let it catch dust until I eventually discarded it.  But for some time the book title has been coming around in discussions with friends and I finally found me a cheap cast-off version of the book in a locale resale shop.

Forty-one years later, I find the book very arresting.  He argued that “consciousness” as we know it began to evolve  during the time of The Iliad and involved a newfound capacity of “self” awareness, a subtle grasp of the phenomenon modern psychology describes as the “I” vs the “not I.” Jaynes noted that this “internal difference” made possible an internal dialogue which, I think he would agree was probably related to what Shakespeare called, “the pauser reason.”  For with an internal dialogue as part of consciousness, mankind could begin to develop a moral and ethical compass in his heart and not be driven merely by unmediated impulses.  It was the event in the evolution of our consciousness that “meaning” also appeared on the scene which is relevant to the “internal difference” mentioned above.

And the subject of meaning and difference brings to my mind one of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems:
There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference –
Where the Meanings, are –

None may teach it – Any –
‘Tis the seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –

When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –