Ego is Not a Dirty Word
There is emphasis on busting the ego in many area of spiritual seeking. The current Buddhist fashion is busting the ego. The Buddhist are not alone here, it is a fad that has been around for a long time.
The concept of the ego is a little over one hundred years old. It came from Sigmund Freud's work on the unconscious. Ego was one of the three entities in the unconscious that Freud used to explain human behavior.
In a spiritual context it is more usual to refer to two entities, the soul and the ego. The soul is usually good and the ego bad. There is sufficient evidence in the area of split brain theory pioneered by Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga to say there are two entities in the human brain that are independently conscious. For the purposes of this article I will use the common names of the soul and the ego.
If we have a soul and an ego there is either a reason for it or it is a biological sick joke. There does seem to be a reason for the soul and the ego, and that reason is consciousness.
If we only had a soul everything we would be conscious of would be external. Consciousness requires a duality. It needs a mirror. If we only had a soul we would only have an external mirror; the world around us.
This might be the way that animals are conscious. They could see everything around them and not see themselves as separate.
The human race does see itself as separate entities. We do have an inner consciousness of self. I am me, you are you and even the closest of marriages cannot merge two people into one.
We see ourselves as unique individuals because we have an internal mirror. That is the role of the soul and the ego. They provide an internal mirror that gives us our internal consciousness. The problem is not that they exist, but that are usually fighting each other.
If the soul and the ego where to become identical and at peace with each other would not be aware of any internal conflict. We would know ourselves and be at peace. If we could reach this state we would not be aware of the separate entities of the soul and the ego. They would seem to be one.
This would be the perfect internal mirror. The soul would know the soul by seeing the ego. The ego would know the ego by knowing the soul, and we would know ourselves through a feeling of internal peace.
Since both are necessary for us to be human we cannot make judgments about either being good or bad.
Busting the ego will bring us peace. It will be the peace of the comatose with no awareness of self. If internal peace with internal consciousness is what is desired, the way to go is to heal the rift between the soul and the ego.
The way to start that process is to stop threatening the ego and praising the soul. They are equal and need to be treated as equals.
The core issue in following a spiritual path is healing the rift between the soul and the ego. It is a strange sort of rift because it is a rift between us and our self. It is an internal rift, and when we are doing any sort of healing work to heal past or present problems this is what we are doing. We are reconciling the soul and the ego. This is essential because until the problem has led to a outcome that is acceptable to both the soul and the ego there will be internal conflict over the issue.
The soul and the ego as the two entities found by Sperry and Gazzinega can be seen as separate personalities that can have different reactions to the same situation. Reconciling the differences between the soul and the ego is something that needs to be done every time something happens that disturbs our inner peace. When that is achieved we can find inner peace and move on.
David Young.