Tag: ego

  • Do We Really Want to Know Ourselves?

    Do We Really Want to Know Ourselves?

    How little personality really wants to know


    “….don’t worry if, at the end of any day, you suddenly realize that you can’t remember a word I’ve said. That doesn’t matter. It’s the journey itself that’s going to change you.”
     Ishmael – by Daniel Quinn (A gorilla comments on the current state of affairs)

    It seems obvious – our attention is skewed by our enneagram fixation AND it functions in a manner to reinforce and perpetuate the fixation. When we are blind to so much, how can we ever hope to see? Our personality, ego structure, and false self always function with an agenda.

    This agenda, whether positive or negative, and the underlying motivation for it is habitual, unconscious, and insidious. But, we are addicted and though we protest otherwise – refuse to let go of the pain and suffering and story associated with it. The pain, the suffering and the story are inseparable from it – they are part and parcel of one manifest phenomenon– who we take ourselves to be.

     ….”I know of no such story,” I told him at last.
    “You mean you’ve never heard of it?”
    “That’s right.”
    …”That’s because there’s no need to hear of it. …Every one of you knows it by heart by the time you are six or seven. …And you hear it incessantly, because every medium of propaganda, every medium of education pours it out incessantly. And hearing it incessantly, you don’t listen to it. There’s no need to listen to it. It’s always there humming away in the background, so there’s no need to attend to it at all. In fact, you’ll find – at least initially – that it’s hard to attend to it.”   
            Ishmael

    The desire to actualize our potential; the longing for freedom and peace; the hunger for love and contentment arise from within the soul as an optimizing force which is quickly co-opted by the ego – incorporated into its agenda and activity for self-improvement. Improving the self is self-defeating – a point of appreciation I owe to Claudio Naranjo’s presentation of the enneagram.

    cOur understanding of self is a Gordian knot – the more we struggle with it, the tighter it gets. So, how does one unravel this knot? How can we help to align our exploration with the optimizing force and relax ego-activity? How can we avail ourselves of the wisdom of the enneagram without perpetuating the fixation?

    We need to get below the surface of the self – surface that includes all of those great characteristics and traits so wonderfully articulated in the enneagram of personality types. We need a crack or two in the shell of the self – for we have been existing for a long, long time as a bounded entity. When a bounded entity turns inward – that movement of attention is, at first, also a movement away from the true self – another conundrum on the path of self-improvement.

    What we need is to NOT do. Allowing our self to see the truth – our situation as it actually is – invites the optimizing force into our experience. Developing the capacity to be in full contact with our experience while not acting out the ego’s agenda – our story – is being in the service of the soul. (Appreciation for the work of A. H. Almaas)

    Our intent is not to do but to be. Our motivation is not self-improvement but freedom and authenticity. Our desire is not to define and explain our self, but to clarify the transparency of the soul. And – believe it or not – knowing your fixation can help – but, as usual, one must take the road less traveled.

    Wanting
    To be, to become, to know
    Is torture
    Sitting in the Night
    Being revealed
    Is the sweetest
    Satisfaction 
                              jh

    The Obvious

    The enneagram is a treasure-trove of insight and information for a self-improvement campaign. I mean, my God, we have your strengths and weaknesses, our high side and low side, our movements toward integration and disintegration. We have our existential issues, our chief feature, our passion, our delusion, our…well, you get the point – no need to write another book.

    personality-defenseBut how do we work with that information in a real way? Go where we don’t want to go – meaning let our attention go there – feel it fully and immediately. When the mind tells us – that makes no sense, when anxiety rises, when we notice places we avoid – we need to get a clue! The personality (ego), according to Freud, is basically a defense – the whole enchilada. It’s a collection of semi-successful ways in which we have learned to cope with life, to survive, to manage our affairs while increasing our pleasure and avoiding pain.

    Take one of your type’s favorite or dominant characteristics or traits and explore its opposite. Love strength? Give some attention to helplessness. Prefer being in control? Explore powerlessness.

    Here’s a way to explore this:

    Get a pen and paper. For 30 minutes answer this question with whatever comes to mind.

    “What’s right about not being ___________?”

    (Fill in this blank with something you avoid, something your personality has learned to compensate for – weak, needy, wrong, stupid, and etc.)

    Right now, some personalities have already rejected this exercise or are in the process of modifying it – say ten minutes instead of thirty. Well, there you have it – just how little it really wants to know about itself.

    In the process answering (be sure to write it all down), make the answers short. Be sincere, get the ego’s position paper on this issue. Anything over a few words is just more story that helps to avoid the full power of the exercise.

    To continue the exercise after answering the question for thirty minutes, explore your family history with what’s in the blank. See how family attitudes and values influenced you on this issue; how they supported you to be a certain way or coerced you to be another. Then, specifically examine your judgments around what is in the blank. Do this by feeling or observing how the judgment affects your level of energy or vitality.

    To complete the exercise: now that you have all of this insight and information, do nothing with it. Oh, and don’t do ‘nothing’ with it also. Observe how you react – your thoughts, feelings and actions. Don’t reject or stop anything – unless it is totally inappropriate, illegal, or dangerous to yourself or others. Remember, do not use this information to improve yourself or as a hammer to beat yourself up.

    The Unfamiliar

    The enneagram talks a lot about the three centers (head, heart, belly) and most people are dominant in one. Explore your least developed center. Observe how it is to function from this center. How does it affect you? What comes up in you – thoughts, feelings, motivations for action? Allow yourself to be a total klutz or ignoramus– no judgments needed here. Take this center out for a test drive.

    Explore your history with this center. Explore the judgments. Explore the personality’s position – How do you explain your position to others?

     “….you assembled this explanation like a mosaic from a million bits of information presented to you in various ways by others who share that explanation. You assembled it from the table talk of your parents, from cartoons you watched on television, from Sunday School lessons, from your textbooks and teachers, from news broadcasts, from movies, novels, sermons, plays newspapers and all the rest.” Ishmael

    Again, for the time being, avoid acting on the desire to become “a whole person” by integrating your three centers. Intrigue yourself for a while with how it has been for you to run on one or two cylinders instead of the three you came equipped with.

    The Unspoken

    This is more subtle and difficult. This is in the realm of pre-verbal experience and deals with knowing our personality at a very deep and uncomfortable level.

    Did you know that the foundation for who we take ourselves to be is mostly in place by age three – way before the capacity for abstract thought develops? This foundation exists in us as an energetic charge – a pattern of tensions and a comfort range of energies. When we start poking the light of attention into this area, we are very likely to get a rapid response along the lines of: “Well, this is just who I am. This is what I prefer. I like myself this way. And, etc.”

    An easy ways to gently rattle this cage to see just how sensitive you are to being outside of our energetic comfort zone (habit) is to change your driving habit. For a whole week slow down ten miles an hour or, depending on our personality type, speed up. If we’re not sure, experiment with both. It will be obvious within a day or so. Do it all day, every day and just observe yourself. Watch how you will attempt to create other situations and venues in your life to bring your energetic sense of self back into the comfort zone. Observe how irritable, antsy, and uncomfortable you can be over something so simple.

    (See Chapter 20 – The Pearl Beyond Price by A.H. Almaas for more insight into this)

    So there you go, a way to explore personality to see just how little it really wants to know about itself, but how it always has grand designs on how to improve itself – like that is really possible when it is so blind to reality.

    An important point to keep in mind when poking around into this personality and ego is to be gentle with yourself. Be kind, but steadfast – appreciate the fact that this bounded entity has been working its little heart out as best it can for survival and well-being. Treat it like the sensitive three-year old it is.

    The superego, the inner critic, the internal judge is another story all together. Learn how to kick its ass out of your experience. Otherwise, life will always remain a prison and we will always be confined to a type.

    personality types enneagramWhy resist
    The unraveling
    Of the great ruin
    Your life
    Has made of you
    God has sent His
    Wrecking-crew of angels
    To renovate
    The dog house you call home
    Into an exquisite palace
    Crystal fountains
    Jeweled domes
    Diamond spires
    And walls of Divine Transparency

    Why resist?
    This Architect’s Plan
    Always includes
    The razing of
    Existing structures
                                               jh

  • Ego Self and Object Relations

    Ego Self and Object Relations

    How the mind’s simple operating system distorts the world and traps us in the past

    object relation self-imageHow the Mind Relates to the World and Others…

    There is you/me

    There is the other

    There is an energetic/emotional/mental relationship between the two that connects to the past and the present is seen and interpreted through this lens.

    Our experiences before and after birth impress upon our mind and nervous system as memory traces – mostly unconscious. These impressions form the building blocks for all future interactions with the world and others as the mind tries to learn from experiences by interpreting events and comparing what’s happening now to the past (projecting the past onto the present) and anticipating the future. These internal mental relationships are called object relations. (more…)

  • Ego Massage – Relax into Enlightenment

    Ego Massage – Relax into Enlightenment

    How do we get the ego to relax – allowing us to wake up?

    ego massageMore than once, I have heard A. H. Almaas say that all we need is a good massage for the ego. His point being that fundamentally, the ego is nothing more than a collection of tension patterns in the mind and body.

    These patterns become habitual ways of knowing ourselves and relating to the world. They show up as conditioned armoring in the body, an area of deep curiosity for Wilhelm Reich. These tensions and patterns affect how our awareness and perception – what we see and how we see it. Many of the beliefs and attitudes that we feel are conscious choices are nothing more than unconscious creations of these contractions in the psyche.

    More and more I notice that during meditation there are periods where I am noticing tension patterns and streams of cycling thoughts, emotions, sensations and energies that I am bringing attention to – then relaxing within them. As an example, I may notice a deepening sense of concentrated awareness and an increasing tension in my forehead, neck or shoulders. When I notice this, I stay with the deepening awareness and at the same time relax the area of tension in the body.

    When the tension in the body relaxes, I notice the awareness deepens even more.

    One thing I practice relaxing with is the sense of self – that guy who thinks he is meditating. An interesting “mirror reversing” experience can arise where there is more just meditation and not so much someone there meditating.

    I think there could be a great demand for ego masseuses. Do you know an ego masseuse you can recommend? What’s the going rate for a 90-minute ego massage – and I don’t mean the type of ego stroking that increases my identification with the sense of a separate self, just the opposite… fade to black!

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  • Ego Hair Extensions

    Ego Hair Extensions

    Is Your Alter Ego Craving Hair Extensions?

    ego hair extensionsWhen you wake up from one of those good hair nights, do you want to run for the scissors or the salon to build on your wild look with ego hair extensions?

    Body art, tattoos, metal bits, body sculpting, cosmetic surgery, liposuction, spray tanning, eyebrow threading, hair extensions… the choices seem endless these days for creating a body image to reflect who we are, want to be or think we are. Which seems to connect to the age-old quest to know – Who am I?

    In the lexicon of spirituality, self-image is usually associated with ego identity. An alter ego is a different ego identity from our normal one or sense of self… a rock star, a past life, an abandoned child – who knows? Alter egos can be anything – a wish for another theater of being?

    I had no idea of the extent of the evolution of hair extensions and the contribution they are making to the world of fashion and glamor. Basic hair extension types remind me of enneagram types.

    According to Alter Ego Hair Design  – Hair extensions are pre-tipped strands of hair that are attached to small sections of your own natural hair near the root. Length, volume or both is now safe and comfortable to achieve, so you can stop dreaming about the hairstyle of your dreams!

    Hair extensions can enable you to transform the appearance of fine, lifeless or short hair into thick, long, beautiful looking hair. Using human hair extensions, you can literally change your hair in an afternoon. Don’t wait another day to experience the excitement of what hair extensions can do for you! Whether you just need volume or you want super long locks, it’s the hair you’ve always dreamed of, made real!

     The quest, the seeking, the endless search for meaning and self-worth continue – as does the desire to find the right image to reflect the self – ego, alter ego, or other.

     

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  • ING Challenges Reification Through Dialectic Inquiry

    Dialect Inquire Reveals Everything is LivING

    Last week, I was engaging in some open-ended dialectic inquiry with a friend when she looked at a table and said tabling? We were discussing how everything in existence has dynamism and she through the ING on table to express that dynamism of the table. (more…)

  • The Recycled Self

    Egoic Self is a Recycled Self

    Yesterday, in his afternoon talk at the Ridhwan School’s summer retreat, A.H. Almaas referred to the recycled self. This is our normal sense of self – a false identity based on self-images and history. This self is engaged in constant ego activity which includes mental, emotional and physical patterns of rehashing the past.

    All of this activity is a result in a belief that effort will get us where we want to be – and while that may be true when it comes to walking across the street, it is not true when it comes to satisfying urge or longing for peace, authenticity, happiness, love and other more fundamental human and spiritual quests.

    The recycled self stands in shard contrast to what Almaas refers to as “runaway realization” – where True Nature spontaneously moves from moment to moment revealing deeper dimensions and understanding with no effort, hope, longing or past.

    The Ridhwan School’s annual summer retreat’s focus this year is – The Fulcrum.

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