I awoke with my mind already in high gear. Even before stepping out of bed my thoughts were scrambled and my feelings were in a state of chaos. Nothing appeared right. And everything appeared tinged with a sense of fear that I would not be able to do my life correctly. There was no one specific thought that dominated the noise in my head; but rather, a series of thoughts that each had me grimacing with fear & worry. My energy was entirely out of touch with my being.
Mostly it sounded something like this: if I am this miserable now, how bad must I have been earlier so that this awful NOW is my Karma. I have a frown on my face and I am reluctant to allow myself to smile. Often, when the ego is so rapidly moving to a tune of urgency, I am unable to stop the process or slow down the merry-go-round enough to get off. In those times, I have to deliberately awaken to a separate reality. I need to regress, if you will, in service of the ego.
I might for example try to listen to some music, or listen for the silence at the end of a Zen chime or gong. While listening to eight minutes of cello and piano music that I had previously composed and recorded I am bombarded with egoic thoughts My ego might drift in and out of telling me that I have to rush through this exercise because I am wasting time becoming relaxed. My ego might threaten me with phrases like: this music is embarrassing, what would so and so think if he saw you listening to this childish exercise, & you are being ridiculous, do something productive. I have to battled each one of these phrases with a simple nod and a smile that I am noticing just how eager my ego is to disturb my peaceful state of mind.
In short time, I find that I like the sensation in my body. It is becoming comfortable and none of the previous thought and feelings of worry are present. And if one of these thoughts do crop into consciousness, I simply smile at it and say, sorry, I am not going there. It really feels like a struggle between my being–my consciousness, and my ego. If I stay comfortably ensconced in the lullaby of being, I discover that if I do not need to engage in a fight with my ego, my ego backs down.
I might compare this to road rage. When I use to feel that a car was encroaching on my territory I would engage with that car in a battle of who is the strongest, the most persistent. Through out these bouts of road insanity, I was carried out of my stream of consciousness into a location in my head that demanded I fight and stay the course and above all stay deeply involved with the thought that I was right.
The egoic presence is a warrior ever standing guard and waiting for the moment to engage. It is forever scanning the world to look for something to judge badly and by so doing think that it has the upper moral hand. The ego, the part of me that i mostly know by my first name, Al, is confusing what it needs to stay dominant with what my organism needs to stay content and peaceful. The ego grew with the same pace as my physical development. It was the perceiving, organizing, protecting, defensive aspect of me that kept me safe, that is, kept my identity safe. As the chore of keeping my identity safe became confused with the chore of keeping my organism safe, my ego developed its current practice of keeping my identity, my thoughts and emotions and opinions safe from encroachment. In other words, it became engaged in keeping my ego identity safe and forfeited the job of keeping my organism safe There is a phrase we use in psychoanalysis called, “regression in service of the ego.” This phrase was developed in 1952 by a then prominent psychoanalyst, Ernst Kris. Essentially he talk about a feeling of elation that is used as motivation in the creative process. He speaks of this sensation as feeling as if it comes from outside, from an as outside agent. His thought was that this was some kind of psychotic regression to some pre-egoic condition. I have a different take on it. My feeling is that it feels like it comes from outside the self because it is coming from the wider consciousness that is actually outside the prevue of the ego…Or, I might say it comes from the soul of the self rather than from the rational ego.
There are many folks who feel a need, so desperately, to keep their identity in tact that they lose all contact with the higher principles of peace and contentment and happiness. The ego in its uncanny fashion differentiates itself from the wider sense of self and diminishes the value of contentment in the face of maintaining its own righteousness and place of permanence in the psyche.
Creativity and sensitivity to one’s experience of freedom and joy are activities that are built, or discovered, outside the agency of the ego. In that way we often hear people talk about channelling another source, or being inspired by a muse. In fact the source of creativity is the self, but the self that lives outside the ego. The ego need not be dismantled in order to tap this source. It is just that one needs to learn to NOT rely on old egoic positions and instead be ready to capture ideas that are free floating and less tied to convention. The source is the divine in us. It is the great “I AM” of creation and we exist as co-creators. It is not up to the universe to bring us joy. It is our task, indeed our purpose in life, to bring joy to the universe. We live in the paradise that we create by flowing down stream, or we are condemned like Sisyphus to be rolling the bolder of life forever uphill.
