The No-Ego Ego Trip: An Interlude

Every year or two I field an earnest message from someone who’s just discovered that the human ego is the cause of all the world’s problems. The sender’s invariably a relatively young man, and he’s usually sure that he’s discovered something that no one has ever thought of before. His preparation for his great discovery might be anything from 750 micrograms of LSD to a decade spent wallowing in abstruse philosophical writings of east and west, and the discovery itself may be embodied in anything from a short manifesto to a book a couple of inches thick, but it’s always the same discovery and it’s generally backed up with the same tendentious arguments.

My reaction to this is always pretty much the same, too. Once it’s clear that I’m dealing with yet another of these earnest young men, I extract myself from the conversation as quickly as I can and back away hard from any attempt to prolong the acquaintance. There’s good reason for this choice of tactics. As it happens, I’m familiar with the arguments in question and disagree with them, but I’ve learned through repeated and unpleasant experience that there’s no point in discussing this fact with the young men in question. They don’t react at all well to anything short of enthusiastic agreement. It isn’t going too far, in fact, to note that their responses to criticism are rather oddly similar to the actions of an egotist.

Their behavior is one form of a tolerably common social habit in modern life, which may as well be called the no-ego ego trip. If you’ve spent time around middle class American Buddhists, to cite another example, you’ve likely seen this habit in one of its other manifestations. There, if my experiences are anything to go by, it takes at least three forms. Most common is the basic social-competition form: “I’m so much more egoless than you are.” Less common is the belligerent form: “You’re speaking from ego and therefore wrong, and I’m speaking for egolessness and therefore I’m going to bully you.” Rarest and most toxic is the carnivorous-plant form: “I have no ego, so you should surrender yours…to me.” Here again, the language of egolessness is being used to justify behavior that, by any measure, counts as egotistical.

To make sense of all this, and not incidentally to connect it back to our ongoing discussion of Situationism and the Spectacle, it’s going to be necessary to go back to first principles. What exactly is this thing called ego? Is it really the source of all the world’s problems, and if not, why does it keep getting blamed for that? Finally, why do those who make a point of rejecting the ego so often turn around and give such a fine demonstration of the return of the repressed?

Let’s start with basics. The word ego is the Latin first person singular nominative pronoun, exactly equivalent to the English word “I.” It got picked up out of Latin in the 18th century and put to use, along with related words such as “egotism” and “egomania,” as a way of talking about people who are too fixated on themselves. That’s why the first English translations of Freud used “the ego” as a convenient equivalent of the German phrase das Ich, literally “the I.” (English borrows easily and often from Latin, while most other European languages don’t do this anything like as much—that’s why, for example, we use the Latin names for the signs of the zodiac, while most other Europeans use the ordinary words for ram, bull, twins, and so on.)

English being the cluttered and contradictory mess that it is, some mystics also picked up the word “ego” for a different use. To this day you’ll find mystical writings that use “the Ego,” almost always capitalized, to represent the essential core of the self. This is not what I’m talking about in this essay—though it’s also fair to note that some of the young men mentioned earlier, especially those influenced by Buddhism, don’t recognize the difference between this and the more general use of the word. What I have in mind is the meaning of the word in ordinary English—when, for example, we say that somebody has a big ego, nobody needs a footnote or a dictionary definition to figure out what that means.

Nonetheless the perspectives we’ve been discussing for the last two months or so have useful guidance to offer here. One of the basic themes of philosophy for the last few millennia or so is the difference between appearance and reality—between the world as we perceive it and the world as it actually is. It’s an important theme in making sense of the world around us, but it also applies to the world within us. Psychology first started to turn into something useful when a handful of psychologists—Freud, for all his flaws, among them—noticed that there’s a big gap between what we think is going on in our minds and what’s actually going on in there.

It’s not a new discovery, though it was news to modern scientific thinkers back in the late 19th century (and some of their modern equivalents haven’t yet dealt with it). Here again, philosophers and mystics were there well in advance. In one of the traditions in which I’m an initiate, we say this to candidates for initiation just before the ceremony: “We do not ask you who you are, because if you knew that, you would no longer have anything to learn; but we ask you, who do you think that you are?” The distinction is a crucial one in spiritual practice, but it’s also crucial in terms of the theme I’m developing here.

The ego is what each of us thinks we are. It is what the self sees when it tries to perceive itself. That’s what it is, and that’s all it is. We could say “self-image” with equal accuracy. It’s not quite the same as the personas we put on to deal with the world—the various images we try to project to our family, our friends, our employer, and so on—because these are masks we wear to interact with others. The ego is the mask we wear to interact with ourselves.

The notion that this mask ought to be taken off and thrown away seems to come naturally to a great many people. Think through what’s just been said, though, and it becomes clear just how problematic that notion is. If the ego is how we perceive ourselves, then tossing away the ego and then trying to perceive ourselves simply guarantees the creation of a new ego. To perceive ourselves at all is to perceive an appearance—that is, an ego.

Mind you, it can be extremely useful to discard one ego and replace it with another, and this is something that’s done quite often in spiritual and occult traditions. Consider a man who’s built his ego around the concept of “loser.” That’s quite common, of course, and it often happens for plausible reasons: for example, the man may have spent his childhood being shoved by parents, teachers, and peers into situations in which he could only lose, and came to perceive himself accordingly. (That was what put me in that situation, for example.) Still, it’s safe to assume that everybody has the potential to be a success in some aspect of life, and getting past the self-identification as a loser is a crucial step in making that potential a reality.

Dissolving a dysfunctional ego and replacing it with a less problematic one can be done in many ways. In my case, meditation, ritual, and certain New Thought methods involving affirmations and journaling did the trick, enabling me first to understand the experiences that led to my seeing myself as a loser, and then to refocus my efforts away from the many things I don’t do well and toward the small number of things I can do very well indeed, so that I could parlay those into a basis for success in life. In the process, I stopped spending so much time fretting about myself, which also helped considerably.

One of the implications here is that egotism doesn’t necessarily follow from an overinflated sense of self. It can just as easily develop in response to an underinflated one. The guy who insists that he’s God’s gift to women when he’s actually a sleazy creep is one kind of egotist, but the guy who insists that nobody could possibly love him when he’s actually a pleasant person is another kind. What they have in common is that they spend all their time staring into a fake mirror and defending the twisted reflection there against anything that tells them it’s wrong. What defines the egotist is obsessive concern with a false image of the self—and having a false image of the self more or less guarantees that sort of obsessive concern, as the image must constantly be shored up against the pressure of contradictory evidence.

We can take this a further step, into the territory inhabited by mystics and occultists. It’s one of the core insights of the world’s mystical and occult traditions that the difference between who we think we are and who we actually are isn’t limited to the misunderstandings of personality just noted. What is this thing we call personality, after all? Examined closely, it turns out to be nothing more than a set of habits. Our usual thoughts, very much including thoughts about ourselves, are core elements of personality. So are our usual feelings, again very much including feelings about ourselves.

There’s a further set of habits of consciousness, to which the philosopher Owen Barfield gave the useful label “figurations.” Most people think of themselves as passive observers of a world that is “out there.” Sages, philosophers, and scientists have been pointing out for a very long time, each in their own way, that this isn’t even remotely true. What we know about the world is a stream of disconnected sensations that we assemble in our minds into a more or less coherent picture. That process of assembly is what Barfield called figuration. It has much more in common with imagination than most people like to admit, and like imagination, it can take place in many different ways and express any number of biases and quirks.

Thus our personalities consist of habitual thoughts, feelings, and figurations. These are the filters through which we experience the world and ourselves. Most people identify themselves with their personalities, and the habitual image of the self that rises out of that identification is the ordinary ego. Ask them, along the lines of the initiatory question given above, what they think they are, and you’ll get an account of those aspects of their personality that they’ve included in their ego. Human beings being what they are, the resulting image is pretty thoroughly edited, and quite often is embarrassingly false in at least some of its details.

This is why mystics and occultists practice meditation. There are many ways of meditating, but all of them are exercises in learning to be conscious of consciousness itself. Whether you’re repeating a mantra, praying the rosary, observing the rise and fall of thoughts in the mind, or reflecting on some symbol or teaching in a discursive manner, you’re confronting the experience of being conscious of something. You’re learning that consciousness has its own qualities and characteristics, its own breadth and depth of focus.  In the process, you become aware of your thoughts, feelings, and figurations as objects of consciousness distinct from yourself as subject of consciousness. You learn through this that you are something other than your personality—and that insight, as you follow it, leads you through the walls and into the Light.

(There’s a fashionable school of modern philosophy called eliminative materialism that claims that consciousness does not exist. It’s quite clear from reading their writings that none of the people who promote and uphold this notion have ever practiced meditation, and that their testimony about consciousness is therefore about as relevant as someone who insists that Philadelphia doesn’t exist because he’s never visited Pennsylvania. Regular meditation, by contrast, makes it vividly clear that consciousness is the only thing of whose existence we can be absolutely sure: everything else is merely an appearance to consciousness. Matter? All anyone knows about matter is that it’s a hypothesis that makes a certain amount of sense of some appearances to consciousness. Still, that’s a discussion for another time.)

The school of occultism that I practice and teach holds that consciousness isn’t just a passive blank that receives impressions. Here again, meditation is the key. With practice, it becomes possible to perceive structures within individual consciousness. These structures have an active dimension, which we can call will or intentionality, that balances the receptive dimension of consciousness as such. These structures make up what this school of thought calls the individuality or higher self, which is distinct from the personality or lower self. Nor is the individuality the end of the road. Go further, and consciousness opens out into infinities.

To borrow an old metaphor, the personality is the glove, the individuality is the hand, and the hand blends seamlessly at the wrist into a body and a brain on a far vaster scale than glove-centered thinking can even begin to imagine. In this metaphor, the ego is the thumb of the glove, the surface against which the other fingers of the glove press now and then. Technically, it opposes the fingers—that’s why we talk about humans and other anthropoids having an opposable thumb—but that hardly makes it the enemy of the fingers, much less the source of all discomfort and unhappiness for the hand.

What about those people who claim to have transcended the ego? Those of them that I’ve met—well, they do indeed claim this. In fact, they tend to claim it very loudly. They make a highly public parade of how special they are, because they’ve transcended the ego, and they can get quite remarkably brittle toward those who don’t bow down to them in a hurry. I confess to a certain amount of skepticism about these claims. That said, I don’t think they’re lying. I think, rather, that they truly believe that they’ve transcended their egos, and in fact are no longer aware of their egos—but this does not mean that their egos have gone away. What it seems to mean, rather, is that they’ve succeeded in repressing their egos.

Repression is a known phenomenon in psychology. Its most obvious symptom—obvious, that is, for everyone but the person in question—is the “return of the repressed,” the process by which a mental content that has been shoved out of consciousness projects itself onto everything and everybody around them. Most of us have seen this at work in others; some of us have had the useful experience of catching ourselves at it. Jung used to point out that the things that irritate us most in other people are inevitably the things we don’t want to deal with in ourselves. This applies to the ego just as much as to anything else, and may explain why people who repress their egos make such a fuss about insisting that the rest of us ought to do the same thing.

Now it may be that there are enlightened masters out there who have in fact transcended their egos. The genuinely wise people I’ve met, however, are those who have domesticated their egos and keep them on very short leashes. If you know that your ego is simply a flawed, partial representation of your personality as you perceive it, you’ll find that you don’t have to put any energy at all into defending it. If you encounter something that shows you that your ego really is an inaccurate representation of your personality, for that matter, you always have the choice of using this as a learning experience, and adjusting your self-representation to fit the facts.

The spiritual and occult practitioners who’ve impressed me the most all do this. They’re well aware of their self-representations, and treat them with the kind of wry kindliness many people direct at an unusually clumsy puppy. They treat each encounter with the world or themselves as an opportunity for learning. Furthermore, since they aren’t emotionally invested in the habits that make up their personality, they can change those habits any time this is useful—being kindly or severe, brisk or patient, meditative or explosively active depending on what the situation needs. They recognize that their egos are tools, not truths. They understand their personalities and their individualities in the same way—and the vaster presence that exists beyond the individuality flows through them into the world, and gives their words and actions a vividness and a power that baffle the rest of us.

It’s at this point that we can return to the insights of Situationism and find that they make an unexpected kind of sense. The ego, the reflection of the self in the blurred and partial mirror of the personality, is itself a Spectacle in the Situationist sense. We can think of it, in fact, as the Spectacular self. It bears exactly the same relationship to the personality that the Spectacle bears to society. Furthermore, just as the Spectacle does, the ego has a political dimension.

Very, very few of us deliberately invent our own egos. Most of us take our self-representations off the rack, as though we were buying a Halloween costume, and tolerably often the costume in question has at least two problematic features. The first is that it fits very poorly. The second is that it benefits the manufacturer much more than it benefits us.

This is where the Marxist background of the Situationists tripped them up most dramatically and prevented them from making constructive use of their genuine insights. As I noted in an earlier post in this sequence, it’s central to Marxism—as to most leftward ideologies these days—to insist that group identities trump those of the individuals lumped into the group. Of course groups have identities, which fill the same role for them that the ego fills for the individual. Since group identities are always blunt instruments, however, they will never be more than a miserably poor fit for any individual, and are at least as damaging to the individual as the most distorted sort of ego.

Yet there’s another issue here. In an important sense, our lives are lived along a spectrum that reaches from the most private dimensions of the individual to the most public dimensions of collective society. The power individuals have to carry out change is always strongest on the private end of that spectrum, and weakest on the public end. By ignoring the private end except as a dumping ground for ideological dogma, Marxism castrated itself and put genuine change out of its reach. It was one of the greatest achievements of the Situationists that they almost grasped and corrected this. We’ll discuss that achievement in an upcoming post.