Egoland: How it Feels

jaggy, jolting – brusque, or slidy, insidious, creeping movements
and the pernicious undertow – the pull towards the vortex of fear

(whereas, in the Heartland – spacious, in balance, at rest - radiating, flowing, natural, effortless)

when we go off-centre and don’t notice we have, we get jolted – tweaked – slapped – to bring us back to ourselves

                         trusting pleasure – not trusting anxiety

This morning, waking in a relaxed frame of mind, I have a clear glimpse of how anxious thinking involves resistance to the flow of reality, and so builds up pressure in the mind.

Our efforts to control what’s happening, in our minds and in our lives - to measure, criticise, strategise – also involve resistance, and so, pressure. Listening to fear-tinged thoughts ratchets up the pressure to ‘take control’ – of the situation, by doing something, or to justify ourselves, to ourselves, by circular inner arguments.

Even after I have faced my fears and survived them, many times over, it is as if there are energies in my mind which, doglike, can't resist snuffling around looking for interesting (i.e. problematic) smells to pursue.

(This is not to demonise dogs, or our inner 'animal' senses, which are our best helpers – telling us when someone is untrustworthy, when something smells a bit off, or when someone needs comfort.)

It may be that, as I become more familiar with my inner landscape, and with what goes on in my psyche, the memories of my fears – detached from their old causes and scapegoats, and from the angry or reproachful scripts which used to disguise them – still rampage around for a time, from old habit, possibly hoping to find real-life hooks to latch onto, to give them credibility, so they can once again become part of my inner repertoire, pretending to be helpful.

Pure, contentless fear is unpleasant and troublesome, but it has no credibility. It is clearly not-me, even though it presumes to speak about me, in my own mind, and given half a chance, would step forward to speak 'for me' about others!

Another aspect of how it feels in Egoland was illuminated for me recently when I found myself in a mental bind which I knew was just ego, but couldn’t seem to shake off. I asked for help, and ‘heard’ the words ‘let go of it – just be free’. Instantly, something shifted, and I then ‘heard’: ‘recognise your agency’.

This is the thing – when I let ego into my mind, when it gets a hold on my thinking, I feel powerless, trapped, ‘up against it’ – at the mercy of some fate, or the consequences of my own, or others’, mistakes. I can feel like the passive victim of a hostile force.

Whereas in fact, I can just open the door and let myself out. No-one else can release me from my inner prison.

I say this, and yet I’ll probably forget it again, at least temporarily, before too long. It feels useful to record what I see clearly at this moment – and what I was helped to see. To look behind the curtains, the illusions enacted to enthral and captivate us – to see the reality that ego wants to distract us from, and to supplant.

Punch and Judy

But the words ‘ego wants’ suggest a consciousness, a will, a living being – and here we get into an area where theology, psychology, and imagination overlap – for I don’t think of ego as a conscious entity, or as having a life at all. Ego is rather a network of strategies people develop in order to cope with adverse responses from the world – to help them assert themselves, or fit in successfully, in a world experienced as hostile, or insensitive to their needs.

The problem is that, if I signed myself over to ego’s protection racket, I must first have come to the limits of my own capacity to cope with what was happening in my life, and so all our ego-strategies are based on the buried fear that without its ‘help’, and its dubious methods, we will be overwhelmed by feelings we couldn’t bear before, and don’t want to face again.

As I let go of my ego-strategies, and learn to trust life now, in the present, I keep coming back to this scary threshold in myself, and again and again have to steady up and just take the next step, over ego and back into real life.

Land of Threats and Promises

Ego operates protection rackets, by which people seek to obtain what they have felt deprived of by life.

Its gambits – which are embedded as scripts deep in our minds – go something like this: “I’ll enable you to get X, Y and Z (e.g. love, admiration, acceptance etc.) by tricking others into providing it – and it’ll all happen under the radar – they won’t know what’s going on, and even you won’t have to know a thing about it!”

Such practices are quite like what companies do when they outsource their production and services to other parts of the world - ego encourages us to outsource our responses, and our responsibility, to it!  We need have no more to do with any of that troublesome, upsetting stuff.  'Let us take care of it for you'.

This promise of ‘innocence’ (or naivete) – based, of course, on denial - is the padlock of unconsciousness. It requires slow, steady work to release.

Ego is like a spiv in the psyche, backed up by an inner thug – full of promises, with menaces to follow. The threats operate like an electronic tagging of the unconscious patterns I have signed up to – as I begin to notice something shady going on, and get a glimmer of insight, feelings of shame, guilt and fear may rise up, to deter me from enquiring further. I feels as if ego’s guard dogs are straining at the leash, snarling: “You don’t want to go in there! You don’t know what you might find".

Thus any ‘assistance’ I accept from my ego is based on my acceptance of a slander against my true nature, together with a slander on life itself, which I may well have come to regard, at some point in the past, as untrustworthy and ‘out to get me’.

Ego, the pseudo-provider, is actually the great depriver, for it thrives on perpetuating a sense of lack.

Consumer Capitalism and the Sense of Lack

billboard in Cape Town - N.B. 'power to you'!!  As if . . .

Bit of a thematic jump here, but I believe there are clear parallels between ego and advertising, between its predatory and parasitic strategies and those of consumer capitalism, with its pseudo-‘growth’ and pretensions to ‘provide’, which depend on ever more encroachment into everything which has not yet been turned into a financial transaction.

How it feels (in Egoland, and more generally in life) is how it is. False – falls. It is all false, and it feels like falling – the vertigo, the fear of falling, the dread in the pit of the stomach – these are signs of the presence of pretence – of ego, and its ‘enforcer’, fear.

Ego wants us to believe our nightmares are true: ‘This is the underlying reality', it hisses – 'all is lost. There is no help – nothing has been gained. You will always be locked in this vicious cycle/ misunderstood/ abandoned/excluded /persecuted’, or whatever scenario it has found gets me going.

As I keep standing up to its threats, and continuing to dismantle my ego-sponsored thoughts and habits, ego’s inner attacks grow less overwhelming. In time, they may no longer grip my stomach or my head, or send my heart into overdrive. They may just generate low-level negativity.

I need to become and remain sensitive and attentive to the atmosphere (the tone of voice) in my mind, and spot when ego is becoming active, in order to stop these initiatives as soon as they begin.