Building the Identity You Transcend
Construir la identidad que trasciendes
A question about whether one needs a mature ego before attempting to disidentify from it, and how the development of personal capacities relates to genuine spiritual inquiry.
Building the Identity You Transcend
A question about whether one needs a mature ego before attempting to disidentify from it, and how the development of personal capacities relates to genuine spiritual inquiry.
I had a question about the necessity of forming an ego before you actually try to disidentify from it. I feel like that might be something I'm experiencing, or have experienced, and it would make sense to me. When I say "not fully formed ego," I mean that I was always so adaptable. I would just become what the situation needed me to be, but I didn't have a strong identity that I expressed. It was just whatever was needed in the moment. That caused me to feel lost many times. I'm just wondering about the dynamic there.
That's a very good question. Unless something goes quite wrong, we all form an ego very young, so that part is already done. But your question, if I rephrase it a bit, is really about the maturity of the ego. There are aspects that can be matured and need to be matured, and that is, in a sense, an endless process.
The correlation between ego maturity and awakening
There does tend to be a correlation between the maturity of the ego and awakening, but it's very hard to know or see what a mature ego looks like. It's a very case-by-case situation, because there are always aspects that are not mature. There is always shadow. There is always work to do.
But some aspects seem to be very highly correlated, and that is why I tend to find myself pointing people in this group, and in other contexts, back toward life. There is quite a tendency to withdraw from life into spiritual work, and that goes against the maturing of the ego. It is better to keep the work going: the work of evolving, the work of growing, the work of facing life.
Living what you most deeply want
Importantly, there is no maturity in the ego if the deeper wants are not being lived. The ego, in a sense, has to be in service, but it first needs to be strong in order to be in service. Otherwise it will just operate in reaction modes.
One thing you mentioned, being adaptable, can actually be a sign of a strong ego, because a strong ego is permeable and adaptable. But then you said there wasn't a center, and that could point to something important that's needed. It will be important to integrate what one most deeply wants. That's a question I ask a lot, because it's what puts the energy in motion for maturing.
Growing up and waking up as two sides of one coin
If a lot of energy is going toward that deeper desire and simultaneously into self-inquiry or spiritual exploration, you have a powerful synergy. What commonly happens instead is one or the other. There are people who are completely in the world and have no sense of the exploration of the nature of self. And then there is the reverse: an avoidance of life that powers an exploration of the nature of self. But if it is an avoidance of life, that exploration is not going to be as deep, because it will be in service to avoidance. It won't be fully transparent, fully honest, fully authentic.
The best way to make this less error-prone, less mired with places to get lost, is to see these two as two sides of one thing, and to not neglect either aspect. I talk about this as "growing up" versus "waking up." Waking up is seeing what is real, what is true now, what is timeless, what is the nature of self, and where all of the illusions and beliefs are. Growing up has to do with living fully to your deepest capacities, living freely, lovingly. That makes no sense if one is avoiding doing what one really wants to do.
So the question of what you most deeply want is a powerful one, because it is a constant inquiry into the deepest energetic of what life wants through you, or as you. That is where there will be the deepest disruptions in the way of thinking, because that is where fears are going to be stronger, where insecurities are going to be stronger, where the egoic structure is going to be most stressed.
I missed that last part. What was going to be more stressed?
When we are aligning to what we want the most, the egoic structure gets stressed. For example, say what someone wants the most is to travel the world, but they have a secure job and end up not traveling. They're engaged in a process of self-inquiry, but there is a deep, true desire to know the experience of traveling the world. For another person, it could be the opposite: traveling the world while holding a deep desire to settle down and have a stable job. It applies either way.
The person in denial about the traveling, for example, is going to find the whole notion of that trip terrifying. There will be a lot of energy invested in pushing that desire away. Mobilizing and freeing energy to move into that deeper desire is going to challenge the egoic structure to a point of maturity where it can let go of the attachment to a safe job and face all the challenges of the trip. The reverse story works the same way: the challenges of committing to a career, settling down, and letting go of the escape of travel.
So this is deeply personal. There is no story or narrative that is universally applicable. But the question of what one wants the most has to remain alive. It doesn't get resolved.
Something clicked for me there. Thank you. I'm doing an NLP training right now, a kind of subconscious repatterning around self-concept. This program involves a method where, through language, our mind creates meaning about who we are, our self-concept, our identity. There is a way to go in and bring out inherent qualities that we all naturally possess but have limiting beliefs around, based on how our mind structures language. I was thinking that this sounds more like building the identity, when I thought the goal was to let go of it. But it does make sense: you're not really building the identity; you're just bringing out qualities that are inherent in you already, qualities that were covered up by the ego. So in a sense, you are freeing them. Does that make sense?
Exactly. The sticky point there is that the more you develop the capacities, the talents, and the potential of the egoic, mental, and physical body-mind, the more forces there will be pulling you into identification with it. But that is actually the only way to truly disidentify, because otherwise the disidentification effort is going to be in resistance to a natural process.
Could you say that last part again?
Building the identity you transcend
If we are not letting the energy move into the evolution of our talents, capacities, potentials, and true natural deep desires, we are going to be in opposition and resistance. Self-inquiry conducted from that opposition is going to be biased. It won't come from a place of truth; it will be partly in resistance to a natural process.
The way through that is enabling and being in service of the human body-mind capacities, the egoic structure. So instead of building an identity that you collapse into, you build the identity that you transcend. The concept here is "transcending and including."
You cannot disidentify from the body if you are rejecting it. You cannot disidentify from the mind if you are rejecting it. You cannot disidentify from the ego if you are rejecting it. The rejection creates a duality: "I have to be against that. I have to not be that."
I was in that trap for ages.
It's a common trap, because the process of body-mind evolution, of egoic evolution, creates a lot of tension, stress, challenges, fears, and pain. That is why I repeat often that moving toward those things is a good direction. We want to be able to go through that and, in a sense, transition through it to transcend it.
Waking up can happen before all of that. You don't need to arrive at a certain evolutionary state of the body-mind in order to disidentify. But there is going to be a dance. The point is that if we are in rejection, in a certain tension or fight with that process, all of the efforts toward awakening will carry a bias, an agenda: to avoid the place we don't want to go. Then the inquiry won't rest in a deep openness to truth, and it will be limited. It won't go deep. It will only reach the depth that you allow yourself to live in the honesty of life.
That's so good. Thank you so much. That was what I needed to hear.
You're welcome. This is a very common thing. It's just the nature of how we can get lost. Historically, there has been a deepening in the understanding of this, in the integration of spirituality and psychology. A deeper and deeper understanding is happening in very recent times. It is still very much in its infancy, and this deeper understanding is still rare, but it is a great deal better than non-existing, which is what it was not long ago.