Growing Up and Waking Up Together
Crecer y Despertar Juntos
A question about whether one needs a mature ego before attempting to disidentify from it, and how the pursuit of one's deepest desires relates to authentic self-inquiry.
Growing Up and Waking Up Together
A question about whether one needs a mature ego before attempting to disidentify from it, and how the pursuit of one's deepest desires relates to authentic self-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 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 what 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 and a good point. 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, and there is always work to do.
But some aspects seem to be very highly correlated, and that is a reason why I tend to find myself, both in this group and in other contexts, pointing people 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 just keep that work going: the work of evolving, the work of growing, the work of facing life.
Living your deepest wants
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 be 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 be something important that's needed. It will be important to integrate what one most deeply wants. That is the question I ask a lot, because it is what puts the energy in motion for maturing.
The synergy of growing up and waking up
If a lot of energy is going toward what you most deeply want, and simultaneously into what you could consider self-inquiry or spiritual exploration, then you have a powerful synergy. Instead of having one or the other, which is what commonly happens. There are people who are completely in the world and have no sense of an internal 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 the 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 sides as one thing. Do not neglect one aspect. Growing up and waking up are two sides of one coin, though they are very different in nature. Waking up is seeing what is real, what is true now, what is timeless, what is the nature of self, where all of the illusions and beliefs are. Growing up has to do with living fully to your deepest capacities, living freely, lovingly. And that makes no sense if one is avoiding doing what one really wants to do.
That is why the question "What do I most deeply want?" is so powerful: it is a constant inquiry into the deepest energetic of what life wants through me, or as me. 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.
What was the part about where it was going to be more stressed?
When we are aligning toward what we want the most. For example, suppose what I want the most is to travel around the world, but I have a secure job and I end up not traveling. I might be engaged in a process of self-inquiry, but there is a deep, true desire to know the experience of traveling the world. For the next person it could be the other way around: traveling around the world with a deep desire to settle down and have a stable job. It applies either way.
But the person living in that denial, say, about the traveling: the whole notion of that trip is going to be terrifying. There's going to 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. And you can tell the story the other way around: the challenges of committing to a career and settling down, letting go of the escape of travel.
This is a very personal thing. There is no story or narrative that is universally applicable. But what one wants the most has to be a question that stays alive. It doesn't get resolved.
That's good. Something clicked for me there. Thank you. I'm doing this NLP training, a kind of subconscious repatterning around self-concept. This person discovered a way that, through language, our mind creates meaning about who we are, our self-concept, our identity. There's a way to go in and bring out inherent qualities that we all naturally possess, but around which we have limiting beliefs based on how our mind structures language. I was thinking, "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?
Transcend and include
That is exactly what I mean. The sticky point is that the more you develop the capacities, talents, and potential of the body-mind, the more there will be forces that pull 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.
Can you say that last sentence again?
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. And a process of self-inquiry conducted from that opposition is going to be biased. It is not going to come from a place of truth. It is going to be partly in resistance to a natural process.
The way through that is enabling and being in service of the human body-mind's capacities, the egoic structure. So instead of building an identity that you then collapse into, you build the identity that you transcend. There is a concept here: transcending and including. You can't disidentify from the body if you're rejecting it. You can't disidentify from the mind if you're rejecting it. You can't disidentify from the ego if you're 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, will create a lot of tension, stress, challenges, fears, and pain. That is why I repeat so often that moving toward those things is a good direction. We want to be able to go through all of that and, in a sense, transition through it in order to transcend it.
Awakening doesn't wait for a finished ego
But 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. There will be a dance there. The point is: if we are in rejection, in a certain tension or fight with the process of growing, then all of our efforts toward awakening will carry a bias, an agenda, which is to avoid the place we don't want to go. Then the inquiry is not happening in deep openness to truth, and it is going to 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 is so good. Thank you so much. That was what I needed to hear.
You're welcome. This is a very common thing. It is just the nature of how we can get lost. Historically, there has been a deepening in the understanding of how spirituality and psychology relate, a deeper integration that 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 lot better than nonexistent, which is what it was not long ago.