If we are on a spiritual path, how should we relate to our egos?

Question. Please tell me, Serge, the best way to work with our egos and how you see ego. Many Spiritual teachers tell us that ego is bad, is what stands in the way of our ability to be who we are and  therefore that we must get rid of it, while other approaches tell us that it is part of us, needs to be honoured and worked with. What is your opinion?

Ecstasy Uncle’s reply. How we deal with ego is all about what teaching we subscribe to and, most importantly, what level we are at or what our spiritual capabilities are. But you are right, from the perspective of most Eastern spirituality, ego is definitely the bad guy!  Most ‘great Masters’ have little patience with their student’s ‘personal life’. For many of them, spirituality is about impersonality - living the unconditional life, not mucking about with all our yucky ‘personality’ stuff!


This approach may be fine if one is from a part of the world where one has not inherited all the many hang-ups that we Westerners have, or if one lives a monkish existence in an ashram in the Himalayas and doesn’t need to concern oneself with things like getting relationships right, enjoying sex, paying the mortgage and finding a satisfying career. It may not work so well, however, if one believes, as I do, that our personal life is as important as our impersonal life and that the name of the spiritual game is to try to sacralize and integrate both dimensions of who we are.  And this cannot happen if we have an ‘I must get rid of’ approach to the domain of ego. Here is what A.H. Almaas, a spiritual teacher, who recognises the importance of the marriage of psychology and spirituality, says about people who try to do this.


‘My perception of what happens with people who claim to have lost their personality totally and spontaneously is that there often remains a split-off or repressed part which will manifest as a distortion or lack of integration. If the personality is abandoned rather than integrated, the totality of life cannot be lived.


’I would like to add a remark of Jung’s to this, namely that ‘Any part of ourselves we do not own, becomes our enemy.’
You see, the problem about the ‘‘Let us transcend the ‘bad ego’’’ approach, is that it makes ego into an enemy, which is a mighty risky strategy since our egos are exceptionally cunning and we tend not to fare well by having them in such overt opposition to us! As the Tibetan Master Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche once said ‘Ego is capable of infiltrating itself into everything, even into our spirituality’.


But don’t get me wrong. I am not eulogising the ego and I certainly see that our egos or the idea of ourselves as being a ‘separate self’, is behind most of what does not work on our planet, and that if we are to evolve as a species, and create a better world for ourselves, that we need to open up higher dimensional worlds inside ourselves and not be so controlled by our ego selves. However,  and this is the key point, this can only come about when we are ready to surrender to the absolute or to die to the idea of any kind of separation whatsoever from the divine. And the truth is that most of us, despite what we like to say, are not ready for this.



So I say that until we are ready, as it were, to plunge ourselves over the abyss and into the Absolute, that we will still need images of ourselves to believe in (and ego gives us such images). Andrew Cohen, who is of the ‘let’s bust the ego quick’ school, would disagree. His take is that we are always ready to drop ego and that telling ourselves we are ‘not yet ready’ is yet another of the many games ego plays with us!


In certain cases, of course, he is right and we can hang on too long to our ‘separate identity’, fearful of who we would really be if we truly surrendered to the unknown and let ourselves become ‘naughted’ (as St Teresa would say). But this is not always so. Often, if we hang on, it is because we are not yet ready to let go, and to try to do so prematurely, may lead not to Enlightenment but to Psychosis!


Basically I see our egos as being   analogous to a scaffolding that is necessary that we erect for ourselves in order to give us solidity and structure thus allowing us to build on new stories or new floors or selves (the spiritual part) of ourselves. If we try to erect our spiritual structures too quickly, without our basic (ego) structures being secure and ready, we may well find ourselves being pulverised by the force of a spiritual fire or current that we are unable to process. As a Transpersonal Psychotherapist, I have worked with several such ‘spiritual casualties’ over the years and it is not easy work.


This is why I say that, metaphorically speaking, only when the ground and first floor of our being has become more solid and secure, is it safe for our ego scaffolding to begin being dismantled. And I believe that if we are sincere in our Spiritual practices, and do not try to run before we can walk (generally because of hubris) that this will happen naturally, just like fruit falling from the tree when it is ripe. Interestingly, it is often when our egos are strong and not weak that they are most likely to start relinquishing their hold over us. Often this happens when we reach a stage in our spiritual journey where, with every cell of our being, we long to ‘play a higher game’ and find we simply cannot bear to act out our old ego dramas for a moment longer!


But I do not believe this process should ever be forced, for if the dismantling is done prematurely, it is possible, as I have just said, that damage can be done. Here, we must remember that many of our paedophiles, serial killers, Terrorists and general ‘wierdos’ are   often egoless people, that is, people who have never developed a strong enough sense of self in the first place!  The cult leader and killer Charles Manson was a case in point. His problem was that he didn’t have a strong enough structure to process the powerful spiritual urges he was receiving and hence all those impulses became horribly contaminated.  Thus I believe, with Ram Dass, that ‘‘We must first be a somebody (have evolved a strong sense of ego self)’ Before we are ready to be a nobody.’(allow the egoic domination to diminish). Thus, we need to work with our ego personalities, not by trying to transcend them as ‘bad’, but rather by opening wholeheartedly to them.  As we intentionally seek to bring higher awareness into the most deficient and wounded parts of ourselves, this allows for a deep purification to begin to take place and what we discover is that our old ego encrustations slowly begin to melt away, revealing the deeper inner (spiritual) structures lying hidden underneath.


The story of our interaction with our egos can be seen in terms of Jesus’ interaction with ‘the devil’ (actually his ego) when he was being led by this part of himself to climb to the top of the mountain, with Satan telling Jesus that with his great powers, he could have the whole world bow down to him. Interestingly, Jesus’ response was not to say ‘Bad Ego get lost, go away’. Rather he said ‘Get thee behind me, Satan’! He was acknowledging that he owed something to this part of him that had helped him up the mountain, but that now he had got there, it needed to be in its right place, behind him as his servant not in front of him as his master. And this is how I feel, eventually, all of us need to be in relation to our egos.