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.

Does my penchant for cruel wit destroy my spiritual growth?

Question. ‘I have been trying to live life with more kindness towards others, but I sometimes find myself thinking very uncharitable (though admittedly funny) thoughts about people. Is it possible to have humour without a degree of unkindness attached? I find most ‘gentle’ humour incredibly dull but am worried that my penchant for cruel wit is destroying my spiritual growth.’ Adie. Suffolk.

Serge. We all have a dark side to ourselves which we need to acknowledge. So join the gang! And here, I mean dark in two senses: firstly, I mean a side of ourselves that is ‘in shadow’ or that we are unaware of, and secondly, a side that may not be as ‘nice’ or as kind as we might like. Here, we need to remind ourselves of something which the great Vietnamese Peace Activist and Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, once said, namely, that there is a murderer and rapist inside all of us! So if you only have a cruel, dark sense of humour, that ain’t that bad!

And well done that you can see and acknowledge this fact, as most of us are not that honest with ourselves.  Unlike you, we like to prance around pretending that we are ‘only kind’ and prefer to hide from ourselves those parts of us that we don’t want to see, which we instead go about projecting onto others. However, the moment we start to recognise and so ask questions about some particular negative trait that we have, the more we possess the capacity to stand back from it, to no longer give it energy, which means that it need no longer control us in the same way. We potentially ‘have’ it; not the other way round. And it seems you are beginning to do just this around what you term your ‘cruel wit’. Well done.

However, I agree with you. If you were to allow this part of you to run you, and if it were to come out all the time, and you were to do nothing about it, then this would be detrimental to your spiritual development.  It would in particular drown out your potentiality for kindness. Thoughts, we must remember,  are ‘things’, and kind thoughts sent out, elevate us and  fill others with kindness, in the same way  that unkind thoughts  demean and narrow us and fill the world with unkindness. As Jesus put it: ‘As a man thinketh in his heart, so he is!’

However, if, on the other hand, you choose to work with this issue – which includes remembering that at the moment you are about to demean someone for your own amusement, you instead send out a kind thought to them,  then you can use this to deepen your sense of self and help  you grow your soul life.

I think humour exists at many levels, and that what we find funny at any time – or what ‘turns us on’, as they say - reflects the level that we are at. The problem we all face is that we live in a society which feels more and more insecure and so we have become more and more attached to needing to make fun of others as some kind of bogus palliative – to try to prop us up. But it never works. So I would say this to you: observe where you may have taken on the shadow of the society around you. Observe the part of you that ‘gets off’ by making fun of others.  Ask yourself where this comes from and what you really ‘get’ out of it? Is laughing at, as opposed to with , particular kinds of people,  perhaps about  artificially trying to elevate yourself, so that you don’t feel so bad yourself   about, say, being thick or fat or bald or  gay or short or unattractive  or drawn to wierdos ( or whatever  it is that you find hard to accept about yourself?) If you can be really honest here, and get more and more of what Jung called our Shadow side up into the light of day, and then you work with it, you will be able gradually to transform yourself.

The result will be that bit by bit, you will find yourself increasingly able to celebrate gentle humour, as you start discovering all sorts of funny, hidden depths in simple little things.  Indeed, you will begin accessing a new level of humour, one that comes from the joy inside your heart and which is inherently empowering of life. And the more you work at this, the less you will feel a need to make fun of others and the more you will be moved to share fun with others.  This is a very significant shift. If we are fun – if a sense of the humorous side of life fun dances inside our hearts – then we are flowing with the inherent humour which endows all of Creation. And when this new space arises inside us, the need to demean others, even if it is just in thought, wholly evaporates.  We discover that God is a great joker. How else those baboons with pink bottoms could have been created, or some of those curious looking multi-coloured puffer fish that live miles down in our oceans!

I think that learning to be more fun is something which we all need to put energy into, and in part, it comes from allowing ourselves to laugh in a positive way - with life and not at it. This is so important and so healing. Life can be pretty heavy and tragic at times, and the right kind of humour can help dissolve this, make us more aware of the fact that life really does have a lighter side to it. Norman Cousins, who was Secretary General at the U.N. many years ago, understood this. He had been diagnosed with terminal Cancer. He refused all treatment. Instead, he bought hundreds of slapstick comedy films - lots of Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy stuff. (I suppose if it were more recent, he’d have included Fawlty Towers!) Then he took himself to bed and spent all day laughing. After six months, his whole system was clear of the disease.

Just as there is nothing less soulful than laughing at others, so there is nothing more transformational than laughing with others.  This is one of the keys to world peace.  I can’t help feeling that if more of us were to train ourselves to make this shift and to recognise and celebrate the truly humorous side of life, we would start unlocking many great spiritual secrets!  I hope what I’ve said may be of help.

Spiritual Trainings and Retreats with Dr. Serge Beddington-Behrens.

Photo Images supplied by Jef Bettens www.iamjef.be