Alright, let's blow this joint.
100 fragments on the ego, its workings, its failings, and its alternatives.
100 fragments on the ego, its workings, its failings, and its alternatives.
1. Starting out, what *is* the ego? The definition I'll use is, the ego is a mental pattern of identification, that is, of a "me"-making. It is the periodic thoughts that attribute this or that thing (thoughts, feelings etc.) as me, and some others (eg. objects, body) as mine.
2. It bears repeating that the ego is just that: a mental pattern. Things go on inside and outside of the body, and the ego is what gets to call some things me or mine. It is a thought among thoughts, and the disappearance of the ego does not compromise much of any other function
3. As a fun fact, ego wasn't the term that Freud used! In his writings, he used "Ich" which is just German for "I", which got translated into Ego in the Standard Edition of the collection of his psychological works, deriving the term from Latin.
4. A more illuminating angle is ego as pattern of *appropriation*: it is the *claiming* parts of experience and existence as me or mine; self-definition by means of thoughts, personality, etc. and by means of objects, propriety can be observed to be the same underlying mechanism.
5. To reiterate, property is just the outside manifestation of the ego mechanisms; ego in general is what one pours this sense of identity into, and what ends up being enmeshed with it.
6. The difference between me and mine in the ego contexts is that "me" is what the ego has declared being so much "mine" that the sense of identity has crystallized around the thing. It is something that the ego is not being willing anymore to consider as separate from self.
7.
8. Ego is the claiming of propriety over reality, which is an act that is fundamentally pretense. Reality is not owned by anyone or anything. Reality just *is*, and in fact continues to *be* as such even after some silly mind decides what's owned by who.
9. Specifically, the ego-personality (or what we usually just call personality) is the aggregate of behaviours and patterns that people feel it most identifies them, or to put it another way, represents them.
10. The term itself, "personality", is extremely telling - it is a Latin word for the theatrical masks that actors wore in order to represent a character and potentiate their own voice through a hole in the mask (per+sona, "through which sound goes").
11. In the same way that theatrical masks are temporary and disposable, so personalities are fixed representatives of a much more dynamic phenomenon - people will plainly behave in different ways under different contexts, heavily straining the concept of a static personality.
12. As much as one could possibly reevaluate personalities as personal tendencies, rather than traits, the underlying pattern remains - the ego is what the sense of self is invested in, and the more investment, the more fixed the thing or trait are required to be.
13. This pattern is endemic, and is what characterizes "weak" or "strong" egos - stronger egos identify more with things being a particular specific way, and very ironically, this makes them much more brittle, and prone to being challenged on their grounds by the events of life.
14. small and big egos are a similar dynamic - a big ego has identified with many things and is unwilling to let go of the association after the inevitable pushback of life, which puts them constantly on the defensive.
15. An important point to observe is how the ego involves a process of reification. In order to identify with something, that something gets first defined - it *becomes a thing*, so that it can be associated to, and the thing is one particular way and not another, by definition.
16. The mindstream gets broken up into thoughts; the actions of the body get collected into behaviours, and sets of behaviours into personality traits; the land gets divided up into plots, and realty split up into objects. Those are all the same movement.
17. The ego is built on this tendency of mind to split up reality into parts, but in the same way that reification is challenged by eternal and irresistible change of all things, so the ego pirouettes over shifting terrain.
18. The reification tendency has a gradient to it - from the pattern of putting names to things (and in so doing identifying *them*) into more and more of looking away at the territory and staring at the map instead, culminating eg. in reductionism.
19. Reductionism is the logical extreme of reification: the conception that reality is made of things, which themselves are made of other things, and that in studying what little things the bigger things are made of, we can come to fully understand them.
20. One poignant metaphor for reductionism is dissection - while something can be grasped by taking a dead butterfly and gutting it open to investigate the insides, it does not show the insides, or the outsides, at work, and barely hints at *how* they work.
21. Life is much more about actions and events and movement than it is about fixed things and objects and stillness. Life is change; without change, time would not be observable, and indeed would not exist.
22. So the ego is founded upon the pretense of things being stable and fixed, and in doing so, is constantly struggling about the fabric of experience itself. It is in constant state of needing to reaffirm itself, and this generates a chronic straining of the mind.
23. Where does the ego come from in an individual?
Turns out, much like the rest of our basic knowledge and conditioning, that it's something we pick up as children, little sponges that they are, through both imitation and the sheer expectation of others.
Turns out, much like the rest of our basic knowledge and conditioning, that it's something we pick up as children, little sponges that they are, through both imitation and the sheer expectation of others.
24. A baby is born without an ego pattern, or a need for such. Besides observing others doing it, they are also expected to conform to specific behaviours - "You should(n't) do this" or even deeper, "This isn't like you". People expect a sense of self from them, and they get it.
25. A person could go their whole life just doing things and thinking things without ever saying that's me or that's mine, but society puts pressure on us to separate the acceptable from the unacceptable, and to identify with (and bring out) the acceptable part of ourselves only.
26. This is worth restating - even with people already conditioned to think/have an ego, such a mental construct disappears once the pressure of society to *have* an ego disappears. The basic nature of man does not include self-identification.
27. A personality is, like the name implies, a performative act, which can be interrupted. In a state of social isolation, all the mental constructs of identity, repression, of "behaving", fall away, and what remains is just sheer life living itself.
28. Ego is a pattern of identification with *some*thing, but not with *every*thing. This is true at every level - we only own some stuff, we are only what's inside the skin, and even within that, there are parts of us that the ego necessarily disowns - the Jungian Shadow.
29. This of course implies that reuniting one's ego-self with the shadow means doing away with the concept of ego-self entirely, because it is unneeded boundary-setting. You are entirely what you are, without needing to define it first, or reify it, or restrict it.
30. Much like the rest of the meaning-making we do, the ego is an ongoing story. It attributes a body, a mind, a personality, a past, a present, and a future, etc. to a me-character. The "me" is just a concept point to which the rest is connected, AND defined in relationship to.
31. A particularly obvious observation spot of the meaning-making and how the ego weaves into it is by reading a novel - the book in itself is just a narrated sequence of events, but we distill patterns in it and call some of them characters, all with their predictable attributes
32. Those characters don't "really" exist but they feel viscerally real to us; the concept of a character is an extremely solid, fleshed-out pattern that arises out of mere words on a page. Such is our ability to pour identity-ness into observed reality.
33. In the same way that all our other thinking shapes the way we look at the world (giving birth to such things as "déformation professionnelle" or "when all you have is an hammer…"), so the ego is part of a conditioning to think in terms of identified, stable, SEPARATE things.
34. But reality is anything other than separate! A good example is a color wheel: it is a diversified continuum, where all color blends together while remaining distinct, and all names and separations put to color are based on drawing arbitrary boundaries to what is and isn't so.
35. We think of distinction between colors being obvious, but even the distinct words for *blue* and *green* are historically recent introductions to language! The historical pattern progresses in time towards having more and more separate names for distinct colors.
36. Separateness also gets in the way of studying living beings - it is impossible to truly study one without observing the ways it relates to, and interacts with, its whole environment, and so to study a living being is to study an ecology (study of the home)!
37. Connection Rules Everything Around Me - words are defined with other words, movement can only be understood as relative behaviour, a living being and its environment are inseparable.
Every thing is *distinct* from another, but never ever separate.
Every thing is *distinct* from another, but never ever separate.
38. Things have boundaries from other things that are a lot fuzzier than many are willing to admit, like between a cloud and the open air. One person clearly does not end at the skin boundary - it is constantly interacting with the outside, and it is in no sense separate from it.
39. The history of the ego is adjacent to the history of private property (both mental processes of attribution!), and so the point in history where it took a decisive turn for the worse is v likely the advent of agriculture. discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/t…
40. Basically with the creation of substantial productive surplus, the need to defend it arises, and this sublimates into such patterns as increased boundaries between what's mine and what's yours, and in tandem, a stronger sense of separateness between what's ME and what's YOU.
41. This is a pattern that has grown steadily deeper and more entrenched with time, culminating in eg. reductionism, a progressive fragmentation of societal structures of camaraderie, and a gnawing sense of isolation and aloneness in a cold, uncaring, DISCONNECTED universe.
42. The more need to separate our sense of self from others, the more our disconnection from everything grows - from Nature, turning alien and full of teeth and claw; from the Universe, blindly deterministic and which has us as flukes of chance, + most tragically from *ourselves*
43. Many of us believe of being just electrical signals in the brain, which we can't conventionally even observe or experience, while denying the fundamental reality of consciousness, which is the one *single* thing we are GUARANTEED to experience, by definition!
44. More and more we are discovering that even beings without neural systems, such as plants, display remarkable behaviours such as displaying distress, happiness, detailed awareness of surroundings, etc. while consciousness remains fully unexplained in terms of brain activity.
45. The implication here is something that many Eastern philosophies have been pointing at for centuries: that indeed, our Self—whatever THAT is—is something that transcends the brain, transcends the body, transcends any and all boundaries.
46. It goes as far as claiming that indeed, there is no such thing as a Self in this whole existence. Part of the standard progress to enlightenment is a direct experience/realization aptly termed of no-self.
47. The realization of no-self is the peeking behind the illusion of thoughts to observe that consciousness does not need, and indeed does not inherently have, any identification attached to it.
48. Stuff just exists and is perceived, and the act of perception is simply that. It's a verb without a subject. It's just something happening, to no one, and by itself. There are different centers of awareness/experience of the Whole Thing but that's it.
49. To experience no-self means to go behind the limitations of thought, which is inherently dualistic (because to think about something you must first *define* that something as separate/different from something else), and language even doubly so.
50. In short, the entrenching of the ego as fundamental, irrevocable, endemic part of the human experience has led us much astray, warped our thoughts, beliefs and actions beyond recognition, and has made a collective fool out of ourselves in countless ways.
51. If so, what's a reasonable alternative to ego?
The no-self is very cool and all, but it is fundamentally a *non-model*—it is the express refusal to think in terms of separate selves, and while truER to experience, it doesn't cut much mustard when navigating social life.
The no-self is very cool and all, but it is fundamentally a *non-model*—it is the express refusal to think in terms of separate selves, and while truER to experience, it doesn't cut much mustard when navigating social life.
52."All models are wrong, but some are useful."—George E. P. Box
When we use models, we don't judge them for being false—truth is an ideal none of them can aspire to. Rather we judge them for their ability to organize life in a matter that makes most sense and brings us results.
When we use models, we don't judge them for being false—truth is an ideal none of them can aspire to. Rather we judge them for their ability to organize life in a matter that makes most sense and brings us results.
53. So the ego was false, obviously, but it's also a deleterious model which has much damaged us, as individuals and as a whole species.
What's the alternative? If seeing ourselves as One is out, and None isn't v useful, the only reasonable one left is seeing ourselves as Many.
What's the alternative? If seeing ourselves as One is out, and None isn't v useful, the only reasonable one left is seeing ourselves as Many.
54. We, as social animals, are *very* geared towards modeling things as *relationships* of various parts, and heavily equipped with handling such connections, be them eg. meaning ties, or spatial ties, or social ties
Ideally this shouldn't be thrown away when handling ourselves!
Ideally this shouldn't be thrown away when handling ourselves!
55. There is so much more complexity inside us that the ego has hidden away from us—the body-mind is a fractal, a shifting kaleidoscope of ideas, thoughts, beliefs, facets, feelings, paradoxes and contradiction, marvelous and boundless and ephemeral.
56.Attributing all this enormous variation to a single agent is a criminally coarse approximation! The ego as single inhabitant of the bodymind masks the true beauty of Being, just as names give impression of understanding without actually explaining much of anything about things
57.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself;
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
Conditions such as "being of two minds", of being torn about two impluses or desires—this is not something you can comfortably describe w/an ego model
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself;
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
Conditions such as "being of two minds", of being torn about two impluses or desires—this is not something you can comfortably describe w/an ego model
58. Not to mention that the ego model implies a control of this single inhabitant over what's going on in the mind, which is blatantly false! Try sitting for an hour in meditation JUST focusing on the breath sensations and then come back to me and tell me if you're in control!
59. The mind's behaviour (to say nothing of the body's!) is by and large autonomous and subconscious. Not even attention is directly controlled, only gently suggested. So is memory, so is motivation, so is most of anything you care about in there.
60. This breaks down another hard boundary—the body IS part of your subconscious mind! Feelings, perceptions, moods, emotions, those all happen within the body and are inseparable from the mind's functioning.
61. The fundamental unit of life and Nature is the holon—an entity that is meaningfully DISTINCT from the rest while not being SEPARATE. Partially autonomous yet deeply embedded in its environmental system, recognizable as one and yet made of other holons, and part of others yet.
62. It is with such an idea that we should approach life of the bodymind, an holon made out of holons (just like flesh is made of cells and cells of smaller living parts still) while also embedded within other holons (relationships, groups, society, environment etc.)
(By the way, this conception of Nature as an holarchy is beautifully detailed in Earthdance: Living Systems in Evolution, which is a book I *profoundly* recommend to get a better understanding of How Life Actually Works goodreads.com/book/show/2742… )
63. Since I might as well, I termed this model of relating to the self "Fluid Plurality".
It is the attitude of seeing behaviour, including within self, as interaction of interconnected and distinct parts, while not staying too attached to any one identification of such parts.
It is the attitude of seeing behaviour, including within self, as interaction of interconnected and distinct parts, while not staying too attached to any one identification of such parts.
64. The fluid plurality model works to our strengths of being able to meaningfully personify much of anything (anthropomorphization, pareidolia, and more) and to create dynamic relationships between them in creative, catalytic, and transformative ways.
65. This maps rather excellently to many of our mental functions because, while autonomous and possessing their own inertia, they can be meaningfully communicated with; their behaviour can be altered through periodic interaction. They can be harmonized as a group is harmonized.
66. The fluid plurality (FP) model also does work in dissolving the hard boundaries between what's inside the skin and what's outside, since many behaviours of the individual are only understandable as the movement of a single, aggregate being (crowds, egregores, societies, etc.)
67. None of this, of course, is my original ideation—not only several successful psychotherapy modalities address the self as made of interacting parts, but it is also a model we are inherently, naturally geared to understand and employ.
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68. In fact, many people already do this in a number of ways, from the simple talking to themselves every once in a while and reasoning things out this way, to the extreme end of splitting up self into many persistent coexistent identities, which is the practice of tulpamancy.
69. More in general, developing a healthy distance from parts of self is a practice of many more psychotherapy practices, such as distinguishing "I AM angry" to "I FEEL angry", which is a moving away from identification with emotion into something that we are simply relating to.
Also, nice.
70. More in depth, FP allows to become more aware of what's going on in the bodymind, because there is no more need to *identify* with something that's happening in there, only to relate to it! This is a profound difference that breaks down a lot of aversion and reluctance.
71. A point of extreme importance is not all parts of self communicate with thoughts! A LOT of what's going on is taking place as emotions and feelings, and cutting those out of the discussion is doing an immense disservice to your self—some parts don't communicate any other way.
72. Intuitions, gut feelings, emotions, impressions, and much more operate below thought, and it is fundamental for living as a whole being to take all those into awareness. Shutting out into our own thought-minds is a mistake far too many of us do.
73.Feelings operate in non-duality, and are capable of mesmerizing subtleness and poignancy, but a good deal of the time to be understood and/or acted upon, the so-called intellectual and emotional minds must connect&interact—the feeling has to be decoded into thoughts and words.
74. One very clear example is the dreamstate—the emotional mind reigns supreme in it and it shapes timespace itself from its emotional narrative, but to be understood, the dream must be interpreted, tied up in words and symbols and meanings to understand the story.
75. Once properly interpreted, a dream is a devastatingly clear window into what's going on with ourselves as an emotional level, but one thing is to have a dream happen, another is to bring the intellect into it and actually understand what it's about and how to act from there.
76. And of course, this requires a back-and-forth between the intellectual mind and the emotional mind. It takes unraveling the dream scenes into points, into events, into things and symbols and names—and to listen to the emotional reaction, feeling what's hitting the mark.
77. This whole dream interpretation can be easily imagined as the dream *trying to tell us something*, which is in fact a framing many use and that is vastly successful. This is but one example of how thinking of the self as distinct parts plays well into the dynamics of life.
78. One point of caution is to maintain the dynamics as ephemeral and transient. If you keep around un-renounciable, rigid structures to define parts of self, you're committing the same blunder of ego. Change is the only constant, and the nature of all things.
79. Don't be too hasty putting names to parts of self that aren't already inherently transient, such as emotions. Names are extremely powerful and have a tendency to stick around, and they can blind to all the ways a thing is made of other things, or is part of others itself.
80. The more loosely you play the FP game, the more freedom you allow yourself to switch levels, to interleave them, to create new meaningful associations and to frame a situation in the exact way that the moment requires.
81. FP is, in fact, a game! It is pretense, just like ego was, and that gives you permission to *play around*, to investigate, to challenge assumptions and break boundaries and make your own conclusions and shape it however it's best to.
82. You are absolutely permitted to use whatever tool at your disposal to enjoy FP and enhance your experience of it—very notably, visualization is an extremely powerful means to color all such interactions
83. Specifically, FP is very helpful to reframe internal dysfunctions as mis-relationships between parts—methods such as the Internal Family System are structured so to have parts of self communicate -> understand one another better -> create more harmonious inner relationships.
84. Practice understanding. Inner behaviour may be irrational but is never incoherent. There is always, at some level, a reason for what's happening in there, and at some level, you can come to understand it, and from that understanding, come to a higher resolution.
85. Do not take things personally! (lol)
There's no self to pin blame to, there is only responsibility to be distributed appropriately, as the situations demand. Pool together and find ways to learn lessons and make discoveries and do things and all the good stuff.
There's no self to pin blame to, there is only responsibility to be distributed appropriately, as the situations demand. Pool together and find ways to learn lessons and make discoveries and do things and all the good stuff.
86. Of course, if some particular structure works very well (such as specific identifications), feel free to keep using them repeatedly, but always keep in mind that you could go above, beyond, through it, split it in pieces and reassemble them other ways.
87. Some interactions might be simple one-timers. No need to bring something up again in a specific way may be felt, and that's perfectly fine. Keep it loose, and let the moment guide you to discern how best to approach it.
88. I cannot stress enough how any part of yourself can be split off and interacted with—your emotions have something to say, your feelings mean something important, you could chat with your memory and come up with something good. If you can think of it, you can interact with it.
89. Sometimes it's good to take your skin out of the game and just take an external/mediator role and watch two or more parts of yourself duke/reason it out.
90. To make FP work for you, take inspiration from anything and everything you feel like—any tool of social interaction or of introspection can work, and much more! Even journaling works as means of condensing interactions into meaning:
91. You can treat your sel(f/ves) the way you would treat a puppy. You need understanding, you need patience with yourself, and care, and compassion, and looking over mistakes to keep living in harmony. Like you would treat a puppy.
92. Talk to yourself as you would to your best friend. You're all in this together, and while different, and sometimes troubled, you can make it work, and beautifully, powerfully, excitingly, meaningfully so
93. There are COUNTLESS ways you could relate to yourself—look around for what you can use for yourself! (thread)
94. Tulpamancy has much to teach about how one can deliberately create powerful, friendly interactions with oneself. Aside from the optional step of how to create distinct mental entities, it lays out plainly processes on how to relate to other selves. tulpanomicon.guide
95. More in general, multiplicity is something that many people live in, for one reason or another (including working something out from Dissociative Identity Disorder), and their experiences are invaluable in describing how an healthy inner system works. kinhost.org/Main/ManualTOC
96. Working with yourself is a fundamental skill! Relating to yourself well is supremely important in life, since you are the only thing you can't run away from! So you better learn how to make this household work
97. Your inner self is a vast environment that you can master, and that can become very, very friendly and harmonious and spectacular and incredible. Mastering your thoughts, your emotions, your feelings, your body, your Self, is the best investment you can make in life.
98. Learning how to relate to yourself well translates very directly and intuitively into both relating to other people better, and to understand greater systems.
As within, so without.
As within, so without.
99. You possess an untold amount of intelligences inside yourself, of so many kinds, and they work in different ways, speak different languages, and can work together in an infinitude of combinations and methods.
100.
A universe sits within you.
Start accepting that, and truly acting from this knowledge.
A universe sits within you.
Start accepting that, and truly acting from this knowledge.
MORE RESOURCES:
The wonderful Alan Watts' Book On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
psychonautwiki.org/w/images/d/da/…
The wonderful Alan Watts' Book On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
psychonautwiki.org/w/images/d/da/…
MORE RESOURCES:
Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth (more on ego and how to deal with it and surpass it into a more functional sense of identity and self-relationship)
eckharttolle.com/a-new-earth-ex…
Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth (more on ego and how to deal with it and surpass it into a more functional sense of identity and self-relationship)
eckharttolle.com/a-new-earth-ex…
MORE RESOURCES:
Gateless Gatecrashers (specifically focused on ego dissolution and realizing reality as Life Living Itself)
liberationunleashed.com/PDF/Gateless_G…
Gateless Gatecrashers (specifically focused on ego dissolution and realizing reality as Life Living Itself)
liberationunleashed.com/PDF/Gateless_G…
And that's all for tonight, folks. Have a wonderful existence!
Whoops, just kidding—have Eric Raymond's Dancing With The Gods, a profoundly illuminating recount of how gods can be seen as supremely powerful archetypes we contain inside ourselves catb.org/esr/writings/d…
