Think of the ego as clay. If a human being is clay with breath blown into it, then the thing you call I is not the clay at all. It is the breath. The trouble starts when the clay begins announcing that it is the Self.
This is not the old line about man being dust and nothing better, nor a verdict on your worth in the other direction. It is a question about occupancy — who is sitting in the seat where the breath belongs. What sort of seat that is, I have written about already, in You Were Not Asked to Swap Your Mother for God. What follows is what a life looks like once the clay has climbed up into it.
Growing up is the moment the head comes down
Becoming an adult is the ego meeting the Self. And in that meeting, the head comes down. Before God, before life, before nature, the mind turns humble. Reaching that stage of humility is what being grown up is.
Ignore the current and anger is what is left
Whoever cannot lower the head goes the opposite way. There are currents running through a life that we know nothing about, enormous currents, and this person ignores them. I get married when I want to get married. I eat when I want to eat. I take a shit when I want to. And then it does not go the way I wanted it, and the anger arrives. A great many grown adults live at exactly this address, carrying anger and hatred and depression around with them.
You can read off what the ego is from that. The ego is the part that thinks it is grander than God. Which leaves it no reason to look into the Self. It does not ask, it does not try to make contact, it goes on living by its own lights and its own preferences.
“That is what the law is”
The ego runs on its own method. I will try living this way. I will try living that way. Religious life is no exception — do it like this and your faith is good, no, do it like that and your faith is good. Track any of it back and the ego has been driving the whole time.
There are people who live with real heat, hard and devoted, religious life included. And a person living like that is out of contact with the Self inside him. Out of contact with the Self means not connected to his own inner wisdom. Something moves into the empty place: the ego’s concept of the thing. Live this way and you are a right person, live this way and you are a holy person. That is what the law is. Keep what the world taught you and you will shine, you will be impressive, you will be holy.
It looks like something, for a while
Handling reality is the ego’s actual job, so a life run on the ego’s method does look plausible for a stretch. It looks like something is being built. Ultimately it does not hold. You keep going over.
It relapses, it falls, it repeats. You did not want to live like this and the same situation keeps turning up (Your Life Script: Why You Keep Repeating the Same Ending). You tried to get better. You tried to have better faith, tried to live a holy life, and again it did not take. You can push at that pitch and the freedom inside you never shows up. Real freedom.
Small wisdom and big wisdom
The first admission in addiction recovery is a confession — I was powerless over the addiction, and there was nothing I could do about it. Read that as a statement about supply: the ego’s resources have run out.
Sooner or later you collide with your own life. I tried it with my wisdom and the thing will not come untangled. The weariness of living, the matters that will not resolve — human wisdom cannot get them open. Human thinking is fragmentary to begin with, and extremely narrow. What we manage to assemble inside that narrowness, thrashing about trying to survive, is small wisdom. A life gets solved with big wisdom. Small wisdom will not solve a life. Big wisdom is the wisdom the true Self tells you.
Somebody hits you once
So what does small wisdom actually look like, close up? It is a calculation of profit and loss.
Scripture is paradoxical, and the thing it is paradoxical against is human thinking. A person has worked out that doing it this way will pay, this way will be good for me — and scripture mostly says the reverse. No: do it the other way, and that is where the benefit is. The instructions it hands back are of that kind — sacrifice, give, forgive.
In human terms, forgiving is a loss. Somebody hits you once, across the face. You are told to forgive. Forgive and you do not get to hit back, so this is a loss, and you are being told to take it anyway. And then you are told the forgiving is to your benefit. On human arithmetic that is very hard to accept.
The road that helps you gets scored as a loss
Which is why, nearly every time, the methods we think will benefit us are the ones that bring us harm.
It runs the same way from the other side. Somebody lays out the road for you — it would do you good, it would make you happier — and you do not take it. There is one reason. You think you will lose by it. The flesh’s way of thinking registers that loss. It is not that the benefit was hidden from you. The loss calculation answers first, before anything else gets a turn.
Most people scrabble along on the ego for the whole distance and die that way, never having tasted real freedom or real truth, having tried hard after their own fashion, and then finished. And then there are people who got addicted, who are carrying an injury, who went looking for a way to fix it and ran into the truth on the way. It hurt too much to leave alone. So they looked deeper, and deeper again. For them the pain turns out to be the blessing.
There is one passage to get through before that, though. It is the one where you look at the way the ego has been running your life and admit, plainly, that it was shit. Clay settling back down to where clay goes.
Related
- Why Self-Love Feels Fake: You’ve Been Faking the Other Thing
- You Won the Argument and You’re No Happier for It
- What Did I Do to Deserve This? Punishments End. This Doesn’t.
Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board