The Bible says that when God created human beings, He shaped them out of clay and then breathed the breath of life into them. In this picture, the ego is the clay: the part of you that deals with everyday reality and weighs up profit and loss. The breath is what I will call the Self, with a capital S: God’s breath in you, and the source of the wisdom inside you. So the thing you call I is, at bottom, not the clay at all. It is the breath. The trouble starts when the clay claims to be the Self, and the ego starts acting as if it were the real you, running your life by its own will.
This picture does not say that a human being is nothing but a lump of dirt. Nor is it simply telling you that there is something precious inside you. The question it raises is who is sitting in the place that belongs to the breath: who is actually running your life. What follows is what a life looks like when the clay has taken that place for itself.
Growing up means learning to bow your head
Becoming an adult is the ego meeting the Self. You can see that meeting in one thing: you bow your head. You grow humble before God, before life, before nature. Reaching that humility is what being a grown-up means. A child cannot do this yet. A child still tries to make life go the way it wants.
Ignore life’s currents and anger is what is left
Whoever cannot bow their head goes the opposite way. Life has its own enormous currents, far beyond anything we understand, and this person acts as if those currents did not exist. Their thinking goes: marriage has to come when I want it, a meal has to come when I want it, everything has to happen when I want it to. And when it does not go the way they wanted, the anger arrives. A great many adults live exactly like this, carrying anger and hatred and depression around with them.
This shows what the ego is like. Until it bows its head, the ego thinks it is greater than God. So it sees no reason to turn to the Self. It never asks the Self anything and never tries to reach it; it goes on living by its own will, doing as it pleases. You may have caught this attitude in yourself, as resentment toward God: “Why did You make my life like this? Why did You give me a family like this?”
“Live this way and you are a holy person”
The ego has its own methods, and it keeps trying them. It tells itself: I will try living this way. No, 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. Trace any of it back and you find that the ego has been in charge the whole time.
There are people who live with great passion and work very hard, and they go about their faith the same way. And yet, living like that, by the ego’s methods, they are out of touch with the Self inside them. Being out of touch with the Self means being cut off from the wisdom inside you. Where that wisdom should be, the ego’s ideas move in: live this way and you are the right kind of person, live this way and you are a holy person. That is what the law is, in the religious sense of the word: the rules you keep so that you will count as right and holy. Keep what the world taught you, the thinking goes, and you will shine, you will be impressive, you will be holy.
For a while, it seems to work
The ego’s actual job is dealing with everyday reality, so running your life the ego’s way does seem to work, up to a point. It feels as if you are getting somewhere. But in the end it does not hold. You keep stumbling and falling.
You slide back into old ways, you fall, and it all happens again. 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 work. You can throw yourself into living that way as hard as you like, and still you never find real freedom inside yourself.
Small wisdom and big wisdom
In addiction recovery programmes, the very first step is a confession: I was powerless over the addiction, and there was nothing I could do about it. What that confession says is that the ego’s resources have run out. Its own ways of running your life have all been tried and used up.
Sooner or later, you hit a wall in your life. You have tried to live by what you can work out for yourself, and things will not come untangled. The weariness of living, the problems that will not go away: human wisdom cannot sort them out. Human thinking only ever sees pieces, and it is extremely narrow. What we manage to put together inside that narrowness, thrashing about just trying to survive, is small wisdom. Only big wisdom can untangle a life. Small wisdom cannot. Big wisdom is the wisdom the Self gives you: the breath in you, not the clay.
Somebody hits you once
So what does small wisdom actually look like, close up? It is a calculation of profit and loss.
I often say that the Bible is paradoxical. What it runs against is human thinking, exactly this kind of calculation. People work out that doing it this way will pay off, that this way will be good for them, and the Bible mostly says the reverse: no, do it the other way, and that is where the benefit is. Sacrifice, give, forgive: that is the kind of thing it tells you.
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 that forgiving is good for you. By human arithmetic, that is very hard to accept.
The road that helps you gets counted as a loss
Because small wisdom calculates like this, nearly every time, the methods we think will benefit us are the ones that bring us harm.
The same thing happens in counselling. People are shown a way that would do them good and make them happier, and they do not take it. There is one reason: they think they will lose by it. It is not that they cannot see the benefit, and it is not that their faith is different. It is that the loss calculation answers first: before anything else gets a say, it has already said no.
In fact, most people struggle through their whole lives the ego’s way and die like that. They never taste real freedom or real truth; they try hard in their own way, and then it is over. And then there are people who became addicted, or who carry a wound, and who went looking for a way to fix it and met the truth on the way. It hurt too much to leave alone, so they searched for wisdom, searched for the truth, deeper and deeper. For them, the pain can turn out to be a blessing.
But to meet the truth and find real freedom, there is one point you have to pass through. It is the point where you look at the way the ego has been running your life and admit it plainly to yourself: this was crap; the very way I have been living was completely wrong. Only when you can admit that do you finally take in the big wisdom, God’s wisdom. That admission is the clay climbing down from the place that belongs to the breath and settling back where clay belongs.
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