The Ego Has Crash Landed

The following are some current thoughts inspired by a friends question regarding whether or not my persona (ego) realises it must “die” and become assimilated as part of the journey of personal evolution.

My view of the persona (and ego) is partly derived from Psychosynthesis, although what I express here is my own personal view, developed through experience and reflection.

I don’t see the persona as a whole and complete entity unto itself. It is a “mask” that we show to the world, but it is a composite or collection of various parts of our personality (ie. subpersonalities). As such, it is not uncommon for people to have different personae (masks) for different occasions – in one sense you could say “living a double life”. For many years I never revealed to most people I knew my interests in the occult. Only other people involved in the occult knew of my interests and involvements. So I showed a very mundane exoteric persona to most people who were friends or work colleagues.

It is clear to me that the persona or ego is not dependant on being a specific way all of the time. It is factors slightly deeper that give rise to it. For instance, from Psychosynthesis terminology, subpersonalities working as a group or conglomerate are what actually gives rise to the persona or ego. While there are predominant parts which we tend to “live out of” it is also possible for us to polarise, and go into the opposite subpersonalities and therefore change our ego and persona. An example would be the powerful and authoritarian businessman who goes to a dominatrix and lives out a persona of a powerless and weak submissive who desires to be controlled.

It is true that all these parts (subpersonalities) fear their own loss of identity, or synthesis within a highly functional and holistic persona. What needs to be remembered though is that changing a part, or combining it with it’s opposite doesn’t mean annihilation – it means transformation. It has been liked to a caterpillar’s metamorphosis into a butterfly, where the old form is destroyed and a new form emerges.

All our subpersonalities are important and valuable. It isn’t that we need to destroy and get rid of them. The problem is that they are out of balance. They have been compared to the mutinous crew of a ship (the ship’s captain being the Self). They have their strengths, but when the polar opposite is suppressed or weakened things are disproportionate and out of balance. When some kind of crisis or shift occurs, then a person will find themselves operating out of the weaker polar opposite that is normally suppressed, and struggling due to this part being underdeveloped. It would be analogous to consider someone only using their right arm to work with, and allowing the muscles of the left arm to waste away or never develop. Then one day they injure their right arm, and must now rely on the left. Because it has never been developed, everything is a struggle as this arm is weak. Beyond this, the injury may never have occurred if both arms had have been used together – synthesis.

The above said, on a deeper esoteric level there sometimes has to be a willingness to undertake the challenges of one’s magical path. It is easy to understand the analogy between being a warrior and undertaking spiritual development, as there must be a fierce determination to succeed against the (perceived) odds, and not quit when the going gets tough.

It can be understood from a magical perspective that no amount of breaking apart and purify the parts of the individual psyche will lead to or cause spiritual death. There is the alchemical interpretation of the letters I.N.R.I. (usually “Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum” translating to “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”) as “Igni Natura Renovata Integra”, which is variously translated as “All of nature is renewed by fire”, “Fire Renews Nature Completely”, or “through fire, nature is reborn whole” (contrast this with some of the sayings, attributed to Jesus, relating to fire in The Gospel of Thomas). What is meant is that the essence of a thing is not destroyed by fire, rather it is reborn whole. So the perceived destruction of the ego/persona is really a process of renewal that will lead to a rebirth of a whole individual (again consider some of the sayings in The Gospel of Thomas).

This fits in with the school of thought that says the Kingdom of God is here now. In this scenario the whole and “perfectly balanced” psyche is already here, only we do not see and recognise it. The internal Garden of Eden is in perfect order, and offers us eternal life and sustenance. Perhaps it is the “fire” which is needed to burn up the illusionary projections of dysfunction and non-wholeness. It is certainly fitting with Psychosynthesis and various occult doctrines that the Self and especially the Higher Self are present within us, at a higher or deeper level than we are are normally aware of. The Higher Self is really the macrocosmic blueprint of our psyche’s potential, while our Self is the microcosmic manifestation of this within our current lifetime. It is trauma, and a naturally tendency towards polarities within our causal reality, which give us a perception of dysfunction and opposition as the only form of existence we have. However, this is all only one level of existence and experience.

At my present stage of development I still experience the fear of the parts of the psyche who sometime sense an impending doom – a metaphorical Sword of Damocles hanging above them, threatening their existence. However, it is important to keep in mind that these parts cannot die. They can only be transformed – as death itself is only a transformation of energy, not a final end itself. These parts will continue to exist, as functional elements within the totality of the psyche. They are not, even now, separate in a spacial sense. They can be considered as delimited and defined, much the same as the Psychosynthesis Egg Diagram depicts the psyche as an egg with permeable divisions, rather than concrete separations. The yin/yang diagram likewise represents unity of the yin and the yang, both contain the seed of the other.

I don’t believe that even after the “death” of the ego or persona, or an understanding and embracing of one’s place within the whole, that the individual identity is completely sublimated into the “All”. We are already part of the “All” and our separation from it is an illusion that we project out onto the world. Things are only out of balance, or perhaps comparable to having all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, but not yet having put them together to see the bigger picture. Once the pieces are in place, then the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts, however the parts still form the whole.

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For more information on Psychosynthesis you can check out the following websites:

• Inner Path
• The Will Project
• Southern Psychosynthesis Community Network
• Psychosynthesis – Two Not 2
• Psychosynthesis Books
• Psychosynthesis Online

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