Can We Learn from "the Ego Blues"?

In the posts on the five Koshas I mentioned in passing that the ego has a low reputation in spiritual circles. Ascetics try to discipline themselves not to obey the ego; Buddhists extol 'ego death'; many forms of Yoga involve control over the runaway mind with its incessant ego demands. Is this just a given? Must we fight our egos in a lifelong struggle?

These questions came to mind when a responder on the Leela thread said, "I guess I'm just going through the ego blues." He was referring to the depressed, dull, despairing state that anyone can fall into when the ego doesn't get what it wants, or when it realizes that happiness can't be reached using ego tactics.

The ego blues show that even if we give in to our egos, the result will be a simulation of happiness that requires enormous energy and effort to keep up without ever achieving the real thing.

But maybe the ego blues are also something else. If you've ever raised children and been tempted to give them everything they want, do they wind up being happy? Almost never. A child whose desires are allowed to run away winds up being exhausted, bored, and frustrated. This is one of the mysteries of the ego. It constantly wants more but is never satisfied.

There's a saying I like: You can never get enough of what you didn't want in the first place. As applied to ego, this means that the constant pursuit of gratification doesn't end in happiness and fulfillment. In fact, the two are disconnected. Happiness isn't a string of desires that achieve what they want; it's a steady state of fulfillment. Where is that to be found if not in desire?

Life is driven by desire, so it would seem that some kind of enormous fraud is innate in the ego. If it keeps following its desires for power, money, love, possessions, status, and sex, which is only natural, why does the whole thing fail in the end? Here we find ourselves in deep water, because sages have given many answers to this question. Speaking personally, I have never favored trying to defeat, kill, or discipline the ego. My reasoning is that Leela--the dance of creation--is the true model of life. If life isn't meant to be a struggle, then it isn't meant to be a struggle against the ego, either.

Here is an alternative to the ego blues, and I will leave it to you whether you find it applies to your path:

The ego is essentially a gatekeeper. It allows in certain experiences, which become "mine," and rejects other experiences, which belong outside your self system. Krishnamurti pointed out that this process of rejecting keeps life from ever being whole or complete. But what can we do? This tendency to accept and reject comes naturally to the ego. For its job is to define "I," and you can't be everything to everybody--you must define yourself as "I" in some way.

The trick is to use the ego's natural tendency for your own good, to make it evolutionary so that a higher "I" can be constructed. You constructed the "I" that you have now, so constructing a higher "I" is entirely within your abilities. In lower stages of consciousness, this possibility seems remote. A person is too overwhelmed by the basic needs of life, and emotions like fear, anger, and greed dominate. But as self-awareness dawns and the basic needs are met, as a person feels safer and mostly free of fear, the ego can shift its attention. It no longer has to be a worried gatekeeper, a defender of the status quo.

Strangely, the people who seek pleasure most desperately--such as addicts--are the most afraid. Pleasure protects them from deeper anxiety. By itself, in the absence of other problems, pleasure isn't a negative thing. It is incidental, in fact, to the purpose of life, which is evolution. Once the ego realizes this, it stops craving so much pleasure and allows pleasure to be what it always has been, a passing moment.

Now, once it commits to evolution, the ego can become a different kind of gatekeeper--it can start to let in experiences of the higher self. No other part of the self system performs this function, and therefore the ego is not just a friend, it is totally necessary if you want to evolve. I know that this perspective defies a huge amount of spiritual lore, but we need to remember that in the world where Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed taught, few people lived in any state but fear and marginal survival. Their desire bodies contained far different material than ours.

We have a surplus of ease and pleasure compared to them. This can't be said of the sick, the dispossessed, and the troubled, but by and large an ordinary life today is not threatened by survival issues. So we live in a perfect setting to give the ego a new job.

The ego's new job is two-fold:
1. Notice signals from the higher self. Bring them in and pay attention to them. Allow the higher self's values to become your own.
2. At the opposite extreme, allow the repressed, dark material of the unconscious or shadow self to come into the light.

In this way the ego becomes a spiritual gatekeeper. Instead of letting in pleasure and pushing away pain (which is the job it now performs for 99% of humanity) the ego lets in impulses of spirit and heals impulses in the shadow self. In a word, the ego's job is to get real. Once you get real and drop the thick layer of self-image, happiness follows spontaneously because it is in the nature of life, the Leela of creation.