Ego and self, all snuggled up

Earlier, I wrote about the distinction I’m seeing between the ego and the self—the ego as the rational-mind “I” and the self as the imaginative-mind “I.”

When I say “imaginative-mind ‘I’,” I don’t mean an “I” that you imagine yourself to be—some kind of future ambition for yourself—or any other imaginary persona. This “I” is real—maybe even more real than the ego, though often more elusive. It’s the “who I really am” I—the I in which your imaginative intelligence is centered.

I was visualizing these two manifestations as side-by-side, but now as I write I’m seeing something more like an inner self protected by an ego shell. The self is a tender core. It feels vulnerable. Why? Perhaps because as it developed, it was assaulted by expectations: social expectations, family expectations, your own expectations of yourself—which may have been heavily influenced by the first two.

And so, we weave an ego to protect the self, out of the tough fibers of those expectations, the knowledge of how our social world works, and our desires. We build an ego according to how we want to be seen by others, and how we want to see ourselves. This ego is responsible for navigating our way through the world: making plans and decisions and judgments, remembering the past and forming hopes for the future.

The ego is necessary for a functional life—but because it’s associated with the rational mind, the consciously thinking mind, it can smother or stain the self it was built to protect. And if it isn’t a good fit for the self inside it, it rubs and irritates. And frays.

And so, you find people who are “conflicted.” People who seem to be (non-clinically) split personalities. People who constantly complain—usually about small things, which tends to be a diversionary tactic, because complaining about the big thing threatens what they perceive as security. And people whose egos are overblown and feel inauthentic. Too severe; too sweet; too hearty; too self-abnegating. Too eager to be the person they think you want them to be.

That last example used to be me. I was a chameleon, entirely out of control of the color changes of my skin, and feeling like a different self each time it changed. These days, fortunately, my sense of self is stable—and my chameleon history has given me the gift of being able to fit in in any social situation that will have me. In that, I know I’m lucky.

I think I quoted last week the number one wish of the dying, as reported by an end-of-life nurse: “I wish I had the courage to live my own life, not the life others expected of me.” These people didn’t go through their lives aware of this distinction. Probably, for much of the time, they had no idea there was a different way to live than the way they were living; only approaching death brought it into focus. I’m guessing this because if they had realized it earlier (as I was lucky to do, though only semi-consciously), they would likely have done something about it—but they didn’t, because their ego compressed their self so tightly that there was no friction.

Or perhaps—and maybe for good reasons—they just felt they couldn’t change the path they were on. So they were aware of the friction, but just suffered it as unavoidable, like mild arthritis.

I may not be expressing this very well. I’m thinking by writing, rather than thinking thenwriting. And it’s late on a Monday, so I won’t be revising this piece much, if at all.

For those folks, the ego was a shell that trapped the self and immobilized it. But what if you think of the ego as more like a coat—something you put on to go out into the everyday world but can take off at will, as you do when you “get lost” in awe and rapture and appreciation of beauty.

Gaze up at a star-filled night sky, and you lose your sense of yourself in the world. People will say they feel like a speck—but not in a bad way. There’s an impossible-to-articulate feeling of completion and harmony in being that speck—no position in the world to uphold, no importances creating anxiety. You don’t disappear to yourself, but you feel yourself disappear to the everyday world—or, better, the everyday world disappears to you. You, rooted in your self, undistracted and unarmored by the ego, are simply here.

I may be entirely wrong here, but I suspect that if you make a practice of dropping your ego, like a coat, you strengthen your ability to hear the voice of the self at other times. Times when you might find yourself doing what’s expected of you, rather than what nourishes your spirit and makes you glad to be alive. Times when you’d benefit from letting your imaginative intelligence lead, from that place of inner knowing, rather than your rational intelligence, with all its worries and ideas of how things should be.

I’m really liking this image of the ego as my winter coat! I can wear it loosely, unbuttoned; I can button it to some degree; or I can zip it up to create a cozy, protective barrier. It fits snugly, and though it’s padded and quilted inside it’s not bulky. It even has a padded collar which softly supports my head, along with knitted cuffs at the wrists which keep out any cold drafts. Plus, it has a subtle gray pattern on the arms, which makes me feel strong. 

I feel that this is exactly what an ego should be, to serve the self best.