From the perspective of most Eastern spirituality, ego is definitely the bad guy!  Many  ‘great Masters’ have little patience with their student’s ‘personal life’. For many of them, spirituality is about impersonality - living the unconditional life, not mucking about with all our yucky ‘personality’ stuff!

Now this ‘transcendence approach’ may be fine if one is from a part of the world where one has not inherited all the many hang-ups that we Westerners have, or if one lives in an ashram in the Himalayas and doesn’t need to concern oneself with things like getting relationships right, enjoying sex, paying the mortgage and finding a satisfying career. It may not work so well, however, if one believes, as I do, that our personal life is also of importance and needs looking after and that actually the name of the spiritual game is to learn to bring the sacred down into the worldly as well as celebrate the impersonal us.  And this cannot happen if the domain of ego and personality is ignored. Here is what A.H. Almaas, a spiritual teacher, says about people who try to do this.

‘My perception of what happens with people who claim to have lost their personality totally and spontaneously is that there often remains a split-off or repressed part which will manifest as a distortion or lack of integration. If the personality is abandoned rather than integrated, the totality of life cannot be lived.’

If we remember the sheer amount of so-called ‘enlightened Teachers’ who profess to be egoless yet who subtly abuse their power, are vain and arrogant, cultivate ‘celebrities’, sleep with their students and are financially greedy, then where does that leave us ‘ordinary people’ who practice paths of ego transcendence?  Often, if the truth be known, in a bit of a mess! Put simply, we do not become less neurotic and   more holy simply by trying to leave certain parts of ourselves behind, especially if we are not yet ready to do this. I believe that if transformation is to be genuine, it has to include all of us. In Jung’s words: ‘Any part of ourselves we do not own, becomes our enemy.’

And the problem about the ‘‘Let us transcend the ‘bad ego’’’ approach, is that it makes it into an enemy which is a mighty risky strategy since our egos are exceptionally canny and cunning and we tend not to fare well by having them in such overt opposition to us! As Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche once said ‘Ego is capable of infiltrating itself into everything, even into our spirituality’.

Please don’t get me wrong. I certainly see that our egos or the idea of ourselves as a separate self, is behind most of what does not work on our planet, and that if we are to evolve as a species, that we need to move beyond being so ego driven. However, this needs to come about when we are ready. It may be that until such a time as we are ready fully to surrender to, or identify ourselves as, a divine or God Self (if ever!), that we will still need images of ourselves to believe in (and ego gives us such images). Andrew Cohen, who is of the ‘let’s bust the ego quick’ school, would disagree with this approach. His take is that we are always ready to drop ego and that telling ourselves we are ‘not yet ready’ is yet another of the many games ego plays with us!

Sometimes, of course, he is right and we can hang on too long to our ‘separate identity’, fearful of who we would really be if we truly surrendered to the unknown and let ourselves become ‘naughted’ (as St Teresa would say). But this is not always so. Often, if we hang on it is because we are not ready yet to let go….

Basically I see our egos as being   analogous to a basic scaffolding that is necessary that we erect for ourselves in order to give us solidity and structure thus allowing us to build on new stories or new floors (the spiritual part) of ourselves. If we try to build our spiritual structures prematurely, without our basic structures being secure and ready, we may well find ourselves being pulverised by the force of a spiritual fire or current that we are unable to process.

This is why I say that, metaphorically speaking, only when the ground and first floor of our being has become more solid and secure, is it safe for our ego scaffolding to begin being dismantled. And I believe that if we are sincere in our spiritual practices, and do not try to run before we can walk (generally because of hubris) that this will happen naturally, just like fruit falling from the tree when it is ripe. Interestingly, it is often when our egos are strong and not weak that they are more likely to relinquish their hold over us. Often this happens when we reach a stage in our journey where, with every cell of our being, we long to ‘play a higher game’ and find we simply cannot bear to act out our old ego dramas for a moment longer!

 But I do not believe this process should ever be forced, for if the dismantling is done prematurely, it is possible that damage can be done. Here, we must remember that many of our paedophiles, serial killers and general ‘wierdos’ are   often egoless people, that is, people who have never developed a strong enough ego in the first place!  The cult leader and killer Charles Manson was a case in point. His problem was that he didn’t have a strong enough structure to process the powerful spiritual urges he was receiving and hence all those impulses became horribly contaminated.  Thus I believe, with Ram Dass, that ‘ ‘We must first be a somebody (have evolved a strong sense of ego self)’ Before we are ready to be a nobody.’(allow the egoic domination to diminish). Thus, we work with our ego personalities, not by trying to transcend them as ‘bad’, but rather by opening wholeheartedly to them.  As we intentionally work to bring higher awareness into the most deficient and wounded parts of ourselves, this allows for a deep purification to begin to take place and what we discover is that our old ego encrustations slowly begin to melt away, revealing the deeper inner (spiritual) structures lying hidden underneath.

The story of our interaction with our egos can be seen in terms of Jesus’ interaction with ‘the devil’ (actually his ego) when he was being led by this part of himself to climb to the top of the mountain, with Satan telling Jesus that with his great powers, he could have everyone bow down to him. Interestingly, Jesus’ response was not to say ‘ Bad Ego get lost, go away’. Rather he said ‘Get thee behind me, Satan’! He was acknowledging that he owed something to this part of him that had helped him up the mountain, but that now it needed to be in its right place. It needed to be his servant not his master. And this is how I feel, eventually, all of us need to be in relation to our egos.