The Ageing Ego

The ego is a marvelous construct and in my case it arrived fully formed as I rolled down the front steps of my grandmother's house when I must have about two going on three. By this I mean, I was lying length-ways along the top step and then I rolled to the lower steps until I reached the bottom. There was nobody with me and there were only about half a dozen steps but I had the realisation when I reached the bottom that "I am". Prior to that I'd enjoyed the freedom and spontaneity of animal consciousness.

With that "I am" experience, I slowly became painfully shy whereas before I'd been the quintessential Aries: footloose and fearless. It took me decades to grow out of my shyness and it certainly handicapped me in the first half of my life. However, like most egos, it did the job and got me through life and at age 73 is still getting me through. As I age though it becomes more and more apparent that my ego is just a construct, artificial and temporary, that has no solidity or permanence. 

I shall be glad to shed it and, while consciousness is retained after death, it's of a very different quality to the ego-bound variety that most of us experience on Earth. First and foremost, as the fraud Freud said, the ego is a body ego and once the body is dropped, consciousness experiences a profound shock and fundamental change. It's experienced as a liberation compared to the tyranny of the ego with its sly, self-serving interests and petty vanities that limit us and make us far smaller than the infinity that we really are. As Barry Long called it: the stinking self. Like electricity, the ego is a useful servant but a terrible tyrant. 

With the body gone, the barriers that the ego set up to preserve its identity drop away and we can review the life just lived objectively. We can experience the effect that our actions had on others whereas as in life we weren't fully aware of them or didn't care. It's a self assessment. No one is judging us. It's our own review and we draw our own conclusions. The lessons learned shape our future life: its circumstances, the time and place, karmic debts to be repayed etc.

Toward the end of life, my life at least, the ego feels like a straight-jacket formed by the habits of a lifetime. I realise that I'm part of something much larger of which this current life is just a facet. My consciousness is focused on that facet currently but soon the light will shift and illuminate another facet. This multi-faceted reality is what Jung termed the Self. All the facets exist simultaneously but the focus of consciousness produces the illusion of time. The goal is to experience the light that is illuminating each facet and with that experience comes liberation. The facets were a means to end, a way of drawing our attention to the light.

For most of our life we are absorbed at a granular level in the details of one facet of this multi-faceted reality, with our backs firmly to the light. We are absorbed in the shadow play on the wall of Plato's cave.