Andrew Cohen & Ken Wilber: Aspects of Ego

um it seems to me that ego is becoming synonymous with a shadow yeah and um so and some of the other things that I've heard you know caring about your effect in the world and you know having confidence I see those as aspects of ego I can't imagine um bringing forth evolutionary Enlightenment in egolessness and I mean as long as I have a body and I have to feed my body to live you know I will have that investment in who I am so I'm just wanting has to do with the word the word ego is being used to mean to me two or three different things the problem is the word that we're using it seems that it's being used most often to describe the shadow to it's used being used more often than not because because we're speaking in an Enlightenment context this afternoon that's why okay but but the you see when I use the word ego 99% of the time I'm using it in as as something that is wholly negative self-contraction yeah which is which it could be used to be pride and the negative sense or arrogant self-importance or a real existential way to see it is the emotional and psychological compulsive need to see oneself as being separate from what is actually happening all it's an emotional psychological need to be able to see the image the self-image or the image of the self as being separate from what's occurring and and this is really and there's a tremendous amount of investment in this that is that is quite overwhelming and this that emotional psychological compulsion is is this fundamental obstacle to this to this kind of wholehearted embrace of Consciousness and recognition that Consciousness is truly who the self is but the the positive definition of ego as you could say it's a self-organizing uh principle in the psyche yeah that that integrate that integrates uh different aspects of the self it creates it creates this this this sense of wholeness and also there you know there there's there's this part that has to do with our character and our personality and and and a sense of you know um of respect for you know you know for the self and appreciation for the self because there is a definition of ego and the positive if you want to have a good ego in can of course written about this I think he's he's said that that the individuals that really have made the biggest imprint they individuals had very big egos I mean they they they had a lot of guts they probably thought very highly of themselves and they really believed in what they were doing and they will spirits that that's the point and and Andrew right there's at least two different definitions of ego and and I agree with you I think we're all kind of a little bit tired of of ego being made nothing but the Fall Guy now when Andrew talks about it it's very specifically means the self contract the activity of self-contraction and the activity that creates otherness the activity that creates a sensation of otherness arising in this textual field and that self-contraction is the ego that goes all the way up that that that that's its home is in the causal that that's the fundamental root of the ego in that sense then the other sense is a very positive one and even the Scholastics said that the ego is that which gives Unity to the mind and today in psycho analytic circles it's defined as the self-organizing property of the mind so if you lose that ego you're not enlightened your borderline psychotic so you know choose one um another way to think about it too is that you can think of um sort of selves inhabiting different states and I like that too because it's waking dreaming deep sleep and the self that orients to the waking world is the ego the self that orients to the dream state is the soul and the self that orients to the causal is the pure witness or pure self so there's ego soul and self and everybody even an infant wakes dreams and sleeps so of course you have a self capital S it's that which is aware of everything that's arising right now and of course you have a soul which is the repository of your wisdom and your virtue and it might transmigrate and then you have the ego that is bound to this body and dies when this body dies and so that's another sort of common way to look at those but but yeah we don't want to demonize the ego but when it's talked about in the Andre's talking about it really is just that constant activity of self-contracting and recoil in the face of everything that's arising moment to moment the degree to which we actually truly want to transcend ego in the negative sense is the degree to which our personality our character is going to express a kind of strength a kind of deep deeply deep wholesomeness and a kind of shining you know integrity and and and and strength and what we're calling ego in the positive sense I believe emerges in its most beautiful Radiance to the degree to which our attention is being compelled by something which transcends it that when your attention or my attention gets compelled by that which transcends me personally then something happens to the personality something happens to to one's character one uh there's a kind of for of kind of forcefulness and the strength of the self emerges the self emerges as being truly a sense of integration and wholeness that definitely wasn't there before and ultimately I don't think true integration can be found outside of outside of these higher levels