fredag 28 februari 2014

EGO Part 2


Left and right brain

If C G Jung had not made the concept “Ego” known to people as a psychological mechanism Tolle would not have been using it. Tolle would have picked some other word, probably from Indian philosophy.
But this new meaning of the word Ego, which means I, is presented to us by English translations of the books by Freud and Jung. It belongs to their language and concepts and there are many books about it if you want to know how Freud and Jung were thinking.

Note that they discovered a psychological function and not a word. The word was just something that he decided to use as it was an old word that now got a new meaning.
If you translate the word ego into another language it just becomes I, and Das Ich was what they wrote in German, not ego.

Now Tolle makes the bright trick: he uses a word that everybody already knows about, but almost nobody understands. So we get the impression that he explains the theory of Jung.

But people react in the same way as they reacted to our old religion: with the formation of a conflict between two concepts, one good and one bad -  and the bad one has to be taken away.
And then people get trapped in this conflict and are unable to solve it.

Please God, save me from the grip of the Devil!
Please anyone, tell me how to get rid of my ego!

Freud used the word ego for many things, as for example control, planning, reality testing, defence, intellect and more. These words belong to the left brain, which is reason and logic.
It is described as an intellectual judge, that separates reality from what is not real.
This also sounds like the left brain, which is focused on what can be scientifically proven. Ego should be the wise guy who finds the balance between passion and reality.
Reading about it I see that they seem to make a mix of sense gratification and spirit calling both passion.
Well, the fuel for passion is dopamine that boosts your will, but your focus can be both anger, greed, hunting, idealism or God or whatever you are passionately interested in. And then you have the ego that separates out what is real by organizing the thoughts in a meaningful way.

As Tolle is not just sitting on the sofa being high all the time he must have re-activated his ego to sort out what to do in this world. He has structured and organized his life into writing books and lecturing and making money. He makes perfect use of his rational ego.

You will be miraculous transformed by being in the now. Just get out of the past and future and be in the now! Past and future have no reality of their own.

It is possible that he is calmly "just present in the now" but he still has a working ego that tells him what to do.

Jung did not say that we should get rid of the ego. His teaching is not that easy and simple.
The ego is the center of consciousness and the word ego or I is in Sanskrit Aham. Here we do not find the idea of getting rid of the I. Aham is used in the absolute highest sense:

AHAM BRAHMASMI= I am full of knowledge. 
The soul now identifies with Brahman and becomes one with Brahman, the highest knowledge.

It is also often said that the ego is what you identify with.
One kind of philosophy claims that the goal is to not identify with anything at all, but to me that sounds like a religion created by the left brain.
There is more beauty, love and life on the right side.
You  have the possibility of letting your ego, your center, identify with anything. Then you become the object of your identification. You merge and become one. Tat tvam asi.
I suppose it means that you do not get to heaven unless you identify with heaven.

By making the totally wrong identifications you can mess up your life and get into endless trouble. So instead og trying to get rid of your ego, maybe you could try to educate your ego and identify with something that brings happiness.
Why not identify with some kind of eternal quality that you cannot lose if the house burns down
.
Whatever you identify with 
will fill your heart and transform your life, 
so there is no need to experience 
a fight between the ego and the heart.


AHAM PREMA 
I am divine love  
Ego sum amore
You can chose if you want to identify with something in your left brain or something from the right side.

Left and right have always been of major symbolic meaning in our old belief system and the word for left, sinister, also has the meaning of perverse, harmful, disastrous, miserable, unfortunate and so on.

Today we do not have to talk about the ego because we have discovered how our brain and our instincts are working, at least on a basic, biological level. Freud and Jung did not know about this and maybe Tolle does not either.

Tolle sounds quite good, as if he really knows what he is talking about. As if he would be a really deep-thinking, wise old guru from Himalaya.
Of course he knows about his own experience, but maybe it can not just be imposed on all other people.

Real old, wise gurus and shamans have traditionally been very careful with giving out spiritual information to people, because if your consciousness is not on a higher level you will very easily misunderstand and misuse any information.
You just twist it a little to suit your own mental status.

That has happened with this Love contra Ego, which now takes part in our eternal conflict between right and wrong. It is like the mental war between God and Devil when people get accused of "having an ego instead of love".

There is a reason why gurus traditionally were the old people with life experience and why the shamans had their apprentices, who were set on a long training to slowly change their consciousness.
There is a reason why we had monks and nuns in monasteries and also why the symbol of deep wisdom, the hermit, appears alone in a cave.  There is a reason why Jesus went out in the desert and there is a reason why Buddha was meditating alone under a banyan tree.
The thing is not to get more information from outside. It is to change consciousness.

It is clear that the majority of people does not have this kind of consciousness that Buddha and the gurus were talking about.
We get so much influenced by the mental standard of the people around us and it is difficult to change into something that is completely different from the group.
As all people have to earn money you get drawn into thinking about how to make and save money and how to take care of house and family and then you are in the “past and future” planning, unless you are lucky enough to have an artistic job that you just love and the money floats in automatically.

But we can always train on developing the right brain or the side that is the weakest one.

When you use the left side of the brain you are more egoistic because you are an individual that has to fight to survive. You are logically calculating and you only accept those facts that you believe have been proven to be true by science. You look at details. You do not believe in God, aliens, angels or astrology or anything that is not fixed and proven to be true in a laboratory or clearly visible.

People that are being dominated by the left brain seem to be so wildly afraid of such “foggy concepts” that they totally refuse to listen to any tiny piece of information about it.
They are the ones that believe that dogs do not have any feelings – unless it has been scientifically proven by brain scanning on the poor dogs.

They give an impression of being in a mental prison behind thick walls of concrete. They do not see the polarity between right and left brain. They just see the polarity between intelligent and stupid.

Start talking about religion, spirits or astrology and they will immediately place you among the stupid ones, who are also the superstitious ones that just “believe in anything”.
They do not believe in "anything", they believe in science even if they know nothing about it.

When your right brain dominates you are focused on concepts that are eternal like symbols, art, music, painting and so on. You have the capacity to see “the whole” and you can see how a symbol is at work everywhere and you can see the relations between the symbols. You can see the eternal truth in an old legend.
Your friends are not your friends only now: they are your friends in eternity and you meet them again and again in lifetime after lifetime where you have to deal with your karmic gains and troubles. The quality of your relations can be seen in your astrological charts.
The right brain can easily grasp such ideas that are beyond our normal concepts of time and space.
It is like a “quantum brain” that transcends our material world.

It is very practical to have a good left brain, but your happiness is in the future and now you have to work on it, otherwise you will never reach this goal. Being only in the left brain can make you depressed.

If your right brain is activated you get happy right now, from beautiful music, fantastic creations of art or from religion. You can easily get a boost of energy from praying to Jesus, God or Krishna or just from using your fantasy in your own way. You are living in an eternity that is overfull of beautiful beings (or any beings that you prefer to focus on).

When I hear someone saying that we should “be in the present” I can easily think that it means to focus on the work that I am doing right now even if I am just washing clothes. And, of course, things work better if you focus on what you are doing. It is also more fun to do something that you are focused on.

But this is true only as long as you know what to do.
If you do not know what to do you will have to start thinking about it, you will be planning and plotting and making up shopping lists and checking your car and your working calendar. If you are working and also having children there are so many things that you have to plan and when you think about it you “are in the future”.
If you cannot handle this your life can easily turn into a mess.

This was not the situation for an Indian guru in the good old days.
He was living in a village where people gave him food because he was a wise man or because he was old. His job was to meditate, to know things and help people. Guru means elder.
He did not need to buy clothes or gasoline for the car or pay the rent.

Life went on in the same way all the time and he knew what to do and so did other people. A farmer was a farmer and he could not change it. They did not have to be planning the future. It was senseless to try to plan anything else than the marriages of the children.
They did not have calendars over-filled with decisions to be made.
They had all the possibilities to use mainly the right brain, as Tolle also had when he was just sitting on a sofa.
So it is not strange that we have got such a lot of wisdom (gods, religions, spirituality, astrology etc.) from these ancient cultures.

It is very much possible that evolution wants both the left and right brain to be developed in balance with each other.
Thousands of years with a right brain dominated life created the opposite of the swing and we are now living in a culture that is focusing on the left brain. Science rules and everything has to be scientifically proven. This turns society into an effective but boring machine where people freak out because it is so boring. Or we live on ssri-pills because we cannot escape from a prison-like life.

The left brain is ego-boosting, but it also helps you to become an individual, if that is what you want,  an individual that has to make his own fight for survival, but also has the free will to change focus of the ego´s identification.

Our problem is that the left brain wants to rule alone so it denies the life of the right brain.

So the famous duality between Ego and Love, between living in the linear past-future or in the eternal world of bliss, is the duality between the left and right brain. But I don´t think that the ego has to be the left brain, it just happens to be so in our culture. So ego becomes the name of the left brain, because that is the dominant identification that rules our whole society.
It is the part of you that says "I am" regardless of what you experience that you are.

I am science and technological inventions!


Instead of saying “past-future contra present” we could better say “time contra eternity”.
Either you focus on a life that is dominated by your experience of being caught in time and space or you focus on a life filled with eternal joy.

This is not just for anyone to do, because if the right brain takes over you will also see anything that you have earlier filled your mind with like horror movies or traumatic memories.
A strong left brain can also stop you from ending up in a mental hospital from having seen a lot of strange things that were scaring you.
The ego can be blown up too much, but it can also be the guardian that prevents you from doing the most crazy things. It is the captain of the ship and he puts up all the sails only if there is a strong wind that holds the ship back.

Of course we can throw the captain into the waves and feel the happiness of drifting around in full freedom on the cosmic ocean and "be one with the wind".

When Tolle says that you should get out of past-future and get rid of your ego he tells you to live in the right brain, as the old Indian farmers could do, and...yes.... if you have a trained right brain with “the right spirits” you might be capable of that.
Stop planning and just pray to God and then rely on getting the right inspiration and intuition that will tell you what to do or simply guide you to it.
But that can increase your sensitivity and throw you into a life where you have to experience a lot of ups and downs and strange adventures that can be difficult to handle.

You will be Parsifal on his quest for the Holy Grail and on this path you can need a guru or a hermit  as a guide.
You will end up on The Path of The Spiritual Warrior, where you can need a shaman or a magician as a teacher.
Or a Guardian Angel.



torsdag 27 februari 2014

EGO


Fighting against the Ego.




A word can be an old word with an old meaning and then I think you get wise if you discover the old meaning, because that is what people meant with it when the word was formed.  Or at least we can go back in time and come as near the formation as possible.

In this case ego just means I, which especially in Indian wisdom is not something to get rid of. Rather something to develop towards Aham prema = I am love.

A word can get it´s meaning from peoples´ opinion about it and hopefully people agree.
It was C G Jung who invented this tricky use of the old word for I. So the new meaning of the word kind of belongs to him and if we want to know what it is we can read about it and learn it.
Without Jung the word ego would not have been used in this way.

Then we have the New Age where people "believe" in a conflict between Ego and Love, very much in the same way as people in earlier times believed in the fight between God and Devil. 
They have just changed the words because of this old need to fight about good and evil and feel that they belong to the safe space behind "being right".
I cannot feel high from being on the right side if I don´t have other people who are on the wrong side.

In old times people got accused of being with the Devil and today they are told that they "have an ego".

And it is also used to "win" in discussions: "What you say just comes from your ego! I can feeeeel it in my heart!" It is also used to put other people down:  "Her problems just come from her ego".

Some people seem to be in troble because they feel that they are not allowed to themselves because then "they have an ego". Jung seemed to mean the opposite: Be how you want to be and the ego will help you with that. Then, later, when you have managed to be who you are the ego has done it´s job and calms down.
If you start with denying your ego it will just dream of revenge.

C G Jung invented a whole glossary of his own and these words and concepts are not words that exist in all languages. They belong to the language of Jung.

We all have an old word: egoistic. 
Why not use this word?
Everyone knows what it means and the problem disappears. 
It works better also because it is an adjective and not a noun. 
It is something that you can stop being by changing your mind and behaviour. 

A noun being something that you "have" and then "have to deny" or "get rid of" just makes it difficult to handle or even understand. It is similar to a fight where you think that you have an "evil spirit" in you and then you have to cast it out (without knowing how to do!)
It can easily create a conflict where you feel as if you do not have the right to be yourself and in the same time you have to "find yourself". And the more you indulge in such a fight the more you can get trapped in it and then you have created something that in the beginning did not even exist..

"Ego" has become a  word for identity, it is what you identify with.
But even if you do not identify with anything in this world you would still say Aham prema: I am love.
And Jesus seemed to have identified with God.
If you use the word I or not depends on the grammar of your language.


If you find a good, old shaman from some tribe you can always ask him what ego is - but if he has not studied Latin or Jung he does not know.
Most likely he uses his own words in his own language and he can not translate them properly to English so you would not really be capable of knowing the absolute right meanings of them.
Philosophical words are not really "translatable" between languages that are not closely realated.

But if he speaks English he probably knows what "egoistic" or "greedy" is. Or "wanting to be big" or "to have power" or "to be best" or "to be cruel" or so...
If we just know what we mean we can take it down to easy words and get the same meaning.
Back to reality!

The more you use a tricky language the more you can get payed for giving lectures where you explain your tricky words.

One reason to be wanting to be big and powerful can be that you have been denied as a child. Maybe they told you that you were nothing - and now you want to show people that  you are something.

As far as I remember C G Jung said that the ego has to do it´s work so it might not be the best to deny it. But also not to overdo it in a way that hurts other beings. Of course.

In Latin the word ego is not written if it is not "blown up" (emphazised).
I am = sum
IIII am!!!! = Ego sum
We have the same in Italian.
I am = sono
IIII am!!! = Io sono!

As they don´t have this in German Jung can have chosen the word ego out of this reason. Ego is an I that is blown up.

Ego is also related to our defense mechanism and we have to defend ourselves, but not too much everywhere and not against everything.

To create big bombs is when the defense mechanism has grown too much and has turned into a dragon.

In the old folk legends it was not the ego that was eating up everything and sleeping on a heap of gold: it was the dragon.

St George came and killed the dragon and the Christians tried to kill the Devil by killing the people that were supposed to be his servants.
Today even quite peaceful people are being told that they are being possessed by an invisible monster called Ego. We use the word "have" instead of "being possessed" but the meaning is the same.

It would actually be better to say that we all have a little dragon inside and we should not let it take over.

This metaphoric story should be seen as a reflection of our inner qualities. It tells about the result of greed and a never-ending hunger and to be more precise it is a warning against feeding the "endorphine brain" because it never gets enough. It just grows and grows (the receptors close down) and creates heavy dependency.
This is the old part of the brain that we share with lizards. It is just concerned with the basic survival techniques like sex, food and defense. If you take away this part of the brain you will die.

When Jung wrote about the Ego the instincts and their ways in the brain were not yet discovered so Jung knew nothing about these functions of the brain.

Your defense brain will always work but you can educate it to behave in a good way. Most likely this is also a warning against those foods and chemicals that trigger the endorphins. Such things can be used in ceremonies to boost energy but not every day just for the fun of it.
It also depends on how sensitive you are. Some people easily get sugar addicted (and so on) and I have got the impression that people who are genetically "hunters" have a more sensitive and reactive nervous system.
Can be good to know that wheat is activating the endorphins so it acts in the same way as heroin (but not so strong).

St George must be a symbol for the Higher Self or the Real I, the one I am. When he shows up the dragon looses it´s power.