Tag Archives: ego

Weaving Candyfloss

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It seems to me what we call “me” – our ego – is spun up as we develop from a foetus. Something like candyfloss at the fun fair where a stick is held within a spinning sugar stranding machine so that this wonderful pink confection arises seemingly from nowhere. I remember the mixture of awe and anticipation as a child as it magically appeared from nowhere.

If that’s a helpful image, then what is the stick from which our ego is spun? In a material sense of course it is our genes and the physical bodies of our parents. The sugar that adheres is our bodily experience. Our ego is a confection of embodiment. Our particularly experienced ego, our very selves in this life are the latest manifestation of emergence that has been unfolding since the Big Bang and the accretion of the earth and moon 4.6 billion years ago and the emergence of life 3.7 billion years ago. Life evolving through single cells and dinosaurs to humans. We are just the latest, and not the last, expression of life. What though is the point of our ego, It will die. What trace will be left, and for what purpose? This candyfloss will re-merge with all that is as our individual body fades. Why have this sweet separated space in which we become?

Carl Sagan said “ we are the way the cosmos gets to know itself”.

And that knowing is through relationship with other parts of the embodied universe. In that way something new emerges. Something like fabric created from weft and warp of individual fibres – each in turn spun from plaited ropes of our individualities.

Maybe a way then to think about this is imagining our individual candyfloss combined into a rope or plait with others?

Reality and Joy

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All is not as it seems; in fact – better than we fear or even hope. Much. All the world’s a stage; a set to hold and enable connection. Reality is not within us – our self – but in relation. Which is itself movement, whence relationship arises.

It is our attachment to our unfertilised ego that binds and imprisons us. Sentenced thus to solitary confinement. Magic shimmers when synapses between us crackle with the vibrancy of what lies beyond.

Relation to, with, through. Nature, others, creativity, ideas. Anything in fact except the non-existent “I” (Ich-Es) and its bedfellow materialism; which is literally stuff and nonsense.

The language of love is movement and acceleration. Relationship is evanescent motion, choreographed by joy. The word existing beyond time.

Experience deceives. It is built from the the rubble of the dry concretised and digital past. It is history, always outmoded. As Eliot and Buber put it:

“In the act of experience Thou is far away” (Buber)

“In the knowledge derived from experience, the knowledge imposes a pattern and falsifies, for the pattern is new in every moment. And every moment is a new and shocking valuation of all we have been” (Eliot)

“just as prayer is not in time but time in prayer, sacrifice not in space but space in sacrifice, and to reverse the relation is to abolish reality.. I do not experience the man to whom I say Thou. But I take my stand in relation to him .. No deception penetrates here; here is the cradle of the Real Life” (Buber).

“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, Except for the point, the still point,There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.” (Eliot)

Note to selfless

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Yes, Ego – but you’re only a confection. Candyfloss spun by my mind; and your price is loneliness. My “self” is a prison, and you, my Ego are a false gaoler. Death only exists for you, my Ego. Without it (in every sense) I  truly live. Live truly.

Eternal life is in relation, between I and Thou. You are death, my Ego. You and the relation “I-It”

Extract from Martin Buber’s I and Thou..

(For reading click here to listen …trimmed -i thou 1-7 to man the world is twofold

To man the world is twofold, in accordance with his twofold attitude.

The attitude of man is twofold, in accordance with the twofold nature ofthe primary words which he speaks. The primary words are not isolated words, but

combined words.

The one primary word is the combination I-Thou. The other primary word is the combination I-It;

wherein, without a change in the primary word, one of the words He and She can replace It.

Hence the I of man is also twofold.

For the I of the primary word I-Thou is a different I from that of the primary word I-It.

Primary words do not signify things, but.they intimate relations.

Unknotting nottiness

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I hold to one-ness, to boundary intensifying connection. I reject the primacy of ego and materialism and the loneliness and fear of death to which they condemn.

Humanity is in a blind alley. We are here because we have followed two whopping lies.

Here’s the first (courtesy of Sigmund Freud).

You are not me.

You-Me. Yes to that – there is boundary – it is the edge between us that allows us to experience each other. It’s the little word not that causes all the problems. You are not me. Distinction, separation, contrast. The birth of Freud’s concept of ego.

And this nott-iness is perculiarly modern and western. After all the Hindu – Namaste means something like “I bow to the divine in you”. Our culture – European and American – is also rooted in “community”. Together, we are one. Do our achievements in the west not stand on the foundations of all of the tribes, families, villages, congregations, parliaments, colleges, schools, classes of the past? The individuals who we remember – the Shakespeares, Napoleons, Eliots, Einsteins, Washingtons, Elizabeth Reginas – were they not the flowering and expressions of their age. They did not appear singular and without context.

And here’s the second great lie (thanks to Marx and Engels)

All is matter.

Dialectic materialism. There is no such thing as spirit; no concept of purpose or any “other”. Without a yardstick against which to measure moral compass what is there? Self-referential humanism and its close cousin narcissism.

From these two ideas – “ego” and the exclusive worship of “matter” has sprung the western “triumph” of atheism, the advance of capitalism and the fragmentation of society.

I hold to one-ness, to boundary intensifying connection. I reject the primacy of ego and materialism and the loneliness and fear of death to which they condemn.

When my body dissolves, then the molecules will become part of new patterns. So too will my other essence. My soul. The fragment of spirit that animates this collection of atoms. As Rupert Brooke puts it.. “a pulse in the eternal mind, no less”.

Or perhaps

Let us go gentle into that good light,

Old age should turn to brave the close of day;       

Courage guag’d against the flighting of its wight

Molecular soup

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We are all belong to each other. We aren’t separate ingredients at all..

Profuse connection and abundant writhing change. The two things we truly know.

Your body is a collection of molecules called “I”. And this little bundle of chemicals is in constant flux. In fact they change completely every three years or so. Each of us is physically entirely changed every 1000 days or so. But the sense of “I” continues. Isn’t there a clue here? There will come a moment when a particular set of atoms that is known as “me”  is entirely dispersed amongst billions of other creatures. Bound by covalent bonds to the molecules that are in new generations of  you and me and all that is and ever has been. New realities emerging.  Physically we are a constantly exchanging bubbling molecular soup. We’re not separate at all – either from each other or the rest of the physical world.

Hug your Fear

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We can’t push it away; not now. What then?

Embrace it, honestly. If it’s there anyway then really look at it. Anyway I found that it led me to the inbreath of the joy which lies just beyond acceptance. Really. Truly.

This is a diary from the front of the war with fear.. (bear with the language, it’s influenced by Martin Buber’s little book “I and Thou” )..

“Consideration of any “thing” entails full exploration of its meaning, including all contexts and antonyms.

Fear is a context that shades meaning of each “thing”.

The unknown arises because  fear prevents its consideration.

Therefore fear, unlike joy, disgust or sadness, has to be subsumed in order that the unknown “thing” can be considered. That is, it must be seen as context, separately from the “thing”.

This perspective is achieved by accepting the worst feared outcome, by plumbing the depth of possibility.

Death is an antonym of, and also a context of life. The opposite is also true.

Fear of death is a surface reflecting our ego. It is a narcissistic mirror at the boundary of the ocean of existence. It’s reflective property is a barrier to our consideration of existence.

Fear of death prevents the conscious consideration of a deeper monster – existential angst – whereby we fear utter meaningless of infinite non-existence.

When existential angst is plumbed it is found to be a chimera, a confection of our ego; however it must be confronted and experienced for this this truth to be released.

It is by swimming naked in the infinite sea of potential meaningless that meaning emerges.

It is through integration with nothing that number and all “things” are realised.

It is through this mechanism that death is dissolved through a wider perspective, so that the joy of unification with “all that is” is glimpsed as the truth. “All that is” is synomymous with “the word existing beyond time”.

Some do not have to travel this path to truth. They are most often securely attached and live confidently (with trust). This is most often a gift from their parent, who held them in maternal reverie through their perilous crossing to the world of “things”. They are blessed”

The Two Types of Ego

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This is a personal theory only, but for what it’s worth..

I think there are two fundamental ego types – The Candyfloss and The Softcentred Chocolate.

The Candyfloss – has a woody and well defined spine, around which is constantly spun a fluffy melting sweet floss where it contacts the world. This creates a fuzzy boundary which invites fusion with others. But… the ego melts and is in danger of falling apart but is rescued by the clearly defined core.

The Softcentred Chocolate – has a brittle and well defined exterior which defends the soft inside. Will one break ones teeth on a hard toffee? Dare one bite in? It’s only on intimacy that one discovers that the inside is meltingly delicious.

The Freud Boson

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Everything now has a field theory, explaining connecting forces. Like the electromagnetic field for instance. For each force physicists have name a “fermion” which carries the force. Electrons carry electricity, photons transmit light etc.. Lately there has even been confirmation of the Higgs Boson, which transmits gravity, also I think called a graviton.

Why not then a field describing the force of selfishness, self interest and self-centred ness. What should we name the transmitting particle (certainly negatively charged). I propose the Freud Boson, else known as the egoton…

I was afraid

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I was afraid of dying last night. Terrified. Full blown existential angst. It took me back to my childhood. I lay there trying to fathom why that fear was back again – my old enemy.

I realised that it is my “I” that is afraid. My ego; the confection that has spun up in this particular life of mine.  I have throughout my life woken suddenly in the night with a sense that my heart has stopped – as it misses a beat – and with the immediacy of dying. Whilst it was frightening as a child and into my early adulthood, it disappeared as my faith grew that there is more beyond this life. (A faith built out of intense questioning). Indeed what lies beyond this virtual reality is all, everything. Not the nothing of our ego’s fear.

I am lucky because I have experienced good deaths. My mother had almost died and described her experience of moving toward light and love but being summoned back to this life – and her reluctance to return. This is of course common; but it’s difficult to be a doubting Thomas when your mother – a true glorious person – gifts you her personal experience. My father died after an operation and I experienced for the hours after his death his transcendental joy before disappearing. Literally he was bursting with excitement and joy before he finally left me. It was intense and real. Since then some part of the thought of death has been exciting – a way through the fundamental loneliness of life.

Lucky. Because I have known other deaths where there was fear, confusion and loss. Intensely painful rather than joyful, and I have seen how those deaths affect those left behind.

So, to last night..

I believe that our ego only exists in this particular life, like some kind of computer memory that fades when the machine is switched off. Of course my ego is terrified of death. “I” am not, however, my ego. I am part of all and will return to the everything beyond. In what way, is not for me to see here now,  because our senses can only see “through a glass darkly”. I do know that in order to move beyond my fear, my work is to move beyond my ego, and back to the living and loving connection that continues and is what I anyway call God. I only use that word tentatively because it puts some people off – because many “religions” hijack this personification of all-that-is for their own purpose. Political manipulation.

A rose, however, is a rose by whatever name.

In any event, I offer my thoughts not to convert – but as a witness to hope.