Personality, Ego, and The Divine

                                         Personality, Ego, and The Divine

 

“Growth of personality at the cost of essence, that is, a growth of the artificial, the unreal, and what is foreign, at the cost of the natural, the real, and what is one's own. Contemporary culture requires automatons. And people are undoubtedly losing their acquired habits of independence and turning into automatons, into parts of machines.... Man is becoming a willing slave. He no longer needs chains. He begins to grow fond of his slavery, to be proud of it. And this is the most terrible thing that can happen to a man."

Gurdjieff

 

One of the launching events of the Renaissance, was Cosimo de' Medici commissioning Marsilio Ficino to translate a Pagen work called The Corpus Hermeticum. Medici (whose family started banking as we know it), had the intelligence to know this would be invaluable to have this work translated from Greek into Latin. The effect of this translation was to see that the symbology, myths and images of the Pagan world are indeed, the very same imagery and motifs that are in Christian symbols.  This launched artists like Botticelli, daVinci, Michelangelo, etc. out of the darkness of Christian orthodoxy into a re-visioning, sexy, embodied art form that was a whole lot more than what the medieval Christian dark ages had to offer.  

 

 

 

 

What we know of and call ‘God’, is the personification of divine energy. Because we are rational beings living in material bodies and a material world, we try and make rational sense of what is not material, i.e. what is spiritual, so we give it names, create rituals, religions, and all the interpretations that our rational culture trains us to do. But the spiritual is transcendent of all this, that’s why it’s called spiritual! Our concepts only point to something beyond the concepts when it comes to what is divinely spiritual. This is why art and nature are such pure experiences of transcendence, they move, evoke, and inspire (literally fill with spirit-breath into), spiritual experience.

 

 

We create suffering when we try to put spirit in a bottle, label it, and market it as a known and knowable quantity. Can anyone possibly articulate and package the love they have for their children? It’s a mystery, something that is real and tangible, but not knowable and communicable. The only way it is communicable is in the way you show your love, herein lay the practice of physicalizing what is spiritual.

The book “The five love languages” is helpful in this respect, because it helps people acknowledge the ways they feel loved, and gives their partners guidance on how best to express love in a way that your partner will feel it.

 

 

Being willing to take the perspective of another is one of the hallmarks in the evolution of consciousness. We generally are so wrapped up in our own perspective that our ego won’t allow another consideration in.

This is quite odd when you think of it, because we have other perspectives all the time. For example, when we watch a good movie, read a good book, or see/hear something hilarious that cracks us up, we instantly have an experience and perception beyond ourselves, which is beyond our ego personality. Even this saying “Cracks me up,” is denoting a crack in my ego egg that makes an omelet out of my usual perceptions!

 

 

It is a delightful experience to be cracked up, this is why people do drugs, to get outside themselves, the word ecstasy means being outside one’s self, so it’s in our language that it’s a pleasant experience.

 

 

 

Another way we daily go outside our usual ego perceptions is in our dreams. Every night we find ourselves in a strange land and have perceptions and experiences that are quite beyond our usual daily experiences. If you pay attention to your dreams you will find that they all make sense in a way that is quite beyond your ego, it is a way to come into wholeness and the experience that you are way bigger and more than you ever imagined, in fact, you are infinite!

We also step outside our usual perceptions with our pets. That’s one of the reasons pets are so therapeutic to be around, because they will draw us out of ourselves, out of our pain and neurosis. A dog is so genuinely itself, so authentic in its being, that is to say unpretentious, that this facilitates us to get outside our usual pretentions.

 

 

We also project and personify our pets just as we do our gods, giving them all kinds of silly names, coats, costumes, and stories about what they’re thinking or feeling. We imagine that they enjoy looking glamourous, or are feeling really guilty about chewing up the pillow, and we video them with some story we made up when we catch them in their bad behavior and we are the merciful god that bestows forgiveness as we document our latest u-tube video that will bolster our ego.

This is the same game we play with religion. We come up with some localized form of the divine which we create all this pageantry, ceremony, and dogma, and proclaim this as the “truth” that everyone should see and accept.

 

 

We create conditions and myth around our interpretations and get others to buy in, sign up, and “spread the good news.” It’s the same game that we play in capitalism, where we have a product or a service that we figure out how to market and create a niche that will create a false sense of need.

 

 

This is the history of bait and switch humanity that has displaced our spiritual nature in terms of a limited version of ourselves that is afraid and vulnerable.

 

 

Just as Darth Vader is a sad and lonely man masquerading as a powerful villain, so too our ego, both individually and collectively, is hiding under the cloak of pious grandiosity.

 

 

 

This time of the year is when the Kraken (a word designating an unhealthy animal or something twisted) is unleashed unto the world at shopping malls, on the internet, and around the family dinner table. It is the devouring ego writ large, whose greed, and imperial lust consumes consumers whilst they are consuming. Save yourself whilst ye can, lest your ship and crew perish! 

 

Because we are beginning a New Year, we owe it to ourselves, our children, our planet, and our pets to stop believing in fairy tales that make us think we're special and that daddy is bringing us presents if we behave like we think he wants us to, that is simply childish!  

 

 

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