Ego is just your “I,” the center of self-conscious experience that locates and manages a personal identity in the middle of everything. It’s not what is wrong with you, or the “obstacle” on your path to liberation, enlightenment, and wellbeing. In fact, none of those long-sought goals of salvation would be possible without your ego. Removing it from the picture might solve the problem of unhappiness, but at the same time you would lose the one thing that makes you uniquely human.
On the other hand, it is possible to think too highly of your ego – as in the case of its popular confusion with the soul, referring to the node of spiritual intelligence that grounds your consciousness in the present mystery of Being.
Soul is not self-conscious in the way your ego is, nor does it have any interest in being or becoming somebody special. Its distinctive contribution will be explained in more detail below. But for now, we just need to break the confusion of ego and soul in order to better appreciate what each brings to your human experience.
To orient our meditation on this topic, I suggest that we consider human consciousness using the analogy of a five-floor building. Each floor offers its own experience, its own frequency of awareness and quality of engagement with Reality.
From the basement of soul to the rooftop of spirit, through all the floors above ground and in between, including the lobby of will and the floors of heart and mind higher up: here we have the ‘structure’ of human consciousness.
Using this analogy, we can think of your ego – your center of self-conscious personal identity – as the part of you that ascends and descends the five floors of consciousness using an elevator. Like most people, you probably have a favorite floor where you feel more comfortable and at home. This is where most of your communication and coping skills were developed, what the various personality assessments might describe as your “type.”
Are you more of a doer, a feeler, or a thinker?
Chances are, you spend less time in the basement or on the rooftop, since getting to those floors of consciousness requires something from your ego that most people find nearly impossible, whether it involves surrendering their personal identity (basement: soul) or transcending it (rooftop: spirit).
After working so long on the project of forging and defending an identity for yourself, why would anyone want to give it up or go beyond it anyway?
The answer: for the exquisite experiences associated with soul and spirit, which are the two nodes on the thread of spiritual intelligence that, respectively, shift awareness to the Essential Ground and Ultimate Reality of existence.
For a better sense of the range of possibilities across the five floors of consciousness, let’s take a tour. We’ll begin in the first floor lobby, where in the illustration above we can see your ego just exiting the elevator. This is the floor of will, referring to the thread of intelligence devoted to freedom, purpose, and (personal) power. Your ego has a keen interest in exercising control, which marked a strategic achievement in your early development and socialization.
Becoming a protected and respected member of your tribe required that you pull back and hold off on certain animal impulses of the body that might otherwise get you sent to your room or tossed in detention.
Ego served, and still serves, as a psychomechanism for converting these animal impulses into prosocial behaviors, which is to say, into behaviors that were acceptable to your tribe of taller powers. Whereas the body is moved by the pulses, rhythms, and reactions of urgency, life in civil society is – or needs to be – more goal directed: Do this, so that.
When the socialization process of training, discipline, and instruction is well managed, the result is a person (you) who is self-possessed, centered in who they are, morally responsible and socially engaged.
From the lobby of will, your ego can take the elevator up to the floor of heart, where a different type of experience awaits, named passion, connection, and love. Whereas the will is about taking control, getting things done, and living a life of purpose, the heart wants relationship – especially with other human persons, but not only them.
It should go without saying that someone who is centered and in control of themselves is more likely to form healthy intimate and interpersonal relationships than a neurotically insecure control freak.
Up another level brings us to the floor of mind, and once again the frequency shifts. Mind is the thread of intelligence devoted to reason, knowledge, and truth – thinking rather than feeling or doing. If you like hanging out here, it could be because you have a natural talent for thinking. Or else it might be that you cope with stress by detaching into objectivity and abstraction – hiding out from the ambiguity of real life.
A lot of people lock themselves up inside the rigid shelter of convictions that reduce the complicated ambiguity of real life to the diametrical simplicity of ‘black-and-white’.
The three floors in the structure of consciousness explored so far constitute the standard faculties of Western psychology: your rational mind, emotional heart, and volitional will. What I earlier named the two nodes of your spiritual intelligence, soul and spirit, are rarely included in the full picture, much less granted any scientific respect.
That’s been changing more recently, thanks to better science.
Let’s return to the lobby, where your ego is busy managing impulses, making choices, and chasing goals. From this station, you might choose to take the elevator down to the basement where things are dark and mysterious – not that they are hidden but because the “light” of your discriminating mind cannot penetrate its profound mystery.
Ego must be surrendered – not renounced, but released – so that awareness can descend into the Essential Ground of existence. Faith (i.e., total trust), grounding, and peace are experiences associated with soul.
This esoteric-contemplative dimension of awareness is the source and seedbed of religion’s many metaphors of God. Before a god is named and worshipped, it lives in the Mystery that cannot be named or known.
Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the deeper into the Ground that consciousness descends, the more expansive your horizon of identity becomes. At first you are one person among persons – or even smaller, a white-male-Christian-nationalist who only identifies with others of the same narrow sectarian tribe.
The deeper into the grounding mystery you drop, however – from true believer to human person to sentient being to living resident of planet Earth – the larger your community becomes.
Deepest down and farthest out, you finally awaken to the wisdom that Everything is Connected and All is One. By a vertical move of self-transcendence, consciousness has arrived on the rooftop of spirit, relishing in the joy of belonging to the higher wholeness of all things.
This ecstatic-transpersonal dimension of awareness brings together in a single sacred image the Truth of truths, that you are not alone.
Do your best to hold and take this insight back with you down to the lobby. The rest of us are desperate for the liberation it promises, and we are counting on you.
Tracts of Revolution 