Heal the Split

I identify three main stages of development of the human psyche. These stages generally, but do not always, correspond to specific points chronologically, in terms of age in human years.

1. Ego development. The first years of human development have a great deal to do with the development of our egos. When we come into this world as a newborn baby, we are both (a) an expression of everything that is and (b) without structure or identity. We are fully transparent, unshielded, unprotected. At some point, an infant notices his or her own arm wriggling. At another point, he or she first begins to realize “I can make my arm do that”, and that moment is one of the moments that is often considered a first ego moment — a moment of realization, that there is something separate from everything else. From such a moment, the first seeds begin to sprout, that will eventually lead to a sense of “I” separate from “all.” While this is going on, we begin to receive wounds, usually first from our mother or father.

Our parents have two primary functions that contribute to our growth and development, to provide a climate, a “container”, until such time as we can hold ourselves. This environment makes it possible for us to come into our own as a person. Our fundamental needs are met — our safety, physical nourishment, touch, boundaries — and we develop our identity and self-esteem in such an environment.

The other primary function of our parents is to wound us. While this may sound unpleasant or painful, our wounds are all in service to the emergence and development of coping strategies which arise in direct response to the wounds we receive. The wounds vary from person to person, and include neglect, abandonment, judgment, violence, violation, and overindulgence. These last three fall are problems arising from the lack of appropriate boundaries. Without those coping strategies, we would not have been able to survive through our childhood, through the harshness of forces larger than us (including some of the forces our parents carried and expressed), when we were so young and so small.

The collection of coping strategies is the operating ego. These coping strategies form into subpersonalities within our ego, and are the “front line” that meets the world, keeps us safe, and helps us to do what we need to go through life. And we would not have developed an ego if it had not been for our wounds.

The full force of our emotions are overwhelming and too dangerous, let alone the vastness of forces in the universe that are virtually infinitely larger than us. Our operating ego helps us not only cope, but sets up a strong boundary between it and everything else. This boundary is called the ego/Self split.

Unfortunately, Western society (and more acutely, U.S. society) suffers from the lack of a strong ego. What may appear to be an out-of-control expression of ego is actually indicative of an underdeveloped ego. The purpose of the Voice Dialogue process is to build and strengthen the ego, an aware ego, that is not any of the parts, is aware of the different parts, and that develops the possibility of making real choice. It’s like going to a gym, where we build muscles…in this case, it’s about building the muscle of the aware ego, the muscle of true choice. Having developed a healthy aware ego, we manifest from ego, expressing our “doing” aspect. In a healthy society, this would happen about the time we would reach prime adulthood, our twenties and thirties. But in Western society, this maturation process is being suspended indefinitely, and our egos remain largely underdeveloped. It is our underdeveloped ego that grasps for expressions of power from child and adolescent places in ourselves.

2. Development of the relationship to Self. At a certain point, a deep yearning begins to emerge, a yearning to relate to something outside of our sphere of influence, something vaster. In contrast to the ego, which is limited to only those aspects of ourselves and our world around us that we are conscious of, the Self (with a capital “S”) is everything else that exists, mostly in the unconscious, which is immeasurably deeper than our ego. However, the ego, in doing its protective job to keep intact the boundary between it and everything else, resists letting go of that boundary. The ego knows that it is tiny in comparison with the vastness of the deeper Self, and fears for its very existence. So the ego fights for its life by keeping us away from an awareness of the vastness, and away from relationship with forces that are much larger than itself. This is natural, given that these forces — ranging from the experience of birth (when even our parents were god-like in comparison to our tiny fragile beings) to the vastness of natural forces (such as wind, sun, volcano, galaxies colliding) that all exist in the deeper Self (also known as our “being” aspect) — render the ego nearly insignificant, in terms of magnitude. But in order to move towards wholeness and claim and experience our entire being, the ego must let go if its inflated sense of its size, its notion of control, and its identification with being the larger forces that move through us. In order for such a relationship to be realized, the ego must yield to this vastness. This is often described as a process of surrender.

Note: Many spiritual paths speak of the non-existence of the ego. Some even render the ego as something inferior, speaking of lower and higher selves. Unfortunately, out of such talk come judgments that the Self is valid and the ego isn’t, or that the Self is real and the ego isn’t, or that the Self is better and the ego isn’t. Many people on spiritual paths (including many “enlightened” gurus) walk through life imagining that they don’t have an ego, or that they never act from ego, or that their “lower selves” are undesirable, or that to ever act from ego is undesirable. Many who walk such paths become over-identified with “all Self”, stuck in all “being”, losing their access to “doing.” All of this results in the ego being disowned. I imagine that Jung might find the notion of disowning the ego to be perplexing, or at least interesting, as it is the ego that disowns. Basically, most of these spiritual paths end with the second phase, leaving a person in the imagination that “nirvana” is all Self and no ego. Not only does this not heal the ego/Self split, but rather it serves to further drive the ego and Self away from each other.

3. Partnership between ego and Self. There’s a third phase, which is just about never practiced. After the ego is relegated to being tiny in comparison to the Self, the ego gets “brought back” to work in partnership with the vast Self. Even though there’s a huge imbalance in terms of magnitude between ego and Self, the ultimate job of the ego is to be a steward for the vaster forces, all of which are larger than most of our personal energies, including the tidal waves of our emotions, archetypes arising from the collective unconscious, and the natural forces mentioned two paragraphs earlier. We are a vessel through which something larger — something outside of our own personal conjuring — flows, expresses, and manifests. In this phase, the ego’s job is, to the degree it can, and depending on its skill, to influence and direct those energies and forces. Only then can ego and Self work together as a well-oiled machine. Only then can we live as whole beings, our doing and being aspects co-existing in harmony…and consciously serve life’s intention for us.

(C) 2006 Cal Simone

[First published in the MKP New Warrior Journal, December 2005, as part of the article “Proposal for Restructuring MKP Work”, and subsequently given as a public talk at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, March 2006.]