By iron, iron itself is sharpened. So one man sharpens the face of another. (Proverbs 27:13)The beauty of this essay-writing experience is that it is a work in progress. Thoughts in motion. It can be nothing else. I find myself recording everything as realisation and understanding unfold for me. It is often a stream of consciousness methodology, which is why the essays can occasionally be a mite disjointed.
Today's essay on ego felt like a leap forward, and it was very helpful for me. I published it in the wee small hours, as dawn was breaking, and by mid-morning I had changed my mind about something. Two weeks ago Empathy Is The Skeleton Key, suggested an eventual amalgamation of the inauthentic and authentic self. Today, equating the ego with the inauthentic self enabled me to realise something: The inauthentic must die. There is no room for the ego. There is no need for it. We can live exclusively by means of love. It is man's instinct. There is no need for man to compile rules and laws, or to decide what constitutes good and evil, or right and wrong. Love knows instinctively what to do, and how to act.
I want to thank Joshua Tilghman for turning my thoughts in this direction. Sparks, you see, they can start a fire. I am very much liking Josh's theory about Adam and Eve picturing the conscious and the subconscious. As I was turning this over in my mind, I kept getting stuck on why the ego, represented as the serpent wrapped round the tree of the knowledge of good and bad, should incept mankind through Eve, the subconscious. At last I reminded myself that the writer of Genesis chapters 2 and 3 was not recounting history, he was describing a process.
The ego/inauthentic self is established unconsciously. That is why we need to dig down and reanalyze, in order to uncover how it asserted itself in our lives. It becomes locked in during our formative years, programmed in through our upbringing, established primarily through our relationship with out parents. It becomes lodged in our subconscious/unconscious, manifests itself through our conscious lives, and we must take the journey inwards in order to dislodge it.
"That is why a man will leave his father and his mother, and he must stick to his wife and they must become one flesh." Conscious and unconscious is the amalgamation, and there is no room in such a relationship for the ego.
So, I find myself returning once more to the notion of a death of the inauthentic, so that the authentic can live. (Well, until this evening, that is...)