The Ontological and the Psychological Ego

             Bear with me, I’m going to tie some things together:

When I was first a student of A Course in Miracles back in 1984, one of the first things I realized about it was that it did with the word ego what it did with many spiritual, psychological, and everyday terms: It redefined it. As the Course uses the term, ego is not limited to an aspect of consciousness along with the id and superego, as defined by Sigmund Freud. Ego refers to one’s whole experience as a person. And the Course points out that is is false. This was, to me, radical, and unlike anything I’d heard before.

After the Enlightened Mind (Spirit) came to stay in this conscious awareness (2011), ego grew more and more uncomfortable over several years. The awareness of a new landscape in this consciousness grew. When glimpsed, the new landscape was lovely, but ego was uncomfortable with the change.  This discomfort culminated in the moment I call The Break when something fell away, and it felt as though this consciousness shot upward. With this went not just the former landscape of this consciousness that was familiar here, but also Liz’s life in the world, which could no longer be sustained as it was. However, that seemed secondary, insignificant, really, compared to the changes in this consciousness. It was to get not only more uncomfortable here but also at times terrible. Ego, too, was rising fully to conscious awareness, its delusional nature fully exposed to itself.

At the start of that difficult passage, there was an experience of shock here as it came over ego again and again that a new experience of existence had come. This meant the former experience of existence was gone. This was the first time this consciousness registered ego as a distinct experience of existence rather than as existence itself. Sometimes I would awake in the morning to ego having a dreadful sense that “something terrible has occurred.” It was worse than waking to grief when I had experienced a personal loss.

I had heard that ego’s falling away in a moment is followed by something of ego “winding down”, but because ego had first to rise fully to conscious awareness on it way out, to start it felt more like it had wound up than wound down. But after about two and a half very difficult years, a glimmer of Light came and from then on, though slowly at first, ego’s power began to drain away, although its characteristics remained exactly as they had always been.

Although I knew that enlightenment was occurring and that something integral to ego had fallen away, because ego remained the same, I did not know what exactly had fallen away at The Break. For example, that which formed relationships was gone. That which learned and grew was gone. Life in the world felt completely done. But fear, negativity, attack, judgments, and defensiveness remained.

In time I came to see that enlightenment is when the Enlightened Mind, Spirit—which had risen to conscious awareness here years before—bumps ego out of the center of consciousness. This is echoed by others I have read who seem to have had the same experience and describe it as a moment that “the center fell away” from their minds, leaving a persistent emptiness for ego.

Clarity has continued to unfold and if I remain with the term ego as I have used it from the Course for the experience of existence meant to replace Reality (God), then I have come to see two aspects of it, what I call the ontological ego and the psychological ego. (I abbreviate them to ont-ego and pscyh-ego.) The psych-ego is what I was most familiar with as ego, what showed up as fear and guilt and self-centeredness and defensiveness and so forth. The psych-ego projected meaning, purpose, significance, and value onto a meaningless and purposeless material world, which is how it shaped its false reality. It was like an engine, driving a certain idea in consciousness. And that was the idea of a reality apart from Reality (God), which took the form of an experience of existence. This is what I call the ont-ego. The ont-ego fell away in a moment; the psych-ego has continued to wind down ever since.

Now that it is gone, it is hard to describe exactly what the ont-ego was. I only know that it was an experience of existence that I thought was all of existence until it fell away and revealed another experience—Spirit—that was here all along with it. Its absence has left the psych-ego floundering as it lost both its context and power source when the ont-ego fell away.

The discomfort felt here for so long before The Break was the psych-ego feeling Spirit rising to conscious awareness, undoing the idea that the experience of existence that was the ont-ego was all of existence, which was the foundation and justification for the psych-ego. Since The Break, the psych-ego has gone about its business as usual, but it finds only emptiness, futility, and dead-ends. Of course, ego was always an empty experience relative to the experience of Wholeness that is Spirit. But the psych-ego’s ideas of fulfillment had some meaning in the context of the false reality it made when the ont-ego experience was here. But now what remains of the psych-ego no longer has the ont-ego to serve. Its source, its reality, its god, its power, its reason for being, are gone. It is aware that it spins in a void.

It always frustrated the psych-ego here that the Course never says what ego is. It describes the experience and how ego shows up, but it never says what ego is. And that is because it is nothing.

 

“What is the ego? Nothingness, but in a form that seems like something.” (C-2.2)

 

“What is the ego? What the darkness was. Where is the ego? Where the darkness was. What is it now and where can it be found? Nothing and nowhere.” (C-2.6)

 

 The ont-ego falling away has revealed that the psych-ego was made, yes, to serve the idea of not-God—the ont-ego—but also to hide that it was only ever an idea. Ideas can be undone; they can be shown to be false. And this is what happened in this consciousness when Spirit took center.

The Course notes that ego will still seem to be here when it is gone:

 

“You see it still, because you do not realize that its foundation has gone. Its source has been removed, and so it can be cherished but a little while before it vanishes. Only the habit of looking for it still remains.” (T-19.III.8)

 

Here we see described in the Course the two aspects of ego I have split into ont-ego and psych-ego. The ont-ego, the false experience of existence that was meant to replace Reality (God) and was the foundation of the psych-ego, is gone. The psych-ego, a thought system (consciousness) that served it, still habitually seeks it for a while.

What I do not know yet is how far the psych-ego, a façade without supports now, will wind down. It arose with consciousness, the neutral “stage” on which it could play out the false experience of the ont-ego, but is it a permanent part of consciousness that adapts to a new situation or does it fall away completely, too? Much is already gone. The copious processing that occurred after The Break is over, an ego life review has passed, and the psych-ego’s power has diminished greatly. The fallacy of its way of seeing and thinking continues to be revealed. The psych-ego has gone from being the driver here to being seen by Spirit, along with the material world, as just an appearance in consciousness. And as it winds down, a new Seeing, Spirit’s Vision, begins to emerge.

 

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