Ego's Struggle With Itself

             In 2008 when Liz here was translating A Course in Miracles into plain language, a message it held stood out the whole time. In fact, it felt like it was slamming into this mind over and over again. It was this: “My conflict is not with a world outside of me or a god outside of me. My conflict is between me and me.” It was refreshing to see this, even though it didn’t end the conflict. As a student of the Course, this mind thought it was being shown that conflict is within and that it must be the false self’s (ego’s) conflict with the true self (spirit). But something about this didn’t seem complete to this mind. It either wasn’t seeing it correctly or there was something more to see.

This experience lasted beyond translating the Course, but it eventually faded away as other lessons came forward and it was mostly forgotten. Eventually, the core of ego, the “I”, fell away, leaving only its thought system to “wind down” and when that experience about conflict, which was so vivid at the time, was recalled, questions arose. What exactly was the conflict? What were me and me, for example? There was only one “I” and it was gone. It turned out there was no true “I”, no true self. This seemed to indicate that the conflict was between ego and ego, not ego and truth. This was reinforced by what had been learned about ego: Ego is not afraid of anything. Ego does not feel guilty for anything. Ego is not in conflict with anything. Ego is the experience of fear, guilt, and conflict, which it then projects outward and sees as sourced in the world. This mind was landing again on the awareness that there is no “fixing” ego. For the experiences of fear, guilt, and conflict to be totally gone, ego must be totally gone.

This is not something ego wants to see because it believes so desperately in its own reality but also finds itself almost unbearable. It cries for help, for relief from pain, but cannot accept that the “cost” of total relief from pain is itself. It happily “works” on itself, mitigating the pain of itself, but quite naturally cannot accept that it is the pain it seeks to escape. So, in the end, ego’s scramble to relieve the pain of itself does not undo pain but ends up reinforcing it.

            Eastern religious traditions seem to accept pain is the experience of ego. (Ego can also be called duality or the relative experience.) But in Christianity, pain is attributed to sin, and while some will say we are all sinners and sin can only be wholly overcome by the grace of God—meaning, pain is lifted for no reason they can tell—the implication is that if you do not sin you will not be in pain. So, believers strive to be “good”, to not sin. But, of course, pain persists. That leads to confusion and questions like, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Pain is not a punishment; it is simply the experience of a person in a body in a world.  We should all “love one another” not because the opposite is sin, but because loving feels better for giver and receiver.

That ego is unfixable does not mean that you should not act to change your mind, your life, or the world. It means that you do so with the understanding that while you can fix an immediate source of pain, it will not undo the whole painful experience that is ego. As the Buddhists say, pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. You can make things better, just not perfect.

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