Ego And Emptiness

I have always felt that the ego has gotten an over-all bad rap in both religion and spirituality.

(Imprific.com)

This feeling probably started nearly 20 years ago when I attended my first AL-ANON meeting (which ironically became very helpful to me), and I heard another group member disdainfully define ego as an acronym: Easing-God-Out. 

In other words, god=good and ego=bad.

This protective feeling toward ego then grew further when I went to graduate school in clinical social work and I learned about all of the amazing functions of a healthy psychological ego like sense of self and adaptive defense mechanisms.

It seemed to me that the ego was the psychological equivalent of the liver to the body.  The liver being a not-so-pretty, rather humble organ that amazingly has the ability to run through roughly 500 functions including the detoxification of all of the less-than-nutritious food/drink that we consume all day long.

Similarly, it has been my ego, like the hard-working, under-appreciated liver, that I could thank for getting me from Point A to Point B each and every day; it was my ego that kept my life in some sort of organized chaos.

Take these past 2 weeks for example.

First, my mother-in-law (who graciously offers childcare to my daughter) went in and out of the hospital over several days, and then my husband had surgery.  Keep in mind that in addition to this: my husband and I both work full-time, we have two young children, my father-in-law has early on-set Alzheimer's, I am the primary caretaker for my aging mother, and my 3 year-old is learning potty-training painfully slowly (i.e. a lot of loads of laundry lately).

You can just imagine the near full lobotomy of our home and work schedule these additional medical crises required that would have put any Microsoft Outlook Scheduler to shame.

And I have to say, I believe it was my good 'ol hard working ego that kept me in some sort of sanity in order to remember which direction to drive in to pick up my children somewhere near the actual pick-up time.

So when I read words like below from the late, great Irish poet, philosopher, theologian John O'Donohue in his book (which I adore) Anam Cara I feel deeply perplexed and confused.

One of the greatest enemies of spiritual belonging is the ego. The ego does not reflect the real shape of one's individuality. The ego is the false self born out of fear and defensiveness. The ego is a protective crust that we draw around our affections. It is created out of timidity, the failure to trust the Other and to respect or own Otherness.  One of the greatest conflicts in life is the conflict between the ego and the soul.

Add to this perplexity and confusion more books of a Buddhist slant that talk about "death of the ego," "transcending the ego," and Sufi sayings like: "Die before you die, and you shall never die," I ultimately ended up, shamefully, skipping over the "emptiness" chapters. 

This has not been an act of disrespect to any of the traditions,  I just didn't know what to make of the apparent contradictory feelings inside of me.

But lately, I've had a series of experiences that have opened up what feels like a dialectical possibility to hold both: Ego And Emptiness.

One experience came from a surprising source which was the book first published in 1970: Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice by Shunryu Suzuki.

I say surprising because one might think that such a classic, in the Zen tradition no less, would surly prompt a more rigid stance, not a more flexible one. Yet, here we are.

And in the chapter entitled: Emptiness, Shunryu Suzuki wrote:

If you are concentrated on your breathing you will forget yourself, and if you forget yourself you will be concentrated on your breathing. I do not know which is first.  So actually there is no need to try too hard to be concentrated on your breathing. Just do as much as you can. If you continue this practice, eventually you will experience the true existence which comes from emptiness.

Something about the way this was written unlocked some small piece of insight inside of me.

I understood it to mean that ego is not to be judged as bad or wrong, or even something to pursue or not pursue per se.  But rather a structure that exists...until it doesn't- a time when it might not be needed as much anymore.  Like a snake skin that will naturally fall off on it's own when the time comes.  No effort required.

Strangely, the few experiences I have had of this understanding of ego and emptiness have been when running on the treadmill.

It is not every time, and certainly not for the whole time, but every so often I will come to a point in my run (and to be clear, these are short- I'm no marathoner) when my attention feels utterly in sync with my body breathing, and it feels like a very rhythmic cadence is moving in time with my feet as they hit the floor of the machine. 

I believe some people might call this experience "flow." However, I prefer to think of it as emptiness, which to me feels like the sensation of freedom or liberation. 

And the thing is, for me, ego is not outside of this sensation.  Rather, it is dissolved into it, into infinity.

It feels similar to how I've heard Buddhist teacher, author and co-founder of The Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts Sharon Salzberg describe spaciousness, as she does below in her article Facets Of Metta posted on www.vipassana.com:

Imagine taking a very small glass of water and putting into it a teaspoon of salt. Because of the small size of the container, the teaspoon of salt is going to have a big impact upon the water. However, if you approach a much larger body of water, such as a lake, and put into it that same teaspoonful of salt, it will not have the same intensity of impact, because of the vastness and openness of the vessel receiving it. Even when the salt remains the same, the spaciousness of the vessel receiving it changes everything.

We spend a lot of our lives looking for a feeling of safety or protection; we try to alter the amount of salt that comes our way. Ironically, the salt is the very thing that we cannot do anything about, as life changes and offers us repeated ups and downs. Our true work is to create a container so immense that any amount of salt, even a truckload, can come into it without affecting our capacity to receive it. No situation, even an extreme one, then can mandate a particular reaction.

Ms. Salzberg's metaphor has deep resonance because it allows me to continue to offer gratitude to my diligent and conscientious ego that keeps me above water in my day-to-day reality of coordinating a pill box for my elderly mother and remembering my 3rd Monday of the month staff meeting with my supervisor, AND, at the same time, it allows my mindfulness meditation practices to keep my teeny tiny ego in check within a vast awareness far beyond my comprehension.

What about you? How do you hold both ego and emptiness? Are they mutually exclusive to you?