BLOG 173
“The person who looks outside, dreams; the person who looks inside, awakens.” Carl Jung
Self awareness is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s helpful to know when to zip my lip versus offer unsolicited advice to friends, our children, my spouse, or the guy blowing leaves on the street. But it can also be deeply discouraging, when I register just how often I do the things I theoretically know better than to do. This self-reproach, as I understand it, is just inverted ego. As I delved into the literature on inverted ego, I came across a useful quote:
“I don’t think much of myself, but I’m all I think about.”
And therein lies the rub. Thinking too much of oneself is as stunting as too much thinking about oneself.
In short, an egotistical person thinks they are far superior to others, while one struggling with an inverted ego thinks him or herself to be deeply inferior. The common denominator is thinking of oneself at all!
Why is this aspect that we call ego so powerful a master over our self esteem?
In my personal experience, the desire to survive in the context of my social matrix or “tribe” governs much of my thinking and acting. As a social animal, this is not surprising. Helpless at birth, we depend on the acceptance and approval of others to meet our basic needs. Swami Radha describes it thus:
“That desire to survive is why you try to please, why you are “nice.” You want to be accepted. You want to be heard. You want to be listened to. You want your remarks and contributions to be appreciated. To achieve that, you will go through many complicated mental-emotional dances. But that kind of survival in the family, in business or in a group of friends is not satisfying. You want to survive also in your own mind, in your own judgement, in your own criticism. The idea in your mind of what you should be is a very complicated thing in itself. That you should be beautiful, intelligent, wise, six feet tall, have this nose or that colour of hair, these are all very primitive ideas, but they are very, very powerful.”
These primitive ideas come from the reptilian brain or amygdala, which I’ve written about in previous blogs. This fight, flight or freeze mechanism operates outside our prefrontal cortex, or conscious mind, and springs into action when it perceives a threat to our survival. For example, it’s the part of the brain that sees a tiger and doesn’t waste time thinking “friend or foe?” — it prompts us to hightail it out of there by the quickest means possible.
The problem arises when we allow this fight, flight or freeze mechanism to be carried far beyond our basic survival needs, letting it govern the way we see ourselves in any situation — alone, or among friends, neighbours, and strangers.
So what to do about it? How to reason with a part of the brain that doesn’t listen to reason? Short answer, you can’t. Long answer, you really can’t. Don’t even try. This is why meditators instruct us to simply watch our thoughts, see the endless internal chatter about how it is or how it is or how it isn’t, how it should and how it shouldn’t and, as Pema Chödrön advises:
“…drop our ideals of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be. We give it up and just look directly with compassion and humor at who we are.”
That is self-acceptance. It’s also the key to freeing ourselves from an overarching ego, inverted or otherwise, and an endless cycle of mental gymnastics that has far outlived its usefulness.
🤸 🤸♀️ 🤸♂️ 🦩