SPIRITUAL GROWTH: THE PRIMITIVE EGO GROWS UP
by Dick Rauscher
The Primitive Ego: Childhood Formation
Spiritual growth is a journey of ever-increasing self-awareness and self-consciousness; a work that begins at birth, and continues until we reach enlightenment or death.
"Spiritual growth will require humanity to adopt a meme or paradigm of horizontal power; a world view of cooperation, empathy, diversity, interdependence, and a self-identity that is spirit centered, not ego centered. The primitive ego of early childhood uses a paradigm of negation and vertical power; a world view called survival of the fittest. The vertical power paradigm of the primitive ego is the root of virtually all conflict and suffering. Spiritual growth, the evolution of the human species and the formation of a non-violent global community are all dependent on the maturation of the primitive ego."
The first steps in our spiritual journey begin at birth with the struggle to create our ego and define our self-autonomy, self-identity, and self-esteem. By the time we are eight years old, our reactive, primitive ego is basically developed; our self-identity is in place. If we got the necessary emotional resources from our primary caregivers such as attention, unconditional love, empathy, and affirmation, our self esteem will be solid and positive. We are well prepared to continue growing into a mature adult ego that is comfortable with the anxiety of paradox, gray thinking, uncertainty, and not-knowing. Our primitive ego reflects an optimal stage of human development.
If, however, our childhood caregivers deprived us of the emotional resources we needed for optimum growth, it will be very difficult for us to escape the prison of the reactive, primitive ego. We will find ourselves stuck with one foot mired in the mud of childhood. Our spiritual journey toward a non-reactive, mature, adult, observing ego will be virtually impossible until the wounds of our primitive ego are healed.
Our primitive ego will manifest a false self; not our true self. We will become skilled at showing the world a “self “we believe the world wants to see. Vulnerability and intimacy will be experienced as dangerous. Our self esteem will be weak and our self image will tend to be brittle and negative.
Until we learn that the healing we need is an inside work, we will devote most or all of our life energy searching the external world for things that we think will eliminate the pain, and make us happy. Money, relationships, fame, possessions, and success are common places we will look; addictions are another. The primitive ego will spend it’s life on this false path.
We will grow to become overly concerned with the speck in our neighbors eye and unable to see the log in our own. We will attempt to maintain or increase our self-esteem by criticizing and judging others so as to feel superior. We will blame others for our feelings; a process that will cause unending conflict in our personal relationships, and will virtually always leave us feeling powerless, angry and victimized.
The primitive ego learns very early in life to survive by adopting these unconscious skills called “vertical power” and “negation”; the current paradigm or world view used by virtually every human culture.
Negation And Vertical Power: The Roots Of Conflict
"Vertical power" refers to the ego's need to have "power over"; to be the best, in control, and right. The primitive ego expends a great deal of energy avoiding the threat of vulnerability by making sure it is better than someone else, and passionately defending it's "beliefs"; what it "knows" to be "right". Vertical power, the tendency to catalog the world in terms of all good or all bad, right or wrong, emerges out of the early developmental stage called splitting or black or white thinking
The survival skill of “negation” means that the ego constructs it’s self-identity using all or nothing conceptual categories that define the “me” from the “not-me”. The creation of these me/not-me conceptual categories created by splitting in the primitive ego-mind is called duality thinking in Buddhist psychology.
Using “negation” to define the arbitrary categories of me / not-me, the ego then identifies itself with those conceptual categories or beliefs that it feels are right, and good. (For example, American, Christian, educated, successful, wealthy, therapist, Doctor, CEO, engineer, work for a living, white, male, married, do not use drugs, etc.). Once created, everything and everyone on this conceptual list is experienced as “we / us”. The “not-me” categories are emotionally experienced as “other / them”. These categories of “otherness” are the root of judgment.
After using concepts of vertical power and the process of negation to define itself, the primitive ego will struggle to protect it’s self-identity against criticism, and any real or perceived threats from “others”. Simply stated, the ego needs to be right and will create great conflict to defend its belief system from criticism. It will even go to war and die to defend it’s beliefs.
This unconscious primitive ego functioning should not be labeled as either right or wrong. This is simply how our ego gives birth to itself in childhood and young adulthood. However it is very important that we understand this primitive unconscious ego is “not helpful” in our day to day adult relationships, especially if our goal is non-violence.
Since no one grows up in a “perfect” family, every human ego will, to some degree, have its self-identity based on vertical power and negation. In other words, each of us bring the seeds of conflict and suffering into the world. Non-violence will not be achieved until we understand and accept this uncomfortable reality. The primitive ego is always self-serving. The primitive ego always knows how reality “should” be. The plumb line for right and good runs directly down the center of the primitive ego.
Thus, non-violence simply can not be achieved using the primitive ego-mind’s operational paradigm of negation and vertical power; a paradigm of exclusion and domination or “power-over”. All of the castes and classes; all the gaps between the have and have-not nations; all the racism, sexism, and the painful judgment that comes from “otherness”; have been created using the vertical power paradigm of the primitive human ego.
If we are to continue growing spiritually so that our ego’s energy is less focused on protecting it’s self esteem and is more available for empathy and the formation of compassionate communities, it is clear that we must develop a new world view of non-violence, and radically redefine our self-identity. We must learn to move our self-identity from that of the self-centered ego to the spirit-centered self as taught by all of history’s great spiritual teachers. Injustice and violence will not be eliminated until we learn to think differently.
To summarize, the needs of the unconscious primitive ego are best served by a paradigm of vertical power; the need to be right, to be in control, to be better, to win, and to protect its self-identity and self-esteem at all costs.
The needs a mature conscious adult ego and the development of compassionate community are best served by a paradigm of horizontal power; empathy, cooperation, diversity, and interdependence. We will explore the mature ego’s paradigm of horizontal power in greater detail below.
So where do we go from here? How do we begin to develop this more mature ego? First, lets explore the results of a world controlled by the self-centered, unconscious, primitive ego of childhood and take a look at what happens when our primitive ego moves out of its family of origin and into the larger adult world of diverse cultural and societal memes.
Source-http://www.stonyhill.com/articles/spiritual_growth.html
Read for further given information on -Memes :Conscious Evolution,The Importance Of Diversity:Changing The Way We See Ourselves
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