Personality and Ego

Our ordinary way of thinking of ourselves, of who we are, is to assert to ourselves some verbal formulation, such as we are our name, we are our age, we are our gender, our job or profession, our hobbies, we are our personal history, we are someone who owns certain things, we are someone who has a certain family or certain friends, a particular religion, a particular education or qualifications, we are someone who likes these things and these people and does not like those things and those people, and so on and on.

We build that up from the multitude of experiences in memory, from knowledge and skills, from emotional patterns, bodily impulses, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, the many social relationships in our life, our desires and goals, and much more. All this creates a large, evolving set of adaptable, automatic, and sometimes contradictory patterns of thought and emotion that recur in us. We call this set of patterns our personality. It is so familiar and intimate. It is our own voice in our mind. We assume, without question, that this personality is who we are.

Early in our development, we come to another stage of abstraction that deepens the illusion of who we are. We start to say and think I. Soon enough, so many of the things we say and think begin with the word I. In so doing, we create an axis around which our inner world revolves: this presumed I. Then our dreams and hopes, plans and efforts, are in service of this I.

Yet this most obvious I, born of the patterns of personality and baked into those patterns by the word I, proves to be empty, shockingly, incontrovertibly empty. How so? What happens when you sit quietly and let everything settle down in you, including the slowing down and even intermittent stopping of thoughts. Then where is this I? If there are no thoughts supporting it, that I is revealed to be only just a thought itself, a thought that does not reference something real, but a thought that has gathered our impulses around it.

This illusory I takes its most insidious form as the volitional self, the seeming center of choosing and deciding. I am going to do such and such. This we can call our ego. These ego choices and decisions are not made freely, but are driven by our patterns, habits, experiences, and desires. These are not real choices or decisions. This is not to say that real, free choices and decisions are not possible. They are. But not at the level of ego and not at the level of our personality, because these themselves are totally conditioned and not at all free.

Seeing through the emptiness of personality does not erase it, nor should it. Our personality contains our knowledge and skills, our experience and memory, our ability to interact and navigate life and our social circles. All that is utterly necessary for a well-lived life, though not sufficient. We depend on our personality. It and our body are our major tools for living. Yet being identified with our personality, believing it is who and what we are, is deeply problematic. We end up devoted to perfecting something that cannot be perfected. We end up driven by conflicting motivations. We end up defending something that is too amorphous to defend. But repeatedly seeing our personality for what it is, seeing this mass of automatic patterns and habits, with no core, no central reality, does free us, gradually but ineluctably, from being identified with it.

The situation with our ego is somewhat similar. Seeing that it is only a construct, only an assumption, gradually frees us from it. Our thoughts and emotions point toward an I as their source and center, but pointers are not in themselves what they point to, and if what is being pointed to does not exist, then that thing, in this case our ego, is an illusion. Just because our thoughts say I, does not mean that I exists. It is just a thought. Our body breathes, without an ego choosing each breath. Our automatic thoughts think themselves, without an ego thinking them. When we are quiet, we can see this. Once we have seen through the illusion, we cannot unsee it. Its grip on us loosens and inner freedom grows accordingly. We lose our total identification with what we thought was ourselves, but is only an empty, constructed ego. Our pattern of believing in our ego takes a while to weaken, but ultimately it does. And we are rarely, if ever, fooled again.

Thus we come to a second level of emptiness, from the emptiness of the materiality of our body to the emptiness of our personality and ego.

Unlike our personality, the ego is unnecessary, superfluous, and harmful. Ego centers everything on itself, taints every motivation with selfishness. Without ego, we can start to open to our true individuality, to that in us which connects directly with all life and with the sacred.

Yet we need not try rush toward that freedom. Obsession with seeing our ego, with dropping it, does not help. Indeed, that can be the ego obsessing about itself, wanting to add the badge of enlightenment to its resume. Instead, we just work steadily at the spiritual practices that produce the energies needed by our world and that all the while serve to gradually transform us. We work to open our hearts to the Sacred, to serve the Greatness. Yes, as long as we have a body, our essential motivations include keeping this body alive and taking care of our family; there is no impurity in that, only necessity and love. But moving toward the formless in our deeper practice, brings us into a place where ego cannot follow, where Grace can shower us with its purifying waters.

For this week, notice what you can about your personality and the ego that supposedly stands behind it. You can start simply by noticing your thoughts thinking themselves, your thoughts thinking I.

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