LETTING GO OF THE PAIN FROM PURSUIT OF EGO IDEALISM

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

        Something is a science if it can be observed to be the same in many situations. Human thinking and behavior does operate in a similar manner in all human beings and, can, therefore, be studied as a science.

      We can observe that some people think and behave in such a manner that they seem to be pursuing an idealized self concept and self image.  It would seem that such persons hate their real selves, particularly their bodily selves and seek different selves. These people, apparently, feel that the self they are is not good enough, reject it, and use their thinking to posit an alternative ideal, superior self and quest after it. This process, generally, began with their very self consciousness, perhaps at age one, and for all practical purposes they can be said to be born so.  Apparently, their inherited biological constitution makes their idealistic thinking and behavior inevitable? 

        Therefore, it is not a question of blaming them, or anyone else for their self defeating thinking and behaving patterns; what needs to be done is to understand the pattern, and to the extent that it is changeable, change it.

     The pursuit of ego idealism does not have one discernable positive aspect to it. It has only negative aspects to it.  So what is the use of seeking it? That which has no positive utility ought to be let go and must be let go if one is to experience positive mental health. (See Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth; also see Alfred Adler, The Neurotic Constitution.)

     All human beings have separated ego self concepts and experience fear in their efforts to protect their egos. Pursuit of ego ideal doubles the experience of fear, for such a person is now defending two selves, the ego and the ideal ego.

       The pursuit of ego ideal leads to paranoia and delusion for the person now defends a false ideal self that does not exist, a self that he wants to be but is not, in fact. That self is false and sees others trying to expose it as sham and defends it. Constant defense of the false self makes it seem to exist. Constant defense makes the paranoid person uptight, tense, suspicious, unhappy and lacking in peace.

      All people feel angry when their wishes are not met. Identification with the ego ideal doubles the individual’s anger, for his ideal self feels frustrated from not getting what he expects.

     Identification with the ego ideal reduces the individual’s rate of learning at school, for the individual is so busy trying to protect his ideal self from making mistakes that he does not relax and learn. Learning is not fun for the ego idealist; some such persons do, in fact, drop out of school, to go protect their false ego ideals. In idleness they nurse their supposed big selves. That which needs to be defended obviously is not real.

     Identification with the ego ideal interferes with social relationships. Relationships are inevitable and cannot be totally avoided no matter how much the individual tries. The idealist is too busy protecting his ego that feels demeaned by other people’s lack of respect for him and avoids people to go retain his imaginary big self or fights with people. His social life is conflicted.

     Identification with the ego ideal generates conflict in the individual’s work life; the individual feels important and protects it and does not like to be bossed around and bosses do not like him since bosses like to tell their subordinates what to do. The egotist is almost always quitting jobs or been fired from jobs.

      Identification with the ideal self leads to seeking ideal jobs and in so doing no extant job is good enough for the idealist.  He seldom is in any particular line of work for long. He is seeking an ideal job, a job that would make him feel ideal and superior; he is not ever going to find it. Thus, generally, his talents are wasted.

     Identification with the ego ideal makes one not learn things but want to tell other people what to learn from one. One must learn things to know how they work but the ego idealist pretends to already know the nature of things and wants to impose its idealism on other people. The ego idealist wants to tell people what to do but does not want any one to tell him what to do. He desires to be the most important person in the world and, as such, no one can tell him what to do but he can tell others what to do. This contributes to social conflicts and isolation.

       The ego idealist comes up with ego ideal standards and uses them to judge real people and finds them not good enough and that makes them angry that they are not accepted as they are.  No one likes to be judged, for to judge is not to love. To judge is to ask the judged person to become like ones ideal self, which is an attempt to create the judged person. Thus, the ego idealist is really playing God: he wants to create himself (hence he invented his ego ideal) and wants to create other people (wants them to become his ego ideal) and wants to create social institutions and the world (by expecting them to be like his ego ideals).

      The pursuit of ego ideal cuts one off from other people (and from the whole, God) hence makes one to feel all alone in the world. Since to feel joined to other people is to feel peaceful and happy, pursuit of ego ideals makes one lack peace and feel conflicted.

      The pursuit of ego ideals leads to feeling self conscious, which restricts social behavior, and leads the individual to playing roles that validate the ego ideal and restricting his life.

      The pursuit of ego ideals makes the body tense and to reduce that somatic tension some such individuals take drugs hence it contributes to addictions.  It also contributes to sex addiction, for some persons use frequent sex and masturbation to relax their tense bodies. Sex addiction creates its own problems, for it means that one is not able to love, for one sees the opposite gender as sex objects, not persons to be loved and cared for. If one does not love others one then feels alone and sex addicts are alone feeling people. They suffer from the psychological pain of aloneness.

    One cannot think of one positive aspect of the pursuit of ego ideal and the question then is why pursue it?  One should not pursue it; one should let it go, extinguish it.  However, this is easier said than done.

       Folks do not want to let go of their ego ideals. The reason why folks find it difficult to let go of their ego ideals is that they invented them and are proud of them; they are their handiwork, their idols and they want to keep them.

       Moreover, given the nothingness, purposelessness and meaningless of being on earth, it would seem to make sense to come up with ideal alternatives to what is. The problem is that the ideal alternatives are mental constructs and cannot replace the reality on the ground.  When we try to implement our mental ideals, the laws of physics, space and time make them imperfect.  Ideals are of the mind, not of the external world we live in.

       If you let go of your pursuit of ego ideals, you feel like a heavy weight is taken off your shoulders and you feel relaxed, peaceful and happy. You are now able to learn and get alone with all people. Life becomes easy, no longer a struggle to live up to a preconceived ideal, no longer role playing, trying to be what the ego ideal expects; life becomes fun and worth living.

         In so far that there are ugly aspects of living, scientific study of them and technological attempts to control them is just about all that we can do; we cannot transform the world into heaven. Perfection can only exist in a non-material, spiritual state, not in our physical universe.

DISCUSSION

         It is completely understandable why a child who felt weak and vulnerable would feel inferior and try to compensate with desire for superiority, ala Alfred Adler and seek it. But the fact is that the pursuit of superiority is a chimera, a futile effort that gives the individual pain. For one thing, the individual is not going to attain it for no human being is ever going to be perfect, superior and ideal. 

       Pursuit of the ideal self and ideal world is a waste of time. Wishful thinking, dreaming, fantasy is not the same thing as living in reality. The most that we can do is use science to understand the real world and device technologies to improve it and live with what we cannot improve; we cannot escape from imperfect reality into the world of fantasy.

CONCLUSION

         Human existence on planet earth is characterized by our postulation of a wish to be what we are not. Each of us is something (which, while on earth, he is not aware of) and wishes to be something else.

         The Individual says, in effect: I want to be this (type of person), anything but what he already is. Each of us posits a different self, a self he thinks is better than he already is and wishes to become it and pursues becoming it.

     What is the world?  The world is a desire to be who we are not; the world is a place we come to fulfill a wish of becoming that we are not. 

       Each of us pursues the wish to be a different self in his or her own way, his personality. His unique body makes his personality specific, that is, makes the manner in which he seeks becoming a different self unique to him.

     In what is called normal persons, it is good enough to be an ego, a separated self that is housed in body. In neurotic and psychotic cases the individual not only wishes to be an ego separated self but an ideal self. The exigencies of his or her problematic body (which is self chosen) leads the individual to reject that body and self and desire an ideal body and self. It is the pursuit of idealized ego self that gives rise to what folk call mental illness.

         All mental illness results from effort to become who one is not in fact, to become an idealized self.

    God is all of us as one self; God is one thinking and one mind.  God is the unified self/unified mind. God is infinite selves as one self. God is the whole and all its parts as one self. One God is simultaneously himself and all selves. Where God ends and his sons begin is no where. God is in his sons and they are in him. In that joined and unified state God and his children are eternal. Nobody on earth is conscious of this unified state.

        The psychotic wants to be God, not from a unified self perspective but from a separated self perspective. He wants to be God but have other people not be God. That is to say that he wants to be special, the most important person, god, and have other people, who are not special, not gods, serve and worship him. Therein lays his problem, for he wants to seem superior to other people. In God there is no specialness, no inferiority and superiority; all are the same and equal in God.

       If the psychotic accepted that he is God and that all of us are also gods, not in our separated bodily forms but in our unified essence, he would not be psychotic; he would be a mystic. 

       The schizophrenic says that he is God; the manic says that he is the most powerful person on earth.  The deluded person wants to be the most powerful person on earth, but knows that he is not it and thinks that other people are preventing him from becoming it hence quarrels with other people.

       As long as the individual wishes to be who he is not, an ego and an ego ideal, he is disturbing his peace.  He must feel fearful, anxious, angry, proud, shameful, guilty and other negative emotional upsets.

     What is the solution?  The solution is to give up trying to be somebody else and be who one is created as. Just be who you already are.

        The question is: who are you?  You do not know. Who you are is beyond conceptualization. Just let go of all concepts of who you think that you are, who you think that other people and what you think anything is. We do not know who we are.  The ego separated self concepts we wear are not who we are.

     Let go of all self concepts, for you, for other people and for everything. Tell yourself that you do not know who you are.  When you see other people, and you are tempted to pretend to know who they are, tell yourself that you do not know who they are.  Overlook what you see other people do and do not run to spurious conclusions about which they are; just keep quiet.

       What you see people do is what their egos do, just as what you do is what your ego does. The ego is the dream self; the ego is an illusion, an illusion that adapted to an illusory, dream world.  Keep quiet.

         Do not tell you that you know you, know other people or know anything. You do not know what anything is or means.

       (Science studies the world of illusions, the dream and does, in fact, understand it on its own terms; but science does not know who is beneath the dream, the illusion of separation.  Please do study science to understand the world on its own terms but also remember to go beyond science to meta-science, if you want to understand the truth of human beings.)

        If you accept not knowing who you, people and the world is, you would feel relaxed, peaceful and happy.

         You are no longer projecting your views of who you think that you are who you think that other people are and what you think that things mean, to the world.  You are letting people and things be, as they have already made themselves to be. 

        Each person has already wanted to be a different self and projected it out, so let him or her be the dream self he invented to replace the unified spirit self that God created him as.  Leave him alone. 

       If you let people be who they chose to be without wanting to change them into what your ego ideal wants them to become; that is, if you stop playing the ego god, you would feel calm, peaceful and happy.        

       This approach to being is called meditative.  If you are in this meditative state of being, you let you and other people be without projecting your views on what they should be and do on them, you are peaceful and other people feel peaceful around you, for you let them be, without trying to have them be as you want them to become. You are no longer trying to recreate people into what your ego ideal wants them to become. You have stopped competing with God to create his children (yourself included).

      In the meditative state you go through life undisturbed. This is good enough, is it not?  Peace is not a common commodity in this conflicted world. 

         If you truly let go of all your self concepts and concepts for other people and things, occasionally, you would experience you as one with all being, as not body, as not separated from other people, as unified with all existence and experience bliss.  This experience is the realm of meta-psychology, an area I do not want to go into in this essay. It is good enough to let go of all concepts and just experience peace and happiness and I might add, mental health, relative mental health, for total mental health lies in the formless, unified spirit self, a self that is beyond conceptualization hence not our present  business. (We live in the world of separation and ego, so our present business is conceptual.)

         Be as you were created by the universe and do not want to become anything else that your thinking, imagination and wishes want to become. Do not think or behave from an imaginary ego ideal. Think and behave only from your real self, who is a unified self and you experience peace and relative mental health.

       On earth we cannot attain total mental health. We cannot heal the mentally ill on earth. As long as people live in body, space and time they will be separated from their real selves hence cannot be mentally healthy. We can do all we can but we cannot heal schizophrenia, mania, depression, delusion, anxiety etc for as long as people live in bodies. Of course, mental health professionals should be doing what they could to help the mentally ill, especially try to get them to let go of their wishes for separated self and pursuit of ideal selves and to the extent that they do so they return to some feeling of union hence feel peaceful and happy. 

       In truth, mental health lies only in unified spirit, an experience that can be temporarily felt but not maintained while one lives in this world. This world requires people to feel separated from each other hence to be mentally ill. We can ameliorate mental illness but not heal it in this world.

       Whatever makes folk to feel unified contribute to their mental health and whatever separates them contributes to their ill health.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

September 30, 2006

Robot  Villager

# 1 LETTING GO OF THE PAIN FROM PURSUIT OF EGO IDEALISM ...Read the full article. Posted by Robot| 29.09.2006 17:18

BiafranPrincess  Villager

# 2 Hmmmmm I am simply ...awed. Very interesting piece. Have to print this one for keeps. Posted by BiafranPrincess| 06.10.2006 09:04