E is for Ego

This is a response to the Pagan Blog Project. It's also a day late.

I remember being a little girl - probably about ten years old - and waking up one night thinking about dying.

"It's just like going to sleep," I told myself, and then immediately thought, "no, It isn't. Because you never wake up." The enormity of this squeezed my heart in my chest, and I fled to the living room and my mother's arms, unable to explain why the thought terrified me so.

What I couldn't explain to her, as I sat beside her snuffling in pyjamas inexplicably decorated with dancing German pigs, was that the thought of the essential I-ness of me simply not existing was nigh intolerable.

That's the power of the ego.

A few years later, I would begin my study of so-called 'alternative' spirituality. My dad, bless him, is a very Zen sort of guy, and through him I read books on Buddhism and meditation. I read that the aim of Buddhism was to annihilate the ego, to step out of the cosmic game of life and attain union with the Divine. My measured and mature teenage response was, naturally:

"Why would anybody want to do that?!"

It would be a few more years before I learned about theories involving the makeup of the soul as a thing composed of parts as opposed to a single entity, and about the idea of the Second Death. (And Third! And possibly more!)

Morbid subject matter, but I was goth. Seriously, I've seen Siouxsie Sioux, Andrew Eldritch, and Peter Murphy live in concert; if you'd cut me I would have bled black. This meant that death, and everything associated with it, was a part of my life. I was drawn to gods of the cemetery and battlefield like a fly to... well. Let's say corpses.

But in spite of all the spookiness, still I feared the destruction of the ego.

John Michael Greer's book Monsters was oddly the first downright accessible book I'd read involving Western Ceremonial magic (try slogging through Fortune's 'Applied Magic' when you're eighteen and have only read Wicca 101 fare to date) and in it he says, regarding etheric revenants,  "..the technique is a way of deliberately evading the Second Death... the soul stays within reach of the living." I read that and was actually annoyed he didn't give instructions on bulking up your etheric body so you could do just that!

There's that ego again. Stamping her foot and declaring SHE is too important to be banished to nothingness.

"At this point you may be asking yourself, 'All this may have been fine and good for the initiated royalty of ancient Egypt, but what does it mean to me? I'm not going to school to learn how to die.'
My staid answer to that question would be, 'Aren't you?'"

- Lon Milo DuQuette

Low Magic

The ego likes to think it's all of you. It doesn't like to shut up, either - a constant impediment to my repeatedly failed attempts at simple meditation. Guided meditation? No problem. The ego still thinks she's in charge, and I'm a visual person. But sitting still and trying to get myself to be silent? Oh, fuck me, it's almost impossible!

A couple years ago, my father the Zen master gave me a copy of Yoga Nidra by Richard Miller - I occasionally suffer from stress-related seizures, and I think he was hoping this would help me to chill the fuck out. I still haven't gotten around to listening to the included audio CD, but I've recently flipped through the book again after sort of forgetting about it.

And I've noticed something odd, since doing so... I've started to think to myself that putting a muzzle on the I-ness of myself could actually be beneficial. Maybe - just maybe! - it would finally banish those late-night moments of "holy shit I'm not going to be here one day!" or at least make them less all-consuming. Besides that, I fear I seriously cripple my spiritual development.

I'm not saying I want to blast it away and achieve some sort of miraculous enlightenment right the fuck now. I happen to rather like my sense of self. But one of my goals for this year is to maybe get it to loosen up a bit. Step aside so that I can get a better idea of the other parts of my soul. Just shut up every once in a while so it's easier to hear from other things!

But bitch doesn't have to leave entirely. After all, I'm not at the revolving gates of death quite yet.