All the Way Home

It has been raining the past few days, after several months of fire and dust and drought. And I picked up a book by James Finley - trauma survivor, trauma therapist, former Benedictine monk, Living School faculty, elder, podcaster - who always seems to speak or write the words that pull me out of the swampy, sticky bits of my psyche and lead me back toward the more open places in my soul. When the Living School staff let it be known that they were eliminating remote access for immunocompromised and disabled students I did two things before withdrawing: I downloaded the reading list in its entirety, and I searched the used bookstores for every out of print book that James Finley had written and ordered them all.

Last night these words of his struck me, snapping me out of a few days of alienation.

By ego-consciousness, I am referring to the consciousness that manifests itself in saying “I want, I think, I need, I feel, I remember, I like, I don’t like.” ~ James Finley

Oh, when the I floods in and fools me in to thinking it is the absolute center of the universe, instead of one small but precious part of the whole. Depletion, hunger, loneliness, fear, need - all seem to inflate and activate the ego, drawing our attention to the chafing point, seeking solutions to the discomfort, trying to wrest control over the intolerable, and making the essential I think it is more all important than it is.

Granted, it is a hard era to keep ones discomforts and ego-needs in proper perspective. The many collective dangers - the political, biological, economic, and environmental threats activate our self-protective and survival instincts, summoning the ego to identify resources and press us toward it’s preferred future - one that offers, at least in our imaginations, more safety and peace than we can see in a hazardous present. The I is called forth: I need safety. I want peace. I feel afraid. I desire justice. I yearn for community. I don’t like sending my children out to face their young adulthood in such a precarious world.

But of course this world doesn’t spin around what I want or what I need, and the more I focus on what I do not yet have, the noisier and louder and more agitated and controlling the I grows. The gift and the challenge of ego-consciousness is its relentless focus on what it doesn’t have, what it will need next. There are, of course, explicit moments, and whole phases of life where it is absolutely essential to allow the ego to negotiate our survival upon this complicated earth. And there are times when the self-same I is only a chimera, a mirage, a booby-trap, an inflation, an illusion.

But functioning properly, a healthy ego acknowledges its limitations:

Ego-consciousness is not expansive enough to fulfill our hearts. Ego-consciousness is not generous enough or gracious enough to bring us all the way home. ~ James Finley

Necessary, but not sufficient. This is also why I had to extricate myself from the confines and expectations of the psychotherapeutic profession. I lost faith in the ego. I became exhausted by a world that seems to believe that health means continually expanding our subjective perception of personal agency, attempting to assume more and more control over our future rather than surrendering it.

At this phase of my life, when I become too immersed in the I, when it begins to whisper in my ear and tell me how much I need, what I deserve, how unjustly I have been treated, how much danger I am surrounded by, how alone I feel - I am usually able to recall that becoming too immersed in ego-consciousness no longer serves my growth. The task in front of me now - is to acknowledge, and maybe even learn to revel in all the powers. forces and processes of life that have always been beyond my control.

And anyway, to succumb to the the inflated claims of an over-activated ego is to make yourself inherently more alone.

Ego-consciousness is the subjective perception of being a separate self that has to find God, who is perceived as being other than one’s self. ~ James Finley

The illusion of the wholly separate self is always our downfall.

We are only ever alone-ish at best, and far more entangled than we can comprehend.

Our joys, hopes, fears, sufferings, comforts, prayers are rarely as unique or individual as we imagine. There is always, someone, somewhere - and often many many thousands of people, facing similar terrors, hoping for similar relief, wrestling with similar dilemmas, praying the same prayers.

Have mercy on me. Have mercy on us all.

And our necessary, hungry, resourceful, self-preserving egos will also alienate us from each other, from “that of God in everyone” as the Quakers say. Ego consciousness is not only the subjective perception of being a separate self that has to find God – it is also the subjective perception of being a separate self that has to find other people who are perceived as other than one’s self.

We are cells in a common body, one of millions of organic life-forms on a living earth. We are more connected than our puny and self-centered egos will ever admit, less unique than the I can perceive, and the scope of things well beyond our control is larger than anyone wants to know.

And when my I is in its proper place, I am suddenly able to perceive all that I have not built or procured, all that has been offered, provided, all that exists in the present and that is not specific to me in anyway, that I have no control over, and that absolutely sustains me, even when I forget that it is there, or I am overly focused on how I am going to get whatever my ego thinks I need that I do not yet have.

The air I breathe. The sun in the sky. The people I am fortunate enough to love. The animals that live with and around me. The wildflowers that are just about to bloom.

And today it is raining, after many months of drought.