The word ‘Ego’ originates from Latin, and literally translates to ‘I’. It is the locus point of our subjectivity, where our ‘eye’ combines with ‘I’. The ego is popularly known as a kind of psychic mental system that arises in the course of our maturation. The ego has opinions, can analyse things, has a sense of identity, and acts as a filter for what comes into our awareness. In short, it is seen as the conscious personal mind.

This popular definition is conditioned by our collective attachment to ego. Almost all of us are identified with it, so when we say ‘I’, we are attached to the current opinions, viewpoints and identity that the ego is instantiating, and it can be noticed that this does change over time. Likewise, there are some popular discourses that view ego as the enemy, and this can mislead people and take them down a less constructive path, where ironically, the ego makes an enemy of itself, but remains king by doing so!

The ego often comes to be a powerful structure, so while its content and structure can change, loosen and open up over time, almost all of us are still living from within that box.

Suffering arises to differing degrees from the ego, and these 5 core pillars will explain why this happens, and how deconstructing the ego lowers suffering, enhances perspective, and establishes more harmony and peace.

Firstly, we’ll discuss what the ego is in its nature, its mysteries, and how it comes to be cultivated; this sets the stage for discussing the 5 pillars of the ego and how they can be navigated.

In the end with the dissolution of all 5 pillars, the ego can be transcended, marking the end of suffering and a realisation of the nature of reality.

What is Ego, Intrinsically? How Is It Best Cultivated?

The ego is a sense of self-subjectivity, or self-consciousness and this sense has a focal point. This point is quite like a magnet, in that it accrues the inner and outer contents of experience and builds relationships like connections and associations with and among these contents over time.

The ego is not consciousness, it is the locus point within our field of consciousness; a plant or an animal has consciousness, but it’s varyingly debatable whether they have an ego in our sense of the term. However, we all share awareness as the waking baseline of our consciousness. Awareness registers the field of consciousness.

The differentiating factor here is self-consciousness, this ‘I’ that is a dual-mirror: on the one hand, it apprehends our experiences, on the other, it sees itself in the reflections of what it experiences and how these relate to itself. Some animals such as dolphins and monkeys seem to show signs that gets closer to this gradient of the ego. It must be stressed that this is all not a binary, yes/no classification; the emergence of ego as this blend of consciousness (I experience), a central focal point (I am), and a self-consciousness (‘I see’) is really part of a wider continuum of existence, the ego is an arising within it.

By analogy, the ego is quite like a camera reflecting on its own qualities from the images that it is capturing; except in this case of course, the camera has this quality of self-consciousness which is needed for this self-reflection to occur. In this way, the human ego is distinct from other states of consciousness as it consciously apprehends an ‘I’ and an ‘other’ through a perception of separation. Again, it’s important to note that it requires an awareness and a basic aliveness as it’s foundation through the body, in order to blossom this distinctive quality into being on earth.

This basic life-material germinates the beginnings of ego in our subjective experience, firstly as a kind of awareness through the body, then emotions become intensely developed not long after birth. Emotion kindles ego development quite like how striking flint to steel sparks the potential for fire. Through the constant conflicts between our wills and the environment, an ego is developed, although the discussion of where this can be handicapping, as with trauma, should be explored elsewhere.

In reality, the ego is a sophisticated amalgamation of universal forces that interact together in an utterly vast continuum, however conscious those contents are or not. To get the best from ego, this seeming paradox of infinite, continuous unity and perceived distinctions within it needs to be held. All suffering ultimately happens from a sense of separation.

What is the function of ego? It may be found in its distinctiveness:

• The ego arises within a continuum, a flux of all sorts of things, seen and unseen. It is fundamentally a part of it. One thing can be said about this continuum as a minimum — it creates. It doesn’t just create, it integrates; things come together into new wholes that perform new functions like self-consciousness, clusters of galaxies, and so on.
• The ego is a mode that enables existence to become conscious of itself from a perspective, an ‘I’ sense that evolves in both perception, will and self-conception: What I see reflects what I am, and what I am is reflected in what I will.
• This is allowed to unfold via the unities the ego rests upon: from a material perspective, universal and biological evolution over long spans of time enables this development. More mental factors such as socialisation and conditioning also play a role, and beyond the material, a kind of transcendental basis for all unfoldings in the universe. The ego, like all things, is interdependently connected to each of these material, mental, and transcendental dimensions. The ego occupies a dual position of being connected intimately with everything while having a relative point of view, which enables distinction-making too. And through its faculties, it’s own development.
• Seeing that the ego develops this mounting universal awareness from a relative point of view, lives it out developmentally, and witnesses more and more of how things are interconnected and developing together across the lifetime, the ego’s purpose seems to support a wider purpose of creative wholeness. It is an experiencer and conscious relater in this process.

Now you might be questioning why there’s a wider creative process and how we can verify that, and in any case, what’s this got to do with the ego?

Birth and death in the universe creates more life, more creation, it’s the minimum we can conclude, that creativity is jointly a means and end to a huge degree, stripping away any shoulds and oughts from it all.

The questions the ego really deals with in its development (knowingly or not) are:

• As a part of a whole, what purpose or role do I play?
• What choices are more constructive, aligned, and integrative for me and this whole, and which choices are less constructive and pull things apart?
• How do I navigate my own subjectivity, which can be differentiated from the contents that arise within it?
• What is my potential? Whether looked at in terms of doing and achievements, or states of being and consciousness, as well as the synergies between the two.

Any individual ego’s specific conceptions, boundaries and attitude to many keywords here, like ‘whole’, ‘I’, ‘purpose’, and even the scope of space for choice and identity-making, are all variables.

The Development and Mysteries of the Ego

The ego has a foot in two dimensions and this has created some of the deepest mysteries available to us: it has a foot in the material, and another in the psychic.

Materially, the ego matures firstly as a body-ego, the first task of babies and infants is to distinguish the body from it’s environment by confirming the boundaries of the body. Instead of being blurrily infused with the wider unconscious world and environment, this physical act of abstraction sets up the first subjectively clear boundary between ego/I, and its environment. Ultimately united, but now separately, subjectively, perceivable.

Around age 2, a child will usually stop referring to themselves in the 3rd person (‘There is Luke!’) and take their name as ‘I’ (‘I am Luke’). This is an important event because it is a further act of abstraction. Like the gravitas that a star has on celestial bodies around it, this births and then constellates a mental personality into being; a composition of identities and beliefs from the society, which coalesce with the biological/bodily factors like genetics to create a new whole: a unique personality.

Other events on the way, such as the shrieking of the word ‘no!’ in the ‘terrible twos’ and beyond, the distancing from parents that often occurs in teenage years, are indications of the ego’s independence and mounting autonomy over the developmental span. Further abstractions in the developmental process are made; a person increasingly finds they can think abstractly, observe patterns and regularities, and widen their sense of identity over time, assuming the developmental trajectory hasn’t been stunted.

Further, they are not as swayed as they used to be by emotions and prime impulses; actually, the marshmallow test was really a measure of ego development in children, a test of ego-strength and the scope of perception across time and space (can I sacrifice now for even better later?). The follow up findings of life outcomes for these children later on, point to the significance of building a healthy, balanced, and integrated ego.

In short, the maturing ego arises firstly as a body ego, takes on a mental identity from there, and attains enough mastery in the external physical and social worlds, and then as a further step, increasingly begins to deal with its internal world; it’s own subjectivity and how that subjectivity operates. This takes us into the deeper mysteries of the ego.

With the other foot of the ego being in the psychic, we mean it also inhabits a space beyond physical space. A person can picture all sorts of things independently of the external environment, where there is novelty in those internal constructions, we move from memory into imagination. In what sense are these real?

This said, the ego is also tethered to the body; the continuity of the empirical personality (‘My name is Luke’) relies on it.

Through the psychic, we can experience new contents that have not been encountered physically; this has already been popularly documented in the systematic study of near death experiences (NDEs) by Dr Jeffrey Long, Stanislav Grof’s studies into psychedelic therapies and the different psychic dimensions they can lead to into experiencing (which also display common patterns between peoples’ experiences), as well as mystical experiences induced through meditative practices that create altered (yet more coherent) brainwave states, as discovered by Dr Joe Dispensa and organisations such as the HeartMath Institute.

In terms of how this comes about, everything in the universe is energy: atoms, quantum particles, minds, bodies, are all in dynamic and infinite interaction. The last few decades has seen a greater convergence between physics and psychology and it’s already well known that quantum particles and systems, which make up all of atomic particles and systems (all observable matter), need to be collapsed into a definite (atomic) state through observation by an observer or measurement by a device. Ultimately, that is an incredibly profound link between subjectivity (even of just a purely mechanical kind as measurement) and physics.

The Psychic Aspect of Ego

The purely psychic aspect of ego refers to its relationship to the collective conscious and unconscious. It is transpersonal in the sense that the contents of experience in the purely psychic aspect, are independent in large part from the personal experiences of the person across their lives.

The psychic realm can bring forth contents into consciousness such as witnessings of other/past lives, anticipations of future events, perception of altogether new objects like places or sounds, more or less significant meaningful coincidences (synchronicities) such as thinking of a person and then receiving contact from them, or an altogether new kind of insight, a realisation, one that transforms the personality and consciousness of a person in a flash. One of the most common ones today is discovering one’s own personal individuality, that sense of distinctiveness that also brings a deepened concern for one’s best-interests, preferences, and point of view.

Often these kinds of experiences are ‘peak experiences’, meaning they are both of an exceptional and boundary-breaking nature, and they can then become the norm; they bring a new kind of perception, feeling, identity and so on, to them and can hold a special place in a person’s memory. The ego consolidates by scaling peak after peak in the course of its development, by coming into contact with the inner and outer world’s contents and integrating them.

The tricky thing is, the ego occupies a timeless inner space; it bears a sense of eternalness to it that can be registered by jail breaking awareness from immersion in thought — there is a distinction between the two. While thought gives the impression of a definiteness, it is partial and operates in chains (thinking). When the chains are suspended, when a person rests their awareness outside of acquired thoughts, they can experience in their field/sense of consciousness this sense of timelessness, identitylessness, which is proper given that the field of consciousness really is situated in an infinite continuum.

So what does the appropriate use and cultivation of ego entail?

To paraphrase Blaise Pascal: ‘Man is an infinity compared to nothing, but nothing compared to infinity’

The ego is an aspect of infinity, a something inbetween this infinity and nothing. It is a vehicle, for constructive use for many things depending on the person and their journey:

• It is potentially an ally, a trusty lieutenant for navigating the world and life.
• It is a vehicle for expanding consciousness, skills, and perceptions.
• It is an organiser of memory and experience, and importantly, an interpreter of them.
• It is relational; ego is a bridge to relationship of many kinds and develops through then.

Of course, we all have an ego, but our relationship with it can vary ever so greatly. Contrary to some popular public and spiritual discourses, the ego is not inherently an ‘enemy’, it is a variable aspect of self-conscious existence.

An ego can be experienced as painful, limiting, lonely, incapable, or imbalanced; an ego can also be more positive, connected, empowering, and balanced. These are variables, so the risk many face is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

The Key to Healthy Ego Development: Identification Versus Observation

Some key milestones in our lives are great examples for understanding identification and how that can stultify ego development. Things like our first love, becoming aware of social groups and the need to belong, big events related to our parents that go on to shape our beliefs.

After experiencing these examples, a person may become locked into their persona and a need to belong, rebound from relationship to relationship, or hold on to limiting beliefs and resentments planted in childhood.

Identification is an attachment to the Past, fundamentally, as a desire to recreate, confirm, or remain aligned with it. To ‘live in it’, as they say, and to resubstantiate an existing identity or belief. While observation is an activity that takes place now. Self-consciousness enables us to zip between the past and the future, and to be in now.

Because the evolution of all things happens in the now, it follows the key to healthy ego development is to enable the flow and transmutation of physical and psychological energy to enable it to blossom, heal, and integrate. Attachment and identification negates this process by and large, often then, it becomes the case that we have to learn from pain in order to change.

By taking the view that change can happen, and an openness to what change can bring, we can unbound pent up energy and actualise the potential within our psyche. Some ways to cultivate this include:

• Practicing presence through meditation and mindfulenss techniques
• Taking a two-sided view of all things as a habit
• Being committed to asking the question: ‘how could I be wrong or limiting myself?’
• Going to therapy, and more broadly, seeking out thought-partners in others who can help us to see things differently
• Trying new things and integrating them

We’ve went through a fair bit of content about the ego itself and how it develops, now we can discuss the 5 pillars that the ego stands upon.

The 5 Pillars of Ego Explained

These 5 pillars are sequentially ordered by deepness, the later pillars depend on the earlier pillars.

1. Separation

Each person’s ego is distinctive, to have that, a sense of psychic separation between a self and everything else, an ‘other’, is needed. The deconstruction of the ego is initiated by our realisation that our emotions, beliefs and perceptions have been conditioned and this has distorted the view that we have of ourselves, people, events, and reality. The idea that we are the master and knower of our own house becomes questionable.

Separation occurs via:

• Trauma: growing up, we cut up pieces of our initial openness and unconditional love and put them into our psychic basement. What for? The pursuit of conditional love from others in a world that is already fragmented and separate, and to ensure our survival. We cut up incongruent aspects of ourselves in order to ‘fit’ into the fragmented needs, perceptions and identities of others.
• Identification: Identification with the body, its senses and its perceptions gives us a sense of distinctiveness. We look in the mirror and see ‘me’; seeing how the body connects to everything can be seen through introspection and felt through meditation. Likewise, identification with the mind is inherently divisive in nature; it compares, contrasts, opines, and uses limiting words to process these functions. Awareness contracts into and gravitates around physical and mental contents.
• Disconnection: Occurring from these two, the disconnect is registered subtly or more vividly in the pursuit of external things that restore a sense of connection in various ways, depending on the person.

2. Binary Identification

If I say ‘I am strong’ but do not want to acknowledge that I am also weak, this is an example of binary identification.

Identification is where we say this is me, what I believe, and what I feel, and that the opposites of those identities, beliefs and feelings are not me.

Much tension and suffering arises out of the repression and projection of our discarded and disliked qualities and experiences. That tension comes from the denial of connectedness, which is the very basis of ego and all finite forms of life in general. This is why so many years ago, the Buddha discovered that the end of identification to the ego marked the end of suffering.

Seeing the ‘me’ in everything is the way out of separate identification, that requires nuance and looking at things from multiple levels so that the opposites of identity, personality and existence can reconcile and find their rightful places in our own unique experience. The consequence of that is the humbling, loosening and de-charging of the ego, which registers as a heightened sense of perspective, mindfulness, and connectedness.

3. Comparison

With a basis of separation and identity, the ego creates a framework for making value comparisons. We come to seek roles, status and possessions that serve to protect and enhance us, although as so many stories about pursuing these things go, they are found to never be truly fulfilling. Joyful creativity itself, found in flow states, and relatedly, presence, are fulfilling and intrinsic in nature.

Animals may experience pain as we do, but they do not endure the added suffering that results from the tacking-on of comparative self-consciousness in our moment-to-moment existence.

As they say, comparison is the thief of joy. This is because we are constantly showcasing our superiority or even superiority through inferiority (i.e due to low self-esteem). Yet in doing so, we are creating a sense of lack, disconnection, and essentially, not-enoughness in this act of comparison and striving for a desired self-image or experience. These arise from more or less conscious inner belief systems and their comparative criteria.

4. Projection

Whatever the ego’s beliefs are, and the corresponding denied aspects to them, these get projected from the inside-out onto others and the world, in a way that stops us from seeing it all as it really is. Projections are rather fixed frames of reference that arise from a complex bundle of emotions and memories that conjoin with a common theme between them all. They play a key role in supporting the illusive pillar of comparison, as the judgements we make are often not the full reality.

Why? To protect us from deeper, more painful feelings, in the same way that a loan is taken out to ease a difficult financial situation and to forestall the consequences of it. Eventually, this culminates into a more painful direct confrontation later on. The same is true of the repression of deeper psychological pains and their diluted expression via projections, which are excreted steadily and can even gather momentum if they are not consciously recognised and treated appropriately.

Let’s take an example of someone that represses their anger. This can show up in two ways. They may see and say:

• They are angry with me (I am angry with them)
• I am angry with them (really, I’m feeling angry with myself)

In example one, the repressed anger towards others is compensated by attributing it onto others, so that it is not the projector’s problem; that is, it is no longer their responsibility to get into a conflict to assert their boundaries, and face the potentially threatening consequences of that.

In example two, the repressed anger towards one’s self, is compensated by attributing it to others. In this case though, the person is facing what they do not tolerate about themselves, or what they do not want to take responsibility for, via others. As the saying goes: ‘anger is grief in a red dress’.

Projection is how the ego:

• Avoids the traumatic roots that informs much of the person’s acquired personality; the ego is an ultimate defence mechanism in this sense.
• Keeps a person feeling superior, worthwhile, certain, and identified; that they have a basis for existence that is rooted in comparison with outside phenomena. This makes sense, given that sustained meditation (inner focused attention) ultimately dissolves the ego.
• Sustains itself energetically; it’s like a field emitted by a battery; the two opposite charges (+, outside — and -, inside) are needed for a current to sustain the field. Eventually the ego dies by physical or psychological death, that much is inevitable.

Projections are thus a sustaining dynamic for the ego. Recognising and working with projections is a key mechanism for healing wounds, loosening the ego, and gradually eroding and expanding its boundaries.

5. Abstraction

An easy way to not see reality as it is and keep up an illusion, is mistaking language for reality!

For instance, consider how we often use terms for meat that mask the names of the slain animal (e.g beef not cow, steak not lamb), or when we talk about a topic that evidently causes us pain, do you notice how we can use abstract words to skirt around the topic?

Likewise, when someone makes a sweeping judgement, like ‘I hate liberals’, they are making a big category assessment that neatly divides them from people they may assume to be in that category; not only this, to come across people that break our stereotypes and to see the nuance in them, brings in the realisation of common humanity, and the painful ignorance of our own judgements.

Nuance is found in the concrete details, this is partly why opposing groups (e.g economic, political, social) will tend to keep physically apart; because to interact genuinely in the flesh would gradually strip the illusions that are created by emotionally-laden category judgements, and lead to confrontations with the wider aspects of our total personality through these other people.

Abstraction and language is thus another key defence mechanism of the ego; it simplifies reality, can sweep over nuance, and facilitates illusion building. Of course, language has many genuine uses but in this article we are focusing on the pillars of the ego in a defensive context.

A Simple Basis for Deconstructing your Ego

Deconstructing the ego begins with self awareness. You are not your feelings and thoughts, you are something more. You are that something that you’ve been looking for this whole time; you, I, us, we have been looking for ourselves.

So, pay attention; start making a gap between the thoughts and your awareness. Take time to be mindful and to meditate to cultivate this gap. You’ll see thought and awareness are two different modes of being.

In your thoughts, notice their one-sidedness, are they protecting your image? Trying to make yourself feel good? Trying to make yourself feel bad? Try to link up all that troubles and stirs you with your past, in a calm state of being (this helps the process).

The ego arises in the course of our lives, it is heavily conditioned by the past, and it essentially reflects the past to us in the present and also into the future too.

See the bigger picture, notice how you’re connected to everything; nothing is purely your own. Your evolving body is made up of food, oxygen and water from so many sources. Your thoughts have a similar depth and diversity of heritage, and so too, your emotions. You are made up of star dust, millions upon millions of quantum particles pass through your body every day. The universe’s gravity sustains the cradle of all material existence; the conjunction of space-time which hosts all form.

Reflecting on the life that you have in this wider context can help with empathising with yourself and others, and to take things less personally. Gradually, many doors will open that will strengthen your heart and mind and set them free into territories that many do not believe are possible.

A healthy pinch of faith goes a long way; all of our mainstream historic epochs so far have had their beliefs and superstitions corrected, disproved, or amended, so why not this one? Therefore, let us take our socially-created ego with a compassionate pinch of salt, and see what lies beyond it.

What Lies Beyond Ego-Consciousness?

As discussed earlier, the ego is beyond baseline awareness and has the added faculties of self-reflection, discrimination of content, and will. To have this capacity for separate self-reflection, it needs a relative viewpoint which sets up the fundamental pillar of ‘I’ and ‘Other’.

Going backwards on the process means erasing the ‘I’, as Jung said, a candle in existence, out. Going forwards in the next steps for now, the ‘I’ is not lost, but consciously conjoins with a ‘we’, a unity. The ego is a whole made of parts, the parts are wholes onto themselves. This said, the intelligence of an ego’s self-consciousness is unimaginably different to the intelligence presenting in a liver or animal, so what does the wider connection of ego (a separate unity) into this wider, unseparate whole involve to make such a similar, radical similar kind of leap happen?

Four components are involved which cultivate a witnessing state of consciousness, which is the bridge to entering a state of participation mystique: a psychic sense of interconnectedness to the environment.

To thoroughly integrate this kind of consciousness into everyday experience, four parts are required (and will be elaborated shortly):

• A purified body
• A clear mind alongside a developed and balanced ego
• Presence
• Will to connect

This is not at all a new idea, it has been reflected many times, such as in the works of the German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhaur. He said for instance:

“When one is no longer concerned with the Where, the When, the Why and the What-for of things, but only and alone with the What, and lets go even of all abstract thoughts about them, intellectual concepts and consciousness, but instead of all that, gives over the whole force of one’s spirit to the act of perceiving…forgetting one’s individuality, one’s will, and remaining there only as a pure subject, a clear mirror to the object — so that it is as though the object alone were there, without anyone regarding it, and to such a degree that one might no longer distinguish the beholder from the act of beholding, [then] the two have become one”

But this idea or experience naturally transcends just philosophy as it is a matter of subjectivity — we are all subjects! There are many others who have discussed the experience of this subject/object mergence, such as:

• The writer, poet and philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson: “We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE.”
• In modern psychology, Csikszentmihalyi discovered what is now the popularly termed as flow states, where there is a mergence between the doer and what is being done in a state of open and flowing clarity.
• The artist, Vincent Van Gogh: “I put my heart and soul into my work, and I have lost myself in the process.” And in another letter to his brother, Theo, he wrote: “It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.”
• The depth psychologist, Carl Jung also has a number of quotes on this theme. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he says of his experience in later life: “At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons.”
• In poetry, the work of Rainer Rilke, particularly in the poem, ‘The Swan’: “And yet, as though moved by an immense upsurge, he calmly, deliberately, and with massive grace, on the full thrust of his own wings, stays as pure as an angel or a god, who while soaring, still forgets that he is soaring, and simply becomes the soaring”. This also of course has some Zen-like undertones to it.

Not only do each of these corelates relate to Schopenhauer’s comprehensive, direct description — the pervasiveness of this mergence across different fields is clear and virtually all people experience this kind of state in their lives. The difference here is that in adulthood we return to the centre of gravity of the ego. When this centre of gravity begins to shift, this is when this kind of state becomes a habit of being.

Just as how radically different it is to have a mature ego that processes thought, understands language, and can reflect on itself, versus being an infant without access to these faculties just yet, this change in gravity also brings increasingly significant psytchological changes in a person.

The key difference that demarcates the transition from egoic consciousness to transpersonal consciousness, is this:

1. The ego develops in relationship to the outside world. The subject/object duality creates a process of conflicts between a subject and objects in their environment, which potentiates integrations; the ego needs to adapt to its environment, and in doing so, integrates these material object-contents into an increasingly abstract and comprehensive understanding and sense of individuality.
2. There is then a point, through meditation, shadow work, mindfulness and other practices that make this subject/object duality more porous, where a person takes their own subjectivity as an object of perception, this leads to much more self awareness (i.e of how the ego has come to be constructed) and bodily awareness. At this point, the delving into subjectivity develops innerstanding and sense of collectivity.
3. When, through these practices, we put our willful subjectivity (e.g identity, beliefs, and intentions) to the side in order to immerse ourselves in a pure subject-object conjunction, then it becomes possible to connect with a deeper, subtler, more unified perception of internal and external contents. This culminates in developing what could be called togetherstanding and sense of oneness.

So how does one go from 1 to 2? Here are some ways:

• A neo-advaita practice called ‘self enquiry’, which has some differences to introspection. 
• Meditation
• Quality introspection (beware of windmills and merry-go-rounds)
• Mindfulness practices; simply being with the body and present moment more and more often
• Reflecting on how your identity has been constructed and conditioned through past forces, which brings together an understanding of the nature of these forces which empowers self-awareness and change.

Once subjectivity becomes a frequent object of ego-consciousness and we start disidentifying and unclinging to its contents, this creates a widening of perception; the ego expands but in doing so becomes more integrated, accepting, and balanced, it also becomes more porous and flexible. This sets the stage for going from 2 to 3 through witnessing as discussed by Schopenhauer, which has four key, contributing components:

• A purified body: Rather than being racked with tensions, pains, or even a lack of awareness of bodily processes; we are connected to it and the body exhibits a lighter, smoother, and more flowsome quality to it. One may even feel like the boundaries of their body extends beyond their skin!
• A clear mind alongside a strong but balanced ego: A stiller, more centered state of mind that is not overly invested/possessed/identified with the contents arising within it or the body. Opposing perspectives and different ways of looking at things are embraced and integrate together, rather than being experienced as contentious conflicts.
• Presence: More psychological time and attention is lived in the present moment as opposed to in memory or projections of the future. Living in memory or projection hems consciousness in, submerges it in some emotionally-coloured thoughts, and from there, boxes awareness into thought and traps it there.
• Will to connect: This is a willingness to give ourselves over to an object of consciousness, to be with it on its own terms. When people, situations and things are means to ends, this also hems in the scope of consciousness and potential for connectivity. This is because a rigid intention will limit what something means and can/should be. Then, in relation to a goal or end, everything is seen as either a positive or negative for that end, which will tend towards bringing the mind out of openness and disturb it.

A person can simply look at these four components and ask themselves how they relate to them. The qualities they all summarise can be termed in things like peacefulness, openness, lovingness, balance, clarity, stillness, and awareness.

To the extent we develop these qualities through some of the practices mentioned earlier, the more our state will facilitate witness consciousness and the development of togetherstanding.

What is togetherstanding, then?

It can be described as the intaking of experience or content not just from our own perspective, but from other perspectives. This can simply look like feeling other peoples’ emotions, as well as physical feelings, such as in mirror-touch and mirror-pain synethesia for example; it can even be as dramatic as being in participation mystique with natural objects, and in other things like other people.

Experiences that could be viewed as fitting into this concept of togetherstanding include:

• Past life experiences (this is not necessarily a prior life of the experiencer per-say, but there is a psychic connection between them as a minimum)
• A feeling of oneness with the world or a blurring of the boundaries between one’s self and the environment. This oneness is also known as ‘Samadhi’ in Hindu and Buddhist lexicon.
• Deeper, transcendental experiences such as infinite space, infinite consciousness, ego-death.
• A sense of reality as being symbolic; physical objects also are cognised as representing admixtures of eternal qualities or ideas (like the thinking of Plato in his theory of Forms)
• Various Extra Sensory Perceptions (ESPs), such as seeing auras, feeling other peoples emotional and physical feelings, telepathy, or gaining sudden insights from a seemingly external or other source.

How does togetherstanding come about mechanically? As a person settles more into awareness and ego boundaries become more porous and expansive, this enables a person to connect with more fundamental datum or contents in the universe — remember, we are not separate from the contents of the universe and there are many levels interpenetrating with each other. This is energy; a correlate of this is that cognition becomes less verbal and symbolic in nature; instead, something like a feeling or ‘flash’ of more condensed information can provide information instead of rational, symbol-mediated processes such as sequentially reasoning using language. 

Relatedly, togetherstanding makes life less effortful as a consequence. There is less laboured effort into understanding; things can be grasped more instantly as wholes rather than as parts that need weaving together.

In a nutshell, togetherstanding connects us more intimately to a continuum as a part of it, and expression of it. This connection is registered from the outside-in and in our inner world as well.

The ego is an aspect of our existence, many of us are trapped within its confines, but through the insights and practices discussed here, it’s possible to go beyond it and yet include it into our wider being.

Thanks for reading, see you next time!