After being diagnosed with mesothelioma – way before effective treatments of this rare and especially unpleasant form of cancer spread into the market – Dr. Stephen Jay Gould, responding to assertions that the most effective cure for a statistically incurable disease is a positive attitude, quipped, “From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom” and, less concisely,
We must stand resolutely against an
unintended cruelty of the “positive attitude” movement – insidious slippage
into a rhetoric of blame for those who cannot overcome their personal despair
and call up positivity from some internal depth. We build our personalities
laboriously and through many years, and we cannot order fundamental changes
just because we might value their utility: no button reading “positive
attitude” protrudes from our hearts, and no finger can coerce positivity into
immediate action by a single and painless pressing.
It is, in other words, not within our power to dissolve our
own egos, wipe the slate clean, and shift gears from curmudgeon to roseate at
the drop of a hat for the express purpose of buttressing a psychological
defense strategy against something for which there is little other feasible
defense.
Or so sayeth the late, great SJG. While I usually agree with practically everything Gould has to say about everything, I have yet to find a single person of any intellectual caliber with whom I don’t disagree at one time or another. In fact the ego can be dissolved, albeit not easily, and we really can wipe the slate clean and start anew. All it takes is to realize that your ego is not you; it is an image in terms of which you present yourself to yourself, and to others, and by which you are measured and regarded. In that sense it is like a mask, and it is pivotal at this point to reiterate a curious piece of linguistic evolution that I’ve mentioned before: the term personality, and its shortened form persona, come from the Greek word for the masks worn by dramatists on-stage (per = through, as in perceive or pervade; son = sound, as in sonic or sonar), the personae – plural for persona, which is still used interchangeably with “personality” – being the masks that told the audience who was talking. This was important because, without the mask, audience members wouldn’t be able to tell if the person onstage was Zeus or Aristophanes or a peasant or even a cloud. By donning the mask, the burden of the actor to *play* so complicated a role as a god or a cloud was relaxed, allowing the actor to simply speak the lines and make the motions. The audience knew at a glance who/what was speaking.
For reasons known best to scholars who have a hell of a lot more free time than me, this term has moved offstage and into our everyday usage, and, moreover, our personalities are now considered one of our most valuable things. Your persona is who you are. Someone devoid of personality is either considered vapid or, on a bad day, a sociopath; it is our personalities, and the trappings and signals attached to them, that define us. “He is a nice guy.” “She is a Christian who likes to play Frisbee.” “Those people are hippies but they also shop at Whole Foods which means their anti-corporate rhetoric is at odds with their behavior…” and so on. Our personalities, our masks, are supposed to be intractable, and people become nervous when someone is or becomes unpredictable. So we act as though our personae were our selves. They aren’t.
One of the things that Zen training advocates is dissolution of the illusion that we, as entities, are discrete and separate from everything else. But you don’t need Zen to hammer this point, and in fact I sometimes feel that I lean on Zen and other so-called Eastern philosophies way too often. Instead, just think about when you were a child: you were one person at home, another person at school, quite another person playing with your friends, and yet an altogether other person when visiting your grandparents or attending church. As time goes on we encourage – if not actually force – children to assume socially recognizable roles, and even if those roles aren’t considered “good” or “moral” they’re still preferable to not having a role at all. Thus there is a place in our society for criminals, and it’s within reason to be a thug, but God forbid you’re a criminal or a thug one day and a charitable philanthropist the next. Unpredictability is anathema in our culture; it is worse than being evil, which is at least immutable. However, strip away all of that – all the favorite foods and music, all the Type A or Type B nonsense, all the experience and preference and taste and whatever all else – and what’s left? A spontaneous being is left, like a shark or a chimpanzee, which sometimes moves in detectable patterns but is by no means constrained by them.
So: how does one go about dissolving the ego? There is a broad array of methods, only a few of which I’ll mention here.
First, there are drugs. Psychedelic, psychotropic, and/or dissociative drugs can pretty well wipe one’s slate, and in fact even alcohol can do it to the extent that alcohol intoxication tends to strip away inhibitions and social mores (in vino, for better or for worse, truly veritas). This was among the earliest and most significant aspects of drugs like LSD and DMT elucidated by researchers: someone in the throes of such chemicals becomes, as it were, primitive in the sense that he or she becomes disconnected with what is best described as “personal reality.” The problems with this method are twofold: first, drugs are dangerous, and even in societies where psychoactive compounds aren’t illegal they are (usually) used exclusively by, or under the direction of, shamans; and second, as easily as people in such states can become disconnected from personal reality, they can also become disconnected from capital-r Reality. As a whole. Permanently.
Second, there is meditation and/or prayer, two seemingly very different practices that, in fact, yield identical results. Among Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu, Yogi, and similar-scoped practitioners, meditation is a practice that rids one of the illusion of separateness of identity and illuminates or “enlightens” our total connection with the universe. Among Christians, Muslims, Jews, and other practitioners of that ilk, intense and rigorous prayer is a practice that decries the transience of human life and connects us to the great and irreducible infinitude of which we are created and to which we inevitably return, a.k.a., God. What’s the difference? But meditation has its own drawbacks, chief among which: it’s hard, at least for a lot of people. It involves lots of sitting and lots of deep breathing and, worse, trying not to let our minds wander indiscriminately, and, worse still, it takes time and effort that could be spent doing something else. All culture is distracting (hell, all of *life* is distracting, and it probably wasn’t a whole lot easier to sit in silent contemplation beside a fire when you had to keep feeding the fire in order to keep the lions away), but our culture in particular has a distinctive talent for distraction, specializes in it, revels in it, positively rejoices in it. If we aren’t entertained for whole seconds we get bored, for whole minutes we get restless, for whole hours we start to claw at the walls, and it’s little wonder that the second-to-worst punishment in our society is solitary confinement. A Buddhist or Franciscan monk would delight in being put in a quiet cell with reliable food service for a couple of days, having nothing to do but sit on the floor and contemplate Existence. Meanwhile the average American starts tapping his or her feet when the elevator is a couple of seconds too slow, and a traffic light that doesn’t change rapidly enough can lead to a multi-car pileup involving blood, pain, mayhem, and – worst of all – lawyers, doctors, and cops. So, for most Americans, meditation is probably not an option.
But then there’s a third option, although I hesitate to use the word “option” because you can’t really plan for it: horror, catastrophe, tragedy. There’s a term that psychologists use to explain what happens when someone goes through a horrific event, and it is, not coincidentally, the same term psychologists use to describe the state of mind of one who is on a heavy psychedelic drug trip or in a very deep meditative state, and that term is “dissociation.” It is, to use just one of many definitions (because it’s the one that I prefer, and for no other reason than that), a state of mind characterized by manic or intractable distractedness from current goings-on, not just around the subject but also within the subject’s own head. Dissolution of the self, in other words, insofar as the “self” is the sum total both of one’s perceptions and of one’s perceptions of those perceptions. Another word for that would be “zombification,” in popular terminology, and it too can be created by a certain class of drugs, but let us not muddy the waters…
So just how effective is tragedy at dissolving the ego? Dipping back into Buddhism for a moment: before becoming “the Buddha,” young Gautama Siddhartha’s mother died under mysterious circumstances when he was only a week old. In the words of author and psychiatrist Mark Epstein: “Something tragic happened… right at the beginning. That might be what it takes to become a Buddha, is that you have to suffer on such a primitive level.” This by itself sounds kind of dire. St. Paul, having realized that sin and grace are only recognizable in terms of one another – like lightness and darkness, up and down, hot and cold, yin and yang, and all other complimentary dualities – asked in a rhetorical panic, “Shall we continue in sin that grace shall abound?” Not… necessarily, although I can’t imagine a blessedly moral person having even the slightest inkling of his or her goodness without having had at least a taste of what it meant to be otherwise. And I’m not sure I agree that it requires of one to become enlightened that one first suffers some nasty fall. On the other hand, I definitely think it helps.
For my part, my dissociating event was Lyme disease. While I continue to suffer with the aftermath to this day, and probably will right up until I die, the acute and most insufferable part of the disease is behind me – but that part lasted for at least five months and only trailed off toward nine or ten. During that time I effectively had no personality. I would watch a movie or attend a class or, on days when I could muster the energy, do something “fun” like kayak or hike, and afterward someone would ask me my opinion. I never had an answer. I literally could not form any opinions. I would hear a story about some hero who rescued a child from drowning, and my reaction would be, “Huh – so, what you’re saying is, there are now a couple of people who get to live… a bit longer. I don’t see the relevance of that.” Food all tasted like food, no matter what it was. People all looked like people, neither attractive nor ugly nor funny nor smart nor stupid nor anything but bipedal animals that knew how to talk.
And then I woke up. Slowly, with great effort, and to this day my thinking is cloudy and my memory is riddled with holes like a sign on a backcountry road. But wake up I did, and continue to do, and I am more like a baby than like a 32 year-old man. I keep finding myself looking back on my pre-Lyme life in utter astonishment. Was I really that clever? Was I really that self-righteous? Did I really believe all those things, and did I really not believe all those other things? Did I really think solitude and adventurism were of utmost value? Did I really think love was a myth? Was I really so cocky half the time? Was I really so insecure the rest of the time? Just exactly who in fuck was that guy?
So that, in a rambling nutshell, is my answer to the question, “It is possible to rid oneself of one’s own ego?” (It was asked after I made some off-handed comment about how ego is not a real thing but a concept, and can be shed like any other concept, albeit with tremendous difficulty – which comment had been met with assiduous skepticism.) It is possible, but it is not easy, and the most expedient ways are either dangerous or horrifying or both. Then again, speaking of the not-expedient and entirely harmless meditative method, German author Hermann Hesse said, “Though cured of an illusion, I found this disintegration of the personality by no means a pleasant and amusing experience.”
Preach auf, Kamerad!
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