The Ego Made Me Do It

Anyone on a path of self development will at some point have been told, “It’s just your ego.” The ego is always there, several steps ahead of you, waiting to co-opt your higher intentions and use them to keep you enslaved to a world of illusion and suffering.  Like the body, many traditions have taught that the ego is something inconvenient and base, something to recognize as lowly and transcend.

Most people I know would never say, “The Devil made me do it,” at least not with a straight face.  But we talk about the ego as if it’s an evil mastermind thwarting us, degrading us, always besting us in ways we are helpless to outwit.  It keeps us from our goals, robs us of our successes, ruins our relationships and knocks the ball of wisdom out of our consciousness every time we’re about to touch down into enlightenment.

I smell sulphur.  We’ve found ourselves a new scapegoat. 

Who gave it this power?  Who defined it as the Great Obstructionist?  I call it the ego, as if it’s something that happens to me.  Recoiling from the sting of self hate, I can scream at my ego and say, “See what you made me do?”  But like all the causes of suffering I blame on circumstances I actually created, this dog answers to me. 

Maybe the ego is just neutral material waiting to express all of my unconscious beliefs in a three-dimensional Sensurround display.  But I felt something else in there. Perhaps – well, of course I’m projecting, but when I felt into it, there was an underlying goodness, a nobility and dignity that had been betrayed.  Like a junkyard dog who has been trained to be vicious, you can only be cruel to yourself for so long without creating a monster, and that natural capacity for devotion becomes a servant who hates your guts. 

I don’t know if the relationship can be repaired, but from now on I’m going to treat my ego like a good dog.  I will reward its loyalty, share my food, give it a bath and pick off the parasites.  I will let it sleep in the warm house.  Instead of  “my ego, “ I will call it my Virtue, and every time I notice it doing its job, I will recognize it as something wondrous.  

I feel like I’m in love. 

Apartment 9A

My mother, Lois Runanin

Last night in the thickest part of my sleep I dreamt I was about to receive an important message.  Others were with me as I sat forward, straining to hear, lucid and aware that this was the response I sought.  The woman delivering the message whispered, “9A.”  Everyone around me mobilized to act on this, but I sank in disappointment.  I held up my right index finger to stop everyone and said, “I know what this is.”  9A was my mother’s apartment, the place I left.  9A is the Sad House. 

There is a terrible grief in the inquiry when I find... exactly what I expected to find.  Apartment 9A is the target I can’t miss.  No matter where I launch myself from, a force more personal than gravity grabs me and drags me back “home.”  I could no more avoid it than I could jump off a cliff and land on the moon. I woke up feeling leaden and let down, and even tried to forget the dream, not bothering to record it.  But it stayed with me.  It was an important message. 

This morning I wondered, what if this is not what I think it is?  Maybe I’m not being asked, again, to sift through the ashes of my childhood looking for meaning.  Maybe everyone else in my dream knew something I did not, and I’m being drawn to this place repeatedly because it is a portal, a gate.  My conscious mind thinks it knows exactly what 9A is, and so it masquerades as unimportant, surrounded by a deadly lack of curiosity, imprisoned in futility and defeat.  All roads lead there, eventually, and then give up.

Like the people around me in the dream, I got excited and went to work.  I wondered who my mother would have been if her grandfather had not molested her, if her mother hadn’t been insane, if her father hadn’t been the kind of man who sent all five of his children out to choose the willow switch he would beat them with, if her first love had not had his head blown off in World War II.  I looked at a picture of her and saw a familiar angry disgust.  Where did she land when she fell off a cliff?  I suspect it was a place remarkably like Apartment 9A. 

In the tarot, the number nine is associated with the ninth sphere on the Tree of Life, yesod, the unconscious.  The letter A stems from the Hebrew letter aleph, considered to be a maternal letter in the Western mystery tradition, that which breathes primal air into life.  It is also the letter assigned to the Fool, stepping out from the moon with nothing but instinct and the need to move, as yet unhindered by cherished laws of gravity.

We get hurt, and our bruises solidify into belief, coding into deep parts of ourselves the expectation that we can only create what we know.  Generation after generation only proves to itself what it already believes, and aliveness is forced to go dark, the purview of lunatics and fools who dream themselves awake.  

From Tarot of the Spirit

I felt 9A move through my system like a homeopathic remedy, a small dose of the sad poison that can numb me to love and to joy.  Rather than the water I swim in, it became a wisp of something held separate, an apart-ment, and my immune system held it until the fever passed and it remembered where it belonged.  I felt the Fool’s lack of definition fall through what had seemed like inevitably solid ground and found myself somewhere I hadn’t expected to be, at peace. 

It’s so easy to forget that this is how it can be.      

With love,

Mia

Only Spacelings Need Apply

When I was in first or second grade I started a club called “Spacelings.”  It was spring, and we took old chenille bedspreads and cut them up into little girl-sized capes.  We used magic markers to emblazon them with mysterious and unearthly symbols.  Then, donning these alien artifacts with pride and awe, we all ran down a steep green hill in Central Park together screaming, “Spaaaaaaceliiiiiiiings!” The pounding of our little feet hitting the ground made our voices choppy, like motorboats.  The cotton strings we’d sewn barely kept the capes attached to our outflung arms that were held aloft by the wind that we were creating ourselves as we hurtled down the hill with no concern for our safety.  Everyone was welcome, even boys, because the more of us equipped and flying down that hill screaming, the greater the magnitude of the force we generated with our glee.

I have adopted this as my business plan. 

Years ago, I dreamt of a tree that represented a network that could go anywhere in any world.  It was brand new, and something I felt I’d been building since the beginning of time. It was necessary because the old network was haunted with demons of misinformation, ghosts of past experience that would always misdirect us back into just the place we were trying to leave. 

In my dream this tree was near completion.  But before I was tempted to feel special because I had done such a wonderful thing, it became clear that this is what we’re all doing, building grids and access points to the truth of what we are. Those pinpoints leading to the Mystery are everywhere; we just need to connect the dots.  The timeless sense of this task made me understand that this purpose was hardwired into a level of self beyond what can be tinkered with by any human desire.  It’s my job.  It’s my cape. 

I know in my bones that what comes next for us all can only happen when we reclaim our interconnectedness, when we stand together in the liminal place between what we’re made of and what we create. This intersection is where it all gets designed, and from here there is nothing we cannot build.  We are designed to function in this way.  When we stand here together, we stand everywhere.

I’m shy to the point of tears to say this, but I’ve built something, and I so want people to come play with it, to fly down the hill screaming with me, just because we can.  Anyone can join, but you have to bring your own cape.  

With love,

Mia