Ego, the “garment of flesh” in which we return to God, is not to be disparaged too loudly: but its pitfalls are glaring and unavoidable. Regardless of liabilities, though: both in Catholicism, and in such hindu paths as jnana yoga—thought yoga—it’s possible to elevate the ego until it leads to God, the source of all things.
The post “
On Removing Self from Knowing” basically said this: If you know truth with the ego, it will lead you astray. Unless they are grounded in fierce individual ownership of communal deficiencies, even our efforts to proclaim the communally gleaned “truths of the faith” will be treated as credentials or reasons to judge others.
From a certain perspective, both society at large and the Church as a whole have closed their eyes to this. "I think therefore I am,” a highly prized societal maxim, and “It’s right if you think it’s right” the battle cry our relativism—these grow from the same tree: the ego. They both sprout the same fruit: the false self. Even for those claiming to consciously live a spiritual path, interacting with the ego haphazardly commonly leads to mistaking the self for God. Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s “Spiritual Materialism” talks about the harm of turning spiritual goals into playthings for the ego,
Under the Influence has spoken of the pitfalls of building an identity based on spiritual consolations and wisdom. Figures as prominent as St. Paul have said that the devil masquerades as an angel of light: in such malevolent hands, sources as pure as God’s law serve to take life as opposed to giving it.
We’ve paid lip service to absolute truth, then built towers to the heavens on the shifting foundation of Ego. The story of the “tower of babel” serves as a warning of the result: such self-sabotage will leave us with wreckage and misunderstanding every time.
And yet there are aspects of the Christian experience, often, at most, merely alluded to, that we’d be well served to take more seriously. Images such as Christ’s descent into hell, Benedict’s ladder of Humility, and Bernard of Clairvaux’s “Steps of Humility and Pride” suggest, as last week’s “
Parkway to Paradise, Highway to Hell” post did, that ascending and descending use the same stuff, and happen simultaneously. Those we call great saints often have a degree of awareness of their own sinfulness that would be terrifying if not for God’s mercy, entirely eschewing the popular equation of perfection with faultlessness. Relativism officially feels icky. And yet it’s absolutely true that many of our categories are “relativized.” Behold, a mystery, the depths of which it’s in our best interests to plumb! (Huzzah!)
The question
Under the Influence is concerned with today is whether there’s a more reliable way to interact with reality. Not while we’re caught up in ourselves as the “interactor” there’s not, but I get ahead of myself. Taking some catechetical cues from other wisdom traditions, I’ve come to the following conclusion: that something called the “realm of mystery” is an aspect of the present moment. Not only is it a non-egotistical starting point, it’s an ongoing foil to the false certainties of the ego, which ultimately connects us more reliably to Reality, helps us slip the trap of
Abstraction, thereby creating silence full of God, Christ, and the Gospel, out of which we can speak if God wills. ...
Case 33: “Fr. Mark’s ‘The Logos is easy”
