Raising a Glass: Parting with Ego, Celebrating Engagement

Three years ago, when dating Jackie was new, and I lived in an apartment owned by the Eastern Rite Catholic Church next door, she and I fell into a pattern that would become the norm. It’s the “I get up at 7 to write, she sleeps till noon” pattern. She and I have never lacked time for ourselves: I’m a former monk, who used to rise at 2 in the morning to precede Vigils with coffee and writing. She’s a former Amazon employee who courted shift-work disorder—her eight hour work day began at 10 at night. On any given night, when I start getting tired, she breaks out her “me time” coloring book. On any given morning, including this one, coffee gets made and Under the Influence gets written while she sleeps.

I say all this as preface: I've been writing my way, for as long as we've dated, through a transition in my relationship with self.  I've used poems to name its selfishness.  I've written whole tomes on its gradual expansion.  I've gotten indications of what giving it up would look like.  Our growing commitment is as much a story of ego renunciation as it is anything else.

Three years ago, in any case, knowing me to be a bit of a wordsmith, Jackie bought me a magnetic poetry set. I find them generally limited in their ability to stimulate the hoped-for creativity, but there was one morning back then that I, while coffee was brewing and my new sleepy girlfriend was on my mind, pieced together this verse:

“Remember your heart surrounds all universes. You are never less than vast.” The little verse seemed unreasonably profound, given my limited word-choice and compared to my usual total absence of pre-coffee insights. Despite not really knowing what it meant, I kept it. It has remained, despite several moves, on my refrigerator ever since.

Last June, Jackie and I emptied the refrigerator of any food that would spoil and hopped on a plane bound for Dublin, Ireland. My father and his wife live there—Pop is a choir director, my step mom a vocal coach. They live, quite literally, across the street from downtown Dublin’s St. Stephen’s Green, in a historic home that would cost thousands of Euro per month to rent, were it not part of his compensation.

We’d planned a week of tooling around Dublin, with a two-day booking for just the two of us in the suburb called Dun Laoghaire, and a mildly posh hotel. We weren’t just “poised to have good fun.” On every level, and for two reasons, the stakes were higher. For one thing, Jackie’s deceased father had always wanted to take his daughter to Ireland, the land of her ancestors. Also, we’d been talking for a year about the possibility of getting married. I spent about a year saving money for a ring, trying to figure out her ring size, figuring out which to commit to, of the several she said she liked. Sure, we were planning it, and I was planning for it to happen in Ireland, but within that, spontaneity was in order.

When we got to the hotel in Dun Laoghaire, we decided we’d end each night in the hotel pub, with a round or two to celebrate the day. Neither of us were particularly given to drinking or bar-culture. But we'd met in a bar—the Chicago Bear, near midway in Chicago—so one night, after a nice supper in town, we went out on the sparsely populated pub’s vacant patio. Without ceremony—I didn’t kneel, or anything—I asked Jackie to marry me. She said yes.

The engagement trip was perfect—and it’ll be a good story we’ll get to tell for the rest of our lives. Our engagement also means, interestingly enough, that I’m marrying my guru. I wasn’t prepared, that much is certain, for the strength with which that would later hit home.

Some time ago, I made a request of All-Things-Transcendent. It’s one of the few times I am absolutely sure that one of my thoughts had counted, not simply as mental noise, but as prayer. I’ve always been terrified of my ego, in a way that earlier chapters of my life have addressed through overuse of alcohol—not to mention all kinds of manipulative attempts to get my fragile ego’s needs met. Having become, lately, fed up with such constant focus on myself, I faced the statues of Buddha, Hanuman and Jesus on my puja table and made a request: I asked them to help me to cope with my Ego. My run-ins with my false-self began at 18, and now I'm 38, still freak out when it registers that I wear a mask with people. I asked my triad of enlightened guides to help me fully accept my own brokenness. It’s true, I didn’t want ego to mess up my own life, but still less did I want it negatively effecting Jackie’s.

The Gospel and the Dharma colluded with the universe to respond. It took a form I initially didn’t like. I started noticing that I was throwing the weight of my own selfishness around. All over the place. This could be as simple as needing to get past Jackie in the kitchen, and getting annoyed when she didn’t move. “Having a need, and expecting people to know about it without voicing it” is a classic move of my cranky false-self. Each time it happened, I noticed it. I’m gradually becoming more conscious of the need to speak gently. Another frequent stop was “I feel like I’m bearing all the responsibility for something, and I expect you to share it without talking to you about it.” We split the cost of things much more lately, and I've learned to ask for that in a way that minimizes pressure, but at first it was “I’ve been paying X alone for years, and I need help.” Never mind the fact that she pays a number of bills for the both of us too. My ego is pretty adept at ignoring evidence that unseats its entitlement. I was terrified, and it was appalling.

Even without considering Jackie: the voice that objects "She's not affirming me enough" is just a way of deflecting my attention and the blame for my own broken-heartedness, for the tensions of being formed by the logos. Maintaining that tension (in my own life) is my responsibility. I ran from it a bit too much at first. One day, though, I was washing my hands in the bathroom of a Chili’s—the restaurant where many of our relational insights occur, it seems— and it struck me that all of my recent clashes-with-self were the universe delivering on its promise. Before they can be taken from me, my deficiencies have to become as visible to me as they are to others.

When all of this clicked—why I’d been so confronted with myself, and what the universe was doing—I felt I owed Jackie an apology. One Saturday I sat her down—I was wearing the “serious face” way before she was awake enough to deal with it—and I said “I owe you an apology. I spend all of this time on my stupid blog, talking about how illusory 'self' is—I make all this noise about how the past and future don’t exist, that the present is all we have. But as soon as something comes along that I’m attached to, it’s 'I want X, and you never do Y.’ That’s not fair to you: because who am I? How constructive is my attachment to that desire? I’m so busy offloading my egotistical crap on to you, even as I'm not asking myself how I deal with ego and desire in the present moment. Well, I feel like a hypocrite, and I suck. And I’m sorry.”

Some might say, “Jesus, Josh, that’s a pretty heady way to pick apart an argument. Does conflict resolution always have to include such blatant nods to the Dharma?” My response is “Remember, I’m a big nerd. So, um, heck yeah it does.” Ms. Jackie, by the way, cultivates a less intellectual spirituality, but doesn’t hate what she knows to be my spiritual tendencies: much more than I do, she has the patience of Job.

We’ve talked a bit about our vows. We’ll most likely write our own. I haven’t figured out what I want to say yet, but I’ve told her I can at least promise her this: my ego will not run our marriage. The only “outside influence” I want in our relationship is the benevolent third-will that brought us together in the first place—that voice that isn’t mine or hers, but whose ideal for our relationship forms us both. I know I’ll promise to keep my ears open to what it’s trying to teach me.

All of life is a big experiment in what scientific researchers call “the expectancy effect.” What we’re looking for, says the expectancy effect, we generally find. Popular culture usually conflates hope with expectation, but hope is Egoless—the assumptions that rule our interactions are, all of them, eventually harmful— to the exact degree that they don’t square with reality. Expectation is what makes relationships hard, and scientific experiments biased.

I say this because, routinely, the way I look at Jackie is the way she appears. If I am looking at her without acknowledging that ego is coloring my vision, she seems to me to be full of desires and preferences that grate on the nerves for not squaring with mine. If I am looking at her in a way that’s mindful of the distortions of my false-self, the differences grate on me less.

There’s a third option, but I’ll wait to talk about that. For now, suffice to say that the expectancy effect is the way projection works: “My intention’s like glasses that make everybody look like me.”

I’d like to talk a bit about the ways I’ve been able to take responsibility for eschewing my own assumptions. At the outset, an admission: I’ve not had an earth-shattering, spiritual paradigm-shift—or an altered state of consciousness in prayer—for at least a decade. When I talk about growing awareness of spiritual realities, I’m talking fundamentally about processes of slow-reveal. I get pieces here and there. Sometimes they come together—and maybe I level up, but only slightly. The drama’s largely gone out of the spiritual life for me, and that’s ok: it just means that watching the face of God for an eye-twitch is about as interesting as watching the linoleum curl.

Here are some of the pieces that have been lately coming together. In the midst of the clashes I’ve had with ego lately, Ram Dass said something that struck me on a heart-level. He said “You don’t have to listen. You don’t have to try. You just have to be together, and it will all happen.” At the time I was so constantly being bombarded by anxious run-ins with my own selfishness that I clung to this like Titanic passengers do life-preservers. I did all the silly things, like go to the refrigerator and write it on the dry erase board. It was a paradigm that didn’t turn on my own, shoddy efforts, and I needed it desperately.

Jackie and I, on the day of our engagement

I’ve been actively wondering what living would look and feel like if something other than ego ran my life. Driving to work recently, I was listening to an audio book by a man named “Sadhguru.” From a very early age, altered states of consciousness and a variety of samadhi experiences simply began happening to him. He didn’t seek them, they just happened. He says of himself, in a way that manages not to sound egotistical, that he learned the spiritual life completely from experience—that he relies on no guru or particular religious philosophy. To an extent, though his categories are generally Eastern, I trust that he’s telling the truth, that he has learned his lessons from experience. He recounted a spiritual experience in which the boundaries of his self expanded to include the visible world. I was in my car when I heard it, on South Chicago’s 103rd street, near the end of my morning commute. As Sadhguru described his experience, I looked at the traffic, the street, its lights and the horizon, and I thought “What if they’re all me?” For just a second, they were. The message on my fridge had proven true, if only for a moment. “Remember your heart surrounds all universes. You are never less than vast." I had had a brief experience of peace, of what total non-opposition to the world would feel like. Then the car in front of me stopped fast and I snapped back into normal consciousness. I’ve tried to access that space again, and the trying gets in the way of reuniting with it. Sadhguru’s “altered states of consciousness” happened without his working for them. And I’ve long since learned I can’t manipulate providence. As that insight sinks in, if my “self” is becoming larger and larger, I’m trying less and less to know that its happening or cling to the journey’s insights.

There are times, when I am at my most spiritually attuned, that I’ve looked at Jackie, and haven’t see anyone. Sure, her consciousness is present, but her body, and the set of desires that make up her “false self” are nowhere to be found. Surely she’s present to my eyes, but I’m present to her with something other than my eyes. At those times, she is, at most, a mirror of my own selfishness. That is, she’s only solid or permanent to the degree that I’m bouncing my unreconciled desires and drives off of her. Like any insight, or like unfamiliar saviors breaking bread after talking on the road, those insights disappear as soon as they’re beheld. Only if I were more consistently egoless could I sustain that mode of seeing things.

But perhaps even egoless existence could not sustain spiritual awareness. Perhaps we’re all vehicles of higher forces like the Holy Spirit, like the Gospel and the Dharma and whatever spiritual powers of which Ram decides you’d be a useful conduit. If I am blessed with multiple lifetimes, it may take that long for me to be as truly detached from spiritual realities as I claim to be from material ones. Then, perhaps, spiritual insights will be like the clouds—the ones I see out my window even now, as I write—they’ll come and go, like everything else, and I’ll let them.

With regard to my life with Jackie, there’s one last stop to make: one last insight, and it belongs to Maharaj-ji. It came to me, as so many of his insights do, through Ram Dass. Ram Dass was complaining to Maharaj-ji about the political state of the world—but I’m getting ahead of myself—for a moment, let’s check back in with Jackie.

One day, Jackie and I had the air-mattress set up in the living room (in the summer, our in-window air conditioner is only effective enough to cool the front room. Our bedroom is a sweaty place to sleep indeed.) I woke up briefly, and looked at Jackie, smoking her e-cig and playing video games on the couch. Then Maharaja-ji’s advice to Ram Dass—responding to comments about the world’s imperfections—they were the loudest thoughts ringing in my ears “Can’t you see?” Maharaja-ji asked, “Can’t you see that it’s all perfect?”

I looked at the couch, and in a brief moment—in my mind’s eye—I saw a sequence of images: first, I saw Jackie and I sitting on the couch. She was just sitting on her typical end of the couch, doing her thing. I was sitting at mine, but inside of me I could see my whole system of egotism and desire trying to reach out for her, depriving both of us of peace. I was busy with inner-grasping Second, I saw us both—still sitting on the couch. But this time my ego and desires were calm. Our images appeared like grey clouds, and each cloud had a locus of consciousness inside it.

I knew, of course, not to get hung up on the images. Even Isaiah, seeing heavenly visions of the temple, knew them to be temporary. Hammering home the way imagery was facsimile at best, he said “this was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of God.” Feelings, in my case, were better indicators: the emotional tone of the first image had been anxious and conflicted. The second image felt much different. It was totally even, totally peaceful. Jackie and I were still ourselves, each of us, but we were unified—no more serene for being together, no less serene for being separate points of consciousness.

As I drifted back off to sleep, I heard Maharaja-ji in my head again: “Can’t you see? Can’t you see it’s all perfect?” The words flashed through my mind, and the experience was over: just a little taste of something larger, that’s all the cosmos wanted me to have.

I awoke, the next morning, and egoic consciousness had reasserted itself. We two were back to our old selves, bumping into each other in our tiny kitchen, slowly going nuts with claustrophobia. But perhaps I’d just fallen back into my old habits of projecting my self onto other, unsuspecting points of consciousness. I don’t know.

And ultimately it doesn’t matter. We’re engaged.  When Jackie responded to my question, a small vial of her father's cremains hung around her neck.  We were engaged in the country of our ancestors--they were silently present with the trip's every lifted glass.  We’ll have a small wedding when we can afford it. We just have to be together, and all that needs to happen—despite the roadblocks of my egotism—will happen. We’ve got forever, after all. The hope that it gives me is full of presence and clarity and peace. It’s true, there is no past. And in the end, anyway, always is swallowed by now.