I have been wandering of late. I’m wandering through my own heart and mind, juxtaposing my actions and words with my thoughts and experiences. I have been wondering of late. I’m wondering what is right, and I’m trying to teach myself what action to take in the very moment it is necessary to act. I’m trying to learn and trying to do at the same time, to hop on one foot while carving a circle in the air with my left pinky, or some such impossible feat.
It sounds like a lot. It seems like I have my heart and hands full. But I don’t know whether they really are that full.
There’s a lot of pain in this life, and mine is much less than a billionth of what’s out there. Almost all the world’s turmoil has nothing to do with my petty personal complaints. But I think a lot of it comes from personal complaint, singular. It is ego, and ego is no small ingredient in the cruelty we see so much of, from police brutality to military invasion.
Mayhaps I should clarify what I mean by ego. The word has positive and negative associations, and it serves as a beast of burden for many an academic paper.
It seems so hard to understand right now what is moral in this Universe. Are we to view ourselves as individuals, which seems to drop us in the realm of lonely particulars (or roaming particles), who operate best when acting in their own self-interest? Or should we instead dissolve that particularity in our individual minds, in order to sign up for a notion of diffuse humanity and nebulous sameness?
I’ve been feeling intensely my own petty pains lately, both physical and emotional. My jaw aches, and the oral splint I’m wearing has become flat from grinding. I’m angry a lot, or I feel hurt emotionally. I have been wanting to avenge wounds, and not just the ones inflicted on me.
I think it was Jung or maybe it was Freud or Horney or Maslow or somebody else who claimed ego is a positive development in persons, a necessary and healthy structure, the result of met needs and normal growth. When we use the word in conversation we generally throw it in the trash bin on moral grounds, damning it distastefully with a scrap of chalk we picked up off the ground beside the foot of the neighbor we were grousing to.
Yesterday I read a short excerpt from David Whyte’s book, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. I love the idea of his book. I love his attempt to unearth unconscious meanings through ordinary language. This essay was on “hiding”. (By the way, he doesn’t have an entry in his book for ego. I guess that word has too big a head for his compendium, especially when it’s so-to-speak, hiding its inferiority complex in the italic formatting I applied to it here…so unlike humble “hiding” who questions its meaning inside a pair of apostrophes…appearing to our eyes, apocryphal [of doubtful authenticity], a word which itself finds its source in the Greek apokryphos [hidden; obscure, hard to understand]. And there’s that word hidden, hiding in plain sight in the meaning of apocryphal.)
Whyte says,
Hiding is a bid for independence, from others, from mistaken ideas we have about our selves, from an oppressive and mistaken wish to keep us completely safe, completely ministered to, and therefore completely managed.
I was here struck here by the contraindications.
(And just as I note here my use of the medical word contraindication to examine Whyte’s statement, I also know it’s because I’m seeing him as a doctor from whom I can get help for a spiritual ailment.)
At first, I found this part confused. Isn’t hiding a solitary act? We choose a place for complete safety which can’t be found. In order to be safe. How is it a bid for independence from a wish to keep us safe? We seek hiding for safety. In independence we are choosing solitude. In solitude, safety. You see, hiding is, for me, essentially a place of cover. Maybe even a place of fear.
Whyte goes on, seeming from my perspective to grab the axis of his idea and twirl it the other way.
Hiding is creative, necessary and beautifully subversive of outside interference and control. Hiding leaves life to itself, to become more of itself. Hiding is the radical independence necessary for our emergence into the light of a proper human future.
He talks about the “dissected soul” in a world awash with “too easily articulated ideas that oppress our sense of self and our sense of others”.
He also says this, which I loved:
What is real is almost always to begin with, hidden, and does not want to be understood by the part of our mind that mistakenly thinks it knows what is happening. What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence.
His meditation opens with “Hiding is a way of staying alive.” We are hiding from ourselves and from others. We are hiding from control while flying through a void at a pace that is itself out of control.
Well, back to my grasp of ‘ego’. I’m tempted to wax deep, and talk about the seat of the soul. Instead I’ll think about the hidden nature of ego, or the purpose of it, or how pride can be a good thing. I sometimes view ego and pride not exactly as one and the same, but as swirling planets coexistent in an ambiguous cosmos where self-interest makes up the aether. I know ego can be a good thing. I knew there exists a form of pride that is, for lack of a better term, good. What I did not know, is exactly how fine the line is between the self-interest and other-interest. The malignancy of hate and malice is borne by those harboring those feelings or attitudes. I must accept myself as both discrete and as a part of a whole. Particle and wave. Others are watching. I am watching. Life is watching.
What I now see is that the hidden precious thing is pain. Seeds and embryos are pain, breaking their own casing to carve out a space, to assert their growth deeper into the world, to come into the light. To become exposed while keeping their endosperm protected, and their potential under wraps. The hidden thing–the thing which we become–may only process and proceed when we give our hidden, inmost self its due respect. Protection of self. Protection, too, of the hidden in others. Precious suggests a requirement of honor.
The following is the full meditation on ‘Hiding’, from Whyte’s book:
Hiding is a way of staying alive. Hiding is a way of holding ourselves until we are ready to come into the light. Even hiding the truth from ourselves can be a way to come to what we need in our necessary time.
Hiding is one of the brilliant and virtuoso practices of almost every part of the natural world: the protective quiet of an icy northern landscape, the held bud of a future summer rose, the snow bound internal pulse of the hibernating bear.
Hiding is underestimated. We are hidden by life in our mother’s womb until we grow and ready ourselves for our first appearance in the lighted world; to appear too early in that world is to find ourselves with the immediate necessity for outside intensive care.
Hiding done properly is the internal faithful promise for a proper future emergence, as embryos, as children or even as emerging adults in retreat from the names that have caught us and imprisoned us, often in ways where we have been too easily seen and too easily named.
We live in a time of the dissected soul, the immediate disclosure; our thoughts, imaginings and longings exposed to the light too much, too early and too often, our best qualities squeezed too soon into a world already awash with too easily articulated ideas that oppress our sense of self and our sense of others.
What is real is almost always to begin with, hidden, and does not want to be understood by the part of our mind that mistakenly thinks it knows what is happening. What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence.
Hiding is an act of freedom from the misunderstanding of others, especially in the enclosing world of oppressive secret government and private entities, attempting to name us, to anticipate us, to leave us with no place to hide and grow in ways unmanaged by a creeping necessity for absolute naming, absolute tracking and absolute control.
Hiding is a bid for independence, from others, from mistaken ideas we have about our selves, from an oppressive and mistaken wish to keep us completely safe, completely ministered to, and therefore completely managed.
Hiding is creative, necessary and beautifully subversive of outside interference and control. Hiding leaves life to itself, to become more of itself. Hiding is the radical independence necessary for our emergence into the light of a proper human future.
