Ego and Surrender – Retreat/Workshop – Part 3 of 4 – Ron

Hi there. My name is Ron. I am an alcoholic. so uh my topic is ego and i thought i'd maybe split that into like three little sections i thought maybe i'd talk about the origins of the term ego which goes back to sigmund freud a little over 100 years ago and i though maybe i would talk a little bit about Harry Thiebaud and the Thiebault Papers, which is another discussion about ego. That happened let's say 50 or 60 years ago. And then maybe just talk about today, you know, what is it that I'm supposed to do with ego? Am I supposed to kill it, smash it, or you know what am I supposed to do it? So the origins of the term ego go back to Sigmund Freud. He had a theory about the human psyche, that's spelled P-S-Y-C-H-E, and we're all supposed to have a psychic change here in Alcoholics Anonymous. So the psyche is my thought life, it's my consciousness, it' my thinking, it''s everything that goes on in my mind, not my brain but my mind. And so, Freud's theory was that when we are born, we are born with an element of the psyche that is called the id, I-D. That's little i, little d. And that element of the psyche has to do with pleasure. And that's quite a functional need that we have because we find suckling at our mother's breast pleasurable. This is something we need to do instinctually. We need to be fed to grow. The id knows nothing about reality, about the real life. The id is about gratification. The id says, I want to feel good right now. This actually serves us well as an infant because when we are born, we really don't have a self. We don't think of ourselves as something individual separate from our mother. Actually that doesn't happen for several days sometimes. We think we're part of mom. So, this instinctual thing, this id, is what we're born with and that's the element of our psyche that we grow with to begin with. So the id is all about feed me right now, change my diapers right now. Do whatever it is right now! The id has no concept about what is needed in real life, it just wants what it wants. It has no ability to accept frustration. So gratification has to be right now. There's no such thing as delay of gratification, forget that, I need it now. And the other thing that's an element of this id is that it needs everything done in a hurry or everything is done in hurry. So if you've seen two-year-old kids going to grandma's house in a minivan with a group of other kids that are older, and everybody gets to grandma house, sliding door opens and it's the two year olds that are out that door like a bolt wanting to get hugs from grandma. Wanting to get whatever that is. This id, part of our psyche, cannot stay involved with anything for any amount of time. It gratifies itself here and then it moves on to something else and then it moves onto something else. So if you see two year olds, you give them this fabulous $25 toy that is just the greatest thing in the world and they have a blast with it for three minutes and then it's no good and they're off to something else. So it's important to know about this element of our psyche because all of us still have it. This didn't go anywhere. So according to Freud's concept, as we grow somewhere between zero and three years, somewhere in there, we start to realize that sometimes it's better if we delay gratification just a little bit sometimes if we learn to put stuff off our needs off just a Little Bit we'll actually get more of what we want so as that starts developing that actually is what Freud called the ego function ego spelled with a small e so ego is kind of a it's a moderator of the id ego according to Freud's concept is kindof dispassionate evaluative it just kindof looks at the world and says no, we can't do that right now let's put that off a little bit later on so according to Floyd's concept we grow a little farther sometime between the ages of 3 and 5 we start internalizing what mom and dad has taught us about, no you can't do that right now that's not good they start teaching us about right and wrong we start externalizing a concept which becomes our conscience conscience is what would God have us do so we start developing that and the conscience is saying be like God all the time. Do the absolute right thing all the time and sometimes we can't do that. Sometimes we find ourselves in a situation where we've got to do right over here, we've gotta do right over here but you can't do both. So according to Freud's concept ego Ego becomes kind of like a dispassionate moderator of that. So ego is in between this conscience, which is called superego, and the id. And according to Freud, this small e-ego is the thing that keeps us on a balance and lets us function in human experience saying, you know what? I can't be always gimme, gimme and I can not always be God. How do I just do this now? And according to Freud as we develop, we develop a mature adult ego. I wouldn't really know about that, I've never had one. So these are the three aspects of this. And the id is where King Baby, the concept of King Baby came from. So if you've seen one of the flyers that we have around about King Baby that's actually a Freudian concept. So King or Queen Baby is the monarch, the absolute monarch of their entire realm and no one can argue with a monarch. So a lot happened between 1900 and 1910 when Freud developed all of this and later on in the 50s and 60s. And as Harry Thiebaud tells us, Harry ThIEBAUD was a psychiatrist that worked with Alcoholics Anonymous at a very early age. He was one of the psychiatrists that evaluated the first 100 sober alcoholics. He was quite familiar with us as a group. And Harry Thiebaud said all of those concepts that Freud came up with are great, but by 1950 or 1960, the usage of the term ego had evolved. Nobody was talking about the id or the superego anymore. They were just talking about ego. and so the practice became that they started spelling the word ego with a capital E to mean all of those three things together and when capital E ego is used, it's used to talk about us at the personality level which is a little bit different than the level of the psyche of what Freud was talking about I developed my personality based on all the experiences that I had in my life So I developed a personality, call it a character, which is one of the words that we use in Alcoholics Anonymous. I developed this myself in experience with everything that was going on. So the popular use of the word ego and the way we really use it here in AA is the capital E ego, meaning personality level. It's part of how I function. So, Thiebaud looked at all of us in Alcoholics Anonymous and he said, in the process of surrender, which is what we need, the alcoholic necessarily must undergo a surrender which involves deflating the ego. So, at some level what's happened is if I ever had an adult, mature 21 year old ego, which I don't think I did, but at some point when I made the choice to drink as I did and I started developing this thought life, this destructive alcoholic thought life Wendy was talking about. One drink at a time, one think at a time, I developed a character. And this character was built on an immature ego. Literally the ego of a three-year-old. So when Harry Thiebaud evaluated all of us back in the day, he said that we were still, those of us who were, he was talking about alcoholics sober for a couple of years that had sobriety, that were functional. He said that we were still childish, emotionally sensitive, and grandiose. He's describing a three-year-old ego. So one drink at a time, one think at a time, I built a character and a thought life that functions at the level of a three year and you can't tell me that at the level of consciousness because I'll give you 101 reasons why it's not true but if you look at my track record if you looked at what I do if you looking at me giving the finger to somebody on the freeway because they cut me off and they don't belong on my freeway which is the 405 between the valley and west Los Angeles my free way this is grandiose I mean I act like this I think like this. Sometimes I'm able to control myself, but I still have the thoughts. My thought life is where I live. So I built this character. And these are some of the aspects of this ego and this character that I built. The first is defiance. and I have the ability to thumb my nose at reality and move on and live without a concern. And I developed this because I needed to be able to do this, to beable to drink or use like I drank because I knew that I was destroying myself. I knew it was hurting myself. I knew I was causing damage but I couldn't look at it. So I had to build a thought life that says, I'm not hurting myself. I'm nicht doing anything wrong. And this is where this defiant kind of thought life creation happens. Problem is, after I get sober, I've built this character and it's still acting out the same way. And this defiance causes me all kinds of pain in my interrelationships with others. So, grandiosity is an idea at a subconscious level that somehow I'm entitled to things because my name is Ron. This is the monarch within King Baby and this is an egoic function. So, grandiosity isn't something that I think or talk about from a conscious level. It's something that's going on below the level of consciousness. Separation is a function of the ego. Separation means I'm absolutely unique by myself. I can be better than you are, or I can do a lot worse than you are. It doesn't matter as long as I'm unique and different and separate. Ego's function is not, ego does not want me to be one of many, a worker among, worker or friend among friends. Ego can't stand that. Ego has to be unique. So I'm the one in ego that walks into an AA meeting with 100 people and AA will work for those other 99 people but not for me. Shame and guilt are two aspects of ego. And they're the biggest levers that ego has to keep me wrapped up in ego. Now, shame and guilt are not given to me by God. These are things that are created from the egoic mind function. Guilt is a feeling of remorse or feeling bad about something that I have done. So in my drinking days, if I was a bank robber or stole from the office or something like that, I have a sense of guilt because I did something wrong and I need to make amends to make that right. Shame is different in that it is a feeling bad or a feeling of remorse simply because of the nature of who I am. Maybe this came about from mommy and daddy. I don't think any of us had moms and dads that loved us unconditionally. My parents loved me, but their love quite often was conditional. Get a good report card and we'll like you. Go to bed tonight, go to sleep, and do what you're supposed to do and we will love you. And I internalize this as everybody, civilians, alcoholics alike. But this is how I develop the sense of shame. In me, the alcoholic, but I believe it's a lot more extreme than it is, let's say, in a civilian. The last aspect is avoidance of reality, the avoidance of the now. Ego does not want me to be here in this moment right now. It cannot allow that. If I am right here, present, Right now, in the now moment, by definition, I am with God. God exists in the Now Moment. My portal to the experience of God is right here, right now, in this Now Moment? Ego does not know about God because to know God is the death of ego. but ego does know that it has to keep me out of the now moment so ego takes me to my past and i find myself even you know 15 years almost into a spiritual message and spiritual practice my mind will take me out all the time it'll it'll bring up issues of fear it'll bring up anything keep me out of the now moment i'll be trying to do a paper at work i'm on the computer and i'm doing all this stuff and my mind will take off and all of a sudden i'm on some some ride someplace in an amusement park and i don't know what happened and 20 minutes later i wake up and it's like what have i been doing all this time. This is ego. This is ego validating itself. One other little note that might help explain how this all functions, and I'll bring Freud back into this. Freud had a picture of this whole thing about ego and superego and so forth as an iceberg. If you can imagine an iceberg, the tip of the iceberg is maybe 5 or 10 percent of the total mass of that chunk of ice. So the tip of the iceberg, according to Freud, was conscious thought, the interaction right now that we're having. Just below the level of surface, under the water where you can't see the iceberg. But just below the surface level is what Freud called the pre-conscious. Just right below the levels of surface. And he said that's where the superego and the ego were. And they took up the level from, let's say, sea level down to the middle of the iceberg underwater. Down below in the far bottom reaches of that iceberg is where id exists. The gimme gimme right now, I want, I Want, I WANT. And all of those things are functioning at the same time. I can be here in conscious thought and be interrelating and interacting with you, and sometimes not aware that really what's going on, my motivation, where I'm coming from, is coming from this lower level id or this egoic idea of what I need. I'm not even aware of it, but it's operating. It's telling me what to do in the moment that I'm in. So what the hell do you do with all of this? I mean, what good is all this information? What practical use is it? And this is where I need to have an awareness. I need to know what this is because I'm not going to do the step work of Alcoholics Anonymous unless I know what's in it for me. I don't know about anybody else here, but I am not somebody that just does things because they're virtuous and nice. I got here on the basis of a circumstantial thought life and a circumstantional character. So I need to have an awareness of what's going on. I need to have the motivation to do the work that's called on. Because who the hell really wants to do complete defeat and personal powerlessness, which we'll talk about a little bit later on. Ego has a function of wanting to take those aspects of me, the aspects of myself that I want to get rid of, the shame, the guilt, all these things that I dislike about myself. Ego says that I can take all of this stuff and project it out onto the world out there and get rid of it. Evo tells me this is what I can do, and the way that that looks is, you know, if I step on the bathroom scale and I'm 20 pounds over where I should be, Ego will show me a world of people that need to lose 40 pounds. And I'll see them everywhere, and I'll think, isn't this remarkable? All these people. Boy, I may be bad, but I'm not as bad as that one over there. That may be a funny example, but all of these other aspects, the shame that I have and so forth. I see a world that's guilty that's shameful that's attacking and I'm projecting this out there myself. The problem is I grew up in a world where I was told that everything out there causes me to feel the way I feel. I am a victim of the world it happens out there and I feel the same way the way that I do but it's not true in fact, it's exactly the opposite Sermon on the Mount tells me that what goes on in the world is actually an outpicturing of my own consciousness the whole world out there is a function of my thinking the world out there has no character of its own whatsoever it only has the character that I give it through my thought, which is why you can have twins that look exactly the same with the same DNA that go through the same experience and see it two completely different ways. So if I'm living from a mind function of ego and I'm projecting all of my shame and all of My guilt and all Of My alcoholism and all this stuff out there onto the world to get rid of it, what kind of a world am I living in? And it's no wonder I couldn't live in the world that I lived in without drinking alcohol or doing drugs or whatever it was. So Carl Jung, who actually is in the lineage of Alcoholics Anonymous, called this aspect of us that we were trying to get rid of, this egoic aspect of us, that we try to get rid of... he referred to that as the shadow. part of us. It's like the shadow that's behind us that we're trying to get rid of, but we can't get ridof it. And Jung said that the shadow is part of the unconscious mind consisting of repressed weaknesses, shortcomings, and instincts. He says everyone carries a shadow and the less that it is embodied within us, the blacker and denser it is. Which is to say, the more I put it out there, the worse it gets. The solution is to bring it within, to process it. This is what steps four, five, six and seven, eight and nine are all about. I do an inventory, I give away my defects of character, I look at my shortcomings, I make amends. This is bringing all this stuff within, giving it to God and processing it up and out. It's not getting rid of it through this egoic function. Jung said this aspect of us is instinctual and irrational. Jung says we project our personal inferiorities and perceived moral deficiencies onto others. These projections insulate and cripple us by forming an even thicker fog of illusion between the ego and the real world. So, I need to see this. I need to understand this. I need to see myself. I need to have somebody hold a mirror up to me and show me how I act in the real world because my mind is not going to show this to me. When I really start understanding how this function works and why I live in such a painful maladjusted world, I start looking in the mirror, and that's when I start looking for a power greater than myself. And that's when I started getting some idea about the way I'm really supposed to act, what I'm empowered by something greater than myself, I can see this stuff. And I have an awareness, God, I'm sitting here at this computer and my mind is going someplace, will you help me concentrate? Will you just help me affirm right here right now I really am taken care of. All of my needs are met. I really am okay. This fear that I'm feeling is absolutely ridiculous. God help me be with you while I do this silly report and get it done. And in that moment, in that empowerment, I can sit there and finish what I'm doing. Thank you for letting me share. Thank you. So questions and answers? I understand, this is a question, I understand that there are many bad layers of ego. Does my ego ever do any good? Do I have good layers of eco? A psychiatrist will probably tell you that you do. And I happen to be in that, I'm not a psychiatrist, but I happen TO BE IN THE FIELD OF PSYCHOLOGY. So I look at it this way, and this is just my own answer. Any separation from God is not empowerment. So I'm NOT going to even get into the game of what's good or bad. I'm going to let the power of God flow through me and let God decide that. But the only way that I possibly could be trying to figure out what's good ego and bad ego is to be an ego in the first place. God doesn't have that discussion with me. God doesn'T know anything about ego. God just knows about love. So it's not that I want to get into an argument with anybody, it's just I'm not going to go there, that's all. um is my ego a separate entity as in duality because when my ego jumps up to defend itself i see it isn't defending me or is it it is it a separate identity it's a separate act it's an aspect of of my consciousness or an aspect of my psyche. It's an aspect of me. I created it. Nobody else created ego. I created it. Part of the function of ego for me is that I brought ego in to be my defender against something. I don't know. I feel that I'm being attacked. This is all part of alcoholism and ego and I need defense. Is it a separate entity? it's an aspect of me part of my function here part of the reason why I'm here on earth in this experience is to grow in the image and likeness of God for me a major part of that growth is understanding ego so that I'm not living from a place of separation so that I'm living from the energy of oneness with God I'm in the energy of God I may not be talking to God every minute every single day but I'm thinking about God I'm asking a power what should I do from that energy I don't need to figure out ego when you shine the light of God on ego ego is absorbed by the light of spirit So I don't have to figure out ego. I just need to be aware of its function so that I can see it when it's happening and I can be treated. If God created us in his image, then is ego not part of that image? I can only answer that in terms of myself. I don' t think it is. I think that ego was created by me. And it may be a learning device. Pain is the touchstone of spiritual progress. That's one of the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous. And ego creates pain. If I am in ego, if I'm operating from the level of ego, it is an absolute that I will be in anxiety and in fear because they go hand in hand with ego. Shame and guilt is another thing that I automatically have if I am in ego. I've bought into it. So, I need to have an awareness. And the only way that I can have an awareness is being empowered by God. Does awareness of ego ever help diminish it? Absolutely. Well, no. I'll take that back. Awareness helps me make a decision. Let's put it that way. If I have an awareness of ego, I have a window of opportunity. And I'm being perfectly honest, sometimes I have an awareness of what I'm doing and I go ahead and do it anyways. Yeah, slash those tires. That'll really fix this situation. Or for me, tonight, it's more like, yeah, have another piece of cake. When I didn't really need another piece of cake, ooh. So, awareness of ego is what's needed so that I can make a decision. Empowered by God, that takes away that egoic function. How does ego as divider fit into this conception? Ego is about separation, which is a divider. It's about division. so ego separates me from my fellows my sisters, my brothers ego would have me be perfectly happy isolating myself in a room using crystal meth or using alcohol or whatever this is ego, this is my uniqueness ego is about division, separation whatever word you want to use it's about me being something different than the true essence of what I am. Who I really am is spirit. I am spirit having a human experience. I have a body. I have an experience. I have relationship. I have car. None of those things are who I am, so if I'm separating myself from the truth of who I really are, then that's where the dysfunction comes in. Am I doing okay on time? I don't know. There's two more questions, so... Ego equals personality level. What do you mean by level? Do you mean maturity or level 1 through 10 or what? Okay. I developed Freud was talking about the psyche as kind of like a universal thing that I'm born with I was born with the psyche with consciousness I have consciousness it's an aspect of me the personality level ego is something that I created through my experiences in life, just as I developed alcoholism. The personality level of me is a function of the good things and the bad things and how I interpreted them and how i perceived them and how i reacted to them. So again you can have two twins, same DNA, same parents and they react to life out there in a completely different way and as they grow up they have completely different personalities. So the ego that, with a big E, is in reference to the personality that I've developed as a function of living here. It also has to do with the character that I built. But this is something that I take in total to God and say, God, help me with my defects and my shortcomings to grow in the image and likeness of you. difference between brain and mind okay brain is is a bodily organ it weighs nine or ten pounds something like that you can do an autopsy on a brain once we die you cannot autopsy a mind without getting into religion or too deep I think that we all are part of consciousness I think we're all part of one divine mind Sermon on the Mount talks about that that's not really so much a discussion of ego but we all are part of this one, it's like we're all partof the ocean but there's individual waves on the ocean that have an individual character, but they're still part of the ocean. So I am part of consciousness. I have a mind. I'm an individualization of that. But that's something completely different from the brain. The brain is powered by the mind. The grain is simply a thought pump. Thank you. Thanks for listening.