Unconscious Consciousness

Egolessness: Unconscious Consciousness?

by Peter Messerschmidt

The self-development field is a fascinating place, and one filled with fascinating individuals.

As lifetime students of the human condition, we have always been rather intrigued by the highly diverse paths people take in pursuit of their personal journeys towards enlightenment, self-realization or whatever else it is they seek, which brings us to this thing called ‘ego.’

 
Unconsciousness Consciousness and Ego

Ego is perhaps the singlemost over-analyzed, over-discussed, and over-used concept in the so-called New Age and Consciousness business. Look around, and you’ll see and hear phrases like “transcend the ego” and “kill the ego” plastered all over the place. If someone does something others don’t like, at least one or two people in the crowd will pipe up and claim “Oh, well, they are in their ego.” This is typically delivered with all the wisdom and clarity of someone saying, “You should go see a doctor!” after you’ve sneezed twice.

That’s all fine and dandy, but there is a bit of a problem here. Namely, that we seem to have reached a place where ego has become this ‘universal bad guy’ commonly blamed for all manner of unconscious and self-involved behavior without a second thought. Or, for that matter, without the speaker possessing any deeper understanding of what ego actually is and does.

The thing about ego is that it is no more good or bad than money. Let’s examine that analogy for a moment. Self-professed spiritual and high vibration people spend a lot of time talking about how money is “the root of all evil.” Many try to cleanse themselves of all things material, but what is money really?

Money is just a convenient common base for facilitating exchange. Money actually makes it easy for us to exchange things by offering us a temporary store of value that enables exchange and trade. Money allows us to not be concerned with whether the person with whom we want to trade for a bag of potatoes actually needs their house painted that week. Living without money tends to make life super inconvenient. Even those few who claim to live money-less lives are engaged in a form of subtle self-deception, since 99% of them would actually not be able to survive absent their interaction with a world that does use money. It’s what people do with money that can become a problem.