C: Ego Structures & Holes

Different Types of Ego Structures

There are two main types of ego structure, each of which requires a different approach to healing and reintegration:

1. Protective Structures: are not created to protect the distressed exiled parts of our being, they are usually created to protect us from the distressed exiled parts of our being. They protect the ego-self from becoming overwhelmed by stopping us from getting too close to distressed exiled parts. The protection comes in two forms:

• Locking it away: Enclosing, suppressing and repressing the exiled part. Note: Repressing structures are also used to repress unwanted personal qualities and primal impulses (both of which are explained in the book).
  Forgetting about it: Guarding parts are programmed to distract or divert our conscious attention, often by triggering a reactive or compulsive behaviour (i.e. an addiction). Sometimes two or more guarding structures are created to protect one exiled part, and they may have very different strategies for keeping us away. If their strategies conflict, they can psychologically pull us in different directions. This forces each “side” to take more extreme measures, which can destabilise our entire psyche and lead to extreme behaviours such as alcoholism, drug addiction, violence and abuse.
  Origin: Protective structures are created out of our fear of becoming emotionally overwhelmed.
• False Beliefs: Protective structures are built on the false belief that we cannot cope with feeling the distress of the exiled part, so a protective part is programmed to (falsely) believe that the exiled part is a threat. While this may have been true at the time of the original trauma (when we were a young child), it is almost certainly not true now. The protective structure was created and programmed at the time of the original trauma, so it is made from very young consciousness which almost certainly believes that we are still a young child who is unable to cope.
• Healing: A protective structure won’t relax or dissolve until the perceived threat is gone, i.e. until the exiled part has been healed and reintegrated. But the protective structure probably won’t let us near the exiled part until we reassure it that we are a loving, caring and capable adult with good intentions.

2. Coping Structures: are programmed to take on the functionality of undeveloped personal qualities that were not transposed from the soul’s essential qualities. They help us to function in the world without our authentic personal qualities.

• Origin: Coping structures are created out of a perceived deficiency – to replace a missing or undeveloped quality.
• False Belief: Coping structures are built on the false belief that we have lost a part of our soul essence (“soul loss”), but actually we have just lost awareness of it. When we lose awareness of an essential quality, it stops unfolding in our personality, so we create an ego structure around the “hole” in our being and program it to take on the functionality of the “lost” part.
• Healing: When we stop defending against feeling a hole, and actually allow ourselves to feel it fully, we discover that it doesn’t feel deficient or empty at all – it feels like spaciousness or pure potential, which is not unpleasant at all. When we allow this spaciousness to be (i.e. accept its existence and feel it without any resistance), we re-discover the “missing” essential quality and realise that it has been there all along. This reactivates the process that transposes the essential quality into a usable personal quality, so the “hole” fills up with the authentic personal quality.

Holes

We create all sorts of reasons to explain the inner pain, anxiety, anger, depression and discontent we feel about these “holes” in our being. For example, we may believe that we are anxious about a job interview or depressed about a relationship breakup, but that’s rarely the whole truth. We project the cause of our inherent inner suffering out onto an external event because our ego needs an excuse for its negative feelings.

Blaming our suffering on an external “cause” absolves the ego of any responsibility and diverts our attention away from the real underlying cause. So most of our suffering isn’t actually caused by external events, they just trigger the deeply repressed emotions that we already have about the “lost” parts of our being and our “lost” connection to Self.

We attempt to avoid feeling our pain and discontent by:

• Doing: overeating, alcohol, tobacco, drugs, sex, TV, internet, video games, exercise, work, etc.
• Objects: fashion, cosmetics, jewellery, money, gadgets, houses, cars, partners, babies, pets, etc.

We believe we are trying to solve an external problem, so we think these external solutions will work. But the real source of our discontent is internal, so only an internal solution will work. The real source of our dissatisfaction is our lack of wholeness – we are full of “holes”, so we don’t feel whole. The only way we can find lasting fulfilment is to fully feel our holes and allow the “missing” qualities to manifest. This cannot happen while we keep “doing” things to avoid feeling our holes or keep trying to fill them with “objects”.

When we experience the loss or separation of a loved one, not all of our sadness or grief is because we miss them. The relationship helped to fill a “hole” in our soul and masked the pain of our “lost” essence. Now that they are gone, the relationship can no longer fill our hole or mask our pain, so we feel our inherent pain, sadness and grief. The same thing occurs, to a lesser extent, with the loss of objects. As previously mentioned the only way to effectively “fill” a hole is to feel it as fully as we can, without any resistance, i.e. fully surrender to our pain, sadness or grief.

Another Type of Hole

The self can move around our field of consciousness (which extends beyond the physical body) at will. When it moves out of our body we enter into a state of trance. The self is not present, so we feel absent, detached, dissociated, spaced-out, sleepy or dreamy. We can use this as a subconscious defence mechanism to avoid feeling psychological pain or distress.

The same process occurs, but much faster, when we are startled or shocked. Our self “jumps” out of our body (to protect us from the peak intensity of the anticipated trauma) and immediately back in again. When a psychological trauma is accompanied by a sudden shock, the piece of traumatised consciousness is not only frozen, it can also be ejected from the body as the self “jumps” out. The self immediately returns to the body, but the traumatised piece of consciousness can get left behind – floating in our aura, just outside of our body – the ultimate place of exile. The ejected exiled part leaves a noticeable hole in our psyche (mental, emotional and/or energy bodies), so the ego’s standard coping mechanism comes into play. The hole is encased in an ego structure that is programmed to take on the functionality of the lost part.

Ejected exiled parts are responsible for some of the “voices” that some people hear. These free-floating exiles can be healed and reintegrated in one of two ways:

• If we can sense the ejected part in our aura, we can move our awareness to its location and consciously merge with it. The intimate connection that we establish between our soul’s presence and the ejected exiled part heals the wounded relationship and allows the ejected exile part to return and fill the hole in our psyche.
• If we can sense the hole, we can move our awareness to its location and consciously merge with it. The intimate connection between our soul’s awareness and the hole heals the wounded relationship and allows the ejected exiled part to return and fill the hole in our psyche.

Freedom from the Ego

Thought-forms are typically short-lived; without concentrated effort and energy to sustain them they quickly dissolve. The same applies to our ego (which is just a very elaborate thought-form); without energy, effort and constant reinforcement it will gradually dissolve. However, we (falsely) believe that we are our ego, so we will do everything we can to maintain it and prevent it from dissolving.

When external events conflict with or invalidate an aspect of our inner model of reality, our psychological structures weaken because the foundations they are built upon (our false or distorted core beliefs) are thrown into doubt. We fear that our sense of self may collapse, so we have to strengthen our position by defending against the perceived attack. We zealously defend our position as if we were defending our life, because subconsciously we believe that we are. The ego, which started out as a safe place to protect us from the distress, has been defended and reinforced so many times that it has become a fortress. But it is a fortress that we cannot leave, so it is actually more like a prison.

The false/ego-self cannot permanently leave its fortress/prison because it is an inherent part of the ego super-structure. The ego is the prisoner and the prison, and both are made of the same “material”. The ego-self is an ego structure – it can move around our body and even out into our aura, but it can never escape from being an ego structure.

The true-Self is different – it is not a thought-form, so it is not bound by the mind or mental constructs (ego structures). The true-Self can easily pass through the prison walls of the ego (like a ghost), so it is always free – it always has been, and it always will be. The only way can attain psychological freedom is to shift our perspective from the ego-self to the true-Self, which is represented graphically in Figure 8, but that is easier said than done…

Our journey to freedom is not an outward one, because we cannot escape by pushing outwards against the walls of our prison. The journey to freedom is an inward one, towards the true-Self. It is a journey of Self-discovery because we need to get reacquainted with our true-Self before we can realise it as our true nature. It is like waking up from a dream, or perhaps nightmare is a more appropriate term! It is like stepping out of the darkness into the light, or stepping out of a virtual world into true reality.

Shifting our perspective from the false/ego-self to the true-Self is not easy. The false/ego-self has a powerful hold on us because we have been identified with it for so long – we have invested an entire lifetime in being our ego-self. So even though we want freedom, we are afraid to leave. The ego’s primary objective is to get us through life without feeling the pain of our repressed psychological wounds (exiled parts).

The inner work of awakening goes directly against the ego’s objective because it requires us to feel into our old hurts and inquire into our false and distorted core-beliefs, so we need to proceed gently. Only when our desire for freedom exceeds our fear are we truly ready to enter the path.

The Truth About The False-Self

Up until this point, I have described the false/ego-self as a persistent, complex thought-form, and it is, but that’s not the whole story… A thought-form doesn’t possess enough self-awareness to convince us that this is who we are, and it doesn’t possess enough intelligence or will to competently direct our life. So what else is going on?

The true-Self (monad) and its field of awareness (soul) experience things by merging with them and literally becoming one with them. This natural tendency means it is easy for the true-Self to lose sight of its own ontological existence and become mis-identified with the false/ego-self, and that is exactly what happened in our early childhood…

As our young mind developed, we began to create a mental idea of our self, which was based upon our mental sense of self, our emotional sense of self and our physical sense of self. This thought-form gradually solidified into a reasonably stable concept-of-self that characterised us as a separate physical person. This concept-of-self received more validation from our parents or care-givers than our true-Self did, so our true-Self gradually became identified with our concept-of-self and our false-self was born. So, our true-Self’s mis-identification made our false-self a living “reality”. And since then, our true-Self’s life-force has vivified our false-self, and our true-Self’s will and awareness have operated though that false-self.

We lost sight of our true identity when we were about 6–8 months old, and the only way to rediscover it is to awaken from our deep-seated mis-identification and realise that we are, and always have been, our true-Self.