Being, Ego and Towards Mastery: Part 1 of 3
Part One: Ego
Introduction
Ego is a drunken swagger who believes they know everything and because of identity’s need, they become attached to all they purvey. Ego cannot reach mastery without Being, and Being cannot reach mastery without ego. In short: they have a mutual need. When ego claims the idea of Being attachment follows ego becomes high on the rush of self-aggrandizement and illusions ensue.
The processes of mastery occurs along a continuum of work. Enlightenment exists within Being always. The discovery of Being is a peeling away of illusion to “know” glimpses of enlightenment at the beginning and through development later may include transcendent enlightenment while remaining embodied and with ego. Though there may be an uncovering of bliss in the process of enlightenment, it does not obliterate ego or ego’s doings.
Ego is not bad. Ego is a manager that interfaces with other egos to manage daily life. In our current world we would not be able to function without an ego. When we come to believe that ego can be a master by denying, forgetting and/or repressing Being then we get lost in a maze of illusion and confusion. .
To understand the relationship between ego and Being we must sense / know what they are and how they operate from a neutral observer within if the long hard road of work towards mastery is be embarked upon.
The World of Ego
Ego probably began and evolved concurrently with spoken and written language. Language, ego-identity and linear time have been cemented in our modern culture and are invisible technologies that separate us from Earth. We have been trained to think within the context of language and it has merged with ego. This cannot be undone as far as most of us know.
Around the time that the patriarchy began, agriculture became more formalized and city-states began to appear. The ego became more sophisticated to deal with a regimented societal structure.
To examine the history of ego it follows that our current epoch and its appendages assist in defining ego:
1. Kali Yuga — the last 6,000 years
2. The Patriarchy
3. Capitalism in late stage patriarchy
4. Ego within the context of numbers 1, 2 and 3
Kali Yugas
Since the Descending Kali Yuga began in 3676 BCE (Before Current Era) and the Ascending Kali Yuga ends in 2025 CE (Current Era) or 4 years from now with a 300-year cusp or buffer to 2325 CE; it is characterized by duality and divisiveness. It follows that our egos would fall under this rubric [1].
There appears to have been no — one inciting event when the Patriarchy began. In 4000 BCE “fatherhood” was first recognized [2]. This appears to have taken place 324 years after the Descending Kali Yuga began. Patterns of thought within the Kali Yugas appear to have shaped the ego as humans moved more aggressively into agriculture, animal husbandry and the city-state. This could be the first example of either/or thinking and the advent of a new egoic structure in human beings that is also characteristic of the the Kali Yugas and their natural out-growth: the patriarchy.
The Kali Yugas both descending and ascending together have the following attributes:
· Avarice and wrath will be common.
· Humans will openly display animosity towards each other. Ignorance of dharma will occur.
· Religion, truthfulness, cleanliness, tolerance, mercy, physical strength and memory will diminish with each passing day.
· People will have thoughts of murder with no justification and will see nothing wrong in that [this probably developed over the full length of the descending and ascending Kali Yugas].
· Lust will be viewed as socially acceptable and sexual intercourse will be seen as the central requirement of life.
· Sin [as in against moral and/or religious law] will increase exponentially, while virtue will fade and cease to flourish.
· People will become addicted to intoxicating drinks and drugs [as well as other repetitive acts that become harmful when indulged in excessively].
· All the human beings will declare themselves as gods or [as blessings] boon given by gods and make it as a business instead of teachings.
· People will no longer get married and live with each other just for sexual pleasure.
· Weather and environment will degrade with time and frequency and unpredictable rainfalls [droughts and fires] will happen.
· Earthquakes will be common.
· Many fake ideologies will spread throughout the world.
· The powerful people will dominate the poor people.
· Many diseases will spread [3].
Patriarchy
Before the patriarchy was the matriarchy. The matriarchy had a horizontal hierarchical structure. All land and resources were communally based and centered around the Goddess as represented by women, yin and/or the receptive. Women were communicators with the Divine Feminine and Earth’s body. Child rearing was done by the group — no families. There was agriculture and egalitarian hunting groups that brought animal kills to augment the seasonal vegetables, fruits and grains. Major decisions were discussed by the community and the women of the community with women as authority because of their link with the Goddess. Astrologer, Jeffery Wolf Green postulates that the patriarchy grew out of a massive rebellion against the horizontal hierarchy of the communal group. The Matriarchy belief system, Green postulates, states that the Goddess worked through men or the male to deliver the seed to the woman representing the Goddess. Men only acted as vessels and nothing more so the Goddess could deliver the seed to make a woman pregnant with child. Over many years men began to think of themselves as more than empty vessels and began to rebel against the Goddess [4]. That and the sweep of the Huns across Asia into Europe and the Mediterranean — many matriarchal communities were obliterated in Eurasia. “Rebellion against” is a reactionary move against an opposite and could be characterized as an example of both associative and dualistic thinking [5]. The patriarchy could have been the origin of these types of thinking and a different more structured ego.
The patriarchy is a vertically organized structure based on the dominance (and ownership) of women and children as well as other humans deemed by men as to be inferior or sub-human groups. This vertical structure appeared to be responsible for the formation of the family and was definitely defined by the ownership and subjugation of women. Women were branded for life by taking the man’s surname in the bondage institution of marriage. Marriage, with regard to women giving-up their maiden names and taking on the surname of the man has survived in a majority of those who are married in the current age. Some women when married take in a hyphenated name, preserving their maiden name but I would hardly call this real progress. Only those women who retain their maiden or family name in marriage may be another step closer in separating themselves from the yoke of patriarchal power; albeit a small and important step.
Men of property and name (as in royalty — later in business) passed on their property to male sons thus developing male lineage and a hold over women. Men who did not own property were named commoners or serfs and were lower in the pecking order of the system.
Its possible that the early Greeks were black. All the Gods and Goddess of the Greeks were black and even Jesus was black as some evidence suggests [6]. The Romans appeared to have had an integrated culture of blacks and darker skinned Romans. Both the Greeks and Romans had slaves. With the advent of the Roman Catholic Church across Europe and the Anglo-Saxon whites many others became slaves or serfs. As the European countries flourished under Monarchies the white male came into prominence as the top of the patriarchal structure.
The United States adopted slavery and even though the Civil War was fought to free the slaves, black people have remained under the Jim Crow laws and other forms of systemic slavery to this day. The Nazis modeled the Third Reich on American models of institutional slavery [7].
The patriarchy is a top down vertical hierarchical power structure. Even those who vie for top positions in the structure lose power and are dominated by someone else. Money is a currency of power-over in this system. Those at the bottom of the structure — poor blacks, poor people of color, poor LGBT peoples and poor whites* are under the full brunt of patriarchal power……. ___________________________________________________________________ *economically poor whites are at the higher end of blacks, people of color and gender/sexual orientation some of whom have been radicalized as terrorist or domestic terrorists.
Capitalism in Late-Stage Patriarchy
Capitalism has undergone many iterations of itself to become what it is today: Predatory Capitalism built on planned obsolesce, un-sustainability, dividing products / services into increasingly smaller parts to sell for more money, hyper-competition, monopolies, stock buy-backs that focus on power and more money. It is the more power and money that is never enough; in short — breeding greed, addiction and the lust for power. This is a zero-sum game where the losers are: all people except those at the top of the 1%-ers. Earth is also a loser because capitalism treats Earth as a repository for unlimited resources — raping earth of oil, water and minerals through unsustainable practices and a waste bucket for all useless tech and refuse. Capitalism treats the people who use the products and services as products / consumers in the system headed for destruction.
Corporate Power with slightly left and right leaning ideologies that control governments stripping America of democracy for an oligarchy while keeping the appearance of democracy — barely.
The shortsightedness of predatory capitalism through quarterly profits, treating products and services and the consumers thereof as objects is wholly unsustainable such that the climate crisis will destroy the human cancer.
Ego
Ego is the good manager. A strong boundaried ego with good self-esteem is necessary to act as a proficient manager in our daily socio-political interactions [political is not being used as governance term — as in political parties but as a phenomenological term — a social creature with social interactions]. We need a strong ego to function well in our social milieu or mix to help us know who we are. Without a strong ego we can’t definitively know ourselves. To release or surrender ego to know the being self or a wider consciousness becomes muddied if we have unhealthy egos.
Ego, language, linear space-time, are the invisible technologies that interface with a world we are meant to think is real. Ego is defined by the epoch, by the organization structure and its components.
Ego lives within the context of:
· The Descending and Ascending Kali Yugas with the prescribed parameters of everything is a business (including animals, human animals, plant life, minerals, water, sky, the Sun as objects of business) and define reality through divisive either/or — aka dualistic thinking. The Kali Yugas are about destruction to create something new from the ashes.
· The patriarchy is an instrument and the victim of the Kali Yugas.
· Capitalism is a tool of the patriarchy
· Ego is ruled under the parameters of the Kali Yugas, the patriarchy and capitalism
Ego is the buffer between the Self and the modern world. It is a manager who believes that the Kali Yuga, patriarchy and capitalism are real because that’s all we know so it must be true.
Ego belongs and is owned by an invented concept of linear-space time of past, present and future. The past has been invented as if it were a place, when “the past” exists as memories of the past in the present. The future is invented based on assumptions, expectations, extrapolations, predictions, hopes, fears, faith that is invented by the ego and projected on an illusory place called “the future”.
Eternity is a linear-time based illusion of something that belongs to an “afterlife” that continues on forever in an infinite time-line of past and present rolling out indefinitely. Religions rely on beliefs and not direct experience of divinity, ordinarily. Eternity is associated with the “place” of “heaven” where eternal life exists in perpetuity due to the traps of ego related time-based realities that were systemically created eons ago. Linear space-time is a convenient way to describe this illusory world based within the system where ego co-creates a fixed reality.
Beliefs are built from automatic habits for the most part and are generational. They are passed on by parents, peers, generation and culture. If a child rebels against a belief in religion, for example, they are caught in a dualistic world of illusion due to the act of the rebellion. In other words, the act of rebellion enslaves a person in the illusion because it belongs to a divisive dyad of within the set of contradiction.
Humans hold contradictory beliefs because egos are based on illusion and seek to deny the illusion by creating another illusion of wholeness within the ego. Each parent holds contradictory beliefs within themselves and passes them on to the child through modelling behavior and via words. “Do as I say, not as I do.” are types of phrases that reveal the contradictions in behaviors. A child sees the hypocrisy and incorporates that as part of the operating system and attempts to reconcile it with other beliefs. When they cannot it is forgotten, suppressed, repressed, sublimated or diverted through unconscious behaviors. The ego is a flawed manager puffed up by belief attempting to deal with a flawed world without a full deck.
Beliefs are built out of habits that originate with actions. They are held by the mind of the body, by the mind of the emotional center and by the cognitive center (the thinking mind) and then incorporated through habit into the operating system. All good and bad habits are held indiscriminately through the mind of the body which may create diseases to deal with the inconsistencies and contradictions especially when habits arise out of a trauma base.
For those that hunger for truth these are the thirsty seekers who will stop at nothing to learn the truth and live by it.
Part 2 is about Being https://the-kai9.medium.com/ego-being-and-towards-mastery-part-2-of-3-4b601e89fe
Part 3 is about moving Towards Mastery along with some rudimentary techniques — https://the-kai9.medium.com/towards-mastery-being-ego-and-towards-mastery-part-3-of-3-99ef85ca0dc5
Notes
1 https://www.bibhudevmisra.com/2012/07/end-of-kali-yuga-in-2025-unraveling.html
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarchy#Pre-history
3 The brackets are mine used to expand / tweak the meaning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali_Yuga#Prophesied_events
5 study of Consciousness: https://the-kai9.medium.com/beyond-time-the-locus-of-consciousness-96842f0fe2a1
6 https://gnosticwarrior.com/all-the-gods-and-goddesses-of-greece-were-black.html
7 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism
8 General Source materials Enlightenment and descriptions of ego arises from Buddhist teachings. The association of ego with language are both observations and arise — in part from a book: Language in Thought and Action, SI Hayakawa https://www.amazon.com/Language-Thought-Action-S-I-Hayakawa/dp/0156482401/ref=sr_1_1?crid=133OE67K4BAYB&dchild=1&keywords=language+in+thought+and+action&qid=1611606685&sprefix=Language+in+%2Caps%2C239&sr=8-1
