FAQs about Adi Da & Adidam > Other Traditions > Developing a Healthy Ego Before Transcending It

Developing a Healthy Ego
Before Transcending It

Chris Tong, Ph.D.

Question: A core part of Adi Da's Teaching is about the transcendence of egoity. A common "New Age" notion I have heard is that one must develop a "healthy ego" before one can transcend the ego. What does Adi Da say about this?

Brief Answer:

Adi Da has explicitly criticized this view many times. In fact, the difference between this view and Adi Da's view is largely a matter of semantics, not substance: what exactly is meant by the word, "ego". In conventional language, "ego" or "self" is used rather confusingly, with both negative and positive connotations ("self-obsessed", "self-centered", etc. vs. "self-esteem", "self-worth", "self-love", etc.) It is that semantic conflation that is largely the basis for the notion that one must develop a "healthy ego" (i.e., develop "self-esteem", "self-love") first before we can transcend the ego (and qualities like "self-centeredness", etc.)

Adi Da uses "ego" and "egoity" in a very specific, technically precise manner, based on His complete awareness of the nature of egoity and the process for transcending it. In Adi Da's view, egoity is not a "thing" or "structure" (that can be "healthy" or "unhealthy") but an act — an act of self-contraction, a separative act — that is superimposed on the body-mind (and all its functioning) in every moment, creating a contracted, fearful body-mind rather than a free body-mind, happy and fearless in its felt connection to its Divine Source (because it is not separating from the Divine via egoity).

In Adi Da's "seven stages" framework of human development, all the growth that must occur in the first three stages of life is exactly what most people mean by "developing a healthy ego" — it's just that Adi Da does not use the word "ego" in that (confusing) manner. This includes "individuation" in the first stage of life (ideally fully occurring in ages 1-7); to "socialization" of the second stage of life (ideally occurring in ages 7-14); to "integration" of the third stage of life (ideally occurring from ages 14-21). I add the phrase "ideally occurring" because in many (even most) people, that ideal development does not fully complete itself during those periods of human life, and people become "chronological adults" (adults in age only) without being fully humanly mature. And the reason that ideal human maturation process (misnomered a "healthy ego" in Adi Da's view) does not occur is because of egoity: the child or young person is unconsciously "doing" egoity, and that has a ripple effect that undercuts everything, including all human development. Human maturity occurs far more effectively, quickly, and fully when the developing body-mind is not contracted (i.e., not "egoic") during that development process.

So in Adi Da's view, there is no such thing as a "healthy ego", or a positive side of "egoity". Egoity — that added act of separation — is always a liability. What is commonly called a "healthy ego" are phases of human maturation and functional development that are only hindered and crippled by the act of egoity, and are in fact served and accelerated by its transcendence. Imagine trying to individuate, or develop "self-worth" or "self-love", when you are also feeling terrified, separated, anxious, stressed, neurotic, etc. Then imagine trying to develop "self-worth" when you are fundamantally already happy — because you are being raised in a culture that supports ego-transcendence and Divine Communion (and has the means to do so — as in the Way of Adidam) from the beginning of a young child's life!

Additional Notes

Transcendence of ego. Obviously how "ego" is conceptualized impacts what is meant by "transcendence of ego". The common spiritual viewpoint is that the "ego" is a "structure" or a "something" or a "somebody". And the notion that you have to develop a "healthy ego" before you can "transcend the ego" corresponds to a notion of first building a structure (the "healthy ego") and then dismantling it (into some kind of Divine "Emptiness"). Jack Engler puts this in the form of a quip, "You have to be somebody before you can be nobody." [1]

In Adidam, "transcendence of egoity" is not the endpoint of a process of Spiritual Realization. It is a capability. The ego is an action, and so "transcendence of egoity" is itself a counter-action. Adi Da's name for that capability in all its many aspects is self-understanding. It is a specific capability of raising the self-contraction to awareness. Self-understanding is based in the fact that we ourselves are unconsciously doing this painful action of pinching ourselves, or squeezing ourselves into a knot in the Divine Consciousness that we call "me", creating the sense of being a "separate self", as well as creating many troubling ripple effects throughout the body-mind.

Initially, in the process of growing self-understanding, we become increasingly aware of that action of self-contraction from "outside" the self-contraction: feeling all the disturbance and pain it is creating in us. And that takes a lot of courage and perseverance, because our culture trains us to desensitize ourselves to that pain, and endlessly "seek" for ways to distract ourselves from it. Self-understanding requires the exact opposite movement: to not distract ourselves, and feel the self-contraction increasingly more.

At first it feels as though we are "outside" the self-contraction — feeling it from the outside. The process reaches its culmination in the moment when we find our conscious awareness to be inside the self-contraction, in exactly the position where we are doing the self-contraction, "squeezing" the entire body-mind into a knot. In that moment, we suddenly have the key to the self-contraction (and all the unhappiness that results from it) because, in the next moment, we can just stop doing it — just stop squeezing ourselves into a knot. Adi Da calls that moment of fundamental self-understanding hearing.

Hearing is the key to ego transcendence, but it is not the end of the process of Spiritual Realization. We don't "disappear into Emptiness" in the moment of hearing. We simply are now capable of choosing, in every moment, not to create the self-contraction — which means we are incredibly happy! Here is Adi Da's description of the moment of hearing in His Own practice:

On this extraordinary night I sat at my desk late into the night. I had exhausted my seeking, so that I felt there were no more books to read, nor any possible kind of ordinary experience that could exceed what I had already embraced. There seemed no outstanding sources for any new excursion, no remaining and conclusive possibilities. I was drawn into the interior tension of my mind that held all of that seeking, every impulse and alternative, every motive in the form of my desiring. I contemplated it as a whole, a dramatic singleness, and it moved me into a profound shape of life-feeling, so that all the vital centers in my body and mind appeared like a long funnel of contracted planes that led on to an infinitely regressed and invisible image. I observed this deep sensation of conflict and endlessly multiplied contradictions, such that I was surrendered to its very shape, as if to experience it perfectly and to be it. Then quite suddenly, in a moment, I experienced a total revolution in my body-mind, and, altogether, in my living consciousness. An absolute sense of understanding opened and arose at the extreme end of all this sudden contemplation. And all of the motions of me that moved down into that depth appeared to reverse their direction at some unfathomable point. The rising impulse caused me to stand, and I felt a surge of Force draw me up out of my depths and expand, Filling my entire body and every level of my living consciousness with wave on wave of the most Beautiful and Joyous Energy. . . In that great moment of Awakening I Knew the Truth was not a matter of seeking. There were no "reasons" for Joy and Freedom. It was not a matter of a truth, an object, a concept, a belief, a reason, a motivation, or any external fact. . . . Instead, I saw that the Truth or Reality was a matter of the absence of all contradictions, every trace of conflict, opposition, division, or desperate motivation within. Where there is no seeking, no contradiction, there is only the unqualified Knowledge and Power that is Reality. . . . . I also saw that Freedom and Joy is not attained, that It is not dependent on any form, object, idea, progress, or experience. I saw that human beings (and, indeed, all beings) are, at any moment, always and already Free. I Knew that I was not lacking anything I needed yet to find, nor had I ever been without such a thing. The problem was the seeking itself, which 'created' and enforced contradiction, conflict, and absence within. . . . It took me many years to understand that revolution in my living being. . . It marked the rising in me of fundamental and Non-conditional Life, and it, in its moment, removed every shadow of dilemma and ignorance from the mind, on every level, and all its effects in the body. Avatar Adi Da Samraj, The Knee Of Listening

Traditional spiritual practices are profoundly slowed by the uninspected presence of the self-contraction, in the midst of any other spiritual attainment. Traditional spiritual practitioners proceed through a very lengthy evolutionary path, that usually takes thousands of lifetimes (i.e., evolutionary amounts of time, since it is an evolutionary process), first outgrowing the physical dimensions of reality and the physical body, then the astral dimensions and the astral body. But all the while, the core of egoity — the self-contraction — remains intact and uninspected. In those traditions (as in the "New Age" communities), ego is conceived as a structure, and ego transcendence as a structure-dropping process. In the spiritual traditions, you first drop the physical structure (the "body"), then the astral structure (the "mind" or "psyche") and that is understood to be that much less ego.

In this context of the historical spiritual traditions, Adi Da's contribution of the ego as an activity rather than a structure is radical. There is no inherent problem whatsoever with the body-mind structure or any of its parts (physical, astral, causal)! The problem is the contracted body-mind. The hearing capability removes that problem.

The hearing capability also exponentially accelerates the Spiritual growth process, so that the entire process of Spiritual growth — all the way to God-Realization — can even take place within a single human lifetime. Hearing not only removes the sense of being a separate self (even while still being associated with a body-mind). It removes all separation from the Divine:

The question "Is there a God?" reflects an immature, self-contracted state in human beings for which they must become responsible. When one's own self-contracted state is transcended, the reality of God is overwhelmingly obvious. Avatar Adi Da Samraj

And so in Adidam, the milestone of hearing is followed shortly by the milestone of seeing: the direct awareness of the Presence of the Divine, perhaps the most astounding experience one will ever have in the Spiritual Process:

To actually experience Me Spiritually — Coming Upon You From Outside and Beyond Yourself — Is A Miraculous (and Ultimately, Incomprehensible) Event. Avatar Adi Da Samraj

Together, the capability of hearing and the unencumbered Spiritual Communion (unencumbered or greatly diminished by self-contraction) of seeing initiates an exponentially accelerated growth process, both human and Spiritual. The core of the Seeing process is when the Presence of the Divine "Crashes down" in the frontal line of the devotee (without any resistance from the devotee, because of hearing), and begins a process of "cleaning out" all the residual egoic patterns.

The Seeing process reminds me of the ancient myth of the labors of Hercules, where Hercules was required to clean out the Augean stables, in which manure had been piling up for centuries. A single human being (even one as great as Hercules) would be at it for years before he could finish the task by himself. But a different approach suddenly dawned on Hercules: the stables were not far from a great river. He could dig a channel from the river to the stables, and have the river to do the cleaning! And so that is what he did, and the stables were cleaned in a single day.

So it is with all one's egoic patterning. If one has to "clean it up", "integrate it", etc. through "working on oneself", it would take eons. But letting the Divine in its full force do the cleaning instead dramatically reduces the required time. What's more, that cleaning of the body-mind by the Divine is so profound that, when the process is done, the vessel, its patterning and its karmas, have been so purified, that enormous energy and attention are freed up, one's identification with the body-mind is released, and one awakens into the position of Consciousness Itself, and begins a final process in pure Consciousness that Adi Da calls "The Perfect Practice", whose completion is God-Realization — Perfect Enlightenment.

Children's education in ego transcendence and God Communion. In Adidam, there is no "healthy ego" that must be "formed" first, only to later be deconstructed or dissolved in (so called) ego transcendence. Instead, human maturation and ego transcendence occur in parallel. A process of human maturation in the first three stages of life (through age 21) is accompanied by education and training in ego transcendence and God Communion, in a form that is appropriate and understandable for each age group. One illustration of this is the book Adi Da wrote specifically for children: What, Where, When, How, Why, and Who To Remember To Be Happy.

RETURN TO "COMPARISONS WITH OTHER TRADITIONS"

FOOTNOTES

[1]	Engler, J. (2003). Being somebody and being nobody: A reexamination of the understanding of self in psychoanalysis and Buddhism:An Unfolding Dialogue. In Safran, J.D. (Ed.), Psychoanalysis and Buddhism: An Unfolding Dialogue (pp. 15-100). Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications.