article: handling the spiritualized ego

cal. 575 (article)

The positionality of the core of the spiritualized ego can be summarized as: the smallest imperfection is shameful and leads to "spiritual death." The underlying postulate is that you have to make yourself perfect (via the spiritualized ego, of course), or God will not accept you, so you'll be cast out on "judgement day." 

Note that a final reckoning with God is a mentalization of a projected future which, by its nature as a projection, is not Reality (cal. 580 ADAP). The truth of "judgement is everyday" (cal. 570 ADAP) removes the ominous, psyche-controlling fear that the sum total of one's misdeeds, sins and errors will be devastatingly brought to bear upon one's soul in a future meeting with God. 

Judgement may instead be seen an ongoing process concordant with God's grace and one's own motivation, intention and capability to forgive himself and others, plus the processing out of vulnerability to negative fields ignorant of and hostile to what God actually is. This 580-level understanding of "judgement day" ameliorates the spiritualized ego's terror-inducing, shame-based leverage upon your psyche.

The spiritualized ego's perverse "pathway to perfection" generates endless, self-inflicted suffering as you assent to and agree with judgements and condemnation inherent to the attractor fields of shame and guilt. In guilt or shame, no minor error or passing thought is too small to catastrophize, dramatize and inflate into an extinction-level emergency of the soul. 

Chronically, this leads to spiritual neuroticism, experiential apathy, e.g. dark nights of the soul, and loss of energy to live in a human body. Notably, the spiritualized ego makes your karmically appointed, God-seeking incarnation as a human into a symbol of your enduring unworthiness (statement at 580 ADAP). 

Suffice it to say, the spiritualized ego hates your humanness, which it derisively regards as contemptible, carnal, animal nature. One need only internalize the wisdom of "to err is human, to forgive divine" to refute this false position. 

Allow yourself to be human, and forgive yourself for it. The spiritualized ego does not want you to forgive yourself for anything, ever, for therein lies its power over you. Nor does it permit acceptance of your fallible, human nature which is prone to making mistakes in the trial-and-error "school of life."

One's alignment with the spiritualized ego is based, simply, on ignorance of the true nature of the fields of guilt, shame and terror. They present themselves as helpful and necessary to ascendancy on the spiritual journey, e.g. "fear of God," having a conscience and being a "good" person, yet with the crushing downside of nothing less than their dualistic, horrifying essence as eternal guilt, shame and terror. Clearly, these fields represent the greatest possible inversion of God's true nature.

In Transcending the Levels of Consciousness, Doc mentions "reasonable guilt" and "decent regret" as a way of finding workable, middle ground when dealing with a hypertrophied superego (moral center). He also stresses the utility of having a sense of humor, in contrast to the spiritualized ego's grim humorlessness. 

Inasmuch as it facilitates a realistic perspective on everyday, human error, "keep it light" is a useful posture to preclude unnecessary or unwitting descents into the suffering that is the spiritualized ego's actual essence, experiential hell, and the subjective, utter absence of the truth and love that is God. Obviously, then, the spiritual dictum "don't go there" applies to alignment with the field of spiritualized ego.

author: Brian Gibbs