EBE maintains that there is a basic and irreducible subpersona architecture of the human emotional body based upon a universal sequence of how our unconscious shadow-aspects develop, are stored, and express. Because of this, what is referred to as a ‘subpersona’ in EBE emotionology is defined in a very different manner than in all other subself-type models.
But first it’s necessary to know how EBE defines the actual development of what we call the ego or sense of selfhood, and how it structurally differentiates out of the pre-cognitive state of infancy in order to better understand how the ego develops later secondary expressions of its shadow. This discussion may be somewhat technical for some, but if it’s kept in mind that this is how EBE sees the manner in which your own ‘you’ came to arise, it may have more personal meaning.
As is well established, in infancy we swim in an ocean of visual, audial, olfactory, gustatory and tactile experience commonly referred to in developmental psychology as the Uroboros. In this state, there is no way to distinguish ‘self’ from experience itself or from any ‘other.’ Our ability to develop a self or ego only occurs as we disembed from the reality of being experience to the ability to have experience.
In this way, individual consciousness forms from natural neurobiological maturation of the mental body associated with the brain as we develop our capacity to disembed from, and then relate to as ‘other,’ what we call outer reality via emergence of the subjectively-experienced inner personal seat of individualized self.
What we call ego thus forms via a neurological process of object relations with external elements of life that begin to ‘precipitate out’ of the undifferentiated Uroboros, at the same time imparting an internal perception of an inner ego or self who is then able to witness and experience those gradually precipitating outer elements and objects. This internal perceptibility of a ‘stand-apart’ experience of an ego or separate sense of self is thus created, maintained, and later kept in place throughout life by the gradual arisement of the mental body in early childhood through brain maturation.
For those interested in the metaphysics of transpersonal levels of consciousness and how consciousness relates to a possible overarching architecture of Reality, and as explained more in Enheartenment, the manner in which classical buddhistic paradigms have explained how a separate ego forms via the arising five skhandas has a glaringly obvious and completely disingenuous defect in its basic formulation that has gone largely unnoticed in the few thousand years it has been promulgated.
In contrast, EBE and its parent paradigm of Theohumanity offers a different and noncontradictory way to look at how ego forms at the level of dualistic transaction relative to the mental body. This way allows a seamless integration with a picture that includes the nondual aspect of consciousness, albeit enfolded into a greater vision that does not impart root-reality status to Nonduality in a vertical ‘ladder’-type architecture as do buddhistic and transpersonal world-views that define ego as illusory.
In terms of this discussion, it is our mental body that carves out an objectified self from the Uroboric gestalt. It works on a governing dynamic of resistance-based dualistic categorization of experience that allows us to have the ability to separate, from our point-of-view and reference, our more undifferentiated Uroboric experience with sensate stimuli into separate and specific experiences as a ‘this’ kind of experience versus a ‘that’ kind, which ultimately lead us to include an inner experience of ourselves as a ‘this’ and everyone and everything else outside of us as a ‘that.’
In that way, in early development, an experience of the mother’s breast blends the five physical senses of the child uroborically into one gestalt that includes no differentiation between the child and the mother. Later, this evolves into one wherein the growing sixth sense of mental body function of the child acts like a prism and begins to dualistically separate our one Uroboric ‘light’-gestalt into two different basic ‘colors’ or ‘slabs’ of ‘this is this’ and ‘that-is-that’ experiential content. In that way, consciousness moves from that which is experience to that which is having experience.
When this process is completed between ages four and six, we begin to experience that the inner ego or self is apparently of a different order of reality than what we experience as Other and this inner self seems real and distinct from that which is experienced. It is exactly this apparency that’s accurately confronted in nondual buddhistic practice. Theohumanity offers an entirely different metaphysical basis for the dynamic.
As offered in Enheartenment, the ‘illusion’ doesn’t lie with the non-real nature of ego, as buddhism has mistakenly taught, but with the degree we overidentify with and over-attach to it out of fear as the only way to experience reality we’ve been conditioned to know.
This is a subtle but game-changing distinction unknown to the Buddha, who only offered an all or nothing scenario: Nonduality-as-the-only-real vs. ego-duality-as-illusion. This is a glaring and obvious duality in his own teaching he and all who followed him never tracked. In a paradigm based on emotion-as-essence, ego-duality is real, Nonduality is real, and both co-exist without contradiction.
In this way, natural neurobiological capacity thus allows us to form a disembedded-from-the-Uroboros objectified version of ourselves we can then also secondarily objectify our own inner experiencer of experience as if we are standing apart from it. This self-recognition differentiating us from Other first and then secondarily differentiating a watcher of our own inner experiencer allows us to observe, reflect upon, create an ongoing narrative of, and otherwise have relationship with ourselves, in a similar fashion as we have a relationship with others whom we identify as not us, who have different self-narratives and relationships with experience.
In EBE, what we call ego differentiates as a 5-step sequence:
* Reactive Object Entrainment: ‘I am that which is related to by Other’
* Object Relation Cathexis: ‘I am that which relates to Other’
* Mental Imagery Cathexis: ‘I am that which stores or possesses Other’
* Reactive Projected Differentiation: ‘I am that which is stored or possessed by Other’
* Reactive Ontogenic Differentiation: ‘I am that which is not Other’
Reactive Object Entrainment and Object Relation Cathexis are actually one dyad comprised of two movements. ‘I am that which is related to by Other’ is the initial instigator of our ability to form a self. The seed for our individuated ego experience in incarnative life must be planted by an Other relating to us in an Object Relational context. That relatedness with an outer Object, in this case the parent and all the associated experiences with the parent, is internalized over time as an inner dynamic we call the ego, and the self-reflective relationship we learn to have with ourselves. It is in this way that at the level of locally embodied self-differentiation, EBE sees ego not so much as a ‘noun’-based dynamical structure, but as a ‘verb’-based loose internal relatedness mediated by a mix of the mental and emotional bodies naturally imprinted in us by a parent Other relating to us in a stable and nourishing manner.
As described in Enheartenment, an overarching soul consciousness with processing algorithms which impart far more information about Reality than just our five physical body senses and our one mental body sense of thought, is the actual energetic structure that provides the ‘awareness that we are aware of our awareness’ dynamism throughout our more locally expressed version of soul in this densely-textured realm of being. Our emotional, willful, mental, and physical bodies are in that sequence gradually more densely ‘precipitate’ in a ‘super-saturated solution’ of Spirit-identity, consciousness lying upstream of the more densely-edged expressions we identify as ourselves in any incarnative life in earth.
This truth cannot be embraced by rational empiricists who require strictly dualistic data limited to mental body criteria of the ‘local’ six senses. As such, they’ve yet to activate their own reality-processing organs needed to ‘see’ a more energetically rarefied soul-level of being. But this soul-based understanding isn’t required to understand and work with the process by which the local ego forms psychodynamically: all contact parents have with a child initiates and maintains this first phase accumulatively, and provides this initial template-seed of selfhood.
This Other ‘object’ in the form of caregivers thus provides an outer reality in relation to which our fledgling Uroboric consciousness can begin to feel its self-‘edges’ of being, as it were. In that way, personal ego in any one incarnational chapter arises reactively by having relatedness with what’s perceived as an outer Object, against which our self-boundaries can arise and feel ‘up against’ and thus secondarily discover their existence.
‘I am that which relates to Other’ simply involves our secondary emotional and physical responses to the caregiver presence of the first phase, an arising primitive ground of emoto-physical reactivity which arises in direct relation to entrainment by parents’ presence and ongoing emoto-energetic involvement with the child.
A parent who hovers over a crib or holds the child thus entrains the infant’s fledgling consciousness to emotively and tactilely respond, and extends experience of his/her nascent ego-boundaries by his/her reaction to the parent’s presence. This is the first evocation of a primitive substrate of self, our first ground of ego-foundation located within ourselves and arising spontaneously in direct dyadic response to caregiver attention. This can occur because the child’s undefended emotional body and vulnerable physical body allow caregiver dynamical presences to energetically ‘penetrate’ their being and begin to reside within the child.
In this way, the parents’ presence lands in the child and creates a dynamical heart-chord reaction in his or her soul-field, energetically much like a hand pressing the keys on a piano and elucidating tonal expressions. The ‘strings’ of the child’s emotional and physical being are already structurally present in the energetic of the soul-being, and await only the caregiver presence to elicit the music to ‘bring’ them to this dense level of being. This heart-toned reactivity and the melody-as-self it produces is in direct proportion to the ‘musicianship’ of the caregivers, in terms of the degree of their own emotional body porosity.
In time and as the mental body matures and creates a subject/object duality of self and other, the Mental Imagery Cathexis phase emerges, characterized by ‘I am that which stores or possesses Other,’ which is the secondary persistence or storage in the mental body of our primary emotional and physical experiences of our parents in the first two steps. Here we begin to ‘remember’ via the mental body how we were ‘met’ or not in our physically and emotionally hungry moments by a caregiver’s stable presence.
In this stage, we begin to associate caregiver presence with the basic pleasure of emoto-physical contact and nourishment, and through that association we construct an inner mental-body-mediated substrate for a not-as-yet experiencable sense of a self. In this way, relation with a parent starts to live in a mental-body mediated ‘virtual reality’ projection inside the child. This new dimension of inner relatedness to outer ‘objects’ is then added to the already present emotional and physical body relatednesses.
The addition of this mental body relatedness thus sets up an ever-reinforcing cycle of being able to count on reality in some minimally safe ways, and sets up the capacity for the child to begin crying for the physical presence of parents whenever the inner virtual reality experience arises.
Reactive Projected Differentiation, or ‘I am that which is stored or possessed by Other,’ does not occur until mental body activation deepens to the next tier, between three and five years old. As that occurs, it begins to dawn on the child in an unrefined awareness that in the same way caregivers live within him/her as a virtual reality mentalized projection to which the child responds, the child also actually ‘lives’ in a real way within the consciousness of caregivers and to which they respond. This is a growing awareness that the child ‘lives’ outside themselves and inside of the mental and emotional bodies of the parents in the form the child realizes as how caregivers ‘think’ and ‘care’ about him/her even when the child is not present.
In that way, a child’s realness of self-identity is supported by that identity ‘persisting’ inside caregivers. Being energetically and emotively ‘possessed’ by parents is a critical link in the chain of creating another deepening track for the child to identify him/herself as a separate being who has the power to create mental and emotional body reactions and effects in the parents. This makes the child feel even more intrinsically real within themselves, an inner strengthening of self-being again mediated by an outer reality of object-based relatedness with caregivers.
This realization that the child also lives within the parents makes reality safer not only because they ‘persist’ in the mental bodies of caregivers, but because there is also some real response of caring or positive responsiveness the parent has to the version of the child that lives within them. This messages to the child not only that s/he ‘exists’ but also matters to the caregivers, that s/he creates an emotively-lush and persistently meaningful ‘impression’ in the Heart-fields of the parents, in effect creating the existential basis for relationality itself for the first time.
In this way, the ideal fulfillment of this stage is a direct function of how well the child has been able to feel the parents feel what s/he feels, why s/he feels it, while s/he is feeling it up to that point. If the parents are not emotionally porous enough to provide that experience, then this stage of ego-development remains incomplete to that degree. In that case, a minimal safety of reality imparted by the child knowing s/he lives within the caregivers to some degree occurs, but not being able to feel or emotively inhabit that connection by having it upholstered with emotional colors, textures, and warmth leaves that critical component incomplete.
This sets up existential-level structural gaps in selfhood construction and the arisement of correlating defenses and later addictions of medicative substances and behaviors needed to plug those gaps, the ground of what we call our adult ‘issues’ of how we relate to ourselves, others, and reality itself. It’s within this stage that all of our existential pain is engendered when the emotive dynamic of not being able to feel our caregivers feel what we are feeling, why we are feeling it, and while we are feeling it occurs, the pivot where our dependent needs linked to caregivers are met or not, as a child experiences whether or not s/he can ‘land’ in his/her parents. If a child does not experience s/he can ‘land’ in this kind of emotive-based representation of their being within the heart-field of caregivers, they cannot adequately store a sense of existential realness or worth within themselves.
Ideally, feeling felt and sensing that they thus abide or ‘live’ substantively and emotively within the heart-field of the parents thus imparts a sense of both realness and worth back to a child: basic realness is imparted by knowing s/he lives in the parents’ mental body, and a basic worth is imparted by the experience that s/he live in the caregivers’ emotional body. This combined sense provides an assurance of emotional identity and safety in the strange world the child finds him/herself in, because at this stage, a child’s sense of self is still tied deeply to parents like an extended ‘network-self’ and not as yet an independent ‘inside him/herself’ sense of self.
This is the form our most basic human emotive imprinting takes, where we require emotive ‘landing’ in our caregivers in order to then ‘land’ safely within ourselves, because reality to that degree is rendered emotively safe. Without that, we literally either energetically or emotively disconnect from our emotional bodies in some form and then must use the mental body to strategically plug that gap, with the predictably strategic result of almost always losing our perceived sense of emotive authenticity.
In that case, which occurs to the exact degree we can’t feel our caregivers feel what we are feeling, why we are feeling it, and while we are feeling it, and so applies to all of us to the degree caregivers did not heal their own dependent needs from childhood before having children, self-disconnectedness and its expression as deep self-unworth are thus created, remain in the unconscious, and will always underly and limit all other positive conscious self-assessments to the contrary and render them strategically compensatory no matter how unaware we are of the deeper truth.
When this step does not occur emoto-energetically in sufficient depth, and so without the realness and worthiness imparted by its sufficient completion, the child neither possesses enough healthy real inner ‘selfness’ to connect adequately to Other nor has the experience that they live with in parents as the basis for relationality. An existentially deep and enduring mistrust of self first and relationality second thus occurs because first the inner self-pole of the relational parent-to-child dyad is never properly fed, and nor is positive experience of registering meaningfully in the outer Other-pole caregivers. This makes it impossible to healthily connect later to others in adult relational space and thus cripples the child for a lifetime in terms of healthy attachment dynamics in friendships, and especially intimacy. In that way, a child of emotively immature parenting is indelibly conditioned to be capable only of codependent relational forms in adulthood to compensate for the incompletion of this phase.
Codependence in that sense manifests in two main forms: in more negligent forms of immature parenting where parents are emoto-energetically too far away, the malformed self-pole in the child is under-validated and thus leaks emotively too far into Other in adulthood for self-validation, called we-spacer adult codependence in EBE. The other form occurs in more abusive forms of immature parenting where parents are emoto-energetically too close, as the malformed inner self-pole is entrained to compensatorily over-validate itself and thus energetically stays too far away from Other, creating me-spacer-based codependency.
It is in this tragic way that immature parents condition children to crippled adult relational forms by the way they relate to them in the context of a child’s ego development. Emotively immature parents who are emoto-energetically too far away from children seed adult codependence, conditioning children who as adult then leak too far into others for self-definition to compensate. Immature parents who are emoto-energetically too close to children seed adult codependence, conditioning children who remain too far away from others for self-definition.
Emotively mature interdependency, a state of noncodependent relationality our species has never known in any critical mass of experience, requires one properly emoto-energetically formed self-pole relating to another properly emoto-energetically formed self-pole, which allows appropriate inner self-validations on both sides whole enough to then be able to let go vulnerably, porously, and riskily into adult relational space. Only adults who have had emotively mature parenting are capable of emotively mature noncodependent relationality.
Parents have thus never realized how who they are as people in their own me-spacer and we-spacer forms of emotively immature selfhood and the degree of the inherent codependence in the bond out of which children are born, literally pass down the emotionally immature virus to the emotional bodies of their children. This spawns yet another generation of children arriving at the doorstep of adulthood relationally crippled and thus poised to pass down the virus to their own children. Only emotively mature parents generating noncodependent bonding patterns are able to allow their child’s ego development to proceed properly in the sequence.
Because we have never had sufficient emotional maturity established in parents, all human relational space, peer-to-peer, authority-to-subordinate, subordinate to authority, parent to child, child to parent, and human to Divine Being in all of our history has been polluted with codependence in major degree, all stemming from the fact that we create physical children before we create maturity in our own emotional bodies.
In summary, only when step three, ‘I am that which stores or possesses Other,’ is matched mirror-wise suffused with emoto-energetic dynamics provided by emotively mature parents, with step four, ‘I am that which is stored or is possessed by Other,’ are existential algorithms that define and extend basic relational space established.
Without this dynamic, relational space is forever after rendered dangerous, creating the necessity for strategic inauthentic compensations to either avoid closeness or crave neurotically to make up for what did not occur in this critical phase of ego development. Parents in all of our history have never realized the power they have to cripple their children in this specific way, never realizing completion of this phase has nothing whatever to do with how much they love their children, and everything to do with unhealed unconscious dynamics of which they are almost totally ignorant.
Equally ignorant of the criticality of this phase, therapists are unable to ever create a universal metric for healing codependency and thus have no clear causal-level treatment modalities to offer adults in dysfunctional relationships, which is why they can only offer attitudinal/behavioral coping solutions. EBE dharma is rooted in these truths, which is why it can offer causal-based interventions that address the incompletion of this phase.
To the degree emotive imprinting in the first four stages is successful, eventually the child begins to more deeply internalize the experience of how parents live within his/her consciousness and that s/he lives emoto-energetically within parents’ consciousness to the extent that a deeper sense of separate existence or selfhood begins to precipitate out. This normally occurs between the ages of five and seven as the mental body matures more deeply, and the final phase of Reactive Ontogenic Differentiation is free to precipitate in the child’s inner world.
‘I am that which is not Other’ is the terrifying stage of separateness when a child experiences that s/he exists irrevocably apart from the parents wherein his/her previous experience of being stored in the hearts and consciousness of parents no longer provides a sense of reality-safety. This is the phase where nightmares are so common and a child may resist sleeping in his/her own bed or room. This is why s/he craves more extended physical presence experience to assure him/her caregivers will still be there when their attention or presence is withdrawn, as the virtual reality projection of living in parents doesn’t always help cover the fear.
It is easily seen that deficiencies in the prior phases intended to create a reality-orientation of safety and emotive nourishment will deepen and extend the effects of this last phase wherein the child must inevitably confront the existential truth of their own separate being. To the degree the prior phases are not met is the degree the overall effects in this phase are exacerbated, and the degree that they are is the degree they are mitigated.
In the ideal playout with emotively mature parenting, a child wrestles the inner distress of being a separate being akin to a red-hot sword being plunged into cold water to anneal, and integrates that struggle in the context of porous, emotively lush space-holding by parents. This challenge allows a child to forge, maintain, and express heathy outer boundaries that are neither too rigid nor too leaky, and the healthy molten inner core that is porous and vulnerable with Other without being too neurotically needy.
The importance of this ego-developmental sequence cannot be overstated for the fields of psychology and psychiatry. Too long have understandings like these languished as theoretical musings with no link to clinical treatment. Ignorance of its ramifications in the modern era of psychology and psychiatry is pandemic, as clinicians and therapists tragically caught up in the wild feeding frenzy of genetic causality for emoto-psychological difficulties and the resultant ties to Big Pharm dominate the field.
Symptom clusters like borderline personality, assorted dissociative disorders, bipolar syndrome, and even schizophrenia are demonstrably relatable to emoto-energetic deficiencies in the ego-developmental sequence, and as such are tragically and mistakenly assigned to neurochemistry stemming from genetic errata instead of disruptions in childhood of proper ego structure foundation and its direct relationship to emotivity-as-essence. Genetic tendencies only effect downstream degrees of expression of these kind of symptom clusters, and not any deep upstream cause.
Attachment to genetic causality and psychotropic drug substitution for real heart-to-heart help is always the footprint of impotent and inadequate therapeutic skill sets and theoretical training in the modern day. This has occurred because the field is mired in ‘I think, therefore I am,’ or ‘I have a brain, therefore I am’ paradigmatic overlays that screen out possible and real heart-based theoretical and clinical solutions for distressed individuals and relationships based in emotivity-as-essence.
It is time for ignorance in this domain to end before someone in Big Pharm steps in and manufactures a pill for codependency to add to its mood-enhancing products that manipulate human nature to create fake states of reality that covers over how little therapists trained in the old paradigm have to offer clients and patients.
It also informs how both parents and therapist are so apt to do unconscious counter-transference with children and clients, as the defenses required to compensate for improper ego development in therapists and parents keep those dynamics off their radar screen of awarenesss, free to do their undercover reactive projections, and displayed only when it reaches the level of outer behaviors such as collapsing domains and the all-too-frequent examples of sexual impropriety in the therapist to client realm.
No modality of therapy in the training of therapists ever reaches this far down into the being to address and heal these kind of dynamics, instead focusing on downstream symptomatic behaviors and projections within Dim Age-based ‘I think, therefore I am’ or ‘I have a brain, therefore I am’ paradigmatic distortions of such therapy. Lack of that causal healing thus allows unconscious and conscious counter-transferential leakages.
And of course enlightened gurus who emotively, physically, and sexually abuse their followers are operating out of the same unconsciously wounded inner states rife with malformed egos the mere attainment of buddhistic mental body enlightenment never touches, as they look to escape the vast complexities of the emotive burdens of that malformation by defining the ego as illusory and transcending it. Additionally in this domain, maladaptations in the ego-developmental sequence also has enormous implications for buddhistic metaphysics and practice.
When primary structural ego-self-differentiation does not occur in the final stage of Reactive Ontogenic Differentiation because of incompletions in the prior steps, the fears associated with how we are forever alone in the egoic domain of consciousness are never addressed and resolved in that egoic domain itself. When resolution does not occur in the domain of egoic reality, the non-resolution causes the associated emotive conflict to be driven into the unconscious beneath the waterline of the conscious ego.
But wounding associated with incomplete ego development, because it occurs earlier in life than situational playouts and thus nearer to Uroboric states, is ‘heavier’ than other later situational-based wounding, and falls to the ‘bottom’ of the unconscious where it abuts one’s existential aspects of consciousness. This is the mysterious realm secular- and empirical-based philosophy and psychology have no clear picture of and no access to.
This existential aspect of human consciousness is structurally and functionally accessed and illuminated by EBE’s emotivity-as-essence paradigm for the first time. In its deeper aspects, our existential aspects of consciousness segue into our meta-egoic soulful aspects of consciousness that capacitate normal waking consciousness at the level of personality expression. In that sense, what we call our existential domains of consciousness are frequencies of consciousness that link situational aspects of our identity in any one incarnational chapter with our pre-existent soulful aspects.
So in terms of structure, EBE sees human consciousness as comprised of three main layers or frequency domains: normal waking consciousness associated with personality expressions; the unconscious, a vast storehouse of unresolved and disowned emotive-based wound patterns conditioned into us by inadequate parenting and experience-based exacerbations of those patterns; and the existential soulful domain of consciousness filled in the shallowerer layers with archetypal pattens of identity representing issues carried from other chapters of being. In its deeper layers it is comprised of the soul-based domain of consciousness of Spirit from which, and within which, we all ontogenetically originally arose and continue to arise fractally moment-to-moment now and now and now.
Relative to the linkage of buddhist metaphysics, when the situational ego-based domains of self-as-alone are not resolved in childhood in the fifth step of ego development, they thus are driven into the emotive-based unconscious, where they then migrate or ‘fall’ to the ‘bottom’ of the unconscious. Here they resonatively laminate to other deeper and structural existential terrors associated with what EBE’s parent paradigm of Theohumanity refers to as the Terror of Not-Being, one of three existential Terrors of consciousness described in Enheartenment and i feel, therefore i am.
The Terror of Not-Being is actually one of three soul-level Terrors that accompanied our original creation as soulful children of Divine Being, and is the true gestalten dynamic that is healed in Theohumaity’s version of mental body enlightenment, but not fully in buddhist-based enlightenment dharma because of all its paradigmatic distortions and errors.
Unresolved ego-level fears from childhood thus add another layer of obstructive access to the existential Terror of Not-Being, which is why enlightenment has always been so difficult to attain in buddhism. This is because buddhism never addresses and heals these upper layers, mistakenly deemed as they are to be in service of maintaining one’s illusory ego narrative and so taught to be transcended in context, never healed in content.
But this lamination of unresolved emoto-energetic issues conditioned into us derivatively from lack of adequate ego development to already present existential terror only occurs in emotively immature parenting. In the presence of either emotively mature parenting or the causal-level healing that occurs in EBE, the situational fears of separate ego-being resolve and thus do not laminate to the existential terror of Not-Being. This allows a far easier access to nondual enlightenment vis a vis the algorithm of healing the Terror of Not-Being, not transcending duality.
As described in i feel, therefore i am and Enheartenment, if a spiritual seeker does not pass through an almost indescribable and extended feeling of existential terror as his/her sense of ego or separate self erodes as a result of prolonged nondual meditative and radical self-inquiry practice, full access to the nondual aspect of Divine Being will not occur.
The critical distinction between transcending an ‘illusory’ ego and healing the fear of not having ego-continuity, is the key bridge in linking eastern and western metaphysics, as well as all of our psychological and spiritual world-views. Nondual enlightenment does not occur through the algorithm of transcending an illusory ego, but by accessing the nondual Aspect of Divine Being via healing the existential fear of ego-death.
In other words, for dualistic-based rational empiricists, just because we can understand why we over-identify with our sense of individual ego realness and cling to it as explained by early self-differentiation theory, doesn’t mean Divine Being doesn’t exist. And for nondual ego-transcendentalists, just because Nonduality is ‘real’ doesn’t mean individual ego or self is unreal just because we can’t experience it directly except as a mental-body-mediated dualistic concept.
It is exactly this Terror of Not-Being experienced as the fear of ego-death that the buddha believed he encountered. But he never realized how much of it was overstuffed with emoto-energetic over-attachment and over-identificational dysplasia from dystrophic forms of parenting. Missing that, and because he never tracked that kind of dysplasia from his own toxic childhood in himself, he tragically misdiagnosed the issue of human suffering as fully structural in the context of an illusory ego, rather than in the context of the realness of ego possessed of many deep layers derivative of hidden issues of misparenting. Misdiagnosed in this way, buddhism remains ignorant of many basic truths about the reality of ego-based individual self, soul, and Divine Being.
People who heal situationally in EBE and in the overall paradigm of Theohumanity and so resolve issues around the emoto-energetic completion of the ego developmental sequence, simply do not overattach or over-identify with their ego: an emotively completed ego formation dynamic is a forgotten ego. As said, this makes it easier to access the existential Terror of Not-Being without needing to spend years meditating.
As of this writing, in the span of less than a year, five mental body-based enlightenments that heal the existential Terror of Not-Being spontaneously occurred in people who were born with an innate access to nondual Aspects of Divine Being and who spent many years in EBE healing ego-level issues, with virtually no transcend-duality-based meditative practice.
An emotively mature human being was never available to the buddha: all he encountered in his day was consciousness so clogged up by an array of collectivistic, situational, unconscious, and existential forms of suffering so complex, he assumed only wholesale transcendence of the illusory ‘organ’ he believed was at source for the suffering, would obviate suffering.
Had emotively mature consciousness been available, he would have seen human suffering was not only caused by the mere over-attachment to, or overidentification with, an illusory ego. Born in the time he was, his assumption, while patently erroneous, was inspired. But his misdiagnosis of human nature and the cause of suffering has cut a wide swath of soul-level damage in the heart of all buddhism’s followers by denying the realness of ego, the realness of soul, and the realness of Divine Being.
Individuals who undergo EBE to correct deficiences in the ego developmental sequence simply do not exhibit what are called unenlightened behaviors like greed and inhumanity. What are called toxic unenlightened behaviors are only underlain by over-attachment and over-identification to wound-based ego-states only: health-based emotively mature egos simply do not possess them, a reality completely missed by buddhism. Buddhists in the modern day who remain slave to an outworn paradigm and its mistaken metaphysics only impede consciousness evolution in themselves and in those whom they teach, not advance it as they tragically and erroneously believe.
In summary, the picture of our projected egoic ‘end’ lives in the mental body, but the feeling of it abides in the emotional body upstream of the mental body. This is why transcending mind-based dualities does not touch the existential fear of ego-death that lies in the emotional body, because buddhism mistakenly teaches emotivity lives inside the mind as an ersatz form of thought: transcend mind content and you transcend emotive content. But emotivity is not a subset of mind: mind is a subset of emotivity. That one premise makes buddhism in all of its forms utterly obsolete, a product of a darker, more ignorant time, however innocent it may be in its ignorance.
Proof that existential level emotive dystrophy lives on after enlightenment is clearly displayed by all the unenlightened behaviors exhibited by obviously emotively immature gurus and teachers who: never knew emotivity is a more primary reality than cognitivity and so almost comically believe suffering is transcendable by transcending mind; mistakenly believe ego is only a structural illusion imparted by the human mind; and, because in all the centuries since buddhism has flourished they themselves never experienced adequate emoto-energetic completion of the human ego-developmental sequence and so pass their dystrophy onto followers.
As such, they sought compensatory refuge in a paradigm that sold the wholesale loss of ego and the suffering entailed in its overattachment and over-identification that goes along with its incompletion as a drug. What better way to allay or avoid the existential-level suffering inevitably associated with noncompletion of the human ego developmental sequence than to define ego as an illusion altogether?
We all suffer from a lack of completion of the ego developmental sequence in the context of never having been aware we are emotive beings before we are willful, mental, or physical beings, not from an illusory ego. Had Prince Siddhartha not lost his mother in infancy and not had a patriarchal father who lived cannibalistically through his son, and instead had emotively mature parenting, there would never have been anything called buddhism.
The same applies to Lao-Tzu, Abraham, Moses, Yeshua, Muhammed, and all other founders and teachers of religious teachings. All Dark Age-based religions are expressly and collectivistically anti-egoic and as such possess their own forms of equally distorted metaphysical errors, premises mistakenly based upon those errors, and downline misdiagnoses of the innate nature and structure of both human beings and Divine Being.
All of this does not mean there is no such thing as Divine Being, of course. Only that any and all experience of Divine Being will always be predictably and hugely distorted when looked at, believed in, or encountered directly through the lens of an emotively immature ego, the only kind of ego dupable by any Dark Age religion or spiritual teachings, east or west.
An emotively mature ego encounters a Divine Being entirely different than any other religious or spiritual teaching, especially the radical conservative sects of those teachings, inhabited in those religions by the most rabidly emotively immature. It is not a stretch to offer the majority of human suffering in the past and present is generated directly from the unhealed motivations, misdirected intentions, destructive actions, and obstructive-to-consciousness-evolution outcomes of radical and militant religious conservatives and their lamination to childish absolutist religious philosophy.
That tier of religious absolutism allows no room for any kind of situational or existential doubt, which more emotively mature people can digest and live with, allowing personal integrity into the space. As such, militant religious absolutism only attracts the most situationally and existentially wounded, who have no adequate inner healthy egoic center to deal with the difficult realities of human life, and so require rabid religious belief-based fanaticism based in some kind of afterlife to fill that hole.
The tragedy is that such people accurately acknowledge Divine Being, albeit within juvenile paradigmatic contexts and content. This is made even more ultimately so because they tell themselves they are doing the work of God or Jesus or Allah or Muhammed all the while they spread their poisons into the drinking water of global consciousness, never realizing they are the devils they purport to be at war with, not because they are evil, but because they are emotively and existentially wounded and in abject denial of that truth, with no doubt-space that could help them heal.
Now that it is possible to recover from emotively immature parenting for the first time in our historical narrative as human, and create emotional mature egoic states, Divine Being can finally be experienced in self-validating ways more of what It actually is, and will no longer require any kind of belief in It by spiritual people, or rejection of It on the other side by atheistic, secular, or empirical world-views. A world comprised of emotively mature people will far more easily have a common self-validating experience of Divine Being, and with that, the eventual end of all the human suffering in history caused by clashes in religious beliefs east and west.
And in the most global sense, what is called egotism or excessive and bloated self-image out of touch with reality, is merely the me-spacer-based compensation for malformed ego development, not the product of any kind of mythical original sin in the west, over-attachment to illusion in the east, or excess of serotonin or any other brain chemical in the secularized world of pharmacological-based doctoring.
In contrast, EBE refers to healthy egoic functioning stemming from healthy ego development and/or recovery in EBE dharma from malformed ego from emotively immature parenting as egoism. Authentic self-love or healthy egoism is a radically different state of consciousness beyond self-esteem, self-respect, and all strategic performance-based states that only support one’s self-image. Self-image itself is an ersatz product of human inauthenticity only held by the wounded strategic self of humanity.
Only fusion to outworn ‘i think, therefore I am,’ and derivative ‘I have a brain, therefore I am,’ and ‘I do, therefore I am’ paradigms of the human condition causes us to misdefine healthy egoism as a product of attitude, behavior, or rewards for strategic performances. The real egoism of healthy self-love has nothing whatever to do with what we do or perform, and everything to do with who we are in relationship with ourselves.
Only a paradigm based in ‘i feel, therefore i am’ dynamisms illuminates how deeply the domain of human ego has been so unfairly maligned over the millennia by Dark Age religions east and west, and equally so badly misinterpreted by modern Dim Age-based distortions, especially by one of its most strident Dim Age-based champions, Objectivism by Ayn Rand.
As said, in EBE ego is defined as the relationship the soul-based self has with itself. Whatever the source and actual nature of what we call the self or self-awareness may be, EBE defines ego as the way we ourselves actually relate to what we experience, register, and identify with in normal waking consciousness versions as our self.
The idea of what constitutes the self and/or ego has been a lively question for our species for thousands of years. It can be directly known self-validatingly that we actually can never experience in any now moment what we call the self and its representation egoically: we can only experience it in the present moment as a mental body-meditated concept, which buddhism mistakenly uses as proof of its essential illusoriness.
But the truth of its conceptual basis as a ‘noun’ misses its actual nature as a ‘verb,’ as stated earlier: buddhism simply lacked the insight to see alternative possibilities screened out by its erroneous assumptions. In that way, unable to experience it as a noun-thing in the present now-flowing moment, we can only experience what our experiencer experiences, not the experiencer itself. This inability to experience the experiencer of experience is simply a fractal dynamic inherent to the way soul consciousness recapitulates its original ontogenesis within Divine Being, the metaphysics of which is detailed more in Enheartenment.
The ego-based relationship self has with itself can be unhealthy or healthy, full of emotional congestion or free of it, filled with self-loathing or self-Love, and dominated by strategic self or authentic self themes. As has been said, our strategic self dominates the ego by default because of emotively immature parenting in all of our history until a healthier ego is created and released into expression through EBE’s dharma.
Directly related to this redefinition of ego is the idea that there is no more misused term in psychology than what is called ‘self-esteem.’ It is applied to almost anything that refers to feeling good about ourselves, and is almost always defined at the level of performance in terms of action or outcome that supports a specific self-image of some kind. In EBE, what is called self-esteem is not measured at the level of intention, behavior/action or outcome, but at the level of conscious and unconscious motivation.
Assignation of healthy egoism to the level of conscious and unconscious motivation represents a sea change in the way we understand and relate to its dynamisms of being, and only allowed illumination within an ‘i feel, therefore i am’ emotivity-as-essence paradigmatic context. As such, there are only two kinds of motivations underlying all human intentions, actions, & outcomes: authentic self-Love/self-worth-based motivation or inauthentic self-doubt/self-unworth-based motivation.
In that way, true egoic self-Love is not about learning to feel good about ourselves, it is about learning to feel real as ourselves. And we will never feel real as ourselves until we deconstruct the strategic self sitting on top of our underlying and unmanifested authentic aspect of being that imparts its false feeling of real based on what feels good to it.
This re-orientation reframes and utterly obviates the entire modern field of feel-good-based theory and practice that has poisoned countless interventional and motivational bases in psychology, psychiatry, yogic and other pseudospiritual teachings nexi, for change and improvement in our human lives. Feel-good frameworks and their linkage to compensatory false strategic states of ego satisfaction underlie all use of pharmacological agents in the billion dollar business of legal drug dealers, illegal drugs, most modern western adaptations of eastern philosophy, and scores of behaviors-intended-to feel-good expressions in the worlds of social media, entertainment, business, and politics.
Defining ego satisfaction in terms of feeling good never asks the obvious question of ‘why’ any specific dynamic makes us feel good in any moment. The single example of how heroin makes one feel good in the moment incisively and incontrovertibly excoriates the juvenile metaphysical basis of all feel-good-based paradigms of human change, and exposes how there are no deeper defensible guiding principles that determine the relative health of any particular feel-good state.
Because our emotively deficient childhoods never allowed us to get emotive dependent needs met, which definitely did not make us feel good, simply and tragically as adults we seek feeling good as the false drug to medicate that existential feeling-badness. This is the true wound-based metaphysical basis for all forms of feel-good-based algorithms of change.
Being willing to feel real as ourselves and not just good about ourselves is about not avoiding the feeling of any feeling or emotive state within us, especially those numbed off our radar screen of experience by overt and hidden numbing agents or drugs in our worlds, including transcendental practices that teach us not to attach to our personal stories or scripts. Medications of all kinds, energetic, spiritual, behavioral, and substantive, reward and thus keep our strategic self running smoothly in our hectic modern lives. But this smoothness covers the fact that we are actually running on empty all the way down to our existential-level being relative to what our authentic seats of being actually need as real food.
When real food in the form of emoto-energetic emotivity is not available in our personal and societal worlds, we invariably reach for a drug of some kind based in feeling good as the substitute for that lack. A drug only works temporarily, which is why the drug-based natures of all feel-good-based orientations and dynamics must be constantly re-applied to stay effective. When we are actually nourished by real emoto-energetic food, the change is permanent and does not need constant re-application.
In the absence of emotional body self-authentication healing process, our feel-good-based accomplishments and attainments in life are the medications with which we treat our lack of emotional maturity. Attainments based in feelgood dynamics never impart any real or permanent sense of healthy seat of being, and only provide a temporary hit of false self-esteem supporting a strategic self-image that is thus dependent upon the outer attainment to provide it for us. That we need our attainments to prove our worth and value to ourselves, something we are taught to do in all of our cultures, is itself proof of our inner lack of authenticity.
As such, all feel-good-based actions and attainments represent an ‘outside-to-in’ dynamic we generate that runs contrary to the ‘inside-to-out’ way we organically and healthily operate as human beings. Outer accomplishments and success will never help us decongest the core of the inner self-doubt inherent to our inauthentic strategic seats of being.
Such activities will only ever cover it over with a false solutions that will actually make it harder to ever access the wounding it covers over, and prevent any inner healing by making us believe that the feeling better about ourselves and the positive self-image it supports is more important than actually being authentic in our truer emotive essence.
True emotional maturity has nothing whatever to do with feeling better, worldly success, intellectual prowess, spiritual attainment, achievement of goals, or outer accomplishment of any kind. Those performance-based activities lie at the heart of what psychology and society mistakenly support as presence of self-esteem, instead of as compensations covering its actual lack. It is this confusion about the generic support of performance-generated states of pseudo-self-esteem that displays most clearly how limited our Dim Age-based ‘i think, therefore I am,’ ‘i do, therefore I am,’ and ‘i have a brain, therefore I am’ blueprints of the human condition are.
Related to this, in general, psychology overtly or implicitly teaches that self-esteem increases as the gap between the present self and the idealized-in-the-future self decreases, that is, as we close the gap between who and what we are right now and who and what we strive to be. This understanding never realizes that the nature of the idealized self we set as our goal to achieve will always be a projection of our unconscious unworth by default until we heal at the level of our emotional body congestions.
In that way, unlike the projectively ideal-ized self, the healthy real-ized self is not actually a self with new attributes, but a self with a new ground of being. That new ground of being cannot ever be created by adding anything from the outside in to ourselves: it is about subtracting from ourselves the elements of wound-based being that flow from unconscious feel-good-based inauthentic medicative strategies of life.
The actual attainment of one’s strategically created idealized self as presently taught across the entire field of change is just another strategic attempt to be something other than what we are, instead of an authentic deepening into what we actually are right now lying beneath our strategic self. Confused psychological paradigms are so deeply impregnated with performance-based attainments, their successful manifestation actually seals in the very self-unworth and inauthenticity it purports to change.
In other words, what makes the self ‘ideal’ is our believing that attaining this ideal will give us the approval, respect, and Love from others that we unconsciously crave as a result of unhealed congestion in our emotional bodies that produced the lack in the first place. Our desire for personal power, success, security, fame, or spiritual development is always a compensation for emotional unworth until true emotional maturity is attained, as before that, we are unaware of the unconscious reasons for why we seek what we seek.
When that ground of unworth is healed, we may then healthily pursue our life purpose and our own individual creative expression in these areas. But with that healing in EBE comes profound changes in how we define our goals in the first place. This occurs because of a profound change in our value systems that occurs when the authentic self finally takes over as the primary seat of being: the inauthentic self has an entirely different set of values predicated unconsciously on lack of realness and self-worth.
We thus move from values that involve the requirement of outer attainments in strategic compensatory pseudo-self-esteem frameworks, to incubating inner realizations and committing to new ways of processing reality as the dominant dynamic of generating self-authenticity as a state of consciousness as the one and only priority of human life.
In this way, true emotionally mature self-authenticity can only and ever be measured at the level of unconscious motivation, and can only and ever be achieved as a state of inner realization, not at the level of any kind of outer accomplishment. Because it redefined the ground of emotively mature authenticity from the basis of feeling real rather than feeling good, EBE deletes the term ‘self-esteem’ altogether due to its popular distortion, and replaces it with the term ‘self-Love’ and the concept of healthy ‘egoism.’ In contrast, EBE describes ‘egotism’ as the strategic and compensatory unworth-based relationship we have with ourselves, and ‘egoism’ is the authentic and worth-based relationship we have with ourselves.
In EBE, authentic self-Love, the state of egoism, is defined as a state of emotively mature and authentic self-worth operating at the level of our root emotivity, achieved and experienced as a state of inner self-connectedness, not related to outer conditions of any kind. Additionally, its secondary and naturally-flowing outer expression is what EBE refers to as the state of emotive-based self-efficacy. And the term ‘self-worth’ is defined as the full acceptance of ourselves as being worthy of both existence and of Love, in spite of our imperfections, and is the only thing that allows us to be authentically open to real Love. In this way, authentic openness and vulnerability to Love is the only criteria for the embodiment of the egoism of true self-authenticity: it is not about how powerful, gifted, attained, intelligent, or successful we are.
A crucial distinction along these lines is that this criteria is a function of the enormous change in our seat of being that is involved in opening up to our need of Love with another, not from another. The needing of love from another is the domain of the child; the needing of love with another is the domain of the adult. The vast difference between the two states is precisely the difference between an emotively immature seat of being and an emotively mature seat of being, that difference is literally off the radar screen of virtually all paradigms of relationality in planet.
Needing love from another is the nominative state of our healthy dependendent needs of childhood. If those dependent needs are emoto-energetically met, then as adults we no longer need to try to obtain love in that childish way, and if they are not, we cannot but help reach for love from others as an adult to compensate. And since no child in history has ever received adequate completion of their dependent need stage in childhood, all adult relationality is inevitably codependent to that exact degree.
Needing Love or approval from others as adults is the codependent disease supported by all performance-based pictures of self-esteem. Needing Love with others is a natural function of the mature human heart. In that way, almost all of the issues individuals, cultures, and philosophies created around the supposed conflict between the needs of the self and the needs of others has occurred because of the lack of the distinction between needing Love with others versus the needing of Love from others.
A moment’s reflection on the effects of making this simple distinction can show us the way out of how ignorant we have been in the design of our religious institutions, psychological definitions of maturity, revelatory-based moralities, secular ethical codes, and in the very nature of how we define healthy relationship with both self and others. The time of that shift is long overdue: as a species we will continue to devolve without it.
This need for Love from others is thus neurotic, that is, a codependent-based need that acts as a narcotic and without which we cannot survive. But the vulnerable need of love with others is the only healthy emotive-based food that can fully nourish us as mature emotional beings, without which we cannot thrive. Human survival always involves neurotic codependent algorithms in the transaction of love, and human thrival requires the healthy noncodependent algorithms of love transaction: it’s that simple.
Another way of saying all of this is that an emotionally mature egoist is someone whose life expressions are based upon healthy ego boundaries rather than hidden ego defenses. This means that to ever qualify as an emotionally mature egoist in EBE, an individual must have:
* Recognized the false strategy of tying self-worth to performance-based attainments;
* Identified all forms of his/her addictive patterns and the medications which support those patterns;
* Actualized a willingness and ability to demed from those energetics in his/her life no matter how that threatens the status quo themes of his/her life;
* Surrendered to the realization that the first priority of life is to heal the congestion in the emotional body from childhood at cause for all patterns of his/her actions and reactions;
* Sought and manifested effective emotional body healing practice;
* Deconstructed the strategic form of selfhood at cause for distortions in how s/he actually processes reality existentially, and grown a new emotional-based authentic adult self;
* Become strong enough to emotively, and not just energetically, verbally, or behaviorally, surrender and be vulnerable to the need of Love and connectedness with others and not from others.
* Clearly see how collectivistic pictures of the human condition always undermine healthy ego development by marginalizing or vilifying the healthy need of the individual to create their own self health first before learning how to aid others in service.
At this point in time, what EBE defines as an egoist simply does not exist, due to the multiplicity of distortive confusions in our religious, spiritual, psychologic, philosophic, scientific, and secular paradigms that have never incorporated the dynamics of the human emotional body into their world-views in any significant degree. This applies even to the self-styled egoists in the Objectivist tradition, egoism’s most strident champion in the past, or the compensatory strategy of egotists as cultivated by Scientology who equate manifestation of self-will as the ‘cleared’ state without ever asking about the deeper and hidden nature of their self-will.
In that way, those who abide by Rand’s definitions and understandings and Scientology’s versions of egoism only attain a strategically changed self through values clarification, intellectual understanding, behavioral strategies, and mental body transformational algorithms, which do not even remotely impart the emotional maturity of how egoism is defined and manifested in EBE. Even the biological-based psychology created by a protegé of Rand’s does not meet EBE’s criteria for egoism because of the vast acreages of the unconscious that are not proactively sought because of the lack of an adequate architectural map of the emotional body.
In its absence, Objectivists and Scientologists only go halfway: they create self-efficacy as a function of strategic self-image, but never create authentic emotional maturity as a function of authentic selfhood: all because they never learn to inhabit and heal the congestions in their emotional body. Any change that does occur in such people is thus limited to the neurotic strengthening of the will body and/or the mental body and their expressions while ignoring the unconsciously wounded aspects of the emotional body that actually unconsciously drive the will and mental bodies.
Objectivists may thus consciously embody an enhanced self-efficacy and courage as they strive to remain faithful to their values, but they don’t allow others ‘in’ at an emotional level of vulnerability. As such, they mistake sensitivity for vulnerability and never learn how to deconstruct their unconscious fear of authentically surrendering to real Love. They hold that the vulnerability required in this surrender process gives away too much power to others. In that way, they mistake healthy surrender for unhealthy submission and then resist what they experience as submission.
Just so, the states of strategic self-esteem as manifested in Scientologic frameworks based in mental, behavioral and attitudinal algorithms and ‘not being stopped’ in one’s quest for success, attainment, or positive self-image, is the strategic self at work and has no relation whatsoever to authentic emotional maturity. ‘Never compromise your own reality’ is always a teenage-level of emotional maturity as a defensive compensation: a healthy person is always checking in with how their own reality might be distorting perception, and not simply using the drug high of the ‘success’ that comes from never compromising to not look at that domain of life.
Charting one’s lack of ‘engrams’ by using an electrical machine is a laughable measure of the degree of healing the hidden emotionally congested wounds that are covered over by newly-attained states of mind and success. The secrets of the Heart are not measurable by any machine: like healing modalities of all kinds, such an assumption is based on the tragically ignorant position that love is made of energy, rather than the truth that energy is made of love. Machines track energy: they cannot track love, the emotive heart of our being.
More about how love is not made of energy and that energy is made of love instead, can be found in another work, i feel, therefore i am.
All of this of course does not decry the improvement of versions of the human self created by Objectivism and Scientology over the victim-suffused forms of even more deeply confused religious and revelatory-based versions of selfhood. Such improvement simply moves one from more childish dependent and helpless forms of selfhood incubated and inculcated by Dark Age religious mysticism and self-as-illusion paradigms, to Dim Age-based teenage versions of pseudo-independence and power.
The problem is that both paradigms believe these Dim Age-based teenage improvements over Dark Age childish victimhood teachings represent grownup adult actualizations: ignorance of the true nature of adult consciousness is guaranteed by the assumptions undergirding their paradigms. Therein lies their capacity to inhibit any further evolution of consciousness in their followers, which like the childish Dark Age paradigm they purport to improve on, involve attachments to absolutist positions. Rabid Objectivists and Scientologists simply do not have doubts about their world-view. At least Objectivists are benign in their absolutist positionality, but Scientology actually uses coercion and violence to enforce the proscription of doubt.
An authentic egoist is thus never created by rational-intellectual values-clarification or behavioral change. An emotive decongestive process is required. In this way, healthy values clarification and real behavioral shifts cannot occur without an emotive decongestion process, but emotive decongestion will always involve secondary transformative values clarification and changes in behavior. This distinction has enormous ramifications not only for the world-view of Objectivism and Scientology, but for all cognitive-, affirmational-, intention-, and behavioral-based philosophies and therapies.
We cannot create health, growth, or maturity by overcoming difficulties and doubts as these other world-views teach. We do so only by undergoing agonal deconstruction of all the outer performance-based ways we have been taught constitute true mature process.
In doing so, we then expose our existential-level distress, which, when healed, no longer requires the security of success in life to create safety because that safety is created in an emotional body, and not a willful, mental, behavioral, or physical body context. This is also why EBE does not use the term ‘mastery’ in any of its healing algorithms. The dynamic of mastery involves a theme to overcome the existence of some block in our self-image or self-expression using mental, attitudinal, or behavioral means. Only when we undergo the inhabitation and healing of the emotional body congestion at cause for why the block exists in the first place do we manifest authentic forms of self-authentic egoism.
Another seminal point is that one who has manifested emotional maturity no longer needs a self-image. Self-image, the way we prefer to see ourselves or the way we have become accustomed to experiencing ourselves, is precisely the false god served by the strategic self. It is a self-image that is served in all performance-based attainments in the absence of healing unconscious emotional body congestion, including the attainment of enlightenment. One could not help but serve as a goal of enlightenment the self-image of ‘one who is enlightened,’ even if this motive is unconscious to the sannyasin or bodhisattva, in that absence.
An authentic version of self requires no narcissistic mirror of selfimage to look upon to define oneself: it simply comes from whence it comes. Ironically, it is this goal of losing the mirror of self-image that is the idea behind attaining enlightenment. But the only real way to lose the mirror of self-image is to deconstruct the strategic self that possesses it through long-term and agonal emotional body decongestion.
The only self-image that is lost in enlightenment is based in an unconscious strategic attempt to rid oneself of the ‘burden’ of ego and to be in ‘bliss’ as the ‘illusion’ of suffering that inevitably flows from ego falls away. As such, one’s self-image is simply replaced by another more enlightened self-image without the enlightened consciousness ever realizing this.
It is also critical to note that an emotionally unhealed egotist is not just someone with a self-aggrandized or compensatorily over-positive view of him/herself. Egotists can carry an energy of arrogance or of meekness and passivity in their personality style. They can be deeply spiritual people or ruthless dictators. The essence of egotism is not based on what we do or how we express ourselves in life. It is rather about what hidden wound-based motives unconsciously drive our choices and expressions of self, no matter if those expressions are powerful or self-effacing.
In this way, arrogance and piety represent the two polar endpoints of the range of personality styles egotists can exhibit. When we scratch the surface of either overt self-aggrandized or hidden pietal arrogance, we will always find an insecure foundation of self quivering in pain, fear and unworth, with another inauthentic strategic aspect protecting that part with control, piety or power. Big ego(tism) thus always means big insecurity and fear. A true egoist has no need for such, always in a humble and self-centering context that has no need for compensatory arrogance. True humility requires the strength involved in authentic emotional maturity. Without a foundation of emotional maturity, what is called or expressed as humility is just chronic self-unworth in stark expression.
Redefining egoism in this way also redefines what we mean by the term narcissism. Narcissism is always the footprint of the egotist, not the egoist. Whether one creates self-aggrandized compensational personality forms that mask the unconscious unworth, or self-pietal forms that express it openly, one cannot but help be acting within a narcissistic framework because the inner inauthentic self-unworth could not but otherwise seek a solace in an outer way because it lacks the Heart-peace of self-worth on the inner.
This means we could not but otherwise all be narcissists by default until we become emotionally mature, narcissistically needing and seeking our unmet dependent needs from childhood to be met in all avenues and expressions of adult life while this overriding impulse remains unconscious to us. In this sense, narcissism and egotism are equivalent concepts, and remain the de facto state of ego-consciousness until the strategic self is deconstructed and emotional maturity is embodied.
EBE maintains that only an emotionally mature egoist can embody true compassion and authentic humility, because only such a person neither needs to display false compensatory confidence and pseudo-power, nor the inauthentic piety that flows from inauthentic self-unworth: only a truly attained state of emotively mature-based self-worth can drive true humility.
This one insight alone has the power to dismantle the millennia-old power structures and institutions of all religions that rely on self-unworth as the engine for humility before God, and thus for salvation. We must move now into a more grounded reality wherein emotionally mature-based self-worth is seen as the linchpin for all of our activities as human beings, without which our outcomes in life and thus our very worlds of experience will never unwind their inherent distortions and effects.
Specifically, there are three main diagnoses of the cause of human suffering that cover all the traditional religious and spiritual paradigms in earth, and each are rife with deep distortions and errors about the human ego and its supposed contribution to all of our problems as individuals and as a species. For EBE and Theohumanity, all who believe in the western religious myth of ‘original sin,’ those who embody the eastern yogic distortion of ‘original ignorance,’ and those who relate to the error of nondual or Self-Realization traditions of ‘original illusions,’ are egotists because they never healed the existential basis for the false self-image-based ego of the strategic inauthentic self that allows the authentic emotively mature ego to replace it.
In these ways, virtually all religious and spiritual traditions in history see all ego states as homogeneous, not understanding the universe of difference between self-centering, healthy, self-Loved-based egoism and self-centered, unhealthy, shame-based egotism.
The conflict between the religionists and the humanists is another example of one of the most unfortunate displays of our misunderstanding about the nature of ego. Neither side has healed unconscious emotional congestion and so they have created certain kinds of lifestyle-medications to cover up this lack of healing. Relating to this conflict, we could say that our problem in getting along as human beings has historically been framed as a conflict between ‘self-less-ness’ vs. ‘self-ish-ness.’ But as said, selflessness (piety) and selfishness (arrogance) are actually equally wounded states and are always a result of the same egotistical and narcissistic dynamic masquerading as opposites.
But selflessness is simply not a state of consciousness possible to human beings: there are always self-oriented motives and benefits involved in what have been falsely called ‘selfless’ acts or intentions for thousands of years. As covered in the next chapter, only unhealed emotional body congestion blinds us to the obvious fact there are no sacrificial acts, no non-self-interest in and within the human condition. There is no such thing as a higher ‘non-self’ acting spiritually in the material world, and there is no such thing as ‘altruism’ in any of our actions.
In that way, only an egotist could believe in selflessness.
So it is completely selfish to do good works or to serve others altruistically if our unconscious motivation is to gain for ourselves the reward of heaven or enlightenment, which will be the default motive without prior emotional body enlightenment dharma. Those whom we serve in this manner are thus inhumanely reduced to pass-through objects we then use to gain the heaven we selfishly desire, rather than serving others’ needs out of overflowing Love that anticipates no reward. This ‘no reward’ includes even God’s approval for the service we are rendering to others.
Only a healthy egoist, who rejects altruism altogether, and instead first learns to serve self-Love in a healthy way, can truly choose to then healthily serve the needs of others, because the need for God’s approval or validation of their own self-image as a ‘giver’ no longer is what motivates them.
In true Christianity, different than the Pauline form that survives today, this was part of Yeshua’s message when he saw through the ‘good’ works and actions of the Pharisees, declaring that while they were living by the law, they were failing to live from the Heart. That altruism, for all these centuries, has been taught as the ‘cure’ for selfishness instead of as a major purveyor of selfishness, is an irony of incalculable proportions. This is exactly why we as a species remain so spiritually immature, as all of our spiritual practice has been founded on paradigms based upon emotional immaturity, pivoting around the monumental metaphysical pathologization of ego.
To clarify the language used here, EBE’s parent paradigm of Theohumanity makes the distinction between the healthy self-interest embodied by the egoist and the unhealthy selfish and illusional altruistic themes displayed by egotists. A healthy, conscious self-interest embodied by an egoist is referred to in EBE as selfist. The conscious choice to healthily serve the self-interest of others is amorism, which replaces the correlates of ‘selfish’ and ‘altruism’ in egotism. The unhealthy serving of others’ needs before our own, which is always an unconscious charade to receive Love back from those whom we serve, is thus selfish, with altruism as the self-contradictory expression of this selfishness.
This is why the only morality and ethics which stand in true alignment with our ego-based humanity as expressed by our most basic emotional body-based nature would involve a code of ethical standards and morals emanating from the level of unconscious motivation, rather than conscious action. If two identical actions which both serve the needs of others can have opposite motives, then the morality of the situation can never be measured at the level of action.
We can thus have a situation wherein our ‘giving’ is altruistically-based to unconsciously provide the selfish giver a way to get their own enlightenment or heaven-bound goals selfishly met. Or, we can have another situation where a selfist egoist chooses to ‘amoristically’ and consciously serve another from their own overflowing, self-embodied Love. The former can never transmute to the latter until and unless the strategic self is deconstructed, emotional maturity is embodied, and thus the motives that drive intentions and desires to serve the needs of others have been cleansed of their default status of having an unconscious egotistic agenda.
In this way, relationship fulfillment is never authentically and healthily accomplished by doing things for our partner or receiving things from our partner. It is attained by feeling things with our partner. As we will discuss further in later chapters, an egoist would question and reject even pleasant actions directed at them if they felt that those actions were unconsciously motivated by unhealthy, codependent, and fear-based parts of their partner.
So in amorism, serving another’s needs simply involves choosing one set of self-interest benefits over another set of self-interest benefits and is thus a conscious choice from a motivation of transconditional Love. The illusion of ‘unconditional’ Love is part of the same faulty paradigm that defines altruism as actions based on spiritual selflessness. We are always beneficially serving ourselves and our own needs when we are healthily serving the needs of others. What has caused all the confusion is that we deny that this is true. And the reason we have been denying it is because we’ve not been aware that we all have unhealed parts of us who derive some kind of benefit from each and every one of our choices.
In this sense, the ideas of amorism and transconditional Love were really what was trying to be defined originally in what has been called ‘altruism’ and ‘unconditional Love.’ Given how little we’ve known about the human emotional body in the past and present, the ideas of altruism and unconditional Love are the best as a species we could have done, given the strata of consciousness we have had.
To summarize the terminology being offered:
If self-Love is only measurable at the level of inner motivation and is not necessarily manifested in our lifestyle or outer achievements, a state of true egoism can only be actuated through effective emotional body enlightenment practice. In its absence, we could not but otherwise be infected with egotism to that degree while in the thrall of our strategic form of selfhood. As a few examples, an emotionally healthy egoist will not display:
* Overeating/overweight or under-eating/underweight patterns
* Codependency in parental-, romantic-, friendship-, or spiritual-based relationship
* Promiscuity, celibacy, or non-monogamal multiple partner sexual relationships
* Overachieving or underachieving dynamics
* Meditating/transcending to overcome our ‘lower’ selves
* Remaining in an unfulfilling romantic relationship so as not to hurt our partner
* Use of all forms of hallucinogenic or mind-‘expanding’ drugs, especially if described as ‘sacred medicine’
* Using transcendental insight or the power of ‘Now’ to negativize the ego or to avoid feeling deeply into what causes us to have problematic passing moods and feelings
* Working in a job/career or remaining in a romantic relationship that doesn’t invoke our deepest passion
* Use of mind-language-manipulative therapy to upholster over unpleasant emotions
* Participation in any personal-success or power-performance teachings or practices
* Taking a leadership position as a spiritual teacher without ever undergoing effective deconstruction of the strategic self
* Teaching devotees that they must undergo ego maturation as part of their spiritual quest but the teachers themselves do not
* Believing Maslowian-based functionalism as indicative of healthy ego attainment
* Playing a codependent role as either guru or devotee
* Participating in emotional release practices which don’t negotiate with defenses or target unconscious motivation at the level of multiple-subpersona realities
* Looking to psychic-metaphysical phenomena to give ourselves a place in the universe other than within our own grounded, emotive center
* Holding forgiveness-based strategies as spiritual growth
* Moving to a utopian/enlightened ashram or community
* Having children to receive Love from them
Also, it is critical to remember that EBE maintains that an egoist still needs Love with others and frequently cares about what others think. The difference is, no matter how deeply an egoist wants Love or acceptance with others, he or she will not ‘shrink-to-fit’ in any manner to obtain it. This is what makes an egoist an egoist: they will never surrender their values, which is to say, their lives, in order to gain Love or acceptance or romance or friendship or sex or money or power or success or any other life outcome. Again, an egoist will want and need Love with others, but not from others. Egoists always know that their healthy needs in relationship will be met only if they and their partner operate from emotionally healthy motives, regardless of what actions or outcomes may manifest.
In other words, egoists negotiate needs and desires in relationship within the frame that both partners will demand to know whether or not what each desires is based on healthy or unhealthy motivations. If a motivation for a partner is unhealthy, an egoist will reject it, even if the behavior, action or outcome is pleasurable to him/her. Likewise, an egoist will accept a behavior even if it causes him/her agonal pain, as long as the partner’s motivations are healthy. An egoist understands that any pain experienced within a healthy motivational context is given to us as an opportunity to grow as its function is to help burn away unhealthy self-attachments.
It is also not the case that an egoist doesn’t feel fear. It is what an egoist does about that fear which makes him/her different from an egotist. In EBE, creating a new HOH allows for a new relationship with fear, making fear a smaller and smaller percentage of contribution to our motives. As such, egoists never try to ‘master’ or overcome their fear: they heal the source out of which their fear arises by undergoing radical surrender to their emotional decongestion process.
As they do, egoists need no outer sanction for their lives other than the luminous self-integrity they create within themselves and share with intimates. In that sense, egotists employ self-control as a behavioral coping mechanism to overcome or master fear, while egoists employ self-management as an empowerment mechanism to heal what is at cause for fear. Control is always a defense against feeling fearful emotions, while Management allows us to proceed with life while fully feeling fearful emotions.
In summary, in EBE there are three major expressions in everyday life that display authentic egoism: the deconstruction of the strategic self and manifestation of one’s underlying emotively mature authentic selfhood; the ability to transact noncodependent romantic intimacy; and the ability to manifest fulfilling, noncompensational-based passion-work. The first is attained through deeply inhabited emotional body enlightenment practice, and the second two verify that attainment.
So if we are as yet unaware of what our true passion-work is, or unaware of what actually constitutes non-codependent romance sufficiently to not be enmeshed in it, we have work to do to demedicate strategic personality patterns. A fully developed egoist knows what his/her life work/purpose is and has created a noncompensational relationship with it. This also means that an egoist does not need manifestation of his/her passion-work to feel good about him/herself. Passion-work is not what we do in service of attaining or preserving a certain kind of self-image: it is who we are as an expression of a selfhood that needs no self-image to guide it.
A final way of describing a state of egoism is to say an egoist is always willing to both ‘have’ and ‘not have’ equally. Egoists are willing to face the fear of not having life configurations or energies medicatively held onto out of fear. Egoists are also willing to have what they have always dreamed of having without being afraid of losing it once they have it, and have the vulnerability to risk opening the heart to all things with no guarantee the heart won’t be abused.
In another direction, an egoist never has a need to ever ‘win’ friends. An egoist knows that friendship is only a harmonic resonation of values that arises and recreates itself organically as both parties stand for their needs and desires and do not unhealthily serve unhealthy needs in the other just to keep the friendship going. Friends commit to each other’s emotional health, and not to helping each sustain their neuroses and strategies to cope. Honest and emotionally mature relationships are thus never the result of any attempt to artificially create states of friendship based upon egotistical insecurity and approval of others.
In this way, the only friends we can have are those who resonate with our values of life. These friendships will or won’t occur without a need for any strategic production on our part to create or sustain them. Any other relationship to relationship is an egotistical ‘shrink-to-fit’ situation wherein we must contract our being in order to achieve self-acceptance through others. Loneliness is never justification for trading our self-integrity for acceptance. But since we are innocently egotistical until we heal emotional body congestion, a growing egoist endures a deep degree of loneliness that inevitably arises in a culture rampant with intimacy models that cosign the participant’s neuroses and cover over our true terrors.
Ego has never been the problem in our relations with self, others, or God; rather it has been the lack of a healthy ego that has been. We all require a healthy ego based upon healthy ego boundaries in order to be self-centering, emotionally mature persons capable of intimate relationship with ourselves, with others, and with existence. It has always been the fear within the ego, which is the very essence of egotism, that creates unhealthily, self-centered, emotionally immature pre-adults.
These understandings constitute an entirely new basis for morality and ethics based upon emotional maturity rather than on faith, good works, or conceptual-based frameworks. Only emotive decongestion of unconscious self-unworthiness clears up the motivations for all these ‘downstream’ expressions and activities and can, thus, create a moral code that is in alignment with our true divine human nature.
In summary, when the movement from being experience, which is made up primarily of the parents’ reality imparted to the child, collides with having experience, which is the child’s reality imparted to him or herself, because a child cannot feel a fully lush emotively-nourishing bond with caregivers who remain unconsciously overlaid by a strategic form of selfhood, healthy ego formation in the child is frustrated to that degree.
So when children can feel their parents feel what they feel, why they feel it, and while they are feeling it, their reality does not collide or dissonate with the parents’ emotive ground reality. In such a case the child can then continue to disembed safely from his Uroboric reality.
Our neurobiology or ‘nature’ thus allows us to develop the primary structure of an ego, but the element of emotional validation or ‘nurture’ is required to add the colors and textures of self-worthy and self-connected upholstery to that structure. This results in the formation of a healthy, porous ‘interface’ or boundary between self and reality, porous because reality is safe enough to energetically ‘share’ with one’s own internal self. If a child can’t feel caregivers feel him/her, then to the child, his or her inner world cannot dance freely with outer reality, making life experience unsafe and reality an unsafe place to disembed into.
Thus, healthy disembedment is held back defensively and a developmental disownment of self or fixation around being unable to disembed, is created and sustained. This fixation is the unhealthy or ‘nonporous’ ego defense; a mixture of self-boundary and conflict-content that resists energetic sharing with one’s own reality experience. This is in contrast with the otherwise healthy ego boundary formed when a child’s inner and outer reality resonate without conflict.
So a parent’s Love or validation of their child’s emotional reality is the building material with which the healthy ego boundary of our fledgling self is constructed. In any collision between our reality and our parents’ their reality will be experienced as ‘good’ or ‘right’ and ours as ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’. This occurs both because of the parents’ authority to represent reality to the child and because all of the child’s experience is ‘good’ or ‘right’ in the sense that it is ‘real’ or at least the only reality the child has known.
So whenever a child’s reality is in conflict with his parents’, the reality, created by the parents and their energetic imprint, will be the right or good one and s/he will innocently assume his/her own inner reality is wrong or bad. Once such a template is in place, a lifelong set of filters that lie between the child’s heart and his/her experience will be by default a permanent structural energetic which can only be deconstructed with a truly effective emotive-based healing paradigm.
Since young children have not yet created strategic mental-based relationship with reality, they are their feelings, such that if they feel good, then they are good, and if they feel bad, they are bad. It is this self-judgment that is the primary source of our unworth which we then cover over with defenses and compensations that become characteristics of our strategic personality. Unless we can claim that we consistently felt our caregivers feel us throughout our entire childhood, our personality will automatically lack healthy ego boundaries and always create ego-defenses acting as their substitutes.
Once such ego defenses are planted within the growing structure of our Ego, they act as resistance-based filters that affect all further experience; distorting it in the direction of the already present congestion or fixation. This attracts even more hurt emotional congestion like a magnet. When this congestion collects to a certain degree, the hurtful experiences become overwhelming to us past the point of our being able to digest or assimilate them. As a result, what EBE refers to as a subpersona is born.