I really did think I was beyond all that. After all, at 81, I’ve seen it all, done it all. Nothing surprises me anymore.

Oh yeah? You, Ann, just actually took the time to read this . . .

Geez! I realize I’m chronically “guilty” of all these items, except possibly, #5.

1. Oh, I know I need to stop being offended, but woke folk still “trigger” me, big time; and though I try to let go of instant fury in the moment, it’s an ongoing mindfulness practice.
2. This one is built in, I must admit. Because I was the eldest of eight children? Because I grew up a dogmatic Catholic? Even though I spent my graduate school years in philosophy in what I call alt-epistemology, learning how to relativize my own thinking process, it obviously hasn’t worked . . .
3. Ditto to #2.
4. Geez. Once again, stemming back to being the eldest of eight. When I lived in the yurt village in Jackson Hole back in the 1980s, one of my friends named me, only partly as a joke, “Mother Superior.” And yes, I can see myself in that position, in a medieval nunnery, say. Feels utterly natural.
5. This is the one that bores me. No need for more. Need to pare down materially, on all levels.
6. This one really has me stuck. Is my ongoing, now six year Recapitulation Project to to archive on the internet much of my voluminous written work, published and unpublished, over five decades (with some of it also as audios), just a fools’ dream? Is it a need to feel remembered in a certain sort of manner? OR: Is it my way of making sure I don’t die soon? No. I really don’t care when I die; except that I want to be done. DONE. No unfinished business.
7. Yeah. See #6.

 

On the other hand, one can view the ego in a neutral manner, as the “container” for one’s mental processes. The container keeps the inside in and the outside out. Utterly necessary, at least in this culture, the self/other distinction. This is what we learn during our “terrible twos,”  communicated with three emphatic words: “ME,” “MINE,” and “NO”! One might add that all our lives, we are hopefully refining this self/other distinction, so that we don’t end up either utterly isolated, lonely, or completely overwhelmed, sucked into energy fields not our own.

This ego container can be impervious, or it can function as a more or less dense mesh, which, if we are learning, mutates over time. All our lives, personal boundaries are at issue, and we learn much from every single key relationship about the relative importance of what’s mine, what’s yours and what’s ours.

The key, in regards to the utterly necessary ego, is that it protects one from what is not wanted inside; and that it also has a consciously operated nozzle, so that one may express, with greater and greater finesse over time, what’s inside to the outside.

 

Meanwhile,

BINGO.