Our body is created and formed during the uterine stage. All organic systems are already present at birth. As we know, during childhood and adolescence, the physical body needs to continue maturing until it reaches its adult state. The brain will attain maturity, along with the rest of the body, at around age twenty-two. The most important organ of the nervous system is the physical intermediary of higher cognitive and psychological functions, such as consciousness, perception, memory, personality, self-image, motivation, behaviour, acquisition of skills and decision-making, among others. This set of functions belongs to the mind-psyche.
In early childhood, the human being is completely dependent, both physically and emotionally; this is part of our nature. The essential needs that the person has and requires from his or her parents or the figures that substitute them in childhood are the need for affection, the need for attention and the need for support. A baby is not capable of obtaining protection and nutrition for themselves, neither on a physical or emotional level. When they learn to walk they become more independent, yet the chances of survival and learning are unlikely without contact with adults.
The next step in a person's evolution is the development and mastery of language, which normally begins to manifest itself around the age of two, reaching a very significant level from the age of seven onwards. There are children in situations of extreme poverty who are quite physically independent at this age: they are now able to provide themselves with protection and food. So, while this is not the ideal situation, it shows that the age of seven is an age that could be marked as the end of the early part of childhood and the beginning of a change of cycle in the capacity for autonomy in human beings. Ninety percent of self-image, personality and sense of identity are already formed at this time. There is a certain degree of physical strength, and advanced psychomotor and language skills.
The second period of childhood is between the ages of seven and thirteen. During this stage, one must continue to cultivate and consolidate one's personality while, under normal conditions, continuing to incorporate competencies in the form of psychomotor, intellectual, artistic, emotional, social and financial learning. Although not as fundamental as in early childhood, it is clearly better to continue to receive the protection, love and education of adults in order to have a better chance of achieving a balanced and advanced mind-psyche.
The next stage is that of adolescence and early youth, from the age of thirteen to twenty-two. It is to be expected that during this period the individual will work and prepare themselves to achieve real autonomy (that is why adolescents are generally rebellious – they are practicing being autonomous, although they are still not). Meanwhile, learning continues at all levels, and, moreover, sex roles are intensified.
By the age of twenty-two, the process of individualization and emotional autonomy should be complete. By then, the physical body, self-image and sense of identity should be fully formed. This is when the maturation period is over, moving onto the adult stage. At twenty-two, theoretically, the individual can integrate the external world into their own inner world and is able to diminish the childish search for attention, affection and support in others. The individual is sufficiently qualified to continue, without depending on their parents, with his or her own horizontal evolution, that is, with intellectual, emotional, professional, creative, economic and social development. The individual should be able to identify and meet their own needs, manage their problems, love themselves and rely on their own resources, strategies and strengths, while their relationships with others become mature and empowering.
As we move into adulthood, we can take a step beyond experiential development, by sharing with others a life based on evolution and the unfolding of consciousness. This is vertical evolution, in which the main human motivation is the knowledge of oneself, of the mystery of life and of the phenomenon of perception.
However, the reality in our society is altogether different. We are primarily educated to maintain the pattern of emotional dependence, feeding – on a lifelong basis – the compulsive and recurrent search for external affection, attention and support. Society is like a child that does not want to grow up, and the individual keeps claiming from others what they do not give to themselves, not out of real incapacity, but due to a collective choice that is supported and perpetuated individually. In this way, we all weave together the social spider's web in which the roles of owner and possession, dominator and dominated, victim and victimizer are maintained and nourished. The collective is afraid of emotional independence, when, in reality, this would bring us splendour as a society. The individual is afraid of loneliness, yet this is nothing more than the inability to accompany oneself, which hides a strange and ancestral terror of really knowing oneself, of facing infinity.
Every individual has their own core personality, with particular characteristics that mark a series of inertias or predispositions, some of these positive and others negative. This personality needs to be developed, since, like everything else, it comes into the world in an immature state. It will be used by the individual to enrich or impoverish their self-identification and self-perception through the idea of the self, which will be reflected through self-image.
The personality needs to be matured in contact with the social environment. The loan that the collective makes to the individual at birth is the explanation of the world. This interpretation is a sensory, emotional, cognitive, and linguistic model that allows the brain to organize itself in a similar way to how that of its fellow human beings is organized. As I have already mentioned in previous chapters, in Emoenergetica this collective explanation is formed by the first three systems of images, the individual will have to develop his or her own, the fourth. The immature brain is stimulated by the environment and replicates the neural patterns of the adults with whom it relates – it does this internally, as if it were a mirror. First, they grasp and then they learn, to later make their own externalization, sometimes by imitation and sometimes by rebellion, in the form of interests, strategies and behaviours. As I have indicated, in the maturation process, the child has a biological need for attention, affection and support, in quantity and quality, both for their survival and for the proper development of their core personality. These needs are an essential part of shaping one's personality and underpinning other stimuli that come in the form of teachings, belief systems and interactions with others and with the world.
Although the process of the need for attention, affection and support in childhood has a purely biological origin, from the beginning it has been corrupted by a society of "adults" who continue to maintain the same lifelong dependent patterns in themselves. The personality that we are forced to develop and strengthen is the egoic personality, which secretly serves the social order by continuing to be a slave to the biological order and its commands – both reproductive and predatory. Perhaps in earlier times this was not so apparent, since nature has ruthlessly pushed us to abide by its rules. However, nowadays, it is no longer so easy to become extinct, we do not need (at least in principle) to subject the body to life and death in ridiculous competitions whose only objective is the reproduction of the fittest. Technology is beginning to provide sufficient solutions to allow us to go beyond the animal impulse. That same technology, however, is being used to amplify dependency to unprecedented levels. The maintenance and defense of the ego – both individual and collectivized – has become the ultimate goal of human life, right now, when we find ourselves at the juncture when it is most necessary to go further.
Thus, emotional dependencies form the roots of the ego, and are therefore the source of the disharmony, conflict and evil that we have experienced since the dawn of humanity, although, at the same time, it is this dependency that has protected and fostered the perpetuation of the group within a naturally aggressive environment.
In any case, from an emotional point of view, it is impossible to consistently obtain all the attention, affection and support from others in the desired form and amount. This produces a great feeling of loss and failure in the individual. As part of the compensation mechanism for this sense of lack, the egoic mind develops self-sabotage programs in a desperate and perverse attempt to improve its ability to be the focus of attention of the external world and thus achieve the gratification it desires. These programs are called psychological reversals and aim to highlight personal failure in order to make it visible to the world. The individual feels more or less consciously that if they become a failure then others will have no choice but to attend to them, love and support them. It is evident that functioning from this point consequently generates more problems and needs that manifest themselves in the form of malignancies, ego defects and negative feelings, which will strengthen the pillars of the ego and the emotional dependencies themselves, which will stimulate the patterns of dominator or dominated in the individual, thus closing a loop that steals the energy from the original being that we are in order to sustain and nourish the egoic mind. The intensity and negativity of all these egoic schemes is different for each of us, and their effects are also different, and yet we all have them, from the seemingly most capable and balanced person to the individual who is unable to navigate normally in the world. These mechanisms that form the innards of the ego will be explained in detail in the corresponding chapters.
The nature of the ego has been discussed since time immemorial. In spiritual schools this has been a recurrent theme, as has the search for ways to reduce or eliminate it. Many ask themselves why this is. If you are a warrior of consciousness, the answer is simple: to have the opportunity to live the human experience from the original mind, to accept the challenge and the path that hides the option of leading us to experience life as fulfilled beings and thus explore our potential, claiming the heritage forgotten by others. And what if evil consisted of squandering the possibilities of development and consciousness that we have as human beings, using our capacity to decide in a perverted way, turning the prodigious act of living into a serial routine of purposelessness, banalities, attachments, addictions, vanities, lamentations, bad imitations, forgetfulness, illusions and falsehoods?
The ego is not the same as the self. The selfhood is the being, the centre of the original mind, while the ego, which is part of the automaton, is the centre of the egoic mind. We literally have two minds. The ego is noisy, in almost permanent chatter, often incongruous, controlling, territorial and, above all, overflowing with personal importance and egomania. It likes to be aware of what others think of you and feels superior or inferior as a consequence. This happens even to spiritual practitioners who, although they withdraw from the world, are always eager for God to observe them. The egoic mind is a scavenger. It feeds and becomes strong by focusing on the past that has already occurred and the future that it has never possessed, on worries, vices, dependencies, fears, obsessions, and gratifying or painful emotional outbursts.
The original mind is quieter, more serene and humble. It only appears on the scene in the few moments when the other mind moves away; it is sincere and makes you feel authenticity. It has no need to be below or above others and can only be nourished by what it needs when you allow it to focus on the here and now. This is a problem because, generally, the original mind has become lazy, sometimes it is afraid or just has no desire to fight and is carried away by the selfish mind. It is true that the being is more connected to the infinite while the ego handles the everyday world. But that can change: the being can make itself present in the world if it displaces the ego, if it stops agreeing with it.
The ego is conquered from within, convinced little by little by the original mind to be impeccable through the inflexible endeavour to renounce the desire for attention, challenging it to develop true dignity towards itself, making it see that it is capable, developing self-esteem. The ego, by nature, has a controlling character and likes to dominate what it does, so by taking the appropriate steps we can coax it into doing things that suit us. In this way it will be purified through the conscious development of the essential virtues, of authentic interest and of a sublime will, because only a purified ego can step aside, and eventually surrender. This process is not something that can be accomplished in two days, it takes a lifetime to achieve. However, when you understand that the destination is the journey, there is no hurry.
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The Egoic Phase by Chema Sanz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.