To Save the World...Let Down Your Defenses

Protecting the ‘ego-self,’ (the mind’s rendition of how to conduct the body’s actions), is the chief limiting factor of any extension, or reaching out, between 'individuals.' Nevertheless, the psychological self does not exist in any ‘real’ or tangible sense, but you believe it is very much “you” and, in that sense, you certainly 'exist.'

You can’t physically touch your psychological ‘self’ and you can’t experience it without a body, but you do believe there is something ‘there’ you call “I” from which you believe in your 'existence.'

Essentially, the psychological ego-self is nothing more than a “skin-encapsulated package of beliefs” (Freud). This collection of beliefs continues to accumulate over time, yet, the core belief system designating 'what' you are (body-mind) was formulated in early childhood (whereas, the specific "who" you are, comes later). These past beliefs serve to reinforce and actively assert “you” into a "world." However, other beliefs serve, through defensive measures, to impede the assertion of others against your beliefs. These two types of beliefs will aid or obstruct your body’s negotiating what can sometimes seem like a cold, cruel world.

If you had NOT accumulated beliefs about your body (the beliefs you refer to as your ‘self’) the ego might have difficulty differentiating your body from other bodies, since you would not have a concrete reference point for which to anchor the abstraction you refer to as an ego-self. Nevertheless, since you can reference your body and ‘self’ apart from other forms, you have come to see other bodies in two distinct ways. They either serve to enhance your ‘self-construct’ or impede it. Therefore, it is important to the ego-self that accurate judgments are made so as to judge differences and engage or disengage accordingly.

To judge friend or foe, requires that you know the ‘self’ that you interact with. However, since there are often so many that you interact with throughout your day, you have found it much easier to alienate your ‘self’ from others. This is done not just to protect your body (rarely is this necessary), but more importantly to protect your psychological self. Although you have many different protective strategies to insure your ‘self’ is protected, the most effective strategy is alienation and, in fact, you even find it helpful to use alienation with those you profess to “love and cherish.”

ALIENATION

Alienation is a protective strategy employed to offset the risk of attack to the psychological self by fortifications that increase distance between your 'self' and others. You frequently use this strategy with those you don’t know and often use it with those you do know (or think you 'know'), particularly if the ‘self’ has evaluated another as antagonistic in the past (precisely because an ego-self is a composite of the past).

Alienation is nothing more than a conscious and unconscious distancing of the self from others. It is a psychological protective withholding to significantly minimize disclosure of the ‘self.’ It blunts honesty and authenticity in order to avoid being openly exposed, or fully known, and you believe this insures the self against attack. It is often (but not only) manifested as “small talk” or surface engagements. It is the scripted “hello, how are you?” “Fine, thank you and how are you? “Fine thanks, nice day, huh?” Such engagements are perceived as safe and many believe that surface correspondence is necessary in a generally unsafe and often psychologically dangerous world.

In such a precarious world, openness is dangerous, because honest exposure increases vulnerability to psychological attack and must be avoided.

Yet, the real destructive aspect of alienation occurs, ironically, in those engagements we desire be our most intimate. Surface engagement, between those in which joining originated from an expectation of “love,” is an erosion of deep understanding and the eventual termination of intimacy. This often occurs when interactions only address surface issues based primarily on conventional functions and everyday activities.

Surface interactions provide little information other than that which complies with sense impressions interpreted through socially conditioned, conventional meanings.

When surface interactions become the norm, engagement becomes a charade in the distorted idea that this is the extent of our reaching out to one another. Intimacy suffers and eventually dissolves because loved ones have exhausted all opportunities for depth. Egocentric fear limits all engagement and grinds our interactions down to nothing more than conventional correspondence, in which we can always easily predict the outcome.

Surface inquiries do not aid you in understanding and deeply knowing others and does nothing to aid in saving your world. In fact, continued surface estrangement is destroying your world because strangers do not collaborate very well, since they have hidden agendas.

Our microcosmic surface engagements can only maintain our present course of mutually assured destruction of the macro-world. Until we dissolve our estrangement and alienation, our world will continue to erode in response. When we are strangers, the world seems strange, because the lack of human intimacy affects all aspects of our experience of existence.

When we are all strangers, the world no longer feels like home and we lose the desire to save it.

Engaged intimacy is a two-way street of mutual revelation. In seeking to deeply understand the experience of "you," I must deeply reveal my 'self' and not to do so only impedes your honesty. However, this is highly inconvenient to an ego that has relied on itself to provide meaning to its experiences of it 'self' and its 'world.'

Although mutual revelation (revealing) is the only way to bridge the canyon that alienation has constructed, such exposure makes you vulnerable to attack and since the ego-self is a composite of the past, you will base your openness on past precedent. In other words, the ego will restrict your vulnerability for the sake of self-preservation. Problem is, this is what is essentially killing us by destroying the ‘place’ we call home and until the past is surrendered the planet must suffer from it.

Until you no longer fear vulnerability, honesty will suffer and estrangement will prevail. It is ONLY honesty that will save your relationships, as well as our collective world (since our relationships make the world “real” by projecting 'meaning' onto experience). Yet, to engage in honesty you have to let go of fear and embrace your vulnerability. Your egoic self-concept will resist such vulnerability, because it was constructed entirely from fear and, thus, actually constructs the fear it seeks to avoid.

Essentially, you must be willing to be hurt in order to access the part of your mind that is invulnerable and cannot be harmed. By letting down your psychological defenses, you immediately correspond with the part of you that is rarely experienced due to the ego’s defensive fortifications.

However, the when you let down your defenses and allow for open honesty, you will soon experience a deep sense of relaxation and calm (understatement) rarely experienced previously. This “awakening” is merely a realization of the extreme effort that maintaining your defenses has required all these years.

Don’t be surprised when others remark on how “happy” you seem...

...because you have ‘them’ to thank for it.

 Artwork by Laurie Lipton - "Maskers"