Our identity and our ego can become distorted because of their vulnerability and in their constant buffeting with the world. Our bodies contract diseases in the same way. This distortion can make for a loss of connection with our becoming self, and with that loss, our ego and our identity take what meaning making they can from the world around them alone. They can lose the authenticity and security of the becoming self, and in that way, our identity and ego can feel quite lost. When we can discover the way to understand and offer compassion to our identity and ego, we can find the "Yes" that makes peace with both and leads them and us back to the becoming self and its unfolding. When we offer the unconditional to ourselves, identity and ego, which the becoming self can always offer, we can find our sense of unity returns. When we feel that unity, we discover an authenticity of our whole being, identity, ego, and becoming self that allows us to experience and live a more authentic life. It can end alienation and establish unification of our becoming self with our identity and our ego. A good deal of our discussion so far has led us to this encounter now that we have established a sense of how our ego and identity have come into being.
Life expects us all to take an essential stance toward the world of the present, past, and future.[68] We can seek to work at domination and seek control of that world and its random seeming occurrences, or we can choose balance as our attitude toward what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen. In balance we can better make form out of our experience, find or make patterns, find or make meaning, out of what we find.
Our becoming self strives for balance. It makes conscious choices about meaning in the world, critically reflects on the process of choice and the meanings found or made, and chooses actions that reflect these choices. Our becoming self holds to an awareness and openness derived from its confidence in dealing with the world as it comes, even the unknown and unwanted. It knows it can always choose how it will respond to the unknown, the unwanted, and the unexpected. In this confidence based in the power of response, even in the work and play of improvisation, our becoming self desires and exhibits balance.
Our ego strives for control. It derives it choices from the meaning perspectives swallowed whole from the dominating forces around it. The actions our ego takes are determined by these unquestioned meaning perspectives. It cannot afford awareness and openness because meaning perspectives cannot survive the scrutiny that comes with awareness. Meaning perspectives, as part of the dominator model that defines much of our ego and its actions, expect obedience through submission. The actions taken in this way find their basis in repetitions of how the past worked out. They repeat the past because the past keeps our ego and its meaning perspectives from facing the necessity of altering meaning perspectives to respond, even in part, to changing circumstances. Our ego desires and exhibits control. It's a losing cause, but it keeps trying.
Our becoming self and our identity and ego create and assume an attitude toward living. In that creation, give form to the world and themselves in the world. Without one or the other, this essential function of our existence and interaction in and with the world would falter and leave us in an indeterminate state of being. Life would pass us by. When we can join these functions into a whole sense of being, we will find the worldly power and experience of our ego and identity joined with the introspective strength of free choice, autonomy and individuation, from our becoming self, and we can find a balance in life that many of us, me very much included, may feel we have lacked in our lives. In balance, we may find many benefits that we have not known fully before.