Before we look at the achievement of balance on the part of the becoming self and how that works in life and self, we might want to think about the unity of our being that always holds true no matter how we talk about its parts. In an attempt to understand the entire entity or subject at hand, we do tend to look at parts of the whole being. Looking at the parts of something takes us into a reductionist method to understanding and making sense out of complex phenomena. When we choose the reductive method to make sense and form out of some entity, we want remember and to act to restore unity to the entity. It becomes quite simple and easy to get lost in the parts. That does not mean that the whole being ceases to exist or that we take sides with any one part we discover in our process of examination. Appearances might indicate a kind of division between our becoming self, our identity, and our ego, but these elements only appear to be and sometimes even feel divided in a kind of Descartian separation, the becoming self a separate and higher kind of being from the lower kind of being formed by the manifestation of ego and identity. The apparent separation stems from the divisive forces we all experience in the driving confusion of modern life that make so many demands on us for our attention and action. We get stuck in the pieces and forget the whole. In our confusion, these qualities of our whole being take on the appearance of what some describe as warring camps. In this writing, we seek to find only unity through examination and understanding, making sense out of the way in which we respond to the world and ourselves in the world. Search for, find and use the whole being that the becoming self, identity, and ego comprise.
As children, we come into consciousness as the Eden myth and interpretation tells us, and when we do so, we find the material world of the individual makes endlessly more demands on us than we might have experienced in the womb world where everything existed for our comfort, and we were alone with the only universe anywhere. We were bounded in a nutshell, and counted ourselves a king of infinite space, but we had bad dreams to paraphrase Hamlet. These dreams of awareness became the beginning of consciousness and work when we entered life. Feeding at the breast takes a good deal more effort and complexity than feeding in the womb. Crying takes effort and, as we experience, exhausts everyone including the crying baby. Besides the effort, the motivations for crying make quite a demand on a baby.
We were that baby and are that baby. We cry because we feel threatened as a being in some way. We feel vulnerable. That may come from hunger, isolation, pain, even a general uneasiness about our coming further and further into awareness. Before the baby can consciously say to her/himself, "What does that mean?" the baby works diligently toward achieving meaning out of the world around her/him. As we do so, our vulnerability reappears, and we feel the need to do something to end that feeling, to achieve some sort of power within the world and in ourselves. It is from this need for protection from vulnerability and the achievement of personal power that our need for unconditional positive regard emerges. Unconditional positive regard celebrates us as individuals and also places us optimistically within a supportive community. The state of unconditional positive regard serves the one who gives and the one who receives. They form a community of selves which makes both more whole and unified as individuals even as they establish a loving community. Each wants to the other to achieve and realize the becoming self as fully as possible. The balance of the I/Thou exists within us as naturally as the oneness that happens when feeding at the breast.
As we soon find out, life does not always provide such an exquisite balance, and when we find that balance disturbed in some way, we experience that primal vulnerability we feel as newborns and beyond. If I look within me right now, even as I write, I can feel that vulnerability. Out of that vulnerability, we develop coping techniques, ways of keeping ourselves as safe as possible, even to the point of defending ourselves against the world that causes us to feel vulnerable. The need and desire to dominate can grow from the sense of essential vulnerability that comes when we exit the womb paradise and enter consciousness. The mechanisms of defense and domination, identity and ego, arise from needs and demands of vulnerability, and they serve their function quite well—from time to time. The problem arises from them when we feel as if that's all that matters: our identity's need to find greater and greater ways of expressing itself because it feels no center within and our ego's sometimes aggressive defensiveness shown in domination and a belief in scarcity.
The becoming self takes information from the world, and we eventually make form and sense of that information in its own terms. The becoming self feels what we have seen as the "locus of control" within our becoming self entirely whatever the external influences. Our whole being learns that we always have the freedom to choose our response to the external and not to surrender to external domination. That's why I prefer to use "locus of balance" for the reasons we are engaged in examining. Our identity and ego depend very much on the externality of control and their response to those external influences. Our ego and identity find no real stability in themselves because the world offers precious little stability in itself, and they exist to exert control over those influences even as they are buffeted by them.
When we find a harmony among these forms of our whole being, our becoming self of balance and our identity and ego of assertion and defense, we can get on with our becoming our whole being quite well. Eventually, we can return to a sense of unity within all of these factors of our whole being, but it takes some time and it takes, most assuredly, awareness of the full expression of our whole being in any and all its manifestations. With such awareness, such a critical reflection on meaning perspectives and our responses to the world, such a metacognitive point of view on our whole being, we can escape from the trap of a unholy trinity of opposition within our being and allow our diversity of being to settle into a multifaceted whole—the diamond faceted whole being of self. At that point, we can even celebrate our identity and ego for affording our whole being a sense of safety as we grew enough in our becoming self to become more at ease with the vagaries and hard edges of life. When we search for the becoming self fully, we will find that self a unified and diverse whole being, including identity and ego, well deserving of our unconditional positive regard, our compassion, our forgiveness, and our acceptance.[74] We are, indeed, us. We are "I am becoming." The "I" always learns and choose how to live, how to respond to life. "I," in this way, is a verb.