I have come to experience these thoughts about our ego, our identity, and the self as a product of writing these pages and listening to a book by Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable. In writing this as part of this work, I want to demonstrate the process I discuss here continues no matter how far we get along in our understanding of the transformative and our own individuation. The self we discover continues to exist as a becoming self. We are always becoming even as the universe and creation are always becoming.
In order to achieve a more and more fully realized self, even if we can take comfort from knowing that there is no end to becoming, we need to survive as a functioning being. In a life full of the assaults that the world and our fellow beings visit on us, such a survival as a physical, psychological, and even spiritual being doesn't come all that easily. We come into the world with needs on all these levels, and we often don't get these needs met to one degree or another. We begin helpless and needing complete physical care and unconditional positive regard. We remain an always vulnerable being no matter how capable we are at providing for our material welfare. We continue to need other levels of support that comes with unconditional positive regard. We want to thrive not simply survive for the self to come into being and continue into becoming. Mostly we do. Innately as humans, we come into the world equipped with many potentialities. The being with which we begin and continue to become begins with the potentialities of ego, identity, and self. Each one exists for a purpose and operates in a way that enhances our chances for our survival on the three levels of the body, mind, and spirit.
Our ego and identity create for us, in an unstable world, a sense of personal form and structure. Our ego works to keep us safe from the assaults of life, and our identity works to keep us real and visible to ourselves and the world. This visibility makes for an assertion of our existence and importance. It gives us a form which we can relate to every day. Our ego defends that form from the forces that seem bent on attacking it and denying its right to the assertion of the identity. It relates well to the child with the manifold toy pieces. We want to find or make the form of ourselves as much as the child wants to make form out of the pieces. We can feel like pieces as well, and we want to feel some quality of unity to better survive as a being. This unity does not come of its own bidding. We work at it and keep on working at in all our waking moments. Our ego works to allow our identity the space in which it can safely operate. Out of those two elements of beings, we find the self can assert itself into the becoming self when the other two find the right balance within the world and within our being. Such a balance doesn't come easily and often winds up in a distorted state instead.
These distortions happen when our ego and identity assume completion in themselves and simply lose their sense of other purpose, that is for our whole being to continue its becoming fully expressed through the balance of our becoming self, identity, and ego. No matter how distorted this balance becomes, we can always find or construct that balance and go on. Our human resiliency performs in such a way that whatever ill considered choices we make about our life, our life can still go on in a reasonable and absolutely fulfilling way.
Identity and ego operate in a constant interaction with the material world. Just now, I would express the becoming self as an entity which exists in a meta-cognitive fashion, informed by but not dominated or directly involved in the material, so it operates in the spiritual. In that way, for some, that would mean the soul. For others simply the part of our consciousness that is non-material. I don't want to strike a sacred note in this writing that would make some people feel an outsider. The truths about the spiritual will happen to everyone equally however we believe in our lives. We all choose what we believe in accordance with how we want to feel about life, and that helps us celebrate our life to the fullest. That's a good reason to stay away from the post-modern, post-structural choice of meaninglessness, but that's our choice. Frankl writes about this existential choice in Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning: "It is equally conceivable that everything is absolutely meaningful or absolutely meaningless . . . the scales are equally high, we must throw the weight of our own being into one of the scales." That's our choice.
______________________________________________________________________________
Just for the record, I offer the notes I made on finding this idea in my thoughts. It felt as if these pieces of thought had been looking for a chance to coalescence and did so. There I go making form out of pieces again.
Ego and identity —exist in action, are defined by that action, by responses, by experience which arise from material stimulus. Self —exists in being wherein the being defines perception and action which arise from the becoming self. Our ego and identity serve the world. The world serves the becoming self through our identity and ego.
This relates to something that Erich Fromm writes in To Have or to Be. He says the when we act because we feel impelled to do so by outside forces, we are less truly active than when we do nothing based on a desire and a determination within us. Our identity and ego respond to the impelling nature of the world while the self motivates from within.
Ego interacts with the world by way of building a bastion for the safety of our existence expressed in identity. It protects us from our vulnerability. The more vulnerable our identity feels, the stronger our ego becomes in defense.
Identity makes whole, makes tangible, and visible the actions of our ego.
Self informs and enriches itself with being itself mediated from and through the experiences of our ego and identity. Being thus defines form and resulting actions, responses to the world based on the being of the individuating becoming self.
_____________________________________________________________________________