Spiritual Superego and Strength

Dear Friends. During our last session we focused on the spiritual superego. This is about our relationship to authority modeled on how we experienced the authority, bigness, godlikeness of our parents. As a toddler looking up at our parents they are literally big and powerful. We are so small and dependent that we need to be able to look up at Mummy and Dad and see them as omnipotent, larger than life. Assuming that our parents were good enough their bigness makes us feel safe and secure. We all look up at to them in a kind of worship. "This is my Mummy and Daddy and they are the best in the whole wide world." In fact we often brag to our little friends about how wonderful and big our parents really are. Some of don't have this possibility, when we look up, we feel fear, dread and even terror. So we learn to shrink, hide. Some of us will fight to win some love, some truth, some safe place. But the fight ultimately is hopeless. Our parents hold all the power. There can be no real victory.

In either case, whether we look up in worship or we look away in fear, the image of our parents is our first imprint, our template for our relationship to authority.

So as we enter into spiritual or religious life; we join a church, or a spiritual circle like ours we will be exposed to spiritual teachings. We will be directed to holy books, dogma and spiritual wisdom. This is big stuff to the little one inside us. Thousands year of wisdom written down. Powerful words expressed by the Guru or the teacher. Anytime we are confronted with an external authority the early template of our relationship to the authority of our parents will rise up. And inevitably spiritual teachings will be co-opted by the superego, in this case what we are calling, the spiritual superego. So the teachings become about being perfect student, devotee, church goer; diligently following the rules; offering up endless self sacrifice. Or we may feel like a failure, unable to live up to the standards, and expectations of the spiritual superego. How many people walk away from  churches, spiritual communities, defeated, deflated? 

Our relationship becomes one of a child to a coercive or seductive authority/superego. We become codependent and we loose our sense of self. Or we become deeply disappointed when we discover that the Guru, the priests, teachers are not the perfection we need them to be. The spiritual journey is about growing into ourselves as adult souls. Being a child of God does not mean that we are meant to be a child. Rather we are meant to open into the purity, innocence (freshness and newness), openness (vulnerability) of grounded divine presence. We see those qualities in children, because they are still open. They have not yet grown a necessary ego shell to be able to live in the world. We see their divine nature shining through. But children are profoundly immature. They are run by powerful instinctual needs and their brains have not yet developed enough to become self reflective. That remarkable development comes much later. 

So as we sit together it is important to see how the spiritual superego works for you. In some families, like mine, it was a scientific superego that wiped out all possibility of the sacred, of wonder, of God. For some of you it will condemn you; it may drive you to being perfect; it may seduce you in believing that the spiritual teacher is perfect and you are not,....  The net effect is that it will suck the life, the truth, the joy, the love, the wonder, the creativity, the brilliance out of our soul's desire for more depth and opening. 

It is only since Freud that we have some understanding of the superego. It is a very new understanding. So our ancestors did not know that they were sliding into the territory of the superego. Many of them were sincere in their belief that they were preserving the truth. So it is really not surprising  that religious/spiritual teachings  over the millennia loose the wisdom that points to freedom and liberation, but become about rules, about good and bad, about purity and sin, about unworthiness, guilt and punishment.  

So there is a lot at stake here. My hope is that the more you see this your soul will awaken to the outrage and heartbreak of the situation. We need to feel angry in order to tell the superego "enough", "get the hell out of my spiritual life"; " I don't need you"; "I want to understand these teachings for myself, so get lost". We need to feel a soul strength, that is hot and clear.

Last sessions questions: Tell me a way you are supposed to be religious or spiritual. Explore how you feel when you see spiritual wisdom being co-opted by the spiritual superego. 

I am posting this along with the playlist on practicing-presence.blogspot.com