The Ego and The Spirit

You should always seek out for your high-ego. Follow what your spirit calls.

The ego, or lower intellect, is an artificial intelligence, an automaton, a computer with personality programmed by genetics and environment. It arises partly from the human brain’s capacity for intellectual functions, and partly from soul’s capacity to be molded by worldly and bodily factors. The ego is the streamlined interface through which soul can operate more efficiently within physical and social environments2.

When spirit, the source of sentience, looks through this mask and identifies with it, the two together create our human sense of self. What we consider “me” is a composite of pure sentience (spirit) and personality (ego).

In summary:

1) Ego is something that arises at the boundary between body and soul due to body conditioning the soul.

2) Spirit wearing the mask of ego provides it with a sense of human identity.

Since ego is what the world extrudes from the soul, and since the world is fundamentally about competition and survival, the ego is likewise preoccupied with physical matters and is inherently survivalistic and self-serving. By default it behaves as a self-serving predator. The ego is a personification of inner biological and astral drives streamlined by external world influences and standards.(edited)
Further, the ego does not require spirit to function; if anything, it is mutually restrained and antagonized by spirit since both are opposite in nature. For spirited humans, spirit usually takes a passive role in being the conscious observer looking through ego. But in the case of spiritless humans, the ego automaton can function equally well without a conscious observer living through it. In that case, the ego still has personality, but possesses none of the restraining or creative influences that spirit provides. So when spirit is entirely absent, or even when spirit is present but “asleep,” then ego is the only intelligence running the show — and it’s quite the tyrant.

The soul is also influenced by spirit, not just body. Spirit’s influence on the soul likewise extrudes from the soul a corresponding mask. Unlike the ego we all know, this higher mask represents the true face of spirit.

Normally, when spirit identifies with lower ego, it is identifying with a mask that is opposed to its own nature and originates from the physical world. But when spirit identifies with the mask of its own making, the “super ego”, then you have divinity personified.

Thus the soul has two extensions, the ego and super ego. The first is associated with human personality and computational reasoning, the latter with divine personality and higher reason (higher meaning transjective, gnostic, and numinous).

In life, we as spirits choose which of these opposites to align with and nurture. If we attune ourselves to spiritual influences and think transcendently, we increase the divine personality. If we absorb ourselves in materialism and predation and think only calculatively, we increase the lower personality. Spirit has the choice, while incarnated, which of these personalities to build up and step into. When one nurtures the divine personality and steps fully into it, fissioning away from the lower ego, then one becomes spirit personified.


By Fthagn