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Ego:
A Lousy Guide to Relationship
by
Carolyn Godschild Miller, Ph.D.
If
you are to utilize guidance to find a soulmate,
the first thing you need to do is learn to
tell the difference between the voice of your
inner teacher and that of your ego. This is
not really difficult, since your guide and
your ego espouse entirely different thought
systems. Indeed, cultures throughout the world
seem to resonate with the idea that there is a
high-minded influence within us that argues in
favor of love, humility, and forgiveness, and
that it is opposed by another that urges us to
be egotistical, selfish, and judgmental. The
cartoons of my childhood, for example,
depicted what I am calling ego as a little red
devil whispering malicious advice into a
character's left ear, while a winged and
haloed angel representing guidance spoke words
of generosity and tolerance in the other.
Guide's
Thinking Differs from Ego's
The
simplest way to explain the difference between
your guide's perspective and that of your ego
is to say that the former believes that love
is real and fear is not, while the latter
believes that fear is real and love is not. It
may surprise you to learn that your ego
doesn't believe that love really exists, but
it's true. Just think! When you allow your ego
to direct your search for love, you are
actually asking the only thing in the universe
that doesn't know what love is, to find it for
you. Talk about letting the inmates run the
asylum!
How
is it that our false self knows nothing about
love? Well, that's the way we designed it.
From a metaphysical perspective, the human
mind invents an ego for the purpose of making
love seem unreal.
And
just why would we want to do such a silly
thing? A number of spiritual traditions
suggest that it is because God is love. They
say we wanted to forget about our Creator for
a while, so that we could play at being
creators ourselves. And since everything that
God creates is a perfect reflection of divine
love, the only way we could generate an
experience that would be uniquely our own was
to make up an imperfect world where love's
opposite -- fear -- would appear to rule.
Thus, fear is our own original contribution to
an otherwise loving universe.
The
ego's problem is that any experience of love,
however attenuated, threatens to trigger our
memory of reality, and spoil the game we came
here to play. Its job is to make sure that
doesn't happen. Thus, we might compare the ego
to the weight belt a scuba diver dons to
counteract her natural buoyancy. If a diver
took off her weight belt, she would quickly
bob back up to the surface. If you and I
released identification with our ego, we would
quickly bob back up into reality; where it
would be apparent that love is everywhere. As
long as we prefer to remain immersed in
frightening illusions, our ego is necessary to
filter every trace of love out of our
perceptions -- no mean feat in a universe made
entirely of love!
The
fact is that whenever we genuinely care for
anyone, we do bob back into reality, although
usually only briefly. That's why being in love
is so heavenly! It's like an all-expenses-paid
vacation from fear. Our ego has to be
extremely vigilant to nip this sort of thing
in the bud. It knows very well that once we
start loving, there is no telling where it
might end. Today your dog or cat -- tomorrow
the world!
Why
Egos Seek Love
You'd
think that if our false self is so intent upon
preventing us from experiencing love, it would
actively discourage our search for it, but
this is not the case. Our ego doesn't just
warn us not to trust those who care for us; it
also inveighs against the horrors of a lonely
old age. Indeed, far from being indifferent to
love, our false self often seems almost
obsessively concerned with finding it. To hear
our ego tell it, no real happiness is possible
in life until we unite with that "special
someone" who alone can validate our
worth, give meaning to our lives, and solve
all our earthly problems.
What
we need to understand is that our ego knows
perfectly well that love is the only thing we
really want or need. This leaves it with no
alternative but to become embroiled in our
search for a soulmate. If it said what it
thinks -- that love doesn't really exist, and
only fear is real -- we would very quickly see
the absurdity of searching for fulfillment
within a loveless illusion. At that point, our
ego's whole world of distressing possibilities
would be canceled for lack of interest -- and
our ego along with it!
No,
our false self can't induce us to remain in
illusion by ignoring our desire for love. None
of us is so deluded that we'd put up with
that! So instead, it carries out its mission
by offering to show us how to find love, and
then making sure that we never do. Like a
carnival scam artist, our ego assures us that
there is no reason for us not to win the
romantic jackpot on our very next try. But
somehow it never seems to work out that way.
There is actually no "danger" at all
of finding a soulmate as long as we play the
game by our ego's rules.
How
can our false self guarantee that we will not
stumble upon true love despite its
interference? It can't. But what it can do is
make it very difficult for us to recognize
what we've found. Egos render love
"invisible" in much the same way
Siegfried and Roy make tigers disappear on
stage in Las Vegas -- through the skillful
misdirection of attention. First our false
self reassigns the name "love" to
something that poses no threat to it, and then
it keeps us so busy searching for the wrong
thing that we wouldn't notice the right one,
even if we tripped over it.
Continued
on the next page:
The love substitute;
The "special" relationship;
Guidelines for Actualizing a Soulmate
Relationship
 This
article was excerpted from Soulmates:
Following Inner Guidance to the Relationship
of Your Dreams, ©2000, by Carolyn
Miller. Reprinted with permission of H J
Kramer/New World Library, Novato, CA, USA. www.newworldlibrary.com.
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this book
About The
Author
Carolyn Miller has been a
licensed clinical psychologist since 1984 with a thriving practice in
Los Angeles. She is the author of Creating
Miracles: Understanding the Experience of Divine Intervention
and Soulmates:
Following Inner Guidance to the Relationship of Your Dreams. Dr.
Miller, along with her soulmate and husband, Arnold Weiss, Ph.D., are
founding directors of the Los Angeles-based Foundation and Institute for
the Study of A Course in Miracles, a nonprofit organization
dedicated to spiritual psychotherapy and education.
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