Lory Misel is the Pacific Northwest-based spiritual counselor who is known as “The Holy Pig Farmer” in Jessica Maxwell’s Roll Around Heaven (www.rollaroundheaven.com). One of Lory’s lessons is that the ego is always attacking us and it wants us to dislike ourselves. This truly resonates with me because I vividly remember as a child feeling and saying, “I hate myself.” Sometimes I would even yell it. In retrospect, the curse of my self-loathing grew strongest in puberty, which also marked the time at which my ego took up permanent rule in my psyche. My ego came of age even as my body came of age.
Long before my on-and-off-again teen-age self hatred began, I remember being very proud of my accomplishments. As a child, I was always drawing and making cardboard sculptures, models and creations. I loved nothing more than showing these off to my parents’ friends, many of whom were highly accomplished university professors and their wives. I proudly gave them the tour of my room, displaying my creations left and right. Then, when I was about 7 or 8, all at once I noticed that a boy in my class, a boy with giant blue irises flecked with vivid yellow rays, was indisputably conceited. He too was proud of himself but he didn’t need cardboard models to display his pride: his face and body sufficed in and of themselves. My new perception of the boy’s conceited nature made me wonder, am I also conceited? At that moment, my heretofore innocent pride fell away and suddenly became egotism. Filled with a new humility which was probably false, I began to cut short the group tours of my beloved room. My ego was growing and it was healthy: I felt the conscious pride of my ego and with it, simultaneously, my conscious self-loathing.
In time, my innocent childish pride grew at my ego’s nudging into a teen-age superiority complex: I felt that I was better than others. At the same time, paradoxically, like all teen-agers I felt desperately awkward and inferior. Flash forward to today and now I am in my mid-fifties, but it was only within the last week and thanks to Lory Misel that I had another epiphany: an inferiority complex is nothing more than the flip side of a superiority complex. They are two sides of the same coin.
For example, it goes something like this: finding myself at the gym to work out, I look around at the other people and I realize with pride that I am more buff than the others in the room. My ego tells me that I am this body and my body is superior. Then, only moments later, a younger man with rippling biceps enters the room. Now my ego quickly shifts gear: it tells me that I am a body and my body is inferior. Here’s a second example: recently, I attended my professional association’s annual convention in Washington, DC and I was wowed and awed by all the gleaming accomplishments of my professional peers. My ego quickly told me that I am a brain and my brain is inferior. Feelings of weakness and vulnerability swept through me. Returning home a few days later, I was quickly comforted by surrounding myself once again with people who, fortunately, were never schooled or skilled in the esoteric knowledge that was mother’s milk at the conference. Reassuringly, my ego now told me that I am a brain and my brain is (once again) superior.
The problem with all of this Jesuitical self-analysis is that my ego is simply wrong on both counts. I am not a body and I am not a brain. I am not even an ego. On the contrary, I am an immortal soul. When I work out at the gym or go to my annual convention, I only think of myself as playing a role, regardless of whether it is the role of superior brain-person or of inferior body-person. In truth, I am neutral. I am not playing a role and I am neither superior nor inferior. Momentarily cured of my inferiority-superiority complex, I briefly realize that my soul is lit with the infinite and eternal Light of Spirit. With a little luck, I can say goodbye forever to that pesky inferiority-superiority complex and open the door of my soul to the Light.
Bird of Spirit 