I read this article today which I thought had a lot of great analogies to the ideas of Ego and of enlightenment. Although I don't agree word for word on some of the ideas I am presenting it with a follow up of my own words in regards to what this person has written.

     Nurturing the Heart by Cynthia Bourgeault

 No matter what spiritual path one travels, it seems that the ego always winds up the villain.  When one popular New Age Manual dramatically asserts, "The Ego wants you dead," it is merely positing in extreme form the consequences already implicit in the traditional descriptions of "Sinful self-will," "Maya," "Illusion," "Nafs," "The false self," "Dualistic thinking." While the nomenclature varies among the tradition, the road map always seems to be that there is someone or a something in us that inherently opposes our spiritual progress, and our breakthrough to transformation comes with the exposing and dismantling of this pretender.
 Since in my own journey I have grown increasingly suspicious of spiritual warfare as a paradigm for transformation (having learned through repeated experience that no knots disentangle without love), I am persuaded that we need a less oppositional, more productive way of describing the egoic process.
 "The Ego" or egoic consciousness, as I use the term with my own study group, has a limited and observable meaning. It describes a feedback loop, a specific kind of human processing system designed to extract an essential life nutrient from the environment: Psychic Energy.
 Along with the physical food we eat and the air we breathe psychic energy is vital to our human survival. Absence of any one of these three "foods" results in death: In the first case by starvation, in the second by suffocation and in the third by attrition, the depletion of the vital energy or will to live. While we may not be used to thinking in these terms, most of us are all too familiar with the syndrome itself: The deepening listlessness or failure to thrive when the psyche can no longer draw any zest or purpose for life.
 As an energy loop intended to maintain the reservoirs of psychic well-being, the egoic system makes use of that unique (so far as we know) feature of the human mind: self-reflective consciousness, or the ability to stand outside of oneself and perceive oneself in third person.
From this "Third person" vantage point ones sense of identity presents itself in terms of a unique selfhood, a personhood defined by specific traits and needs.
 Between two poles energy can start to flow, and this subject/object polarity becomes a drive shaft of the egoic system. The impression of "having" a concrete identity, informed by certain attributes and imbued with certain gifts and talents that need to become fully expressed if one's personhood is to be whole, sets up a feedback loop by which the reflexive self projects itself onto the world in terms of its wants, needs and expectations, and then sets forth with its programs and objectives for implementing these.
To the extent that we succeed, we experience enlivenment, the sense of our life being meaningful and worthwhile. To the extent that we are frustrated, we experience diminishment and discouragement. Rather than being enhanced, our vital energy is depleted.
 Now, the point spiritual teachers are constantly reminding us about (although in language unintelligible in these terms) is that this energy system essentially runs on the pain/pleasure principle. The egoically generated self seeks pleasure, experienced as enlargement or affirmation of its selfhood, and it avoids pain, experienced as the diminishment of selfhood and depletion of its vital elan. The quest for spiritual fulfillment on this feedback loop is known in Christian tradition as "The Peace that comes from the Flesh," and the wise old desert elder warned serious spiritual seekers to beware of it.
  In our own psychologically sophisticated era however, the peace that comes from the flesh, re-baptized as "Wellness," has emerged as a fundamental principle of mental health. It has taken the self-evident truth that the experience of the enlivenment, vitality and serenity is a sign that one is living life rightly, while the onset of depression, frustration, or emotional or physical malaise is a warning that something is amiss. What is usually not seen is that this kind of inner self-steering is normative only within the egoic system, which will always judge the accuracy of its psychic heading by the quality and the quantity of the well being produced.

  To the extent that one's self image is in touch with reality and relatively free from the domination by unconscious neurotic programs, we can speak of having a "healthy ego." A healthy ego is one that can move confidently and sensitively towards meeting its needs for meaning and enlivenment while respecting the rights of other people to do the same. It is a system working at peak efficiency, and, as stated above, virtually all our psychotherapeutic models of wellness and increasingly our religious ones as well, aim for this goal.
 Father Thomas Keating's popular teaching on "The false self system," for example, show practitioners how to identify and plug the energy leaks caused by "afflictive emotions," i.e. "the healthy ego must be the true self."
 But in fact, as the Buddhists observed long ago, pain and pleasure are simply two ends of the same old egoic stick. As long as one is drawing one's life energy from self-esteem, self-affirmation, and self-expression, even in the service of the purest and noblest causes, one is still orbiting around within the egoic feedback loop. As long as happiness and a personal sense self-worth are still the measure by which one relates to life and adjusts one's heading, as long as the vitality is the measure of spiritual well-being, one is in the egoic feedback system. These are not moral judgments: they are descriptive criteria. And by these criteria, it is depressingly clear that almost all of what is being promulgated as contemporary western spirituality is merely fine tuning the ego.

  In his Meditation on the Tarot, hermeticist Valentin Tomberg distinguishes between two types of vital energy, which he calls bios and Zoe. Although the terms are interrelated, bios is defined as natural life energy flowing horizontally from generation to generation, While Zoe is the vivifying energy from above "which fills the individual in prayer and meditation, in acts of sacrifice and participation on the sacred sacraments."
In the classical Biblical sense, Zoe is "the bread from heaven," Soul food of a far higher order.  Using Tomberg's terms, one could say that the ego is perfectly adapted for its job in life: Drawing the energy of bios to maintain the vitality of the human organism.  
But as such its limit is physical death.
Once the soul has separated from the body the ego's role as the functional seat of human identity is at an end. It perishes, along with all sense of selfhood tied to it.
  There is within us, however, a latent faculty, another feedback loop capable of drawing the energy directly from Zoe, "The love that moves the stars and the sun," without having to download it into the egoic pain/pleasure loop. It moves without regard to pain and pleasure; pleasure does not enliven it, and pain does not diminish it.
 It is not hyper-vitalization, a peak experience. It is not an experience at all, since it lies beyond the experience/experiencer dualism, and hence in spiritual tradition is frequently perceived as a "nothing."  It has no inherent reservoir of vitality; it cannot feed or maintain itself apart from the infusion of the holy. Its permanent seat of selfhood is the realm of contemplation, the unitive heart. When an active self is needed to "do," it moves outward from this center, using the egoic system the way a karate master uses a trained hand to deliver the appropriate blow. When it is not in motion, it has no independent self-propulsion; in this respect, it is far more like a plant than an animal. Comfort or discomfort, mean nothing to it, happiness or unhappiness, life or death; it lives beyond the opposites. Its food, as Jesus says in St John's gospel, "is to do my Fathers will."
 If this sounds somewhat like a dubious blessing, it is understandable why such a small handful of spiritual seekers have actually accepted the call to venture beyond the egoic safety net. Even the words classically used to describe this other feedback loop, "Surrender," "True Resignation," sit uneasily with the modern temperament. They sound a bit too much like handing over the reigns to one's autonomous selfhood and personal well-being, which of course is exactly what is being asked. The only way the ego can picture such behavior is in terms of "delayed gratification," a renunciation of pleasure in this life in order to gain its reward in the next.
 But it's not like this, not at all. The "reward," if such a term must be used, is to participate here and now in "the love that moves the stars and the sun." Once the heart has tasted this love, all egoic self-feeding feels like junk food.

  The Ego is not an enemy; it is a necessary developmental stage in the journey toward full human person hood. When a baby begins to crawl, it is a milestone, but if it is still crawling at age five, we speak of arrested development. The same is true, I believe, of the journey towards personhood. The egoic system is necessary in order for us to exercise our true human destiny, at least, as it is understood in Western Spiritual Tradition: to magnify the glory of God through the lens of individual particularity, "You are the mirror in which god recognizes himself," as the Sufi tradition aptly puts it. On the Western spiritual path, the egoic system is not a mistake or an illusion, but potentially, at least, the expressive vehicle of Gods dynamism and wonder. As long as we are in the human body, we will need to make use of it, and to wield it as well.
  But just as clearly, the ego can function properly as a vessel of divine manifestation only when the permanent seat of one's identity has been shifted to a deeper place, which knows itself without limits and is undivided, a part of the Godhead. This knowing is not a new fact of belief about ones self; that would be egoic thinking. Rather, it is a way of "knowing from," a coinciding with this deepest wellspring within the heart.
   It takes a long time before this enlightened heart is truly ready to merge as the permanent seat of identity. Partly this is so because the heart is not merely a metaphor for one's innermost being, but is embodied: a muscle for spiritual perceptivity and "digesting" the far more highly concentrated energy of Zoe.  The Eastern orthodox tradition locates this spiritual heart within the fleshy heart, but much of the rest of the Inner tradition places it in the region of the solar plexus or diaphragm and hence sometimes speaks spiritual work as the "strengthening of the nervous system." Once activated, its particular attribute is the capacity for "doubled attention," not at the level of holding ones mind on two things at once, but at the level of "being held," magnetized, in the presence of God, while at the same time completely present to the outer demands of the situation at hand. It is in this state that one becomes able to "pray without ceasing."
  Steadily, patiently, we practice. Meditation, regarded in virtually every spiritual tradition as the gateway to transformation, teaches us how to detach our sense of selfhood from the egoic feedback loop and open ourselves directly to the infusion of divine life. Particularly in the practice of such as Centering Prayer, where the emphasis is not so much on concentrating the mind as on surrendering the will, there is a direct and even palpable nurturance of this attention on the heart; one can literally sense this magnetized heart coming alive within. And as the capacity for "doubled attention" grows within us commensurate with this heart, we are able to apply it more consistently in the outward circumstances of our lives, learning how to extract the vital energy of divine being from whatever comes our way, even in the midst of reversal and diminishment. At first it feels like "a place we go to," this heart of God, the still point in the turning world of our being. But more and more it becomes "the place we come from," the light of God within which replenishes our being from its own endless source. And when this spiritual heart has reached a point of development that it can sustain itself outside of the egoic womb, then, like an infant carried full term, we are ready to be born into the miracle of full human personhood.

  The passage from one feedback loop is symbolically described in the gospel accounts of Christ's temptations in the wilderness, particularly the refusal to turn stones into bread or feed oneself by one's own egoic capacities. What is often overlooked in discussions of these narratives, however is that Jesus' encounter with temptation takes place only after his baptism, when he first receives the revelation of his true identity: "This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased" (Luke 3:22).  First comes the unfolding of true identity; then comes the casting away of all that is not essential to it.
  It is also with us, all in good season. So much of the language of spiritual tradition has been cast in the images of violence, of taking heaven by storm and an athletic asceticism intended to overcome the ego is only the ego's usual backward way of mistaking means for end, Asceticism will not "produce" the heart; it is only a picture of the new eating habits of the soul who has learned to feed directly on God. But the real point working in our favor is that evolution is intended. The Glory of God is the human being fully emerged into his or her own ground and able to release the energy formerly bound up in egoic self-maintenance to the sheer dance of the divine abundance. This transformation goes against the grain, but it is intended.  When the heart is ready, it cannot NOT merge. Our real goal in the spiritual work, then, is not to dismantle the ego, which will fall away in its own time when the first is ripe, but simply, quietly, patiently to nurture the heart.

On a personal note in regards to the above article by Ms. Bourgeault, I find I disagree on the relevance of finding palatable language in the hopes of making it easier to swallow in egoic terms. She states clearly that the ripe fruit will fall from the tree where as the unripe fruit would have to be removed and without the benefit of the natural process it would seem pointless to try and convince anyone in easy to swallow terms when their heart is not ready to receive.
By many eastern traditions the essence of the ego is not to go on quiet or peaceful terms but to twist the meanings of words and ideas to bring them back into the habitual forms and self-defeating actions.
One pointed focus is demanded along with guidance and useful boundaries to stay the course. The habitual course of the ego is like any habit and it doesn't always go easily into surrender.
From my own personal experience many come and few stay the course due to habits that most are unwilling to forego, and pure laziness. Another point of reference to this was the temptations of Christ, even he had to one pointedly focus his attention on the higher desire and stay clear of the lesser desires. They would not have been called temptations if they were not a factor in the choices he had to make.
Anyone who is serious about his or her evolution towards enlightenment needs no mollycoddling or coercion, the pretense of language is irrelevant, if it is coming from the divine source, it will always point the way and will always be exactly what is needed at the time.
There is no need to explain Gods voice to one who can already hear it. Seek and ye shall find is Gods promise, one just need be serious enough to meet God half way and it can happen easily and quickly, the only time required is the time it takes to surrender the Ego and allow the Christ to rise within to let God be the thought feeling and action, and to free ones Self from the boundaries of duality and fear.  

Ah! back on serious subject matter. No IPUs here I hope.

Anyway, Joe; I like it. I've only scanned this text and will have to print it out and read it carefully later, but Cynthia has some very interesting points. Particularly for me regarding questions that i have had about "is the path to enlightenment an ego trip?" and "is the achievment of enightenment, death?"

I will digest and get back to you...

Excellent, I really enjoyed reading this article, It has allowed me to put together a picture of the self Vs the Self in my head which I am quite happy with. I will try and draw it out and share it with everyone who doesn't yet have this.

I feel better placed to answer my own questions now about "is the path to enlightenment an ego trip?" and "is the achievment of enightenment, death?".
While the answers are those you probably already knew, they came as a revalation to me.

So, is the path to enlightenment an ego trip?

It can look and feel that way, I know, i've been obssesing about it for a while now. But this is all part of the egoic feedback loop still and is not enlightenment.
For me enlightenment is only the first step on a journey that i don't think ends where Cynthia says it does. Enlightenment is a reduction of the ego past normal healthy values to a state where it is dormant, and is a tool that can be used if needed, however this is not the goal, there is more...

Is the achievment of enightenment, death?

It is definately a kind of death, and not something that can be looked beyond easily. It is leaving behind all the egoic routines, pitfalls, and peaks (it's not all bad!). It's learning that there is more out there and a different source of food to suck on, in time that should probably be transcended also, but it is the next step and you can only take these things one step at a time.
As you still have the egoic model at your disposal, it will not be difficult to relate to others, both philosophically and emotionaly, who have not reached this stage and it will be easier to communicate with those beyond the first step.

to address one of the points you made:

QUOTE

I find I disagree on the relevance of finding palatable language in the hopes of making it easier to swallow in egoic terms

I didn't read this from Cynthias words, I don't know whether your view comes from other articles by the same author? However you do go "off on one" about the language used and i don't understand why.

One of the points you make i feel is absolutely right and is possibly the only thing that needs to be said on this subject of language:

QUOTE

Anyone who is serious about his or her evolution towards enlightenment needs no mollycoddling or coercion, the pretense of language is irrelevant, if it is coming from the divine source, it will always point the way and will always be exactly what is needed at the time.

This article was exactly what i needed at this time, thanks for bringing it to the board Joe  :)

You're welcome.
The point I was making is that there is never anything created that is out of place at any one time.
She eludes to the idea of making it clearer for those that have not understood from other descriptions because the descriptions were too harsh. Like killing the ego as opposed to nurturing the heart.
Only feelings created by sensitive past experiences draw conclusions based on the feedback loop of the ego and psychic energy as she put it.
Once one taps into the infinite and gets out of the way then God comes thru.
The thing is God is never separate at any time. It is only ego that perceives the illusion of separation.
Once one taps into the infinite energy there is no judgment of any energy being negative or bad energy or misguided energy or misplaced energy or inappropriate energy, it is just energy, unconditional love the energy as she puts it, that moves the stars and the suns.
Relatively speaking she follows the confusion that is the seed that sparks the interest and the frustration which in turn drives the intellect back enough to see a bigger picture.
If one is distracted from what it thinks it is looking for it can finally see what was in front all the time.
 
 I'm glad you enjoyed the article, I also enjoy the way the infinite fits together to give everyone exactly what they need all the time every time.
Pure perfection in every moment.

As i said i would earlier, i have had a go at explaining the ego in my own words: www.closertogod.net/main/thoughts/mind&body.htm

an interesting series of articles you have posted there, Laz.   I was now just reading over your Ego Explained one.  Very nice exposition and graphics.    

On the question of death of the ego, can an indicator of its occurence be the realsiation that no matter what happens on a day to day basis, anywhere in the world 'I' am not surprised?
Bill.

The far reaching effects of the egos death have many profoundly altered differences from the dual life of humanity.
You may not be suprised and you may not have any interest. There are no rules to what you might experience.
What dies is the veil that separates you from the rest of creation. It is realized as a part of you or actually you or your ideas and desires in form.

Hi joesus,
What do you call the occurence of never having had a veil?
Like being born without sight; being born without a veil!

Bill.

I'm not sure what I would call it.

I could use the names already given to pure consciousness. It is never separate from itself and never blinded by illusions.

What it creates it creates with perfect knowing and wisdom, like a puppeteer playing with its ideas on a stage.
It is only the puppet that seems delusional of what it is and where it comes from.