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Happy
Birthday Ego - 4,000 Years-Old
©Excerpt based on the book: The Uncommon
Path, O-Books, June 2009.
Mick Quinn's work is also published as
Poder Y
Gracia, Spain - June 2007.
P: As I learn to act with power and grace in community with other
people, is it unreasonable to expect that the ego-mind
will kindly step aside as the primary custodian
of my destiny?
MQ: Yes, and here’s why: It’s taken us 14 billion years to get
to this point in our evolution. A new earth is not
simply going to appear by the end of next month. And
remember, the
ego-mind is not the enemy, just your attachment to its
commands.
P:
But, where did it come from in the first place?
MQ:
God made the ego at the end of the sixth day. But, he
wasn’t happy with it so he fed it to a fish he’d
created the previous day. The ego, however, was smart,
so it broke free from the belly of the fish and has
tormented humanity ever since.
P:
Get outta here!
MQ:
Seriously though, the evolution of the separate sense-of-self and the
ego-mind, were all positive emergences in
consciousness, despite the bad rap they often get.
Let’s look at a brief summary of that development,
based on a broad consensus of cultural anthropologists
and historians.
P:
Sounds good.
MQ:
We find anatomically modern humans first appearing in
fossil records about 200,000 years ago. But,
for a long, long time if ‘you’ and ‘I’ met,
by the entrance of the cave for instance,
there would be no-thing
to say. The fact that ‘you’ and ‘I’ were
preverbal also meant that we were pretty much
thought-less. We were stuck in an unconscious
‘now’.
P:
I cannot imagine what it must have been like to be
twenty years old with a subjective experience of a
contemporary six-month old child.
MQ: And at
twenty, you had already reached the end of your life!
Then about 50,000 bc,
‘you’ and ‘I’ had an initial sense of
a few thoughts2. After another forty
thousand years or so, with many more thoughts appearing,
fully-fledged language had emerged. From about 8000 to
4000 bc,
even though there was role differentiation within our
community, there was no ‘me’,
which also meant there was no individual choice.
P:
So if I saw my reflection in the pond I would not know
it was ‘me’?
MQ:
This is true. And realize, too, that there was no
personal property, because there was no ‘person’
to own it. It was not until about 4000
to 1500 bc,
due mostly to the improvement in linguistic skills and
diversity in communications, that the recognition that
I am thinking
began to appear between our ears. This quickly led to
the amazing birth of self-awareness,
a sense
of ‘I’ at the level of my thoughts.
This was the very beginning of the separate
sense-of-self, of the ‘personal me’. At this early
stage of the development of the separate self-sense,
the ego-mind had not yet appeared.
P:
But, because there was separate sense-of-self,
‘you’ and ‘I’ could at least now make
‘choices’.
MQ:
Yes, there now was an ‘I’ to choose. As the
capacity for thinking in ‘you’ and ‘I’
continued to develop and by giving more and more of
our attention and consideration to this separate
sense-of-self that the ego made its first
appearance. The ego, therefore, is a collection of
highly evolved mental processes that are exclusively
focused on this fact: I can think for and about myself. The ego-mind is utterly and
totally focused on the concept of the little-self.
As
this ego-mind solidified with the separate
sense-of-self as its center of attention, ‘you’
and ‘I’ were now predominantly concerned about me and my thoughts
about my ‘self’. Curiously enough, it was
about this time that the idea of ‘personal’
property appeared. Since that time, the fully formed
ego-mind had been the center of our attention - me
and my thoughts about me. Because of this we had
entire societies of ‘individuals’ who had, for the
first time since the dawn of time, the capacity of
‘choice’.
P:
This was the birth of conceptual-free-will?
MQ:
Yes. At the moment of making an important decision,
your attention
was drawn by the ego-mind to the
separate sense-of-self. As you can see,
conceptual-free-will is not exactly ideal for
transcending the attachment
to the ego or the separate
sense-of-self.
P:
But, there is no denying that the development of
self-awareness and the capacity for decision-making
was a great advancement in consciousness.
evolutionary pointer:
The
amazing emergence of the ego-mind appeared around
the globe at about the same time!
MQ:
Great advancements for sure. But, can you see how
still being attached to me
and my thoughts about me can be problematic, if
you are also interested in spiritual evolution?
P:
Yes, I can.
©Excerpt based on the book: The Uncommon
Path, O-Books, June 2009.
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© 2008
Mick Quinn, All Rights Reserved
Mick
Quinn is the author of The
Uncommon Path and Poder Y Gracia
and the founder of Choice
for Enlightened Living Foundation. Mick's work
is quoted in The LA Times, Yahoo!, CNN
Living, and Woman's World. Gary
Renard, the best-selling (Hay
House) author said this book is "informative
and gripping". Raquel
Torrent
– Psychologist
and founder of the Spanish Integral Association
said, “Mick Quinn’s style is clear and direct -
like silence making music”. Mick lives in Utah
with wife Debora. For upcoming events visit: www.mickquinn.com
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