#THE SUPEREGO HOW TO#

Instead, your superego attacks you, saying you’re too short, your nose is crooked, you're dumb, you say things wrong, you never know which foot to put first-that kind of thing. Under normal circumstances, there is a misinterpretation of the hole, or lack of Brilliancy it is not seen as the absence of a certain manifestation of your Being. Your superego doesn't know about Brilliancy, so it attacks you about whatever sense of deficiency it finds in your experience. The superego does not usually attack you because Brilliancy is missing. You can tell it, “Good-if I’m never going to amount to anything, why are you bothering me? Go find somebody else.” This is a way of disengaging, but with strength, with energy, with awareness. Basically, we need to tell the superego where to go: “Who cares what you think? Go to hell.” Okay, so you feel deficient, and the superego keeps insisting that you’ll never amount to anything.

#THE SUPEREGO HOW TO#

In the early years of our practice of being where we are, we need to constantly recognize the superego and its ploys and learn how to defend against them. In this way, we defend ourselves consciously-by using our strength instead of erecting walls, defenses, and resistance to protect us from dangers of the superego. That’s when we need to directly defend ourselves, to own up to our aggression and to use its strength and energy to throw the superego out, to create space to be where we are. The first way works well during the stage one of the journey when our awareness is not strong, our presence is not developed, and our inquiry is not yet skillful. As you experience this fully, without defending against it, certain essential states arise to move you through this negativity and hell. That’s how you experience it everything is negative. There are swamps wherever you turn-up, down, left, right-all swamps. And when you get down to that, you feel lost, you don’t know what is going on, there’s no firm place to stand. So you can see that in order to work through your superego, you must go all the way down to that pre-verbal, chaotic, hellish, negative merged state. Now when you experience the negative merged state, you cannot separate what is real inside from what is real outside, and your preference is to believe it’s outside. You project your superego outside because in the beginning, the outside and the inside were one thing. This forms the basis of the negative judgments of the superego. The negative experiences with the mother gradually coalesce and become one big thing that is isolated from the positive part of experience. There’s no separation between the infant and the mother, so in that merged state the whole world is anger, or the whole world is frustration, or the whole world is fear. This disengagement allows you to see more clearly what is there in your experience, because if you’re entangled with these attacks, you won’t even know what you’re experiencing or what has caused the attack in the first place.īesides forming the basis of projections-such as the superego projections we’ve just discussed-the merged state in the infant’s symbiotic phase has another important aspect that we call “negative merging.” When the child has negative experiences with the mother, the whole world is felt as negative. Disengaging from the superego is, in essence, a separation from your parents-the parents you long ago internalized and have lived with in your mind ever since. Later, when the Red Essence is more readily available, it becomes possible to disengage from self-judgment simply by clearly discriminating it for what it is and not going along with it. Such an internal confrontation requires great strength and intelligence. This can happen through challenging the superego’s authority-by telling it to back off. Initially, we need to defend ourselves against these attacks by directly confronting them. Here the Red latifa can specifically be used in the service of inquiry, by giving us the strength to defend against the superego.

These are the criticisms, the put-downs, the comparisons, the judgments, the devaluations, the blaming, the shaming, the rejection, and the hatred that the superego levels at you in all kinds of situations. It is relatively easy to see that much of our opaqueness, much of our lack of openness, much of our stuckness, is due to the attacks of the superego-ours and other people’s.