98 - Peering into the Basics
of Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan's Teaching
Regarding the Ego

The primary process upon which Pir-o-Murshid bases the training of mureeds revolves around his adage "make God a reality, so that God is no more just a belief or concept." To make God a reality, one needs to "awaken the God within." It is realistic, rather than based on a belief system - God transcendent. It means discovering and identifying with the holistic dimensions of our being, which Murshid calls our divine inheritance, rather than limiting ourselves within the constraint of our commonplace self-image.

Somehow to validate ourselves against self-doubt we, maybe unconsciously, resort to a deceptive strategy; being defensive may lead to being sanctimonious, pre-possessive, overbearing, self-righteous, or arrogant. This is a very dangerous syndrome often found amongst people dedicated to a high ideal or purporting to be "spiritual" who incur the risk of stumbling between the horns of a dilemma: the ideal versus reality. This leads to incongruity, inconsistency, ambiguity, a mismatch in our self-image between parading make-believe self-validation while floundering in the abyss of self denigration.

Therefore, the first step is "muhasibi", matching our motivations with our objectives, and our objectives with our values.

We ask ourselves why we are doing this or the other thing and what our motivations are in our relationship with another person. Somehow our attitude towards people, and consequently our way of handling people and situations is a function of our own self-image which is ordinarily deceptive. This self-image is commonly a device used, probably unconsciously, to protect ourselves against the onslaught upon our self-esteem by others - a built in strategy which proves ultimately counterproductive because it does not enlist all our resources. In our ignorance of the bountiful qualities of our real being, we resort to a perfunctory strategy!

Investigate whether you are resorting to this strategy. Are you yourself parading an imaginary self-image to protect your vulnerability? If so you may detect the same strategy in others. This representation of what is really one aspect of our real being, with which one identifies, is precisely what Pir-o-Murshid calls "the false ego." Murshid defines the "false ego" as a faulty self-image. Our faulty self-image avers itself to be an inadequate and misleading support upon which to establish our identity, and its consequent effect upon our handling of our problems may have disastrous consequences. Hence it is a fraction of our being with which we identify, whereby we are not enlisting all our potentialities. The crucial issue is therefore unmasking the hoax of what Pir-o-Murshid calls "the false ego."

The false ego is what that ego has wrongly conceived to be its own being. It is not that the false ego is our ego, and the true ego is the ego of God, it is that the true ego which is the ego of God has been reduced to a false ego in us.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

Sardonically, our defense system may in extreme cases, be blown up to the extent of parading a puffed up masquerade of selfish disposition, oppressing and down-treading kindred beings who themselves nurture an inferiority complex, or at least a poor self-image, and do not have the gall, the impudence, perhaps even the impertinence or the ruthless heartlessness to counter this assault on their vulnerable self-esteem. Since by deceiving themselves, they fool others, maybe unawares, the less discerning may submit to their patronizing impact.

This is how this false notion of ourselves may develop: In our youthful, trusting, germane naivet, we believe in our projections of ideal values to which we pledge allegiance. Soon we get hurt by people, wounded, disenchanted, rejected, disenfranchised. The need to provide protection against further assaults upon our vulnerability becomes imminent, urgent, imperative, compelling! What are the resources which promise to provide us with a shield? Where can we find a healing? Outside, in friendly, compassionate, reliable support from the brigade of dedicated helpers, counselors? Or inside - in our very in-built self-healing propensity? Our self-esteem, our self-confidence, our ability to make way in life is at stake!

Our programming equips us with several strategies. The perfunctory one (the commonest) is simplistically reactionary and fraught with rudimentary emotions. See if you can detect these strategies in yourself, then you can earmark them in others:

1.  If abused or humiliated:  anger, resentment that can exasperate into hatred with the ensuing cruelty.

2. If oppressed or repressed by a despotic or tyrannical ego:  either aggressivity, spite, or resenting having to yield by losing one's self-respect.

3.  In one's endeavor to validate oneself by vying in valor or emulation:  feelings of envy or jealousy may be aroused.

4.  If one grounds one's self-esteem on one's vying with the Jones's in one's possessions:  covetousness and greed may ensue. (A curious trick of the ego is that the egoist sees in every other person a pronounced ego. "Why has he got a higher rank than me?")

5.  If there has been a pattern of being punished or disadvantaged by having owned up, or stood for what one believes, or simply being up-front:  a tendency of being devious, cowardly, or manipulative may ensue.

All these reactions (and probably many more) evidence our rather perfunctory and therefore inadequate efforts in dealing with the challenge to our being accruing from the psychological environment. They may present themselves as a shield, a dressing, a parade, or a masque concealing or camouflaging our real being. The consequence of their effect upon our self-image is confusing, contradictory, ambiguous, incongruous. It could work sardonically both ways: it can bloat one's ego to the point of making one megalomaniac, judgmental and contemptuous or on the other hand self-defeating and demeaning. It can lead toward sanctimoniousness or toward false modesty.

According to Pir-o-Murshid this ego feels vain when it says: "I cannot bear it. I am better than the others." And so one's weakness is presented as strength.       

Failure to reconnoiter these features in our personality as strategies obstructs one's discovery of our true identity, which would help in our overcoming or transmuting them. On the other hand, to remove these protective displays, or crutches would trigger off dangerous withdrawal symptoms: otherworldliness, helplessness, listlessness. Yet, they aver themselves to be counterproductive in the long range.

Since they are reactive, defensive, and therefore only engage a small, peripheral area of our psyche, to forestall the withdrawal symptoms that one would trigger off by removing them, it is advisable to replace them gradually by enlisting the rich gamut of resourcefulness latent in our various inheritances. Removing them with the kind of will that we develop when identifying solely with this area of our psyche (which Pir-o-Murshid calls "the false ego) can only cause conflicts and result in a split in our personality.

No doubt by failing to recognize and own features in our personality like guilt, resentment, anger, jealousy, covetousness, they would simply conceal themselves in the unconscious and erupt uncontrollably or make us feel mortified and frustrated. But if we become aware of the way the universe conflues in us (as the ocean in a wave), which is what Pir-o-Murshid means by God consciousness, then we would muster a transpersonal will which is what is meant by the divine will that would supersede the limited, egoistic personal will. This could be illustrated by plugging a battery into the charger.

Furthermore, it is in the nature of life that life is continually self-organizing itself as us, and to achieve this we are concomitantly dissolving at the jagged ends. This could be illustrated by a flower: for the fresh petals in the center to unfurl, the jagged ones at the periphery need to fall apart. One does not have to chase them away; they will disintegrate to give way to the new dispensation.

Besides, Pir-o-Murshid presents an original concept of the will, which he illustrates by the yacht's captain harnessing the wind but directing its momentum in the direction s/he wishes to steer the yacht.  One could represent the wind as the self-organizing faculty written into the programming of the universe and our will in availing ourselves of this force, yet bending it according to our personal initiative (which is what we mean by our will.) In this case it is clear that we are not talking about a will of a fraction of our being, that has alienated itself from our whole self (which Pir-o-Murshid calls the false ego), because our will is a "customized" expression of the divine impulse (in this illustration, the wind).

More importantly, since our false ego represents only a small portion of the bounty of our being, by calling upon it to meet an undesirable onslaught upon our being, one is failing to actualize the virtual potentialities that lie in wait in the wider range of our being: the seedbed of our personality; whereas if we place a buffer between the challenge of the psychological environment and ourselves so as to discover that bountiful underpinning of our personality, that challenge will act as a catalyst rather than an onslaught spurring those latent potentials. One tends to evaluate one's idiosyncrasies on the strength of one's self-image. If one discovers wider areas of one's self-image, latent idiosyncrasies will surface.

This is the reason why Pir-o-Murshid attaches so much importance to becoming aware of what he calls our divine inheritance.

The fulfillment of this whole creation is to be found in man and this object is only fulfilled when man has awakened that part of himself which represents God Himself. The same God, so little of whose perfection manifested in the plant arises again at the end of the cycle, trying to emerge as perfectly as possible in the midst of human imperfection. The one who is conscious of his earthly origin is an earthly man; the one who is conscious of his heavenly origin is the son of God.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

Since the ephemeral being manifest the form of the eternal, it is by the contemplation of the eternal that God communicates to us the knowledge of Himself. You know yourself through another knowledge, different from that which you had of yourself, because it is through Him that you know yourself.

Ibn 'Arabi

Pir-o-Murshid points to the efficacy of meditation to downplay our false self-image and therefore overcome the counterproductive strategy of the false ego, thus mustering all our resourcefulness by discovering the bounty latent in us.

The false ego is overcome through meditating upon the true self which, in reality, is God. It takes a powerful impact, involving our being in its very substance, to bring about a change so as to shift our identity from the constraint of the commonplace self-image. This is where meditation culminates in prayer.

When they stand before God to learn, they unlearn all things that the world has taught them; when they stand before God, their ego, their self, their life, is no more before them. They do not think of themselves in that moment with any desire to be fulfilled, with any motive to be accomplished, with any expression of their own; but as empty cups, that God may fill their being, that they may lose the false self.      

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

The beauty in this is that, when man-the most egoistic being in creation, who keeps himself veiled from God, the Perfect Self within, by the veil of his imperfect self, which has formed his presumed ego-by the extreme humility when he stands before God and bows and bends and prostrates himself before His Almighty Being, makes the highest point of his presumed being, the head, touch the earth where his feet are. He in time washes off the black stains of his false ego, and the light of perfection gradually manifests. He stands then first face to face with his God, the idealized Deity, and when the ego is absolutely crushed, then God remains within and without, in both planes, and none exists save He.

In that state, called Fana-fi-Allah, when the soul is absorbed in God, we lose the false sense of being and find the true reality.  Then we finally experience what is termed Baqa-i-Fan, where the false ego is annihilated and merged into the true personality, which is really God expressing Himself in some wondrous ways.  This is the same also as Nirvana, where the true reality of life is experienced and expressed by rising above themselves.

If this limited self which makes the false ego is broken, and one has risen above the limitations of life on all the planes of existence, the soul will break all boundaries, and will experience that freedom which is the longing of every soul.      

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
