http://enrichmentjournal.ag.org/201303/201303_086_demonization.cfm - currently dealing what I believe to be the unattended reality of this topic, especially in my personal walk
I have found in myself that I am fearful of any arbitrary limitations, as I have had some past experiences of certain limitations making me feel disconnected from my true self. I guess this would point back to a time when I was in Fundamentalist Catholicism, and absolutely hated the experience. I found that I could not even surrender to God if he is some just external entity out there like the gods of antiquity.
is there anything necessarily evil about the ego? I am a little stumped about what constitutes the Ego. For me, the first thing that I think of when it comes to Ego is the intellect, or maybe over reliance on the intellect. Now I have found that the intellect does not have much capacity to think in both/and, and tends to think in a very competitive way. For example, in Trinitarian theology, the father, son and holy spirit are all 100% the Godhead, not father 1/3 God, son 1/3 God and Holy Spirit 1/3 god. This defies all standard logic.
Yes I am Trinitarian. Now I think the modern meaning of Ego is equivalent to the False self. I find that false self is a better term. But Richard Rohr describes the false self as the self that defines itself outside of relationship, and is a product of the mind.
I had some interesting insights about the whole nature of surrender, and the basis of freedom and need. I read an article from Bishop Robert Barron about God not needing us, and how at the heart of this declaration is that because God doesnāt need man, he is perfectly free to love man. Essentially there is no stipulation, as Gods love is purely love of the other as other, without any ulterior motives. I find this is the same thing on earth when it comes to true friendship or relationships of any sort. From my personal experience, it seems like reciprocal relationships never can be personal, as there are always strings attached. Frankly, this is the very foundation of business and economics. This is probably why they say that friends should never go into business together. Or a better example, I thought about comes from a book by Peter Kreeft known as āLove is stronger than deathā, and he compared the change of the relationship of the child and mother at birth. This is considering that the fetus is utterly dependent on mom, but cannot truly relate to his/her mother until they are born, and can have some form of independence. Over the course of growth, the less functionally dependent a child is on their parents. Yet, the more emotionally dependent someone is on their parents, the more I find they dislike their parents(I think it was Ram Dass who suggested spending the week with the family to test how enlightened one is). When it comes to marriage, the ideal is that both parties freely love the other as other, or there is a system of dominance and using. In this respect, someone can be used for physical gratification or satisfaction of social need, all the while being at the mercy of the need provider. I have had experience in the past where the more I could refuse to need people in my life, the more sense of freedom I had to love another and have a real friendship with the other as other. Now to the problem, man will always be dependent on God for existence, and can never not need God. Yet the difficulty is how can we love God freely if there is always some inevitable dependence on God. But at the same time, I wonder how children love their parents, when they are still so dependent on them. Yet they do.
I have noticed that much of religion has not taught people how to surrender, and it is still ego-centric. Much of the surrender to God I have seen has been nothing more than giving into either a 1) Self righteous and punitive judge, 2) Strongest bully or 3) Patronizing nanny. I remember in a book from Richard Rohr, known as Breathing Upward, he mentions that people substitute junk sacrifice for true surrender. This reminds me of the idea of false Humility that is often times self-deprecating.