Ego

From Richard Rohr, in Everything Belongs:

“I hope we can say ego is not bad.  It is necessary.  The only problem is that our culture teaches that ego is the only game in town.  We take it a little too seriously and take the private ego as if it is full reality.  The nature of the ego is that it tries to fix, name, control, and insure everything for itself.  We want predictability.  But that fixes us in the past.  What was, is, so we are trapped in repeating it and nothing new happens.”

Wow!  There’s a lot to unpack in there, but at the center of it all seems to be the assumption that others see, feel, and experience things as I do – and if they don’t, well, they damn well should.  One would think that decades of experience to the contrary would have worn my ego down on this belief, but that ego is, it seems, one tough, resilient sucker!  That is, it occurs to me, Rohr’s point.  The ego is not bad.  We want/need it to be tough lest we melt into a puddle with each adversity, but at the same time, it needs to be a bit more open-minded, less cocksure.  Which I guess takes us back to metanoia, and that constant Romans 12:2 renewing of the mind.