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Me, myself, and I: Another trinity of the psyche




Me, me, me, what I want, what I feel, what I think, how things effect me, my judgments, my expectations, what I see, my point-of-view, my body, my money, my, my, my.

This is all of the ego, that part of us that’s convinced that that’s all that we are, that if there is anything else it’s just fantasy or imagination i.e. not real, or the ghost in the machine.

I usually think that what I am is this person called Bob, with a body that looks a certain way, can do certain things, and has memories and feelings, urges, desires, values, judgments, and rigid points-of-view (one of them being that I have no rigid points-of-view). I wear a mask of the “Good guy” out in public but have an inner voice that reminds me of why that isn’t always true.

Everything that I see or think is tainted with what this “ego-me” believes is true i.e. what “I” think is true. Oh, I know that it’s just a projection of my unexplored and poorly understood psyche and that I have no idea if the world I see is true, in part if at all. But typically I ignore that piece of knowledge because ego-me wants to be right. Actually ego-me “needs” to be right because being right means that it gets to survive just the way it is and as everyone knows deep in their tiny ego-me hearts being wrong is a horrible, bad, unsavory thing to be avoided at all costs– that is if admitting to being wrong doesn’t actually make you right about being wrong, then you’ll admit to be wrong!

It’s true, when we say “I” we are referring to this image of self that we created both inside and out and if any part becomes threatened we will defend its integrity at any cost i.e. by rejecting the offender by banishing it, demeaning it, bedeviling it, ignoring it, or if particularly immature, we’ll even kill it.

But what is this that we are defending, is it real or just something we made up and what do I mean by “we”? When I use the word “we” I’m not necessarily referring to a collective but to what it is inside of us that made this ego up in the first place.

Now this might come as a surprise to most people who believe that there may be more than one “me” inside us, that there is a me that created the ego-me, that there’s a me listening to all the talking and thinking and feeling and believing of the ego-me. I mean, who’s listening to all that continuous chatter going on inside our minds?

Who was it that was there before and just after we were born– before we started adding meaning and memories and feelings and judgments to everything? It’s still there because who else are we talking to inside our head?

Am I suggesting that we are not our ego-selves, that we are something else entirely?

Yes and no. I say this because the ego-self is actually part of the whole called the “self”, there’s also a much, much bigger motivating and animating self that energizes the whole and both are needed to maintain the continuance of our being. Mostly they act somewhat in unison though I admit that the ego-self frequently goes off on ventures that are often self-defeating. But the core-self i.e. for the lack of any other word, the “soul” can often bring it back before too much damage is done.

But existence is a constant dance of polarization that often causes our being to struggle to remain upright and sometimes even causing us to stumble. When in harmony life often looks like two steps forward and one step backward as the dance progresses but when one side of the dance tries to control too much of the flow, then disharmony ensues and the dancers become awkward and stumble. This is what happens in relationships between individuals, between philosophies, religions, and nations. This is what is happening in the world today i.e. the ego-self has (once again) become too dominant and is causing us all to trip.

We are not just our egos (as I’ve defined them), we are much more than that and we need to understand that our small and limited, selves can’t always lead the dance, sometimes we need to listen to our partner and allow them to help us back on course.

And by “partner” I’m not just referring to the “two in one” of our self because the truth is that we are each other’s partner, every one of us, and if we want to keep this dance going, then perhaps we better start treating each other that way.