Asceticism has been a major current in the history of spiritual seeking. Ascetic spiritualities reject the world, finding it to be hopelessly fallen. They believe that the pursuit of God and living the normal life in the world are incompatible because of the corruption of normal life: normal life has to make compromises with money, greed, self-aggrandizement, desire, war, dispute, and so many other forces that seem to be in conflict with the Divine. The solution of ascetic spirituality was to cast normal life aside and seek for complete absorption in God through prayer or meditation in a setting like the monastery or the wandering of the renunciate.
Integral spirituality is a newer and more hopeful idea. Integral spirituality proposes that spirituality and life in the world are not incompatible, that pursuing one doesn't mean having to give up the other. Sri Aurobindo, a leading philosopher of integral spirituality, argued in The Life Divine that the world was created with a purpose, and that to fling life in the world aside for the sole pursuit of God would be to neglect this purpose for which the world was made. There have been movements similar to the integral idea in the past as well, such as the householder spiritual lineages of India and the religious lay life of Christianity. However, these attempts generally found their ultimate end in Heaven or moksha, the final spiritual liberation; there was no attempt to perfect life on earth for the sake of the Divine. Integral spirituality is just this attempt to live a perfected spiritual life on earth itself, rather than only living for the sake of the eventual departure to worlds beyond.
However, even if it has a noble motive, integral spirituality does not live up to its fullest potential if it emphasizes life on earth at the cost of the insights gained from earlier ascetic spiritualities. In fact, ascetic spiritualities had a perfectly valid critique of the normal life, which is that most of the normal life is corrupted by the ego, whose greed and selfishness serve to separate the individual from God. An examination of the contents of one's consciousness with spiritual sincerity will find that countless egoic motives intrude, ranging from jealousy to vanity to greed to laziness. If integral spirituality attempts to do without this insight, it may turn its attempt to embrace the normal life into nothing more than a complacent reveling in the ego and its desires. Integral spirituality, to be truly spiritual, must accept this insight keenly pointed out by the ascetic path and must attempt to live it by renouncing the egoic state. The true aim of integral spirituality must be to live in the world and conduct the activities of life in a post-egoic state that renounces the ego, rather than simply live the normal egoistic life with no alteration.
But there is a vast difficulty, which is that the ego is subtle and pervasive; it reaches into all our activities, thoughts, and deeds. This difficulty is why the ascetic paths came to the conclusion that there is no solution but to cast off the fetters of normal life. The ego infiltrates the job where one seeks promotions, wealth, and worldly success at the cost of divine peace; it infiltrates relationships between people with its jealous conflicts and bodily desires; it infiltrates communal life when people choose to glorify their community at the cost of other communities, leading to antagonism. There seems to be no escape from the ego, and one wonders if the ascetics were right about the impossibility of life free from the ego.
There are solutions, however. The most helpful way out of the snares of the ego is the guidance of the realized guru. The guru is able to point out the movements of the ego and teach the individual to have non-egoic reactions where before the ego controlled the being. With the help of the guru, the individual can learn how to respond with engaged clarity instead of flustered frustration in a board meeting; with humility instead of self-righteousness in a fight with a partner; or with peace instead of fear in a scary situation. In the absence of a realized guru, the indications of the soul can serve a similar function; even if they are more difficult to interpret, the intuitions and rays of light coming from the soul can show the individual where psychological movements need to be changed to avoid the egoic traps. Lastly, where neither the external guidance of the guru nor the internal guidance of the soul are present, there is the technique of offering all actions and psychological movements to the Divine. In the heat of the moment, the individual may in all humility be unsure of what the truly enlightened position or attitude to take may be; the light of the soul may be hidden in the confusion of emotion and the difficulty of the situation may be such that all known principles fail to help. In such situations, it is still possible to offer the thoughts, actions, and feelings to the Divine through the psychological technique of intending that they be performed for the sake of the Divine alone with the highest Divine purpose. The consistent practice of offering psychological movements to the Divine has the effect of purifying the being so that the right attitudes come in over time.
These three techniques are a wonderful help that will bring the individual closer to the Divine. However, they do not provide a general criterion for determining whether a movement is egoic or not. The techniques admit that there is a vast complexity to human psychology and rely on intuitive wisdom to tell the egoic apart from the non-egoic. But in addition to intuitive wisdom, it is also helpful to have clear and generalizable principles that can be used to aid, scaffold, or substitute for the intuition when needed.
One criterion to determine whether a given psychological movement is contaminated by ego or not is to consider purpose. All our actions are done with some purpose in mind, either one that is consciously chosen, or one that is implicitly chosen by the subconscious. When the ego is in control, it has its own purposes: it wants to look good, to have more than others, to have its own private pleasure, to have the advantage, to feel special; these are just some of the motivations that come from the ego. Choices and movements that come from the Divine, however, are recognizable because there is a sound and sensible purpose besides that of glorifying the ego. We can move past the ego by considering whether a given choice or action serves a Divine purpose, or is simply conditioned by the ego.
Note that in most cases there will be a mixed response: there will often be a recognizable Divine purpose behind a choice, in addition to benefits that the ego will receive as well. This is fine, and is to be expected. As we noted earlier, the ego has its thumbs in all aspects of our psychology. What is important here is that we recognize the claims of the Divine and the claims of the ego; at that point, we can gently release the egoic reasons for taking action and see if the Divine reasons still stand. As long as there are sound Divine reasons for a choice, the action can always be offered to the Divine to be purified. This is the key to the integral approach of continuing to engage with life in a post-egoic way rather than casting the activities of life aside as contaminated with ego; all activities will appear to be contaminated with ego at first, but if we recognize the divine purpose behind them, we can continue to engage with them while releasing the hold of the ego.
As an example of how this can work, consider the case of the Divine worker, one who does a service for the Divine such as building a place of worship. It is common for a worker in any line of work to develop a feeling of pride or self-aggrandizement from their work; and this is even common for those who work for the Divine. If this feeling of pride arises in the Divine worker, however, it doesn't mean that the Divine work should be curtailed. In this case there is a sound Divine purpose, in building the place of worship, alongside an egoic movement, the pride of the worker. Once the worker recognizes that this is happening, they can release the pride and continue to offer their work to the Divine.
Understanding the Divine purpose behind various aspects of the manifestation can go a long way towards our being able to engage with them from pure, non-egoic motives. From the ascetic perspective, it may seem that some aspects of the manifestation are already too tainted to engage with; but from the integral perspective we see that they serve a valid purpose and that we can therefore learn to engage them in a non-egoic way. One such activity is art. To the ascetic, art may appear wholly unnecessary, something that has no purpose for the Divine. Indeed, some religious movements such as Protestantism disregarded art altogether, holding that beauty was frivolous and has no purpose for the divine. The ascetic may believe that there is no reason for someone to engage with art except for egoic motives: the artist who desires fame and recognition; an irresponsible searching after pleasure; a desire to impress other people with beautiful and expensive objects. The art world doubtlessly has its share of ego and people who do exactly those things. However, underneath the egoic movements, there is a sound Divine purpose behind art, which is the delight in beauty. Delight is one of the characteristic Divine motivations. It may seem that delight is not Divine because the mere searching for pleasure is something that comes from the ego. However, we can recognize the difference between the Divine impulse to delight and mere pleasure seeking by the presence of craving in the life-force. If there is craving, then we know that the ego is seeking pleasure, whereas the Divine seeks after delight equally and calmly. Therefore, the seeker of integral spirituality who wants to engage in art can engage with art in a Divine way by seeking after delight impartially as the Divine does, and renouncing the egoic motives of fame, pleasure, and the desire to impress others. By staying focused on purpose, the integral seeker can engage with this aspect of the manifestation.
Another such activity is business. Just as art is maligned for its lower egoic motives, the business world has been maligned as well: it has been accused of fostering greed, conspicuous consumption, inequality, the seeking after power and control, and the self-aggrandizement of those who succeed there. There is no question that these are serious and often substantiated charges, and that business is a field of play for the egoic impulses. However, we cannot cast business aside because it, too, has a sound Divine purpose behind it. The purpose of the business world is to create wealth that in turn must be used for the enrichment and uplift of humanity and the manifestation of God in humanity. There is no doubt that the poor are children of God who have God's blessings. However, wealth can be used to make life more comfortable and open the door to higher levels of purpose beyond subsistence. It is true that in the current state of the world, wealth is not allocated in a way that makes the most use of its potential for the uplift of humanity. However, this is still the role of wealth in the world, and as the world grows closer to God, wealth should find its true purpose. Because business serves this important purpose of generating wealth, it is possible to engage with it by renouncing the egoic motives towards greed and power and staying close to the Divine motives of generating wealth for humanity. Here is another area of the manifestation that the ascetic may cast aside completely; consciousness of its Divine purpose allows the integral seeker to engage with it without being compromised by the ego.
A last example of a domain where the ascetic casts aside for its taintedness is the realm of interpersonal relationships, friendly, romantic, and communal. For the ascetic, there is no true possibility of fellowship, as human relationships are tainted by ego in the desire for mutual benefit, the desire for bodily pleasure, their competitive nature, the fact that they are filled with signaling instead of true fellowship, the capacity of communities to clash and conflict with each other, and so on. Once again, we see that there is substantial truth to these charges: the ego affects all interpersonal relationships, and the sincere seeker will be able to find any number of egoic motives affecting their own social life. However, there is Divine purpose here as well. God has created humans as a social species that must work together to confront obstacles and live life out. God did not intend humans to live as solitary units, and as anthropology and biology show, humans are inherently social. For man to fulfill his purpose, he must work together with his fellow man. We were put here to gain support, help, and joy from each other's company as we do our work here on earth. The integral spiritual seeker may engage with the domain of social life if he or she renounces the ego with its jealousy and competitiveness and stays close to the Divine purpose underlying all our human relationships.
Understanding purpose is a great help towards overcoming the ego. Of course, it is no panacea; the ego may deviously argue that there is a valid purpose behind something that it wants, and the outer being may be fooled for a time. But there is no way to completely avoid being ensnared by the ego until we have completely cast off its fetters in the state of enlightenment, and continued sincere spiritual search will eventually reveal any temporary misguided falsehood. To avoid the snares of the ego, the ascetic casts life completely aside; the integral spiritual seeker deals with the problems of life even at the risk of getting trapped because it knows that the problems of life are the problems faced by God's emergence. The ascetic is correct to note that the traps of ego are everywhere in life and there is no way to experience the Divine while still caught in the ego. But the integral spiritual seeker is drawn forward by the greater truth that the world was created for a purpose, and from this idea the possibility of engaging with it without ego, in the Divine light, becomes possible.
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