Stonyhill Newsletter

© Dick Rauscher July 23, 2010
There is a well known Zen Buddhist teaching story in which a very educated but somewhat arrogant professor comes to an old Zen master to study under him. The Zen master offers him tea and then begins to pour the tea into the professor’s cup until it overflows. The professor jumps to his feet and shouts “Master, the tea is overflowing the cup and running onto the floor”.

Ignoring him, the Master continues pouring the tea and calmly replies “ a mind that is already full cannot take in anything new. Like this cup, you are full of opinions and preconceptions. In order to find the happiness and wisdom you seek, you must first learn to empty your mind.”

This Buddhist teaching story, which goes back many centuries, contains great wisdom because it is talking about the primitive ego that resides in each of us……the primitive (immature) ego of our very young inner-child. Until we acknowledge the presence of this part of our unconscious psyche, and learn the skills required to tame it, achieving wisdom or happiness will be very, very difficult. Some say impossible.

Like the professor in the story above, we must learn to become self-aware so we can begin to tame the unconscious arrogance of our primitive ego. Becoming wise and creating happy relationships with others is very difficult to achieve when others see us as narcissistic and arrogant. So let’s take a look at the skills we need to learn and how best to learn them.

Step one: Our primitive ego is not bad.

Our primitive ego is simply young and immature….not a bad part of us that needs to be eliminated. That would be impossible without a lobotomy and it would mean losing most of what we know about the world. But unconsciously allowing a six to seven year old child to run our adult lives doesn’t make sense either. Which leads us to step two on our journey toward wisdom and happiness……..

Step two: Understanding that our primitive ego can make us ignorant.

Like most very young children, the primitive ego of our unconscious inner-child tends to be a bit narcissistic and often quite arrogant…..rather “me” focused. Those traits do not necessarily make us a bad person, but the unconscious arrogance of our primitive ego does indeed have the power to make us very difficult to live with and even more importantly, it can make us ignorant.

Step three: Understanding that ignorance is normal.

But before you put yourself down, remember……ignorance does not mean that we are stupid, it simply means that we have not yet learned something. We all start out life ignorant about everything! We remain ignorant until another person or our life experiences give us the opportunity to learn.

Ignorance can always be overcome and replaced by wisdom……by simply learning about the subject we are currently ignorant about.

Let me say it again…. ignorance does not mean that we are stupid. When we are unwilling or stubbornly refuse to learn and grow…..that’s when we are in danger of being labeled as stupid… or as Webster’s dictionary would put it….a stupid person is one who “lacks intellectual acuity or a keen penetrating intelligence”. In other words, ignorance is not a bad thing, but stupid is never helpful.

To understand what all this has to do with emptying the tea cup we need to briefly explore the danger of black-and-white thinking.

Step four: Understanding the danger of black-and-white thinking.

Primitive Ego Psychology teaches us that as young children, we learn to keep the confusing adult world simple and manageable by using the skill of “either / or” thinking. Some call this dualistic thinking. Others refer to it as black-and-white thinking.

They all mean the same thing….. that we learned very early in life that things are either safe or unsafe, good or bad, pleasurable or painful, right or wrong. We quickly learned that the world was safer and more pleasurable when we were good and right. It was scary to think that we might we bad or wrong.

Wrong meant that we could be criticized or ridiculed. So at a very young age we learned to strongly defend our beliefs and opinions. Over time all of our beliefs, opinions, certainties, assumptions and conclusions about life became very rigid and inflexible. They all represented what is right and good. They all came to represent various aspects of “the” truth. Period.

The primitive ego of our unconscious inner-child often becomes very angry, defensive, and resentful when others tell us we are wrong. It is positive “we” are right and “they” are wrong….sometimes we even label them as “jerks”. This attitude of course quickly makes their primitive ego angry, defensive, and resentful. We now have two upset, defensive, resentful people attempting to communicate with one another.

Beginning to see the problem?

When we unconsciously attempt to use the black and white, all or nothing life skills and insights of our very young inner-child to manage our adult life, we are almost certain to journey through life with a very full tea cup unconsciously shooting ourselves in the foot by arrogantly and aggressively defending our beliefs as “absolute truths” and openly criticizing the beliefs and behaviors of others.

So much for happy relationships with those around us.

In other words, when our unconscious primitive ego is in control of our life, anything that challenges our existing beliefs is automatically and emotionally rejected as wrong. Our primitive ego makes it very difficult for us to learn new things and take in any new information that might require us to change our existing beliefs.

Unfortunately, our primitive ego’s black-and-white thinking process tends to keep us ignorant, rigid in our beliefs, and labeled by others as arrogant because we refuse to open ourselves to new ideas….especially when we insist on telling others we think they are wrong. None of these outcomes are helpful if our goal is to become wise and have happy relationships with those around us.

Our primitive ego is indeed young and immature, and it is part of our unconscious, so until we learn to become fully conscious and more self-aware, our primitive ego will continue to unconsciously exert a very powerful control over our adult life.

Step five: The single most important skill required for wisdom and happiness

We have now arrived at the single most important skill we will ever need in life to achieve wisdom and happiness….and that is the skill of learning to pay attention. No other skill is more important than learning how to awaken our consciousness and pay more attention to the energy that we are sending into the universe.

Is our energy open and loving? Or is our energy critical, defensive and angry? If it is defensive and angry there is a good chance that the primitive ego of our inner-child is unconsciously controlling our life.

Stated simply, learning to live in the moment and learning to “intentionally” pay attention to the energy of our thoughts, behaviors, and feelings……is far and away the most important skill we need to work on if we want to achieve growth in self-awareness. It takes time to become self-aware, but eventually, learning to pay attention to the kind of energy we are sending into the world becomes second nature.

The more we pay attention to those times that our energy is negative, the more easily we will see our inner-child in action. Remember, the primitive ego of our inner-child has the power to control our day-to-day lives only when it is functioning outside of our awareness. When we are conscious and self-aware, we have the ability to consciously choose the kind of energy we want to give the universe……through our thoughts, our emotions, and our behaviors.

As we grow in self-awareness we will find our self automatically practicing the art of emptiness…….the ability to embrace “not-knowing”. Remember, our primitive ego uses black-and-white thinking….it knows everything…..and everything it knows represents absolute truth.

When we develop the ability to “not-know” it allows us to be more open, less defensive, and more able to listen so we can more easily take in new information….information that may or may not change our existing beliefs.

The universe is a very large place and there is a lot we don’t yet know or understand. As we learn to tame our primitive ego though growth in self-awareness and learn to embrace new information and ideas, we will soon realize just how ignorant we really are! Reality is not black and white….it is always gray. There is always truth on both sides of every issue. Until we tame our primitive ego we will not be able to embrace these important realities.

When we are able to empty our mind and sit comfortably with our ignorance we will know that we are truly on the path toward wisdom and happier relationships with others. We will finally understand that virtually every new learning in life is a gift that has come to us from another person.

The Stonyhill Newsletter / Blog and the videos related to each Newsletter are designed to teach the insights and everyday wisdom contained in Primitive Ego Psychology. For more technical, in-depth articles on Primitive Ego Psychology and Primitive Ego Theory go to the Stonyhill website at www.stonyhill.com/articles.htm