Social Liberation: The Quest of Conquering the Ego
- Thilo Weber
- 3. Jan.
- 31 Min. Lesezeit
About J.R.R. Tolkien in Psychoanalysis, the Ego as a Social Construct, and the Solution to Climate Change
When I hear the term social liberation, my first associations are some clichés about the hippies of the 1960s who wanted to break out and build their own new society based on love, sexual freedom, long hair, and rock ’n’ roll. However, when you dive deeper into the 1960s movement, figures like Alan Watts or Carl Jung appear to be at the root of their ideas, and the picture of social liberation becomes quite different from my first superficial image. It is not about breaking out of or overthrowing the social system, but rather about understanding the deeply rooted social bondage in which we live. This social bondage can be seen as the root cause of the many seemingly intractable problems facing our world today, such as climate change, the never-ending stories of war, social inequality, and so on. Yet, the term “root cause” is actually already part of social bondage itself, which gives a glimpse of the entanglement of the whole situation. Liberation from social bondage is not possible through escape or destruction, but only through a deep dive into life and a true understanding of the real problem from the heart of society. This is a quest that each of us must undertake for ourselves. And if enough of us succeed, we may actually wake up in the world that the hippies of the 1960s dreamed of. So, let’s dive in.
Overture: My Personal Quest
My childhood was marked by a long depression that began pretty much on my first day of school and lasted more or less until the end of elementary school. The image that comes to mind to best describe this state of mind is a solid black square. Just a complete absence of light. Obviously, still a very limited description.
Although I understand the widespread notion of depression as a disease, I personally have never found it to be of much help to me. I always wanted to understand the reason for my depression and what it had to do with me. The concept of disease is a way of saying, “It’s just a worldly phenomenon that happens completely apart from the person.” While this may provide a relative relief from feelings of self-blame for many people confronted with the issue, this separation comes at the expense of one’s own curiosity about the phenomenon as well as one’s ability to take action.
For me, those years formed rather the basis for my own quest of understanding, which I continue to this day, driven by the question: What was the cause of my depression? Along the way, I have already discovered many layers of explanation, bringing light into the darkness bit by bit. This article deals with the layer of social bondage.
Conquering the Shadows of the Unconscious
Two of my all-time favorite childhood stories were The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. The Hobbit tells the story of Bilbo Baggins and his quest to free the eastern lands of Middle-earth from the terrifying dragon Smaug. Smaug has stolen a treasure of untold riches and hoards it deep within the caves of Mount Erebor.
Recently, I have gained a completely new and inspiring perspective on these stories through the work of Carl Jung, who interpreted the images found in myths, legends, and dreams as the archetypal language of the human psyche. According to Jung, the “land” in such tales can be seen as a symbol of the human psyche, while the quests undertaken by heroes represent the psychological challenges we face in our lives.
In this light, I see in the dragon Smaug a mirror of my own depression — a force that hoards the “gold” or light of joy, leaving the land shrouded in darkness. The gold, in turn, represents the vitality and happiness that have been stolen from the people, resulting in a sense of heaviness and stagnation.
In Man And His Symbols, a book written by Jung in collaboration with five of his students, Joseph L. Henderson elaborates on the theme of the archetypical hero fighting with the cosmic powers of evil, personified by dragons and monsters:
“In the developing consciousness of the individual, the heroic figure is the symbolic means by which the emerging ego overcomes the inertia of the unconscious and frees the mature human being from the longing to return to the blissful state of childhood, to a world ruled by the mother.” — Joseph L. Henderson, Man And His Symbols (translated from German by the author)
Through this lens, Bilbo’s quest is no longer just a journey to reclaim a stolen treasure; it becomes a symbolic confrontation with the inner shadow. Facing Smaug symbolizes the ego’s conquering of the light of awareness against the darkness of the unconscious. From Henderson’s words we can also see that the darkness of the unconscious, the dragons and monsters, are connected to the archetypal mother. In this sense, conquering the dragon is also about liberation of the bonds and conditioning naturally grown in our early childhood from our relationship with our mother.
Conquering the Shadows of the Ego
After Bilbo has successfully established his ego and conquered the shadows of the unconscious, it was the quest of his grandson, Frodo, to face the shadows of this very same ego. If you look at the screenshot of The Lord Of The Rings movie below, what else can this landscape of Mordor symbolize than the dystopian image of a psyche marked by a conflict between a strong and powerful ego, represented by Barad-Dûr — the “dark tower” that is surveilling and controlling the land with its powerful and merciless eye — and the uncontrollable life energy of the libido, represented by Mount Doom, the erupting volcano in the background.
In the ring trilogy, the dark sides of a psyche with such a strong dichotomy into ego vs. libido — logos vs. eros, thinking vs. feeling, form vs. energy — is attributed to Sauron. Only a hero with the pure heart of a Frodo Baggin is fit to bring the ego to fall. However, in reality, both Frodo and Sauron, light and shadow, are part of the one psyche of each one of us.
Barad-dûr, the strong ego of Sauron, has been constructed by the magical power of the ring. Hence, it can only be destroyed again through the destruction of the ring. The most natural meaning of the “One Ring to rule them all”, is that it is a symbol of the marriage between man and woman, the very fundament of our society. So the psychological message in The Lord Of the Rings — that might well have been unconscious to Tolkien, depending on his interest and knowledge of the discoveries of psychoanalysis at his time — could be stated that, as in order to destroy the ego, we need to destroy society. But what does this connection really mean? Does it make sense at all?
In Jungian terms, when Bilbo’s quest was about to overcome the archetypal mother by bringing the light of ego-consciousness back to the land reigned by unconsciousness, then the quest of Frodo could be seen as that of overcoming the archetypal father, represented by the controlling ego principle of Sauron. Our today’s society is still coming more or less freshly out of the victory of the light of enlightenment over the unconscious dark ages, a battle whose frontlines where fought between scientists and philosophers like Copernicus, Galileo, and Kant against the ignorance of the church. But we are still living in a patriarchal society today. The light of the ego has become the new oppressor.
Describing the ego as the archetypal father is still a rather symbolic explanation of the situation. A much clearer and scientific analysis came to me through the encounter with the compelling analysis of the ego given by Alan Watts in Psychotherapy East & West.
The Ego as a Social Construct
Alan Watts, a British-born philosopher and writer, became renowned for his profound interpretations of Eastern philosophies, including Buddhism, Vedanta, Yoga, and Taoism, bringing these traditions to a Western audience in the 20th century. His teachings and works significantly influenced the counterculture movements of the 1960s, inspiring a generation to explore alternative paths to self-liberation. As he describes in the book Psychotherapy East & West, these Eastern ways of liberation were actually much closer related to the Western disciplines of science and in particular psychotherapy, rather than, as one might naively expect, to the practices of Christian religion or Western philosophy.
The recognition of parallels between the goals of Western psychotherapy and Eastern paths to liberation can be traced to Carl Jung’s foreword to Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the Taoist text The Secret of the Golden Flower. When reading the Chinese text, Jung was deeply struck by the alignment between Taoist practices and the methods and insights he had cultivated through his psychoanalytic work, which until then had primarily drawn upon Western traditions such as mysticism, Gnosticism, Kabbalah, alchemy, symbolic interpretations and dream analysis — all directed toward revealing the archetypal patterns and transformative processes of the unconscious mind.
In his book, Alan Watts states two hypotheses about the nature of the ego. The first hypothesis describes ego-consciousness as an “evolutionary experiment”, that is, as a fundamental biological change occurring in evolution from apes to humans — an evolutionary experiment whose long-term success seems actually, to say the least, quite questionable:
“The puzzling thing is that some of the ‘grids’ which we invent [(i.e., patterns evolving in our organism and mind, such as ego-consciousness)] work, and some do not. In the same way, some animal behaviors seem to fit the environment and some do not. Those of ants, for example, have remained stable for millions of years, but the huge fangs of the saber-toothed tiger, the vast bulk of the Sauria, and the great nose horns of the Titanotheriidae were experimental failures. It would perhaps be more exact to say that they worked for a while, but not for as long as the experiments of other species. But what seems to happen in most of these cases is that the organism/environment relationship ‘splits’: the organism’s attack upon or defense against the environment becomes too strong, so isolating it from its source of life. […] Or it may be that the organism, considered as a field in itself, is in self-contradiction: the weight of the nose horn is too much for the muscles. Turning to the human species, we may wonder whether such a split is taking place in the development of the overisolated consciousness of the individual.” — Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East & West
The second hypothesis describes the emergence of ego-consciousness as a social construct, i.e., that our sense of “I”, of being a free, individual agent, can actually only occur within the social context of human relationships and society. He supports this hypothesis with two derivations. The first derivation is due to the American sociologist Georg Herbert Mead who showed “that the ‘I,’ the biological individual, can become conscious of itself only in terms of the ‘me,’ but that this latter is a view of itself given to it by other people”:
“The individual enters as such into his own experience only as an object, not as a subject; and he can enter as an object only on the basis of social relations and interactions, only by means of his experiential transactions with other individuals in an organized social environment. . . only by taking the attitudes of others towards himself — is he able to become an object to himself.” — Georg Herbert Mead as cited by Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East & West
In other words, the answer to the question “who am I?”, when “I” is referred to as ego-consciousness, is “the others — that’s me”. The second derivation follows a somewhat simplified neurological argument:
“The states of the nervous system need not, as we suppose, be watched by something else, by a little man inside the head who registers them all. Wouldn’t he have to have another nervous system, and another little man inside his head, and so on ad infinitum? When we get an infinite regression of this kind we should always suspect that we have made an unnecessary step in our reasoning. […] Now indeed there is a sense in which the cortex is a second nervous system over and above the primary system of the thalamus. Oversimplifying things considerably, we could say that the cortex works as an elaborate feedback system for the thalamus by means of which the organism can to some extent be aware of itself. […] How can the cortex observe and control the cortex? Perhaps there will come a day when the human brain will fold back on itself again and develop a higher cortex, but until then the only feedback which the cortex has about its own states comes through other people. […] Thus the ego which observes and controls the cortex is a complex of social information relayed back into the cortex — Mead’s ‘generalized other.’ […] The ego is the unconscious pretense that the organism contains a higher system than the cortex; it is the confusion of a system of interpersonal information with a new, and imaginary, fold in the brain — or with something quite other than a neural pattern, a mind, soul, or self. When, therefore, I feel that ‘I’ am knowing or controlling myself — my cortex — I should recognize that I am actually being controlled by other people’s words and gestures masquerading as my inner or better self.” — Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East & West
As a result of these thoughts, the human mind and ego-consciousness are of a nature that extends beyond the borders of the skin of a single human being, but rather “the field or locus of any given individual mind must extend as far as the social activity or apparatus of social relations which constitutes it extends.” Here lies one of the great contradictions of our times: Our society builds on the fundamental idea of individual, independent, and self-responsible agents inside the skin of each human body who act apart from society — however the experience of ego-consciousness underlying the whole idea is itself a social construct that could never occur in an isolated setting.
The Social Game
Watts’ solution to the fundamental contradiction of ego-consciousness immanent in our society is to see that all our social interactions are part of a game. The ego is a game, that imagines humans to be autonomous agents, separate from the world, and thereby enables us to get an objective understanding of separated excerpts of the world and actively act upon them. Watts agrees that the game of ego-consciousness might be a powerful tool for us to interact in the world and in particular for the education of our children. However, this tool is only helpful as much as we are aware of it being a tool relative to a separated excerpt of the world and don’t take it as absolute reality:
“It may be necessary to divide the child against itself for the purpose of learning certain patterns of social behavior, but if the child does not later in life discover that this division was, like the myth of Santa Claus, a trick, it turns into a permanently alienated personality. When such personalities, in their turn, bring up children they impose the division upon them without knowing that it is a trick, and thus their admonitions are given without humor and often without essential kindness. For when the child is recalcitrant, the self-alienated adult is genuinely furious; he does not realize that bringing up children is playing a game with them.” — Alan Watts , Psychotherapy East & West
However, the general lack of such awareness results in our contemporary society being built on a fundamental contradiction:
“Here, then, is a major contradiction in the rules of the social game. The members of the game are to play as if they were independent agents, but they are not to know that they are just playing as if! It is explicit in the rules that the individual is self-determining, but implicit that he is so only by virtue of the rules. Furthermore, while he is defined as an independent agent, he must not be so independent as not to submit to the rules which define him. Thus he is defined as an agent in order to be held responsible to the group for ‘his’ actions. The rules of the game confer independence and take it away at the same time, without revealing the contradiction.” — Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East & West
Watts goes on to identify this contradiction as the psychological phenomenon described by Gregory Bateson as the double-bind, “in which the individual is called upon to take two mutually exclusive courses of action and at the same time is prevented from being able to comment on the paradox.”
“You are damned if you do and damned if you don’t, and you mustn’t realize it.”— Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East & West
The fundamental pattern of a double-bind is, according to Watts, expressed by the commandment to “be spontaneous!”. “The very command contradicts spontaneity, but it only becomes a double bind when one can neither ignore the command nor comment on the contradiction” (Wikipedia). One example of the “be spontaneous” deeply imprinted in our society is the “need to survive”:
“To say that there is no necessity for things to happen as they do is perhaps another way of saying that the world is play. But this idea is an affront to common sense because the basic rule of human societies is that one must be consistent. If you want to belong to our society, you must play our game — or, simply, if we are going to be consistent, we must be consistent. The conclusion is substituted for the premise. […] The first rule of the game, put in another way, is that the game must continue, that the survival of the society is necessary. But we must not lose sight of the fact that the consistencies or regularities of nature are patterns that do occur, not patterns that must occur. Natural events do not obey commandments in the same way that human beings obey the law. Or put in still other words, the first rule of the game is that this game is serious, i.e., is not a game. This might be called the primordial ‘repression’. […] But just as soon as we feel that certain things, such as survival, are serious necessities, life becomes problematic in a very special sense quite different from, say, the problems of chess or of science. Life and problem become the same; the human situation becomes a predicament for which there is no solution.” — Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East & West
Nature only knows interactions that resemble playing or dancing rather than necessity. Human societies on the other hand tend to perceive themselves as a serious business. By taking yourself absolutely serious, you are however in contradiction and hence in conflict with nature. From nature’s perspective, there is only play and hence even the most majestic of human societies is just another game. The same is true for our ego, which is nothing but the individual perception of the social game. As long as we don’t see the game-like nature of the ego and social rules, we are caught in a double-bind — and thereby feel oppressed by the controlling eye of Sauron.
“If all this is true, it becomes obvious that the ego feeling is pure hypnosis. Society is persuading the individual to do what it wants by making it appear that its commands are the individual’s inmost self. What we want is what you want. And this is a double-bind, as when a mother says to her child, who is longing to slush around in a mud puddle, ‘Now, darling, you don’t want to get into that mud!’ This is misinformation, and this — if anything — is the ‘Great Social Lie.’” — Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East & West
The Language Game
The social construction of the ego goes even deeper. Not only is it ingrained into the social rules but also into our very language. From early age we teach our children the “I”, “me” and “mine” of our language. “You are Luke”, “I am your father”, “you are my son”, “this is my spaceship”, “if you give me $ 2M, I give you my spaceship”, “if you join my mission, my spaceship will be yours too”, and so on. With the internalization of the rules of language, ego-consciousness grows steadily in parallel. Again, the problem doesn’t lie in the rules of language or in ego-consciousness. The problem only arises, when we take them serious, or in other words for reality instead of a game humans play in order to have a conversation about reality.
The game-like nature of language is nothing new. It has been described, e.g., by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations, where he showed how language is always used within a certain context and cannot be understood or applied outside of that context. Also Gödel’s incompleteness theorems can be seen an example that even the fundamental language of mathematics can only be understood relative to an arbitrarily given assumption of axioms and rules.
However, the fundamental impact of these findings on our daily experience of life has yet to arrive in society. Here, Alan Watts presents another hypothesis, stating that the maya — the great illusion described by the Eastern philosophies that drives the never-ending cycle of suffering (samsara) — does not, as is commonly assumed, refer to physical nature, but rather to the illusion by which our social structures influence our thoughts:
“It is not within the scope of this book to present a fully documented argument for the idea that liberation is from the maya of social institutions and not of the physical world. […] It is simply a hypothesis which, to me, makes far better sense of Buddhism and Vedanta, Yoga and Taoism, than any other interpretation. […] If, then, the maya or unreality lies not in the physical world but in the concepts or thought forms by which it is described, it is clear that maya refers to social institutions — to language and logic and their constructs — and to the way in which they modify our feeling of the world.” — Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East & West
Science, physics and, in particular, quantum physics describes reality more and more as a unified field rather than a collection of independent objects. For example, sound and electricity “travel” only in our language. If we look closer, they are rather a flow of vibrations in a field of “particles”. And if we look even closer, these particles itself turn out to be just structures and vibrations in an energy field. Maya is often characterized as the world of space, time, and causation. It seems quite plausible that space, time, and causation are only concepts of our thoughts and language. The closer we look at the world, the more their appropriateness is shaking. All static concepts cease to be valid at a certain level of detail:
“Intellectual man had no choice but to follow the path which facilitated the development of his faculty of thought, and thought could only clarify itself by separating out static concepts which, in becoming static, ceased to conform to their organic matrix or to the forms of nature. […] European languages in general begin with a subject-noun whose action is expressed in an active verb. Some apparently permanent element is separated from the general process, treated as an entity, and endowed with active responsibility for a given occurrence. This procedure is so paradoxical that only long acquaintance with it conceals its absurdity.” — L. L. Whyte as quoted by Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East & West
When trying to describe the limitations of language we are getting into the inevitable trouble of being limited by the structure of the very same language we are using for the description. Probably, that’s part of the reason why methods for liberation in Buddhism and Vedanta, Yoga and Taoism, but also in Western mysticism and psychotherapy, all involve practices that go beyond language such as meditation, breathing exercises, body postures, somatic exercises, singing, silent retreats, etc.
Intermezzo: Flavors of Language
It is fascinating, how different languages shape distinct worldviews and influence the way ideas are expressed. For instance, I naturally switched to English for my scientific writing during university, as it seemed well suited for topics like space, time, and causation. In contrast, in my twenties, we had a band that sang in Italian because it felt fitting for themes of enjoying life, food, and companionship (though this was a rather unconscious/intuitive choice at the time). German lends itself to abstract “Gedankenkonstrukte,” while learning Tibetan might inspire societies based on honest sharing rather than ego-driven interactions.
Also Tolkien’s writing of fantasy stories was originally motivated by his deep linguistic interest. He constructed several fantasy languages first, then only crafted stories like The Silmarillion and The Hobbit in order to bring them to life, enabling their evolution through narrative. What Carl Jung discovered, is that results of creative imagination and storytelling reveal deeper structures and dynamics of the unconscious. Tolkien’s process and tales that explore heroes confronting the shadows of the unconscious and ego seem to be a perfect example for Jung’s insights.
Reflecting on my band’s album Antonio, we seemed to have followed a similar process. Only after having chosen a collection of four songs, we linked them with a story about a young Italian man leaving the warm home of his mother for studying in the cold, rational north. There, he encountered a trickster — a rich woman hosting wild parties that mixed up all classes of society — before becoming “Re Zosimo,” a farmer crowned king by the people. The song’s chorus, inspired by a dream, today feels like a proper Taoist or alchemist verse:
“High in the sky, there is only air. Deep in the earth, there is only stone. But in the middle, there is the fire. And it is everyone’s desire. But the fire is only strong in unity.” — Il Coccodrillo, Il Re Zosimo
Only recently, in studying Carl Jung’s books, I learned that Zosimos of Panopolis was also an important alchemist under the Roman Empire, living in modern-day Egypt and writing in ancient Greek. In this sense, our hero became an alchemist or magician himself, transcending the dualistic structures of society and language.
The Curtain of Ignorance
Alan Watts offers a compelling interpretation of the many different practices of spiritual liberation as well as of psychotherapy — that they all aspire to find ways to enable us to see behind the curtain of “language and logic and their constructs”. Not seeing their relative validity and taking them for absolute reality is ignorance, the ultimate cause of suffering and fuel of the cycle of samsara. In this sense, the goal of all liberation practices can be seen under the one common goal of social liberation. The conventions of our social structures are deeply ingrained in our daily thought patterns. Their influence on our lives cannot be underestimated. At the same time seeing beyond them is equally difficult. Alan Watts compares the situation with the Copernican revolution:
“Setting aside, for the time being, the moral and ethical implications of this view of man [i.e., of seeing the rules of society and language as a social game rather than reality], it seems to have the same sort of advantage over the ordinary view that the Copernican solar system has over the Ptolemaic. It is so much simpler, even though it means giving up the central position of the earth. This is, moreover, the kind of simplicity which is fruitful rather than diminishing: it leads to further possibilities of play, greater richness of articulation.” — Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East & West
Nothing really prevents us from thinking of the universe in terms of the old Ptolemaic system. And we could still build all our calendars and clocks and other technologies based on it. As a thought experiment, one could even imagine that people would have managed to find a way to fly to the moon with strictly thinking of earth as a flat surface surrounded by the celestial bodies. Operating in the old system would have just required much bigger efforts and costs for any of these, as at each and every step one has to find ad-hoc work-arounds for the flaws inherent in our underlying thought constructs.
The world view transported by our language and ego-consciousness might well have arrived at an equally critical crossroad. We could keep on going with the current view and fight the flaws of it at every step and corner. Or, we could let go of the “central position” of ego-consciousness, and in turn find out that many things that we have been striving for for so long suddenly appear naturally. That much of our straining was unnecessary. And even more, unlock a whole new world of possibilities that was completely out of reach in our old thought system, like the moon was out of reach to people living on a flat earth. If only we dare to leave the old pathways. What if most of the limitations that we are facing in our lives today are due to our mental constructs rather than due to physical nature?
Resistance
So far, this all sounds great. There is only one minor issue — resistance, or, better known as fear. The ego doesn’t like to give up control just like that. Control is its very existence. And it is well equipped with rational arguments to support its standpoint.
“The problem is, of course, that if men are patterns of action and not agents, and if the individual and the world act with each other, mutually, so that action does not originate in either, who is to be blamed when things go wrong? Can the police then come around asking, ‘Who started this?’” — Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East & West
What is difficult for us to see, is that our well reasoned arguments are often simply an expression of fear from the unknown. We are having a hard time to imagine a better place in this world outside the small little village we accidentally happened to be born into. Unknown parts of the world are instinctively perceived as, at the same time, inferior and dangerous. However, once we know the unknown, it often becomes a source of inspiration rather than fear. As Alan Watts continues:
“But supposing one understood in the first place that this is the way things are anyhow, the experience itself would be far less unnerving. In practice it happens that just as soon as one gets used to this feeling and is not afraid of it, it is possible to go on behaving as rationally as ever — but with a remarkable sense of lightness.” — Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East & West
At the same time, the fear of the unknown is somewhat justified. Because, in leaving ones own small little village one has to leave behind the social web that provided us security and a warm nest to grow up in. Similarly, transcending ego-consciousness by stopping to belief that the rules of the social game are the laws of nature requires to leave behind the security found in taking sides with the crowd. All rules become relative. They stop being a source of identification, leading into a sense of loneliness — the loneliness of liberation.
The Countergame
As we see, social liberation is only something for people who cannot stay in the village of social rules any longer. Because either the longing to explore the world or the suffering from conformity are too big. Who is a guide for such a type of journey? Who is a doctor for such type of pain? After a certain period of search, many individuals approach either a guru or a psychotherapist to ask for liberation from their suffering — of course without being aware of the cause of their problems lying in their ego.
How is a guru or psychotherapist supposed to react to an individual asking for liberation? Using language and rational arguments cannot really help here, as the liberation is exactly from the limitations imposed by the rules of language and rational thinking. As Alan Watts elaborates:
“He cannot say, ‘Stop worrying,’ because the ego is not in control, and just that seems to be the problem. He cannot say, ‘Accept your fears,’ without implying that the ego is an effective agent which can actively accept. He cannot say, ‘There’s nothing you can do about it,’ without leaving the impression that the ego is the helpless victim of fate. He cannot say, ‘Your trouble is that you think you’re an ego,’ because the inquirer genuinely feels that he is, or, if he doubts it, will come back with the question: ‘Well, how am I to stop thinking so?’ There is no direct answer to an irrational question, which was why one Zen master replied, none too helpfully, ‘When you know the answer you won’t ask the question!’” — Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East & West
Instead, the guru or psychotherapist at this point starts to play a variation of what Alan Watts termed the countergame. Watts developed the idea, based on the attempts by J. Haley to understand psychoanalysis better by disregarding its theoretical postulates and simply describing what happens in the communication between therapist and patient, that spiritual practices as well as psychotherapy could be commonly understood as employing a countergame, “a game countering the contradictions in the social game”.
The term of the countergame enables a comprehensive view on various spiritual practices. For example, in Vedanta, the teacher tries to convince the students that the nature of the atman, our true Self, is sat-cit-ananda — existence, consciousness, bliss — and hence untouched by any sort of problems. Or Jesus commands that “thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind”. Or in Yoga there are the many siddhis that a yogi is supposed to attain throughout his steady practice, such as, reading other people’s mind, hearing sounds from far distance, or creating an ageless body, or controlling one’s mind. Or in Zen the master tells that the truth is perfectly fine from the beginning, but then only talks about it in riddles like “the water flows blue and the mountain towers green”, and asks the student irrational questions in the form of koans. Or in psychoanalysis, the patient is told that the true master of his behaviors is actually his unconscious mind, and that as long as he is not able to understand its mechanisms and dynamics, he is just a puppet of his repressed needs and desires.
The common factor that all these practices share, is that they put the aspiring student into double-bind, which binds her based on her irrational conviction that she is in need for liberation. As long as she trust that the proposed means (upaya) will release her from her problems, she agrees to play a game which she cannot win, as there is nothing really to achieve at all in it. Of course, the student is free to leave the game whenever she wants. Only, the guru will tell her that she obviously doesn’t have enough faith or discipline in order to reach liberation. Or a psychiatrist may tell his patient that his suffering is obviously not strong enough yet in order for him to have the courage to confront the darkness of his unconscious. If the student or patient continues to play the game or gives up, in either way it is due to her/his own inability that she/he is still having problems. Until she/he realizes the absurdity of the situation in which the guru was playing a game with her/him, while she/he took it to be a serious contest:
“As the game proceeds, it becomes apparent that the patient’s contest with the analyst is one and the same as his contest with life, or with the alienated aspects of his own feelings. The game ends with the insight that the patient could not win because the very premises of the game were absurd: he was trying to make the subject one-up on the object, the organism one-up on the environment, himself one-up on himself. He had failed to see that every explicit duality is an implicit unity.” — Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East & West
Faith (shraddha) in the practice, teacher, or god himself, and self-discipline (tapas) are therefore two main requirements for an aspiring disciple promoted by all spiritual practices in one way or another, as they are the character traits that keep a student playing the game until the end. If you want to find out for yourself that the world is not flat, you need to be ready to sail towards the horizon in order to experience its sheer roundness. As we have seen, language can never describe the full truth of an experience. It is always ignoring certain aspects of reality. Hence, if you stay with the boundaries of the words of others only, you will always remain in ignorance.
Magic Powers
Besides a disciple equipped with shraddha and tapas, the guru or master needs to be a good magician that is able to seduce the disciple to sail to the end of the world until he is able to see for himself that the world is not flat. Ideally, the guru is a person who is well aware of her magic being just a trick to keep the audience engaged, rather than taking it for real.
Carl Jung, as documented in The Red Book, “sailed out” into the land of the unconscious and magic, and referred to his adventures into “mythopoetic imagination” as “my most difficult experiment”. Jung describes magic as the world of irrationality. The truth is that there is an infinitely large part of reality that is irrational and not accessible to our thoughts and language. The ego, being a construct of thought, exists in the realm of rationality and thought. Consequently, overcoming the ego lies in the realm of irrationality and magic.
In the last chapter of the Liber Secundus (second part in The Red Book), Jung receives the gift of magic — however, only under the condition of sacrificing his own ability to give and receive comfort to and from others. He has to give up the comfort of social reinsurance for a magic, of which there are no concrete ideas at all of what it is about. Maybe the clue of magic is exactly that: to give up the comfort of our ego in order to find out that the ego was just a fantasy story, that the sun is not turning around the earth. Rather than teaching us magic, which was our motivation along the way of trusting a guru, his actual task is to liberate us from magic — the magic spell of the ego.
It seems plausible that Gandalf and Saruman, the two most prominent wizards in The Lord Of The Rings, were first and foremost good “masters of ceremony” who kept Frodo, respectively the orcs, motivated during their hardship, all the while their “magic” was just a trick to keep them carrying on until the end.
The “darkness” of Saruman is actually that he is using his magic power for worshiping the ego (a.k.a., Sauron) instead of overcoming it. A spot-on irony in Tolkien’s story is that Saruman, head of the White Council and the wizards in Middle-earth, is called The White, emphasizing his pureness and perfection, while Gandalf goes with the more modest name The Grey. In other words, Saruman, the perfect guru, is actually worshiping the ego. As Alan Watts is quoting Lao-tzu:
“When everyone recognizes goodness to be good, there is already evil. Thus to be and not to be arise mutually.” — Lao-tzu, Tao Te Ching, verse 2
This is a good reminder for us to choose modest gurus, who acknowledge the grey tones of life, over perfect ones. As there are enough self-proclaimed “gurus” in this world who are secretly worshiping the ego. One great example is given in the BBC series The Century of the Self documenting the attempt of a “dark alliance” of psychoanalysts, politicians and marketing gurus to control “the masses” in the 21st century.
Setting Off Into Uncharted Territory
After the destruction of Sauron, Frodo’s days in Middle-earth were numbered and he sailed west to the undying lands of Valinor, into an unknown future. If we look at the land and stories told in tales and legends as descriptions of inner landscapes and processes of our psyche, Frodo’s departure could be interpreted as a goodbye to childhood (the Shire). Having faced the dark sides of his mother — the dragon — and the dark sides of his father — the eye of Sauron — he has matured and is now ready to enter the unknown world of adulthood. We can also think of Middle-earth as a representation of middle/normal consciousness and after facing the dark sides of unconsciousness and the ego, Frodo’s time has come to raise into a state of higher consciousness.
Finale: Improving the World and Society
What comes after liberation from the mother and father, from nature and society, from the libido and the ego? In our own lives, we don’t just “disappear to Valinor”, rather we find ourselves in the same environment and society, with the same problems and challenges as before. However, our inner experience has changed fundamentally, and with it all our perspectives on the prevailing problems and challenges. So, is it really still the same world if we perceive it fundamentally different?
As Alan Watts elaborated, there have been different approaches in India to continue ones life after liberation. However, the most natural one is that of the bodhisattva who continues his life within society, just in a playful way:
“It was, and remains, a liberation from being taken in by social institutions; it is not liberation from being alive. It is consistent with this view that, in India, liberation went hand in hand with renunciation of caste; the individual ceased to identify himself with his socially defined identity, his role. He underlined this ritually by abandoning family responsibilities when his sons were able to assume them, by discarding clothes, or, as in the case of the Buddhists, by donning the ocher robes which marked the criminal outcaste, and by retiring to the forests and mountains. Mahayana Buddhism later introduced the final and logical refinement — the bodhisattva who returns to society and adopts its conventions without ‘attachment,’ who in other words plays the social game instead of taking it seriously.” — Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East & West
Considering the four Yogas of India — four distinct but equally valid paths for liberation — we already met perfect exponents for three out of them in this article: Tolkien — a Bhakti Yogi who finds expressions for his inner world through imagination and creativity; Jung — a Raja Yogi who explores the darkness of magic and the unconscious; and Watts and Wittgenstein — two Jnana Yogis who uncover truth through logic and a clear discriminating mind. What is left is Karma Yoga, the Yoga of action.
We still life in a world today full of vast problems like climate change, war, and social inequality. To me it seems quite obvious, that at the root of these problems could be found human individuals who are taking ego-consciousness too seriously, spinning an entangled web of social double-binds (yet, elaborating on this would be material for another article). As Carl Jung said in an interview, ignorance about the root of our problems is our greatest danger:
“We need more understanding of the human nature. Because the only great danger that exists is man himself. He is the great danger. And we are pitifully unaware of it. We know nothing of man. Far too little. His psyche should be studied, because we are the origin of all coming evil.” — Carl Jung, in an Interview
Climate change cannot be solved by merely trying ever harder to control nature, as the need to control nature is itself an expression of the very root of the problem. A “solution” becomes possible, only if a substantial share of individuals realizes how their actions are similarly destructive to the environment as they are to themselves — as in the end, environment and self are one. Aspiring to improve the world is a useful enterprise, as long as we can pursue it playfully. In the spirit of the Baghavad Gita, work incessantly but never cling to the fruits of your actions.
Invocation
To all you out there, who are currently suffering under the poor outlook of humanity today, that we are well on the way of destroying our own foundations of life and that of other animals, even worse, that a big part of society is ignorant about this fact and occupied by artificial drama and conflicts — I propose now a countergame double-bind especially for you. If you took the hardship on yourself to read until here, I might have convinced you at least of the possibility that ego-consciousness is not only the root of our own personal suffering but also of our environmental problems and the problems of society, in other words, of the suffering of the earth.
So, let me tell you that, as long as you are suffering from hopelessness and the self-destructive nature of humanity, you are yourself coiled up in ego-consciousness. And as long as you are coiled up in ego-consciousness, you are actively contributing to the very root not only of your own suffering but also of our environmental problems. To turn things around, if you are able to become happy with the world as it is just right now, you will not only contribute to your own happy state of mind but also to the solution of the environmental problems and to many other problems haunting our society today.
So the only solution to all our problems is not to have any problems in the first place. All other solutions are only relative solutions at best. Having no problem is the only true solution.
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