Before going into this in more depth it is essential to define our terms, definitions that can be rather messy to say the least. Buddhism and other spiritual traditions tend to view the ego as a troublesome influence, something to be erased, while western psychology sees ego as an important and necessary component of the healthy person, so we need to bridge these polarized notions to make any sense of  this dichotomy. Sometimes introducing a different label can be of help so here we will speak of the Gurdjieffian and Michael Teachings term’ “false personality” and relate it to ego before trying to tackle the much bigger concept of essence.

Let us begin with the term ego. Ego refers to that aspect of you that runs your physical body. Everyone alive has an ego, a sense of self, an identity that has a name and a story, is capable of using good judgment in flight-flight situations, and can help you to navigate well within the rules of society, culture, and the environment. It is this ego that western psychology speaks of as a healthy and important component of life. Thus someone who is well adjusted, independent, and highly capable has ego strength and someone with a weak ego is considered to be dysfunctional and maladjusted. No problem so far. However colloquially people often refer to someone who has a big ego as being high maintenance, perhaps difficult, and someone who is perhaps controlling or very dominant like say Donald Trump. Thus we need a different word or term here to differentiate between these two types of ego and here is where false personality becomes a useful concept.

How the Ego Develops

Here let us revisit developmental psychology 101, that introductory course you may have taken in school.  All children need to develop their self-identity (ego strength) in their earliest years to become high functioning adults. A strong sense of self begins with infancy when children sense they have the power to get their needs met through crying, smiling, and making faces and sounds. By contrast when infants feel ineffective they feel helpless to get what they want and so they try to adapt to their mothers needs and they learn that they must become something other than their true self in order to survive.

More often the ego begins to go haywire beginning around the age of two when children are unclear about their boundaries, learning to understand what they can and cannot do. When adults set healthy boundaries children settle into stable learning and gradually develop a healthy ego. However if there is no good boundary setting the child can become a difficult behavioral problem that accelerates dramatically around the age of reason, the third internal monad at approximately seven years of age. Why? Because this is the time the intellectual center kicks in to high gear and the developing ego sees the opportunity to gather even more power by hijacking the thinking process. The truth is that even if a child navigates the two’s well, they can still get hung up around age seven because of cultural and family imprinting that teaches the child to be addicted to the thinking process. At this stage, children begin to give over their full allegiance to their thinking and now they believe that they are their thoughts and this leads to the disastrous growth of the false personality.

The ego then in actuality has positive and negative poles. The positive pole of the ego we could call + true personality: coping or navigating tools that include the positive poles of the overleaves (personality traits). This is just what they are, tools, no more and no less. To be healthy one should not identify with their tools, simply use them. A carpenter does not say, “I am a saw” rather they say “I have a saw.” Therefore the healthy stance for a person  is “I have thoughts” not “I am my thinking.”

The negative pole of the ego would be called the false personality. The false personality is the ego identifying with the tools and thinking that that is what it is. Gurdjieff identified this false personality as a product of consensus (cultural) trance, a “fragmenting of the will” into inconsistent sub-personalities each with its own agenda. Thus the false personality outvotes the true personality because it has culture and imprinting to back it up. This leads to all kinds of mischief that we will now discuss.

Many people are so identified with their thinking that they become truly insane because they have totally lost track of whom and what they really are. In this world, many more people are insane than anyone would care to admit. Most of the human population is so steeped in false personality that they could be classified as insane and that is why the world appears the way it does at this time, insane. When the false personality has taken over so completely the person feels separate, locked into their story line, caught in the past or future, and as a result they are quite fearful, anxious, depressed, or in a state of constant suffering even though they often don’t know it or much less admit it.

On the other hand many other people are only partially insane in that they go in and out of false personality and so are clear some of the time and enslaved by the thinking process part of the time. This endless non-stop thinking process that the Buddhists call the monkey mind is in fact a jailer that can trap people either all the time or some of the time. Most people would be deeply offended if you called them a slave but anyone who has given some observation to the mind will attest that this is exactly what the mind can do, enslave.

The brain was never meant to be a jailer, nor was it meant to be the dominant controller of life. It is a tool for looking under the hood of the car to see what might need attention, a tool to plan a budget, a tool to learn how chemistry works and so on. The brain is to be the server, the slave of the essence so to speak.

When a person identifies so closely with their thoughts, they are caught in time because much of what thinking does is recall the past and plan for the future. Thus it is almost impossible to be present when identified with thoughts. Thoughts have a tendency to recall the negative events and project them in the future so anxiety is the result. When they recall good things they tend to want to repeat these things causing anticipation, expectations, and worry over failing to achieve these same pleasures again. Thoughts tend to compare experiences and list them into polarities or hierarchies so judgment enters the picture. This produces the “I am better or worse than…” or “what I am experiencing is better or worse than….” syndromes that plague life.

The false personality is behind all the dragons or fear patterns, self  destruction, greed, self deprecation, arrogance, martyrdom, impatience, and stubbornness described in great detail in  “Transforming Your Dragons.”  It is also responsible for the negative poles of all the overleaves. Eckhart Etolle refers to these as the “Pain body” that so many people identify with, producing such painful results.

It is not possible to stop the thinking process just as while you are alive you cannot stop the blood flow through your Heart. However we can distinguish here between what kind of thoughts you attend to and what kind you ignore. Most people who identify with their thoughts feel that they are their thoughts and so they have no distance from them. Therefore rotten thoughts are given equal value to wonderful thoughts. Since thoughts are a major component in creating reality this causes no end of problems. This is why cancer is such a problem. The body is faithfully trying to reproduce what the completely paradoxical thoughts are creating.


Essence

Now let us discuss Essence, another but more neutral word for soul used by most spiritual traditions. Essence is the substation or the interface between the ego  (true personality) and the Tao or “All That is.” Essence is personalized so everyone has one but of course the Tao is unified so it is One. The Tao contains all essences within it so in the biggest of pictures even essence is a necessary fiction in order to play out this experience of being human. In order to be individualized consciousnesses expressing the Tao in the physical plane we need bodies and we need egos to run those bodies so the notion of killing off the ego is absolutely hopeless. What can be erased or transcended is the false personality. From the point of view of the Tao, the false personality doesn’t really exist. This is an extraordinarily difficult concept for humans to get, perhaps impossible for the thinking brain to ever grasp.

The thinking process, a tool of the body, is absolutely incapable of grasping or ever understanding The Tao or God. That is why it frequently comes to the conclusion that there is no God and that all Spirituality is simply illusion. This is very similar to being so immersed in a delusion that you regard your reflection in the mirror as real and everything else an illusion.

To play the human game essence needs a body with a higher level brain. It needs a self-conscious thought process for purposes of higher awareness. Essence’ ultimate goal is to spiritualize the body consciousness to such a degree that it remembers it is constantly one with the Tao but is still in a body. Only a very few human beings have succeeded in accomplishing this feat thus far but it is the ultimate goal of all human beings and everyone keeps incarnating with this as their goal. To achieve this a human being must gain control over their thought process. The first order of business is to demote the thinking mind to its rightful position as a tool. Then a human must go about quieting the chatter by disidentifying with it and observing it from a distance. A new allegiance must be established with the heart, the primary doorway to the Tao. When not engaged in necessary thought to get something done the locus of attention can be on the breath and how the lungs hug the heart with the breathing process. This is terrifying to the false personality because it has nothing to do, no food, no role to play. It will fight aggressively to distract and capture the attention again but in the end it is no match for essence attention and will gradually relinquish control.

The attention on the heart is powerful because it has access to knowledge and wisdom that is nonverbal, something that the brain cannot fathom. With practice it becomes a juggernaut that revolutionizes the experience of living. The pisser is that this makes no sense to the intellect and therefore is hard to trust if you are used to listening to the arguments of the thinking process.  The intellect is incapable of producing joy and after getting a few years of living in a body under your belt, this should have become obvious. Unfortunately it is not obvious to most folks. Your main point of access to joy is through the heart and the heart is always present while thoughts are seldom if ever present. This is a no brainer, pun intended. Awareness of heart equals true personality equals joy equals presence equals essence equals connection with the Tao equals heaven on earth. Identification with thinking only equals false personality equals pain (dragon activity) equals not present equals disconnection from Tao equals hell on earth. Simple enough don’t you think? Simple on paper but in life distinguishing between the two is one of the greatest challenges a human being will ever encounter. Just when you think you are making progress you discover that you have become distracted and are no closer than you ever were to walking the path with heart only. This difficulty calls for five qualities that you must cultivate if you ever want to succeed 1. Faith or belief that this  path is ultimately the only one worth doing 2. Patience (with self)  3. Persistence 4. Compassion (with self), and 5. A driving ruthless will to succeed. These five must be harmonized or balanced so that no one overrides the others. Notice that these five  embody the three building blocks of the universe, truth, love, and energy.

The best way to begin is with this understanding, “I am truly glad I have the opportunity to make the choice to walk the path with heart, the path of essence, yet I truly don’t know how I am going to accomplish this.”  Next step is, “but it is so worth doing I will find a way. There is no way I am going to accomplish this alone, so all you great teachers, helpers, and guides I am calling on you now to help me walk the path with heart, the path without false personality. That path starts here and now. Make it so.” Be prepared to start again and again and again and again. That persistence is what makes the difference.