The ego, while necessary and healthy when marshaling resources for the Self’s needs, can become actively destructive when marshaling those same resources for a career path chosen for you by a parent, say, or a need to become a famous scholar imposed by one’s teachers, or the need to advance in the political arena to increase personal power imposed by a need to compensate for feelings of weakness.
My parents, for example, wanted me to become a lawyer. I was smart, loved to argue and lawyers made good money, had respect in the community. Easy. Except. I had no interest in becoming a lawyer. Not because being a lawyer wasn’t a fine ambition, it just wasn’t interesting to me.
In need of cash and intellectual stimulation a couple of years out of college I went to seminary, just to check things out. Spirituality and radical politics drew me in closer to the orbit of church life and, eventually, found me in the ministry, doing community organizing, working with the developmentally disabled. But it wasn’t the ministry I wanted, it was the organizing, using the power of groups to achieve social justice. This conflict, between the vehicle I took (ministry) to get regular opportunities to do what I wanted, organizing, eventually grew wider and wider until it ruptured in 1991.
I had let my need to have a stable income trump my fear of the uneven income available to organizers. And I paid the price for this ego-driven decision. Note, it was not a bad decision, per se. What the ego wanted was something I also wanted, to have enough to survive. But in following only that track, without consulting the larger demands of my Self I subordinated my Self to the day-to-day demands the ego made. A recipe for eventual trouble.
