The Operating System of the Self

A Self(ish) Spirituality Reflection for Lent on Luke 13:1-9

Image by Joshua Woroniecki from Pixabay

MISLEADING LABELS

“They brought it on themselves!” Isn’t this one of the most comforting and satisfying phrases in the English language? When something bad happens in our world, we quickly whip out these words to assure ourselves that we are safe. It’s such a relief to believe that there is a cosmic justice system to ensure that bad people get punished and good people get protected. Since we’re good people, we have nothing to worry about and since those who suffer are bad, we don’t have to waste our energy on empathy.

From the earliest writings in the Bible, suffering has been viewed as a divine consequence for sin, a curse for failing to follow God’s laws. Health, wealth, and happiness, on the other hand, are God’s reward for goodness and obedience. There is a pleasing simplicity to viewing the universe in this way. It gives us a clear checklist for gaining God’s favour and offers a legitimate way to dismiss and denigrate those who are different from us. This binary worldview teaches us how to divide our society into normal and abnormal, natural and unnatural, right and wrong, good and bad, saint and sinner. Once we have created and defined our categories, we are not just permitted but encouraged to judge, control, and reject those who fall into the ‘negative’ categories.

Except that the Bible itself constantly challenges this perspective. From the suffering of Job to Jesus’ interaction with the blind man in John 9, we learn that bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. We also learn that there is no clear line between good people and bad. Jesus’ chosen apostles were anything but paragons of virtue and many of those who conspired to execute him would today be welcomed as examples of purity in many churches. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously wrote:

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.

Acknowledging this cosmic complexity challenges all our simplistic, satisfying, but misleading labels and urges us to re-examine not just our assumptions, but our whole way of being. This challenge is at the heart of the Gospel reading for the third Sunday in Lent.

A NEW WAY OF BEING

The Lectionary reading for Lent 2C was from Luke 13:31-35. This week we go back to the beginning of the chapter with Jesus giving characteristically unexpected answers to questions based in our misleading labels. As Jesus preached to a large crowd, some of his listeners asked him about two tragic events.^¹ In one case, Pilate had killed a group of Galileans while they were offering sacrifices, and in the other, some people had died when the tower of Siloam had fallen on them. Jesus’ questioners wanted to know if their deaths were a punishment for their sins.

Jesus’ answer is enigmatic. On the one hand, he gives a clear “No” to the idea that these people were bad and cursed by God. But then he seems to fall back into a pietistic worldview. “…unless you change your hearts and lives, you will die just as they did.” At face value, Jesus seems to accept the connection between suffering and sin—he is just saying that these two groups of people were not sinners. But as always with Jesus, we need to go beyond a surface reading. Jesus uses these two questions to reiterate his central message that we all need to change our hearts and lives.² In doing this, he removes speculation about the connection between our moral state and our suffering—and he challenges every one of us to enter into a whole new way of thinking, perceiving, and being.

In Mark 1:15, Jesus’ first sermon—and the core of Jesus’ entire message—is summarised using these same words: “Now is the time! Here comes God’s kingdom! Change your hearts and lives, and trust this good news!” God’s reign is not a reward for goodness that awaits us after we die. It is a whole new way of being, rooted in the principles, priorities, purposes, and practices of God. And so, in his answer to these two questions, Jesus urged his listeners—and now us—to release simplistic and comforting categories and ‘upgrade their operating system’ so that they would no longer need classifications, judgements, control, and lines of acceptance and rejection. This is not just a new way of looking at the world for Jesus. It is an essential shift that is required if we are not to destroy ourselves by our fixation on dividing and condemning one another.

THE OPERATING SYSTEM

On the surface, it may not seem like Jesus is speaking about our sense of self, but his responses to his questioners go right to our understanding of ourselves and how it impacts our relationship with others and our world. Both psychologists and spiritual teachers speak about the ego as an important, and potentially problematic aspect of our makeup. The idea of the ego originated with Sigmund Freud, although, as Ken Wilber points out, Freud never used the words ego and id himself³. For Freud, the ego is the intermediary between the id (the centre of our primal, animalistic desires and responses) and the superego (the centre which absorbs and is shaped by socially directed morals, expectations, and norms). In contemporary usage, however, the ego has become a slippery and debatable concept. For some, the ego is evil and needs to be overcome or destroyed, with the ‘egoless life’ as the ultimate goal. For others, the ego is a necessary part of our humanness and, like our bodies, brains, and emotional selves, needs to be developed and nurtured to health. I want to suggest that there is a sense in which both views are right.

Our human journey through life is one of constant development. We need to learn to control our body and its physical functions and abilities. We educate our minds and (ideally) learn to think clearly and critically. We are (or should be) taught skills to regulate our emotions and relate to other people with mutuality and respect. The ego has a role to play in all of this. It forms our identity, guides our understanding of our place in the world, and shapes our values, perspectives, and beliefs. But the ego is not a ‘thing’. While it influences every aspect of our lives and world, it doesn’t exist as an independent entity. You can’t find, examine, or define ego as such. As Sam Harris writes:

The feeling that we call “I” is itself the product of thought. Having an ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking.⁴

To put this another way, the ego is like a computer operating system. The operating system on your computer enables you to use the machine and accomplish all sorts of tasks without ever interacting with the parts inside it and with no knowledge of code. But the operating system is not the computer. It is just the interface that allows us to operate the computer. Similarly, the ego is not our ‘self’—it is an interface that enables us to function in the world without constantly needing to process all the complexities and cosmic systems that support life, interdependence, and consciousness. Beneath the ego is what some writers call the True Self, the reality of who we are that is not separate but always connected with Life, the Universe, and Everything.