Remembering the Gods: Ego, Soul & Spirit
Everyone has heard of them, yet nobody agrees on their meaning. Ego, Soul & Spirit are connected and each of them play an important role of the spirit of the times. But it is Ego, the enemy of many spiritual traditions, that is by far the most dominant archetype of our times.
Ego, the archetype of the Hero
Ego is what restricts us and moves us simultaneously. It is what has given rise to our heroic worldview of consumption and war. To the common man with his fists full of facts. A worldview that makes sure that one makes progress in life through diligent striving, defeating many obstacles along the way, in order to climb to the top of the American Dream. Freedom through succes. Victory through conquering.
Ego is when all power is directed towards the mind as the prime intelligence, giving rise to the hero archetype. The self as separate individual that has to give meaning to its life. For me, the Greek half-God Hercules instantly comes to mind. Hercules, the great and powerful hero, having to endure many trials and daunting tasks. But the rewards for his diligent striving was the promise to live among the Gods at Mount Olympus. Does this not sound strangely familiar?
Ego constantly holds a dream image in front of us, our own individual Mount Olympus that we will be rewarded with once we act upon its desires. “Only if I succeed with this will I be granted my place among the Gods.” But through Ego’s perspective, the Gods are replaced by the heroes of our physical world: The rich, the famous, the elite. The ones that are rewarded for their heroic efforts and now sit on their thrones of riches and power. Ego makes us believe that it is only through heroic effort that we can be happy and satisfied. Thereby turning a blind eye towards the great suffering that our modern heroes have to endure. For one who stands in the light externally, will be forced to confront the darkness within.
“He has won the fight against cancer.” “The war against Covid, against drugs, against evil, against all the monsters that hold us back from becoming Heroic Goodness”. In the view of Ego, there is no room for inclusion. The mind separates, creates me the subject having to heroically strive towards happiness through facing the world and its many obstacles. Obstacles that can be defeated but also used for my own goal towards happiness and success.
So we raid the planet, start wars in name of the good, ever-expanding our desires for more, as the climb towards the top of Mount Olympus seemingly gets longer and longer. The more power we grant Ego, the more divine the elites become. And with it, the difficulty to reach the top of the mountain. Even spirituality becomes a battle, a climbing up the stairway to heaven, where “I”, the Hero of this personal story, will find my place among the Gods. The enlightened ones.
Ego forces us to become the opposite of ourselves. To adhere to cultural norms, governing rules, societal expectations. To adjust ourselves to fit the box of the collective heroic world view. To become slaves of the system, without even realizing there is one. Only the ones who dare to confront the Ego will realize that it is only a minor piece of the whole experience of being human. And an unsatisfying one too.
Soul, the individual behind the curtains
Behind the veils of Ego and its limiting view of Self and World, Soul hides itself. The all-encompassing I, the Self that remains when Ego is no longer the driving force. It is Soul that nourishes us, nurtures us, embraces us for who we are as unique individual beings, uncategorizable by any concepts whatsoever. Because what we are is the Anima Mundi itself, the Soul of the World, connected with each worldly phenomenon that appeared mechanical and dead from the perspective of Ego. The Soul is alive. And with that recognition, the world becomes alive too.
As the identification with Ego as Self starts to crack, the story of the hero cracks with it. And so begins the journey towards Soul. The journey through the unconscious, of facing yourself from within. The journey to the Soul, hiding behind every part of yourself that you unconsciously deemed unworthy of being part of you. Either through society’s demands or parental upbringing. Through traumatic events or addictions. Even through collective trauma and generational trauma.
The journey to Soul is the opposite of being the hero in the outer world, bravely slaying demonic challenges on your way towards Mount Olympus. It is playing the role of hero from the inside, a hero that is bound to fail and swallowed by the much more powerful obstacles it will face. And it is through this failure, through deep surrender to pain, traumas and archetypes, that Soul will gradually show itself. It is through healing these karmic knots that a pure essence arises. An essence that defines your unique individuality. An individuality uncontaminated by the collective Egoic perspective. Free from expectations to be different, free from trying to change what is, bonded with the Anima Mundi because it recognizes itself in it. Meaning through being, not through accomplishing.
Soul is our ground, our being in the world as our unique individual selves. Soul is part of the living whole and therefore nourished without needing much in return. Blessed and yet cursed for seeing the damage done to the world by Ego. Happy for being. Melancholic for seeing. Soul is what we have lost through seeing the human mind as the highest form of intelligence. It hides in the shadows, always whispering in our ears but we haven’t learned to listen.
Spirit, the bridge to the Imaginal
Ego automatically dismisses Spirit as nonsensical. For in a mechanical world where ratio rules, there is no place for anything sacred. Spirit finds itself in the dark, for it must compensate for humanity’s suppression. So we believe in the most complicated complot theories, in evil humans, perhaps even reptiles, that rule our universe. In God as a father image above us. In the planet being flat. It is Spirit gone wild, taking the form of any belief that still provides a subtle gateway to imagination.
“And this is all because we forgot. And we forgot that we’d forgotten. And then we forgot we’d forgotten that there was anything to forget. Totally lost was any memory of the timeless, headless beings who line the beaches as our protectors.
We no longer remembered the Gods.”
- Peter Kingsley, A book of Life -
But really, Spirit does not ask to be believed, it asks to be experienced. It comes from the source of all of our ideas and inventions: Imagination. Where there is no time but a lot of light and life. It is found in the depth of our unconsciousness, the same place that has brought us wonderful inventions such as electricity, planes, LSD, the internet and all other things that make up modernity.
Where Soul is the ground of our being, Spirit is the heaven above. Soul needs spirit, as the Earth needs the Sun. Two separate worlds, and yet One. For without the one, the other cannot be. Spirit gives life to Soul, just as the Sun gives life to the earth. The physical realm merged with the Divine.
Each Soul has a personal spirit, a Daimon as a bridge between worlds, suffusing us with ideas, imaginations, visions, while whispering in our ears what we should do next. It is the force of intuition, leading us towards Destiny, so that our Soul’s purpose is fulfilled in this life.
But Ego does not want Spirit to interrupt. It wants to be in control, deciding for itself what the personal goal of life is. The longer Soul and Spirit are neglected, the longer intuition is not followed, the louder they will scream. If not aligned with Soul, if not listening to the wise but demanding voice of Spirit, sickness or crisis follows. Crisis as a demanding force to finally be quiet, finally surrender to Soul. As a life-changing event of death and rebirth. So that your life purpose can once again align with that of Soul.
It is in the Imaginal realm where the Gods live, but it is right here on Earth, where they are too. Spirit gives life to our world, the life-giver of the Anima Mundi, so that we can manifest physically what is brought to us through imagination.
Soul needs spirit. Spirit needs Soul. Both need Ego. Ego is the glue that holds us together, the force that allows us to function, to adhere to rules, to be disciplined, the hero listening to the wise sage. But Ego has driven away Soul and Spirit, and the imbalance of this unfortunate progression is found in both the world as ourselves. A continuous restlessness, a continuous striving. But for what? Nothing seems to really satisfy, because the meaning found in being part of the Anima Mundi as a living whole cannot be experienced by Ego.
So, how to find Soul & Spirit?
Through imagination! All that you suppress in waking life manifest itself in imagination. In dreams, during meditation, visions during psychedelic trips or perhaps even spontaneously. The imagination wants to show itself, wants to be part of waking reality just as Spirit is, but we have learned to suppress it indefinitely. “It was just a dream”, we say. “Just a vision, nothing to take seriously”.
But what if they were serious? Quite serious indeed. Images show us the way towards Soul & Spirit, with Soul being the unique myth of you and Spirit being the collective myths that are alive and kicking in all of us. The story of Narcissus, the man who looked in the water and fell in love with itself. The story of heroic Hercules and his trials and tribulations. The story of Sisyphus, constantly having to push a rock towards the hill top, for it to roll back just before he got there. These are myths, surely, but we all recognize some of them in our daily lives. They ask to be taken seriously, for they are as real now as they were then.
Don’t try to take Soul or Spirit literally, for only Ego can literalize. You know when it’s there, these moment in which you feel aligned with the world and perhaps something beyond. These moments that fill you with gratitude for just experiencing this very moment, sending goose bumps all of your body. Where awe is, Soul is. Follow awe and you follow Soul towards itself.