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moodyblu: I was really not refering to anything you said ..or "terms" you had used directly....I was merely making a statement of related importance.
If you prefer that "ego" means "us"...or "all" I'm cool with that!

There's never harm in clarifying what's said. Most of what I might have to say about the ego can be found in the schizophrenia topic and that's usually where I can be found, but discussion of "the shadow" is very relevant to this topic. Clearly, you have some experience with that as well.

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He was beginning to emerge from the dark defile. In truth, he had already come through it more than once, and would come out of it again. Treatises devoted to the soul’s ordeal were mistaken in assigning successive phases to that adventure: on the contrary, all its phases were intermingled; everything was subject to infinite restatement and repetition. The soul turned about in a circle in its quest.

Long ago, in Basel, and in many other places, he had passed through this same long night. The same verities had been learned and relearned several times. But the experience was cumulative: the pace gradually became surer; the eye could see farther through certain shadows; the mind was at least becoming aware of certain laws.

Like a man who is climbing, or perhaps descending, a mountainside, he was rising or ascending in place; at best, at each turning the same abyss would open below him, sometimes on the right, sometimes at his left. The gain in actual ascent was measurable only as the air became more rarefied, and as new peaks appeared behind those which had seemed to bar the horizon.

But the notion of ascension or descent was wrong, for stars burn below as on high; he was neither at the bottom of the gulf nor at its center. The abyss was both beyond the celestial sphere and within the human skull. Everything seemed to be taking place within an infinite series of curves closing in on themselves.

--The Abyss, Marguerite Yourcenar

Source: Melancholy & Spirituality


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onward with the thread....stay your course....

I'm glad you decided to join us. It's a "darker" topic than many others here and perhaps won't sit easily with everyone for that reason, but everyone's certainly welcome.