Why is there a Psychic Phase?

A lot of enlightenment literature says that the ego is just something you should “put down”, as though this was an easy act of will.  I think this is unduly harsh and also unduly simplistic.

Certainly the ego will be gradually transcended, dissolved and eventually laid aside.  And for some of us there may be a flash of blinding light, a conversion experience, which will precipitate this.

But telling someone who is mired in the stuff of their own life to just put their ego down is a bit like telling you to pick yourself up by your own braces.  It’s a circular argument.  It doesn’t work.  (It’s usually advocated by men; I can’t imagine why!)

What’s wrong?

When we first encounter ourselves, when we first realise that we have “stuff” or baggage, when we first start to confront unconscious material, it is an aspect of ego which does this.  We can get all New Age, start ego-bashing and proclaim that this is another manifestation of our evil minds preventing us from achieving self-realisation, but that really isn’t very helpful.  At this stage the witness, the awareness of spirit, has not really emerged, or if it has, it’s not very strong, so we have no tools with which to observe ego in action.  All we can do is sling mud at ourselves.

At this stage, trying to bash the ego into submission or destroy it is just an act of psychological self-mutilation, and one for which we are not ready, however much we might like to be.  Pema ChÖdrÖn describes this well; she says that if you have a house which is closed up and full of stale air, you don’t knock it down, you just open a few doors and windows to let in the light and air.

Quite.

I like this analogy: the source of spirit is ultimately within us, and it fills us from within when we are clear and light on the inside.  But when we start out on the journey, we are more like a clogged drain.  There is a lot of muck and clutter between us and that source which has to be cleaned out, fished out of the way, before spirit can flow into and through us.

This phase of psychological housecleaning is what the Gnostics call the psychic phase (because it relates to the psyche).  And we all have to go through this phase so we can clean up the stuff that lies between us and our awareness of spirit.

That’s why there’s a psychic phase.