The Ego and the Ascetic

must deny our self. must not be ego-centric. must mortify (literally, make dead) our flesh. Avoid worldly pleasures. Our ordinary English language use tells us much about how we understand ourselves and our bodies. Very quickly we move from (Latin for 'T') to egotistical, from self' to selfishness, from dirt to dirty. Lurking below all this talk and consequent action lies what I call dualism, which can be popularly summarized in a mantra: bad, spirit I do not claim that this extreme dualism exists uniformly in all religions, but I see it nevertheless as widespread and not totally limited to Christian religion--where it runs rampant. It is a deep problem that we all, but especially we Christians, must deal with, and hopefully we all can learn together from each in dialogue. The notion that I grew up with as a devout Catholic that we should strive to crush our egos is, I submit, not only misdirected but precisely misdirected. (Fortunately, we no longer have a plethora of week-long missions in our Catholic parishes when fire and brimstone rained down from heavens, nor do Jesuits any longer stress eradicating their egos and wills--or so I am told.) Not only should we not crush our egos; we ought deliberately to expand them. Look again at Golden Rule: your neighbor as your self(ego). We do in fact tend to love--or hate--our neighbor as we love (or hate) ourselves. We know from an abundance of experience and research that those who have an extremely low self-love also tend to be antisocial and violent. How do I most fully love myself?. By giving myself greatest that I can: gift of becoming most full, authentic human I can be. Love is a unitive force. We see the good and strive to draw it to ourselves. I want to be one with the good in appropriate ways: with ice cream cone I love, with Mozart music I love, with friend, etc. When love is of another subject, another person, and it becomes very intense, we say that s/he has become our alter ego, our other self. As Jesus noted, Greater love has no one than s/he give up her/his life for another, because now ego is more with alter ego than with primus ego. In a shipwreck I would not keep last life jacket for my but would give it to granddaughter Willy, because self, ego, has so expanded, not shrunk that Willy has become alter ego--and I have thus become more fully human. Rather than crush our egos, our religions need to lead us to expand our egos--not only to Willy, but also to those on block, in city, nation, world, Earth, Cosmos, and ultimately Source and Goal of all. Where does asceticism fit into this? In judgment, it has had a very mixed history in religions, especially Christianity. It can so very easily be sucked into abyss of extreme dualism: body bad, spirit superior. Dualism is an ontology that sees all reality as made up ultimately of two kinds of stuff, matter or body (occupies space) and spirit (does not occupy space). Extreme dualism adds element of understanding matter as fundamentally bad and only spirit as good. This extreme dualism was not present at beginning of Bible (Genesis 1), which well over half of world (Jews, Christians, and Muslims) looks upon as God's revelation. There it is said that everything that exists was created by one God--very much including all matter and, yes, human bodies. …