Queen of Nothing

Ashes, ashes, all fall down!








Growing up, my parents alternately and with not a little exasperation referred to me as "Miss Sass" and "Miss Know-It-All." I do wrestle around speaking my mind sometimes with lack of sensitivity. When I feel judgmentalism creeping into my being - and it surely does - I go read some Jung. And I read the premiere ego spinbuster - Little Dynamo. lol When I suffer from the Mary Poppins Syndrome - Dynamo always seems to come up with an essay designed to reflect back at the denied and/or hidden shadow self.

I was listening to a small group of women the other day as they met over grocery carts in the kvetch aisle. That's near the ketchup and canned peas. Every grocery has one! Anyway, they had deemed themselves victim Queens and in a 2-minute fury had managed to bash and trash everything from men to the floor tiles [particularly men.] Then as if on a strange mutual but silent cue - off they flew, in different directions, wearing what I imagined as "Goddess of Everything crowns." I was left swirling in the echoes of their raging self-appointed perfection and godliness. I noticed one was wearing a "peace" sign pendant and a t-shirt that read "God is my co-pilot." Welp - that said it all. When you view yourself as bigger than "God" - I suppose that level of ego allows for raging fury to judge others as less than while adorning oneself with symbols of "peace." Get real, ladies.

I read a blurb on autism at a web place called "Bella Online - The Voice of Women." No thanks, Bella. You don't speak for me as a woman. This raging attitude of woman = good and man = bad permeates this culture like a mutant virus cell bent on destruction of the host. We must, as a people, take the time to explore such attitudes whether we are men or women.

As I listened to those kvetch aisle ladies, I felt an urge to walk over and swat the imagined "crowns" off their heads. It was not a very lovely view of myself. And it was a potent reminder that as much work as I've done over the years to acknowledge, embrace, and re-fashion those darker aspects of myself; well, I've still got a ways to go.

Here is one of the works I read when Mary Poppins is a wee bit too prominent in my persona:

"It is probably even more difficult to de-liver oneself from good than from evil." -- C. G. Jung

from Craig Chalquist's wonderful website, Tears of Llorona: http://www.tearsofllorona.com/ego.html

excerpts:[...]

You've seen them in action. The televangelist hypnotized by his own preaching, the bestselling guru who won't answer a direct question, the chat room terror who instructs the masses, the mailing list mystic who inspires record use of the UNSUBSCRIBE command, the academic philosopher whom nobody can understand, the priest who won't stop advising long enough to listen, the humanities professor who writes everything in a foreign tongue, the therapist whose entire clientele is busy drawing mandalas, the bookstore astrologer who pontificates endlessly about your planets: they all have the same thing going. They are all inflated without knowing it.

"Inflation" was psychologist C. G. Jung's term for the ego's tendency to confuse itself with the entire psyche, the numinous--highly charged--layers in particular. And because spiritual issues have tremendous psychological power, it's easy to get a big head by identifying oneself with them, like a branch mistaking itself for the whole tree or a wire for the current pouring through it. One moment you're an ordinary person interested in psychology, inner work, activism, or spirituality; the next, you're the Voice of the Upper Realm instructing, to their amazement, annoyance, or mutual narcissism, the less evolved.

Of course, the psyche, a self-correcting system, will compensate for such an unbalance by setting itself up for a fall gauged to deflate the inflation. But the compensation will be unconscious, unexpected, unmanaged. Accidents, injuries, financial crises, unemployment, abandonment by friends, loss of relationships: there's no way to know what form the decompression will take or how severe it will be. And with a transpersonal inflation, where the ego defines itself in terms of some transcendent authority, the fall can be a long one indeed. (To bypass debates about God-within or other worlds or the collective unconscious, let's agree for the purpose of this paper to define "transpersonal" as "the greater psyche beyond the confines of the waking 'I' or ego.")

If this has happened to you, you may wish to peruse the following list of symptoms and suggestions for reducing yourself to human proportions.

Some Symptoms or Contributing Factors of Transpersonal Ego-Inflation:

Pompous, abstract, high-flown verbiage that sounds deep but says little ("We are entering a new era of tremendous growth potential and/or utilization of God-consciousness...");

Excessive use of New Age-style clichés; lack of concrete personal self-references;

Use of spiritual experiences for self-intoxication and mood-altering (usually accompanied by brief but intense compensatory periods of sadness or depression);

Seeing the unconscious or the spiritual realm as a personal possession requiring conquest, invasion, or penetration, perhaps accompanied by dreams of committing theft or being exiled;

Fantasies of one's extraordinary historical significance;

Denial of human, all-too-human states of mind like anger, frustration, ignorance, or confusion accompanied by a certainty of having worked through or evolved beyond them (may be accompanied by shadow attack nightmares);

A cold-eyed charisma combined with impenetrable impersonality and a lecturing tone;

Excessive or stilted displays of "humility" or "modesty";

Emotional isolation; an absence of grounded, real, warm, fun relationships;

Preoccupation with "deep" matters to the detriment of everyday demands (e.g., leaving bills unpaid, ignoring friends or family, neglect of health or personal appearance);

An inability to understand skepticism or questioning about one's claims to higher knowledge or unusual spiritual manifestations; an ongoing tendency to share such claims with people who are not receptive to them;

An expectation that one's spiritual gifts should be recognized even in the absence of solid achievements in the here and now;

Dreams of flying, falling from a height, deflation, wounding, being punctured;

Either a character disorder or a history of narcissistic wounding;

A history of being stuck in the family hero role;

A relationship pattern of finding partners to awaken and educate;

Somatic complaints or physical accidents that seem to symbolize compensation for a preoccupation with one's spiritual pole;

Inability to "put down" and disidentify with one's dominant function (sensation, thinking, feeling, or intuition);

Genuine but neglected or one-sidedly developed intellectual, artistic, or intuitive gifts.

The thing especially helpful about Craig's site is that he offers not only the "this is what you might experience or look like," but pointers on helping with self-adjustment and balance to offset the ballooning ego.

::::: POP ::::: off goes the Queen crown and back to sorting socks. lol