Four Religious Placations of Ego-Desire
Ego (Greek for "I") refers in its broadest sense to all the predicates of I used by a given person. My ego includes all of the attributes of my body that I'm aware of. I might say I'm alive, tall, tired, human or hungry. Ego also includes my intentions, tastes, desires, and inclinations. I like oysters, for instance, or love my dog or need a nap. Ego includes all my past preserved in memory. I am, for instance, an actor, a retired professor, and an American who once ate a pizza in Rome and made comic videos in Kentucky. My ego includes all that I have consciously been, felt, thought, or intended--my entire conscious footprint in the phenomenological world--but excludes what I've done without conscious intent. If the wrong word slips out, I absolve ego by saying, "I didn't mean to say that."
Ego seems to die with the body. When brain functions shut down under anesthesia or in deep sleep, ego goes dark, and brain damage can destroy memory and alter personality. The sense that ego depends on a living brain frustrates our most basic drive, self-preservation. In extreme cases, people welcome death. I recall my mother-in-law blind and paralyzed at ninety-three. Depression, loss of face, grief, and suffering can overwhelm the will to live, but the normal state is to want everlasting life for our memories and identities, if not in our crumbling flesh.
In Why Buddhism Is True, evolutionary psychologist Robert Wright explains that this is to be expected in a species "designed" by natural selection to pass its genes on to successive generations. Our brains are hardwired to pursue things such as food, sex, self-esteem, and power, not because they make us happy or give us truth, but because these drives optimized reproduction in our ancestors. We are designed to feel frustrated, hungry, and afraid and to placate these discontents with sex, dinner, and self-defense because that promoted our ancestors' genes. They obviously couldn't reproduce if they were dead, and so we are born with a drive to live. This drive to defend and preserve the ego rules in the healthy young and weakens only gradually after reproduction becomes moot. As a rule, even the old and sick welcome one more day of life.
So beginning in late childhood, we live in the knowledge that ego--the loss of which is to lose everything we know and love--is threatened by death, an existential impasse like a dark cloud over mortal life. And, even if we ignore this and bury ourselves in evolution-driven passions such as family, wealth, prestige, and entertainment, we are constantly frustrated because the world is not our servant, but our master, whipping us from one imperfect satisfaction on to another.
We don't need an evolutionary psychologist to tell us that egocentrism breeds conflict, jealousy, and unhappiness. The Roman Stoic Marcus Aurelius wrote, "The pursuit of pleasure as a good and the avoidance of pain as an evil constitutes sin" (9:4), and the Srimad Bhagavatam taught that "when a man is attracted to the things of this world, and seeking pleasure, pursues them, he suffers delusion and engages in all kinds of evil" (p. 96). An essential purpose of religion is to placate ego-discontent--both the (1) insatiability of desire and (2) the inevitability of death. It does this in four ways.
1a. First, and most obviously, religion promises to answer prayer, thus satisfying desire and reducing ego's sense of powerlessness. In a television news story about the sinking water table in Arizona, one interviewee spoke of farmers "praying to God every morning that water comes out when they turn the faucet." These are prayers or supplication. Such prayers operate like Native American rain dances or spells in a grimoire, differing chiefly in the name of the power addressed. They become problematic if they ask for zero-sum gifts--gratifications in competition with the interests of others, such as winning a game or getting a job. Prayers of supplication that address vital needs such as health, food, and shelter are less problematic, but even they fall into question from the perspective of Robert Wright, Marcus Aurelius, and Hindu sages, who attribute real happiness to the suppression of ego-hunger, not to feeding it. Marcus says, for instance, that it's better to pray for the "gift of freedom from all worldly fear, desire, or regret, rather than for the presence or absence of this or that" (9:40). We move in this direction of this freedom by closing a prayer of supplication with "not my will, but thine be done."
1b. This leads toward a second way religion placates ego, by helping it off the treadmill of endless desire and into the sufficiency of the present moment. Jesus' commandment to "love your neighbor as yourself," (Matthew 22:39) may be taken as a hyperbolic in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount, like the camel passing through the eye of a needle. On the other hand, the Great Commandment directs us to climb off the treadmill of ego-desire. If the farmer in Arizona, for instance, could love herself no more than people in Phoenix whose faucets run reliably, she might feel less anguish over her own plumbing. This is a very high bar, impossible for most of us, disastrous for a market economy, and associated with a monastic prayer and meditation, but it would ease her anxiety. If she identified fully with all the people who have never owned a farm, the loss of her farm would not trouble her. She would be content in any event.
This more difficult placation offers contentment by living in solidarity with the rest of humankind, even the rest of nature. We achieve contentment by not wanting---not by praying for personal wants. The point is that, even if a prayer is granted, we only accomplish satisfaction of one desire with another snapping at its heels. This placation identifies the insatiable ego as the root of suffering and teaches ways to transcend it. Marcus writes, "The soul of man harms itself, first and foremost when it becomes (as far as it can) a separate growth: a sort of tumor on the universe" (2:16). Hindu and Buddhist sages also teach indifference to personal benefits: the enlightened look "with an equal eye upon happiness and misery, heat and cold, success and failure" (Srimad Bhagavatam, p. 40-41). So the second way to placate ego--to address the treadmill of desire--is to step off it. The patient complains, "It hurts when I do this." The doctor prescribes, "Stop doing that."
2a. The third placation addresses a more absolute problem than the cycle of gratification and frustration, the prospect of blinking out of existence. So the third placation answers, "No problem. Ego can exist forever." Historically, this was a new development. For ancient Greeks and Hebrews, the only survival of anything resembling an ego was in a dark underworld, Hades or Sheol, where even illustrious dead such as Achilles and Samuel were shades of their living selves. By Jesus' time, meaningful personal immortality had become an open question, denied by the Sadducees and affirmed by the Pharisees. Eternal life is promised to good Christians in the New Testament--originally at the Second Coming when they would be given perfect bodies on a perfect earth. Rabbinic Judaism promises the righteous a similar resurrection at appearance of the Messiah (a first coming in that case), and Islam promises heavenly rewards to to the dead who answer rightly the Angel of Death. In all three traditions, there may be a period of sleep before resurrection, and in all three condition desirable immortality on right behavior or belief.
Postmortem states of personal reward are even found in Pure Land Buddhism and in the Hindu concept of "the world of the fathers," where "the spirits of the meritorious dead" enjoy the fruits of their good deeds in a temporary respite from death and rebirth (Upanishads, p. 14). In all of these traditions, the unworthy dead are either denied resurrection (Judaism) or punished with horrors ranging from hellfire to rebirth. Given all their bad habits and earthly attachments, there's an open question as to how much of our egos could survive to enjoy bliss if purged of un-heavenly traits. Certainly, many familiar things would be left behind. According to a 2015 Pew Research Institute poll, 72 percent of Americans believe in heaven as place of reward after death, so the third placation pervades the historically Christian nation, as it does Muslim nations where it is one of the six articles of faith.
2b. In general, Eastern religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Taoism--in the broad tradition of the Sanskrit Vedas (as opposed to the Pentateuch and Plato)--regard the ego as having no real separate existence. The "soul" that remembers and attaches itself to things in the world is a problem, and the solution is not to encourage it--not to feed the bear by granting its wishes--but to transcend it through a kind of transformation. In much of Buddhism, no "self" of any kind really exists, and most of Hinduism sees the ego as a shell hiding a real, unchanging Self in union with God. Fear of death, the desire to live forever as the person you are now--a bundle of memories, tastes, and family ties--is futile because it denies the blissful universal unity that is the sole good. Ego tries to find centers or eternal truths to moor itself to in an changing world, but the Center (under whatever name) is everywhere and nowhere, beyond ego. This radical message is not absent from the teachings of Christian mystics. Meister Eckhart's central message is extinguishing of ego, striving "to shed our own form and the forms of all creatures, knowing no father but God alone" (p. 58). To follow Jesus, a man must "deny himself" (Matthew 16:24). Christian are called to die to "the flesh" in order to be reborn. Ego cries, "I don't want to die!" and the fourth placation replies with tough love: "You're a temp. Get over it."
I propose, not four kinds of religion, but two ways that religion placates two hungers of the I-sense, often commingled in practiced religions. I have looked separately at the treadmill of desire and the certainty of death. Overlaying these two discontents, creating four placations, are two religious answers. The first is, "Here, baby, I'll take care of that," and the other, "Grow up, child. You'll feel better." Much of the ethical content of religions aims at social control, but this is entangled with placating the terrors of ego, which may to be organized religion's root appeal.
Works Cited
Bhagavad Gita: The Song of God. Translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood. Vedanta Press, 1987.
Meister Eckhart. Selected Writings. Translated by Oliver Davies. Penguin, 1994.
Marcus Aurelius. Meditations. Translated by Martin Hammond. Penguin Books, 2006.
Shrimad Bhagavatam: The Wisdom of God. Translated by Swami Prabhavananda. Sri Ramakrishna Math, 2018.
Upanishads: Breath of the Eternal. Translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Frederick Manchester. Signet Classics, 2002.
Wright, Robert. Why Buddhism is True. Simon and Schuster, 2017.
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