mad, dead or porous - the ego

An ex-friend of mine once said I had a porous ego. My response, had I been quick-witted enough to think of it sooner than about two months later, would be that everyone's ego is porous, unless they are mad or dead.

Mad, because mental illness specialises in the dreadful separation created by obsessions, delusions, hallucinations that shut out and replace the world as the rest of us know it - the poet Sylvia Plath used the bell jar as a metaphor for depression.

I think my ex-friend was probably referring to certain kinds of sensitivity that inhibit or depress us; they are the result of what some might call an excessive or morbid sensitivity. I don't find such labels and categories particularly helpful. Excessive to whom?

If the ego - the sense of "I" as a separate social being - is a creation of the mind, and if a mind is the product of a unique brain formed by inherited characteristics and moulded by our social and physical environement then it is almost by definition porous, in so many ways.

(Those who believe the mind is something other than and somewhere other than the brain may not agree with much or of all this; neverttheless, the mind may be more that "just" the brain, but it certainly seems to be of the brain, as one might say.)

 Neuroscientists have got us all excited/worried by "brain plasticity;" frequent patterns of behaviour and perception will over time change how we think, at the level of brain structure, routes through the neurons, that sort of thing. Such as using computers, video games etc. Or indeed, meditating.

It's not just about electronic technologies. Take reading books; a long time ago when they became easily accessible and literacy grew more widespread, different brain structures and ways of thinking developed, compared with largely oral cultures. 

So our minds, and therefore how we think as individual social beings, what our egos are like, all this changes depending on inputs.

More basically, being hungry or eating certain foods, can give rise to different emotions/moods, and our egos will change in response. Sugar excites us, alcohol relaxes our inhibitions - they change our sense of who we are, and how we behave.

Our egos will be changed by our beliefs, what we read, what happens to us....

The ego, "I," who I think I am and how I manifest myself to others - all part of the flux and flow, nothing fixed and rigid.

One stage towards a closer identification with the universe, a stronger sense of unity, is not mistaking impermanence for permanence, even for one day in the life of the ego.

We are all more less porous in our ideas about who we are and how we relate to the world and to others. The differences lie in our sensitivity to what comes through the pores.

I think it's useful to see ourselves as porous, changing, flowing; I think it's an illusion to see our selves as needing to cast the biggest possible shadow, to think we are impervious to change, until we die.