Where does the Resistance come from? Seth Godin says that it arises from the “lizard brain”, that is, the primitive reptilian trunk that only knows how to fight or flee and thus resists all attempts by the organism, you and me, to ascend to higher realms. There is something to this, I think, but not, in my opinion, as Seth sees it.

The source of Resistance, in my opinion, is the clash between the ego and the Self.

A definition of the ego.

What is the ego? The ego, as I would define it, is that center of identity that directs our lives in the here and now, the material dimension. When we say “I want”, “I need”, “I am”, the “I” we are talking about is the ego.

(Significantly, when we say “I love”, we are not talking about the ego).

The ego runs the show in the real world. He’s the Boss He has a huge hand in staying the boss.

Now: what is the Self?

A ‘me’ beyond the ego

The Self is a deeper ‘I’, a larger ‘I’. The Being, according to Jung, contains infinitely more than the ego. The unconscious (personal and collective) resides here. Dreams come from the Being, just like instinct and intuition. Visions, myths, archetypes sprout from the Self. The Being adjoins the Divine Base: neshama in Hebrew, the soul.

In the Kabbalistic world view, the soul, which is the source of all wisdom and goodness, constantly seeks to communicate with us, with our consciousness on the physical plane, our ego. The soul is trying to guide us, sustain us, restore us. But there is a force that works against the neshama. This entity, called yetzer hara by the great kabbalistic masters, is an autonomous and self-sufficient intelligence whose sole objective is to block our access to the neshama and to block the neshama from communicating with us.

My Breakfast with Rabbi Finley

I was having breakfast a few weeks ago with my friend, Rabbi Mordecai Finley of the Ohr HaTorah congregation in Los Angeles. I asked him about this very topic. This is part of what he said:

“There is a second me within you, an inner me, in the shadow. This me does not care about you. It does not love you. It has its own agenda, and it will kill you. It will kill you like cancer. It will kill you to achieve its agenda. , which is preventing you from actualizing yourself, from becoming who you really are. This shadow self is called, in the cabalistic lexicon, the yetzer hara. The yetzer hara, Steve, is what you are. I would call Resistance “.

i have been posting these writing wednesday posts for over a year. Here, in a nutshell, is my artistic (and personal) philosophy:

Our job, as souls on this mortal journey, is to shift the seat of our identity from ego to Self. That is.

art and self

Art (or, more accurately, the struggle to produce art) teaches us that. I eat? Because we left, like neophytes, stuck in our egos. We try it out of willpower, lust, ambition, greed, etc. to think of something we can show the world and be rewarded. Ah, but it’s not that easy. The process begins immediately to humiliate us. Like a stern but loving teacher, the struggle itself pushes us, changes us, leads us astray. We are searching for our true voice, our power, our authenticity as artists. We realize, through blood, sweat, and tears, that betting on ego will not get us there.

We have to go deeper. We have to surrender, give up the illusion of control, get out of our own way. We have to conquer our fears and jump off the cliff. Call it Muse, call it “flow”, call it what you want. This is the Self: the instinct, the intuition, the unconscious. When we hit it, it’s like hitting a vein of solid gold. We lose ourselves, that is, our egos, and find something bigger: ourselves.

The lover experiences the same exaltation in her perfect embrace of her beloved. She loses herself by giving unconditional love and discovers a greater Self that is simultaneously her and not her. The same goes for her mother, the warrior, even the drunk and the drug addict. For an interval, everyone erases the small me and happily plunges into the Big one.

Unfortunately, this happy union vanishes the instant we rise, just as a vision flees from the mystic emerging from his trance, or a dream vanishes from the sleeper upon awakening. We have completed our miniature version of the hero’s journey and we are back home. Now what? Please try again tomorrow and keep doing it until we get it right.

resistance and ego

The ego likes to be in charge. He does not want us to seat our identity within his rival, the Self. The ego produces the yetzer hara (Resistance) and fights with all its strength and cunning to keep us tied to it and not to the Self.

The pursuit of artistry, originality, selflessness, or excellence in any ethical form is, beyond all its other aspects, a discipline of the soul. it is a practice. A means and a method for self-transformation.

If you ask me personally, have I accomplished something like this myself…heck no? I still have both feet in the ego and they are mired in mud and mucilage. But I’m trying. Like Rabbi Finley and those adamant mystics of the 16th century, I am going back and forth to Being as often and as consciously as I can, and I try to hold out as long as I can when I re-merge with the earthly realm.

When you and I fight the Resistance (or when we try to love or resist or give or sacrifice or face an enemy), we are engaged in a competition not only on the material plane, but also on the spiritual one. It’s not just about writing our symphony or taking care of our child or leading our team against the Taliban in Konar province. The clash is epic and internal, between the ego and the Being, and what is at stake are our lives.