Another Choice

Before the magnitude and complexity of the task, faced with the force of the ordeal, we now realize very concretely how essential this work of unification is: the fire of life, far from being rejected or condemned, must be placed in the presence of the inmost Fire of psychic love and discernment, just as the fire of intelligence too must be offered at the service of the psychic becoming and contribute to its manifest progression. Because this vital fire is, as we know from our multiple experiences of fall and drift, capable of rushing in the most contrary directions, we have this moral tendency to repudiate it or to distrust it, but the inner being is a conqueror and aspires to serve an integral and wholesome future – and free of all separateness, discrimination, judgment or reticence.

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Our ego, that is, the distinct temporary formation of our present frontal personality, allows a partial identification of the vital force as of the mental force.

Through this process of accretion of our present personal ego, influenced by numerous factors such as genetic transmission, the immediate environment, the social milieu and the dominant culture, but also the inner age and the type of experience the soul has chosen for this particular existence, we draw from the universal physical, vital and mental natures what we can make “ours” and adapt to our needs.

And thus these elements eventually constitute our own unique personal nature – from then onwards they are considered as “I” or “me”: “here, this is my nature, this is how I am!”

This process – of the formation of our ego – is that of a necessity: we could not otherwise exist; this identity is our structure and our shell and our safeguard and our means of communication.

It occurs, takes place and continues since the childhood of the body, through opportunism rather than deliberate will or any sort of planning, till it gradually and by approximation provides us with a relational instrumentation with the world and the others.

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