Ego Hacking: Diamond Approach Basic Ego Model

Ego Hacking The Ghost in the Machine

Journey into ‘ego hacking.’ Unravel the complex layers of self-identity and bridge the realms of psychology and spirituality. Prepare to challenge your perceptions and discover a new dimension of self-awareness.

How do you create a 2D or 3D model of a ghost?

The ego and personality don’t exist as your cell phone exists as a physical object. They don’t exist as chips and circuit boards or even as electricity. They are little more than ghosts, phantoms, and dreams, and yet, they are mostly us and our lives.

Many spiritual traditions and teachings refer to ego and personality as the false self. In many spiritual traditions, this false self, its life, and the world we take as real are referred to as illusion, maya, a dream. Imagine your reflection in the mirror telling you it will work on itself – what would that stream of experience be like?

Ego Hacking

We can assist our process of unfolding, transcendence, transformation, and waking up by deepening and clarifying our understanding of ego and personality. Conceptual models are useful, but how do we model a ghost and the illusion it lives in?

The sense of oneself as a separate individual, which as we have seen depends upon the development of a cohesive self-image, can be seen as composed of memories, and in fact cannot exist without its connection to memories, to personal history. But the memory of a person is not the same as a person. The memory is of something that supposedly existed at some point in the past. This is another reason traditional teachings say that the individual or ego does not exist. A memory exists as an idea, but not as a presence independent of the mind. In other words, the separate individual has no beingness, no substance and no true existence. – A. H. Almaas, The Pearl Beyond Price: Integration of Personality into Being: An Object Relations Approach, ch. 2

Diamond Approach Ego Model

In the Diamond Approach, we use this model to discuss the ego and some of its experience. All of the models used in the Diamond Approach support experiential learning and experience of true nature, presence, essence, and the infinite expression of the real.

This model addresses the basic structure of the ego, its external boundary, the realm where ego life happens, and what is at the core of the ego self. It is a simple map of avoidance.

We will explore this from the outside to the center.

The Shell

Spiritual teachings tell us that we’re all one; the universe is a unity of all of us and everything – no separation, no two. The vast majority of us live in duality, a world of me and others (people, things, ideas, etc.) Spiritual paths and teachings attempt to lead to the nondual – the oneness, the unity not as an intellectual understanding, but experientially as consciousness where our historical subjectivity gives way to the subjectivity of the universe -the I AM.

Me-and-You Entities

It’s easy to understand why we think we’re separate entities – we have bodies with boundaries. Our body doesn’t extend into everything. It ends at the surface of our skin and everyone else; all physical manifestation is outside of us, separate from us.

Zillions of impressions (touch, wind, temperature differences, etc.) and personal experience help to define us as separate individuals. As a result of this and other internal and psychological experiences, our consciousness, whose nature is nondual, takes on this reality of separateness. We become separate in our minds, psyches, and souls – a condition that seems to be a necessary stage of evolution for consciousness, but a stage nonetheless. It’s not the end of the journey.

As we have a body boundary, we also develop a psyche boundary. This boundary of self we refer to as the shell.

This shell, then, is simply the soul, structuring itself through the self-image. It is the self structured by the totality of all self-representations. It includes trying to be a certain way in order to be recognized and loved, but it also includes any image through which we define ourselves. Thus, the shell exists at several levels, depending on what dimension of identity we are aware of. Any definition of ourselves through an image, or through any concept, will at some point be seen as a shell. The moment we know ourselves through the mind, we become a shell. Even an image of the Essential Identity itself can become part of the shell. Any image, arising from any experience, even the experience of self-realization, becomes a shell if it is used by the mind to define who we are in the present. Any memory of Essence, or any spiritual experience, becomes part of the shell if it is used for identity. The shell is the self produced by the mind. It is a mental structure and not beingness in the now. – A. H. Almaas, The Point of Existence: Transformations of Narcissism in Self-Realization, ch. 29

We’re like coconuts with an outer body boundary and an inner shell protecting our inner world.

The shell is an identity based on ideas. Our false self is composed of ideas about who we are, ideas based on memory. This translates into always living in the past, superimposing the past onto present experience, and relating to what is happening now through the filter of the past.

Our skin is not only the surface interface with the external world; it is also a protective barrier between us and the outside. The ego shell and the personality function psychologically in the same fashion.

The False Pearl (Ego Self)

The false pearl is the life and reality of the personality, both inner and outer.

The false pearl, the personality, develops as you try to live according to the ego ideal. It’s the activity itself, what you learned to do, what you have developed instead of your Being; it’s what you have become. To put it very simply: the false pearl is what you have become by living or trying to live according to the ego ideal. – A. H. Almaas, Diamond Heart Book Three: Being and the Meaning of Life, ch. 5

We will discover that the life of the false pearl is driven by endless ego activity, the purpose of which is to avoid what is at the center of this diagram. Ego activity is dynamic inertia. There’s a lot of movement and no real change.

This rigidity of the ego-self, its inflexibility, can be experienced as inertia: the habit of going on and on in the same way, in the same direction, without change. Our perception, experience, and identity contain this inertia. Inertia can also be expressed as an automatic tendency to continue with and live out the status quo. The personality becomes part of the status quo; consequently, its way of perceiving, being, and operating can’t help but perpetuate the way things have been. – A. H. Almaas, Spacecruiser Inquiry: True Guidance for the Inner Journey, ch. 9

Hatred

Hatred is probably the most misunderstood emotion. The Diamond Approach’s understanding of hatred blew my mind. I am fortunate to have found a teaching that knows how to work with hatred, helping students penetrate this distortion in consciousness.

Understanding the ego’s relationship with hatred and self-hatred is a doorway to the reclamation of personal power and deep peace.

Before we try to understand what this hatred actually is, it’s important to be aware of how we are influenced by the way hatred is generally viewed in our society. Almost everyone has been taught that hatred is bad, wrong, or evil—something to be avoided because it harms others and ourselves. But as we have seen, being with ourselves as we are requires a more open and accepting attitude toward all of our experience. This is not a matter of endorsing any particular way of being, feeling, or acting. It is a matter of encouraging exploration. So, accepting our self-hatred in the truest sense doesn’t mean that we are saying that it is good or right; it just means that we can be with it and explore it without judgment, trusting that whatever we need to see and understand about it will be revealed through the wisdom of our True Nature. – A. H. Almaas, The Unfolding Now: Realizing Your True Nature through the Practice of Presence, ch. 9

Frustration

When I first heard that hatred, at its roots, is simply the result of frustration over time, I couldn’t believe it. This explanation seemed too simplistic. To see the truth of this, we need to understand the relationship of hatred to the black essence and how the ego, in trying to replicate the real, winds up frustrating itself and distorting the real action of our essential nature.

To explore and experience hatred and its underlying frustration takes a lot of openness, support, and safety. It would be a very rare individual who could penetrate these psychological layers without the help of a guide.

The sensation of frustration is very painful, usually intolerable to feel directly. What most people call frustration is really a softened and smoothed-out frustration; the frustration is usually filtered through some defense or numbing of the sensation. – The Pearl Beyond Price: Integration of Personality into Being: An Object Relations Approach, ch. 20

Ego Deficiency: The Core of Ego

This model of the ego we are discussing illustrates how the ego defends against experiencing the deficient emptiness at its core. Exploring the nature of emptiness is one of the most powerful journeys we can engage.

I was blessed to have learned of the Diamond Approach when Almaas had only a few books in publication. So, I read The Void: Inner Spaciousness and Ego Structure early on. What can I say? – Read it – change your life.

Space and emptiness are the most powerful forces of transformation we can allow into our psychological process.

The deficient emptiness is actually nothing but this inner spaciousness, experienced through the judgment of deficiency. The state of no self is actually a pure manifestation of inner spacious reality, Being in its openness, we experience it as empty space, immaculate and pure, light and clean, empty of everything structured by the mind. However, the self reacts to the sense of no self in many ways—as a loss, as a deficiency, and so on, plus the associations, memories, and feelings that go with these interpretations. All this psychic content pervades the inner spaciousness so that we lose sight of its lightness, purity, immaculateness, and freedom. Instead, we feel it as deficient emptiness, dull and flat, heavy and dark. – A. H. Almaas, The Point of Existence: Transformations of Narcissism in Self-Realization, ch. 33

Terror: Fear of Death / Annihilation

This should be no surprise when you think about it: our biology gets superimposed on and conflated with our psychology. One of the areas where this is most evident is the ego’s fear of annihilation, which is the effect space has on ego identity.

As we approach the “death/annihilation space” at the core of the ego, we will most likely experience anxiety, fear and even terror. We may think we are going to die or go crazy. This is the ignorance of what actually happens: identification with the ego-self dissolves – the mirror reverses.

Nothing Dies – Identity Shifts – Our Realty Rights Itself

Conceptual understanding of these psychodynamic and spiritual processes is a huge support, as is a teacher, in allowing the process necessary for the emergence of reality.

Terror usually has to do with survival, so it is not just a matter of unconscious material. When people have terror, they are afraid that they are going to die, or that they are going to disappear. The loss of the sense of self comes after that. The self in the beginning is an ego self, what is called the personality, with its identity. If you follow it, you realize that it can go, disappear, and there is a terror about letting go of that. That is when you shake in your boots. – A. H. Almaas, Diamond Heart Book Four: Indestructible Innocence, ch. 7

Space: The Final Frontier

What is this annihilation space?

BIG Surprise!

This space we spend our ego existence fearing and avoiding is none other than the very ground of being. It is the beckoning, brilliant void, the teeming, infinite womb of potential and possibility.

As I wrote this article, I was impressed with the knowledge and wisdom of this simple model – it could fill many books. Fortunately it has. We are blessed by the volume of work A. H. Almaas has contributed to the world’s spiritual and psychological understanding.