Iron John Chapter 003 The creation of Ego. The Journey from the enormous forest to the Castle-Quo

From the Narrative of Iron John: “There was once upon a time a King who had an enormous forest near his palace”

How Ego is created. 

The journey from the Enormous forest to The Castle Quo. (The journey from unity into duality) The first line in the Iron John story. 

Yes. Our Ego is a construct, it is the identity we have come to believe is our identity, who we are. Who we would others believe we are on a good day and who we can be on a bad day.

The first in personal freedom is to understand how our identity came about.

Because this was written for the Iron John story it also rests on the very first line in the narrative of the story.

The very first Journey for an individual into this world and the birth of Ego.

The journey into incarnation is a journey from the unity of spirit to the duality and tension of materiality. From the unity and an experience outside of Time and out of this physical world, however, we believe that to be. We find ourselves incarnate in this world and in a physical body. The physical world is a world of duality and tensions. It is this tension that we perceive with our senses as matter. Like a soap bubble that is held together by the surface tension, we experience matter as solid but in reality, it’s mostly space like the soap bubble. Our physical world is a world of opposites, poles of duality, and tensions between those two poles. Not only of matter but also of ideas.

This diagram is an attempt to represent the journey of a Soul into incarnation and the two major passages of life the Soul goes through. Already I’m in trouble as I’ve used the words Soul and spirit without explaining them, so here goes. 

Spirit cannot directly incarnate into matter, spirit needs a stepdown transformer to interact with matter, Soul is that that stepdown transformer. Soul breaks eternity into Time. Then Soul mediates between Spirit and matter to allow Ego to exist. Soul is like the mortar in a brick wall it keeps the bricks apart and together at the same time. Soul is the connecting principle between our earthly experience and Spirit. Soul sacrifices itself (to make sacred) to allow us to have an Ego and to experience life on earth. Soul is what enlivens our bodies, when Soul leaves no amount of medical science can enliven the body. Therefore Soul has a special relationship with Death.

From Birth to midlife we build our Ego identity and awareness. At midlife Soul begins to call us home. This is why it’s called a midlife crisis whose crisis? Ego’s crisis of course. Suddenly all the promises and the strivings seem unfulfilling and generally unsatisfactory. Soul prompted our Ego in the second half of life by calling us home. “the call home”

As a metaphor for our lives, this is the first line of the Iron John story. I have used the idea of the Castle of the story to describe the collective home of Ego as the Castle of the Status-quo so now shortened to Castle-quo. A stone structure in metaphor always describes literal truth and is generally square in nature, a symbol of the Masculine.

 The how and the why of that journey.

The journey of the soul into physical life is a risky one. There are many things that may not go as planned.

The why. The desire for a body that can experience physical sensation is highly sought after. There are unique lessons that only a physical body and the material plane can bring. The incarnating soul must first surrender to the birth process which is our first initiation into the physical world. and so begins the process, of incarnation, the creation of Ego, Shadow, and so on to the Castle-Quo. As we can see from the diagram life has two major directions.

1. Being in the incarnating process, the embodiment process learning to drive the vehicle we call our bodies and preparing ourselves to sustain ourselves in the community we incarnate into.
2. The time after midlife when we begin to hear “the Call home.” The call to adventure of the Hero’s journey. The call to journey back to the enormous forest to reclaim the child we had to leave behind when we set out for the castle quo and the formation of our Ego identity.

The Scuba dive metaphor. The incarnating process is a little like going into the ocean on a dive, first, there is planning of the why and where of the dive, research, and speaking to others who have dived there. Then there is the equipment. Before we dive, we leave all our clothes and other belongings onshore. Those things cannot be taken on this journey. Before we enter the water we put on face masks, which limit our vision but enable us to see underwater; wet suit, flippers, weights, air-tank all restrictive in this world but necessary in the next. Once ready to dive we can hardly move in this world, but under the water we are free, floating effortlessly, enjoying the wonders of that world.

There is, of course, dive training. Before we can fully experience the water world we need to learn how to be in that world. Once under the water in a very short time, there is only the water world. In my own experience, this happens incredibly fast. As you put on the gear and focus on what’s coming, the outer world disappears, much the same as in storytelling the outer world disappears. While you’re underwater that environment and your interaction with it is all that matters.

The How. The incarnating process is like this. In order to enter this world, we need to put on a suit that will enable us to function in this world. It’s called a body. Like the dive, we had to leave behind all the stuff that we couldn’t bring on this journey, a major part of our total experience up until now. Like the diver,  we enter a different reality. We have to learn the lore of our new environment in order to make the most of the experience. Like the diver, soon the external reality fades away and everything is interpreted by the new context, the new environment.

Strangely enough, this process of incarnating has been called the Fall or the descent. In story, we need to understand that not all of the story needs to take place in our world because we are dealing with metaphor. It is Soul who gives the narrative context, not the other way around. There seems to be a lot of judgment and accusation about the fall, the descent, and the expulsion from paradise. This is a false understanding of the metaphor which describes a natural process of incarnation and, by extension, the purpose and promise of life.

The descent. While not popular in new age circles, is pivotal to the purpose of life for two reasons.

The first is that the very formation of Ego depended on the expulsion (from paradise) of Soul material.   Why?   Because our parents wanted a nice boy or a nice girl. (I heard this idea from Robert Bly)

The concept of the Status-quo: What is the Status-Quo. It is the force by which the wildness of our Soul is domesticated into obedient responsible members of society by the Status-Quo. That domesticating voice of Aunts and Uncles, Parents, teachers, and Professors who always know what’s best (which they always insist on telling us repeatedly).  How the Status-quo controls our beliefs and therefore behaviour. The Status-Quo is the architect of Ego and the creator of Shadow.  How the intimidation of the Status-quo through our human need for love and acceptance drives our behaviour. Acceptance is such a powerful need that we are willing to amputate pa rts of ourselves it to fit in, sometimes the best part of ourselves.

The long journey to reclaim our cut-off parts is the basis for Iron John story and our own Heroic Journey.

Ego creation and the Status-quo. We cannot separate Ego creation from the dictates of the Status-quo, the society we grow up in. We willingly modify our behaviour to be acceptable, thus Soul (our essential self) is denied and Shadow is formed from the denied parts. These parts go and live below the level of Ego Consciousness, the Ego loses access to them and so those parts get projected on other people around us, which is our first clue as to what we have repressed.

When we incarnate into a family, like a dive it’s choosing a place to dive and a way of diving. Families are like that, families have history and expectations, expectations around roles within the family dynamic, gender roles, career roles, religious roles, community roles and cultural roles, national roles even planetary roles. Each of these roles has requirements and like diving gear restricts our expression, focusing it in a certain direction. In order to be a successful member of our community, we have to learn and accept the rules of that community, being nice. The trick is that to be a nice boy or girl we have to accept the roles and conform to community expectations but also not to give so much of our Soul away that we lose our individuality and the gifts from the other side that we brought for the community that we incarnated into.

The Loss of the Golden Ball in the Iron John story. Is a metaphor for what we had to cut away from ourselves to gain acceptance by the status quo. To be a nice boy or girl. The school system, which is an extension of the Castle quo (collective Ego), has requirements and tells us how to be in this world. Likewise, the army, the university, our peers, our jobs our relationships, even our expectations of what we may aspire to has requirements. 

 

By the time we are twenty-five, we have about one-tenth of who we were originally available to us and about one-tenth of the energy.   Now we get married to another one tenth-er.   Do we wonder why married life is a little lonely, a little disappointing, especially if we expected marriage and or our partner to provide the missing nine-tenths? 

“The loss of the Golden Ball” in the Iron John story is a code word for the loss of Soul, as a metaphor. We all experience this loss of Soul as Ego is created. The Golden Ball represents the unity we incarnated with and what we had to self-mutilate in order to gain acceptance to the Castle Quo.  Indeed what Bell Hooks is saying is that Soul is actually assaulted by the status quo. Men are always checking each other out to make sure there is no backsliding. Any hit of something softer, something otherworldly is meet with derision and shaming. Men can be seen having this continual pissing competition as to who has the biggest and best, add alcohol, and drugs to this mix and this leads to abuses of all sorts. Even perpetrated on any differences in other men, never mind women and children.

The retrieval of these nine-tenths is the task of the second phase of life.

The Ego: The second reason is that a major portion of the formation of the Ego was for the express purpose of keeping us alive in an Egocentric world and avoiding pain.   Much of what we call our identity is not true identity at all, but rather a capitulation to the huge forces and energies that shape our lives and demand our complete obedience. Our reaction to the world created our persona the face we present to the world, the face which keeps us safe, and most of all, acceptable. The mask we hide behind. Through this whole journey, our ever-faithful Ego attempted to keep us safe and most of all alive.

The job of the Ego. is to keep us alive and prevent us from being overwhelmed by forces and energies that would be detrimental to our continued existance. Denial, repression and Disassociation are defense mechanisms of the psyche to be used to protect the Ego. The Ego’s job is the one of a warrior patrolling the boundaries of the psyche only allowing in what the Ego can handle at any given time. This could also be seen as denial, but for me, it’s not quite the same thing.

So where does all this cut-off and rejected content go?

It goes into what is called the unconscious by psychologists. For storytellers, it goes into the “enormous forest”, the home of Soul, or simply the other world. Another way to say this is that the content goes into Shadow which is a mythological name for all that we are unconscious of from the Ego point of view. (See towards and understanding of Shadow)

Living as a fully paid-up member of the Castle-Quo. While we moan about our lot within the constrictions of the Castle Quo, in a way we sold our Soul to the devil just to get here, we might not be aware that we have done that and the cost of that.

How can we now expect the Ego to accept back into its world that which it was forced to eject, just to keep us alive? That which the Ego regards as death?  Our Ego urges us to run away from Soul in terror or to fight with all the anger and rage we can summon. The Ego is more than brain function and physiology.   It too has its foundation in Soul and needs respect and honouring rather than destruction.

A Bridge too far, answering “The call home” Like the diver who swims too far, we can get lost in exploring the delights of this physical world, forget the purpose of the dive and what we came here to do. We begin to believe that the underwater world is our true home and its reality the only reality.

Two things can happen now. The first is that we begin to run out of air to stay in the water world and or the other equipment begins to fail, and we have to leave the water world.

The second is that something in us remembers this water world is not our true home and we begin to look about for signs to point out the way back.

One of the ways we can travel back is through stories. “The way back is thoroughly known and those who went before us left us signposts to follow” Joseph Campbell.

Iron John is one such story.

The Frog Prince.

Lord of the Flies. (has been a Matric set work)   https://www.gradesaver.com/lord-of-the-flies/study-guide/themes

Allan Watts expresses some similar ideas here.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G79EHVjLgwU

For a deeper understanding of the formation of Ego please follow this link to the:

                                                                                       Half Giantess Story: Leaving the parent’s house.

                                                                                       Half Giantess Story: The Lake of tears.

                                                                                       Half Giantess Story: Dressing for dinner.

                                                                                       “The Sibling Society” Robert Bly ISBM 0-241-13721-7  Robert Bly. 

 

The narrative  Chapter 04 the Narrative of the first part of Iron John.

Continued in Chapter 06 Towards an understanding of Shadow.

Back to index of chapters of Iron John: