Now Joshua was dressed with filthy clothes as he stood before the angel. The angel said to those who were standing before him, "Take off his filthy clothes." And to him he said, "See, I have taken your guilt away from you, and I will clothe you with festal apparel."Zechariah 3:3-4
Is this you?
Your alarm goes off on time, but you're too tired to get up right away. Half an hour later you rise, look at the clock, and feel an adrenaline rush. You gulp down a quick breakfast, then it’s out of the house and into the morning traffic. An accident on the freeway slows you to a crawl as two lanes are blocked. You feel your heart pounding, and you start to sweat. You can hear the clock ticking in your head, and imagine it showing forty-five minutes late as you enter the office. You want to scream at the slowpoke driver in front of you, even though your head tells you he’s as frustrated as you are. Screaming at him solves nothing; you know you are mad at yourself. You curse yourself for missing the alarm, for staying up too late the night before watching that late movie, for not having the discipline to get up when you knew you should. You imagine your boss’s disapproving look. What will he say? That very important meeting was supposed to start on time. Now everyone is already there, wondering where you are, and whether you’ll even show up. Maybe they’ll figure they can do their job just as well without you. Maybe they’ll finally discover you really don’t contribute anything essential. What will happen to your status in the company? Will they start looking for ways to ease you out? To bring in someone younger and more creative? What a dumb idiot you are! Loser! Blowing your job because you were too lazy to get out of bed!
If this is not your situation, do you do something similar to yourself on some other occasion? How exaggerated is this scenario, considering how you feel once your internal watchdog starts howling?
Welcome to the torments of the superego. The Big S can pop up anytime, sometimes when we least expect it, and ruin our day. The effect can be trivial, or it can be severe. It might be just a mild discomfort at the far edge of consciousness. Or it might be a depression so deep it can even lead to suicide.
There are many names for this mental self-attack. Psychologists call it the superego, but it is also known as the internal critic, the judge, or the "inner mother-in-law" (just kidding). Its attacks vary in severity. Some people don’t seem disturbed by it at all. In fact, they are only too happy to cast responsiblity for everything onto others. They may be so afraid of the internal critic that somehow they manage to block it out of existence. But the critic dies hard, and its presence often becomes evident if you succeed in challenging these people's innocent self-image, after which they become ready to shoot you dead.
Internal critics can be a nuisance, but they are poorly understood. They are often confused with conscience. But the inner critic has very little to do with conscience. Your true conscience won’t drive you against yourself for trivial infractions or even for a social faux pas. It may even seem like your superego would kill you in order to save you - that’s not how conscience behaves.
The superego is a false conscience, which can obscure and compete with our real one. To see this more clearly, let’s look at how the superego works.
While many of Freud’s theories today seem outdated, they actually throw much light on the workings of the superego. Psychoanalytic theory sees the superego as essentially a protective device. The child, afraid of the disapproving parent, internalizes the parental voice, to make sure of never committing a transgression that would incur the parent’s wrath and rejection. Of course, this defense is not foolproof. Sometimes one makes mistakes, and to the superego every mistake is potentially fatal. Therefore the superego cannot forgive mistakes. So never mind if you really were exhausted and needed a little extra sleep. In the deep recesses of the primitive mind, arriving late to work is equated with losing status, getting fired, thrown out into the street, and totally abandoned. That is a child’s worst fear. To prevent this fear from becoming reality the superego clamps down mercilessly, attempting everything it can to undo the mistake, which may include pretending it never happened, trying to undo it in fantasy, or simply screaming it out of existence.
What the superego is best at is beating you up. It will flog you without pity, to make sure you never make a mistake that might put your life at risk. And if you do make a mistake, even a small one, the superego tries to make you feel so stupid and miserable that you’ll never do it again.
It’s hardly any use trying to fight back. The superego is bigger than you are. It’s the internalized voice of every figure in your life who was more powerful than you: your parents, teachers, peers, anyone capable of criticizing you and cutting you down to size. Developing a superego is the way a child copes with the threats such people present: do it to yourself before they do it to you. Unfortunately this process happens so early and so unconsciously that usually we mistake the voice of the superego for our own: “I’m so mad at myself!” is how we often react when we fail to meet an impossible internal standard. Freud so understood this self-inflicted pain that he claimed an adult’s greatest fear is fear of the superego’s disapproval.
One reason this pain is so hard to escape is that we don’t always realize it is self-inflicted. Sometimes we beat ourselves up, and don’t know how to stop. But other times, we think it’s the other person who causes us pain by judging, insulting, or demeaning us. What others say to us can’t hurt unless we identify with it. The pain comes not from another’s judgment, but only when we side with that judgment and make it our own. Someone calls us stupid, we feel pain only if we believe it. As Eleanor Roosevelt said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” We do to ourselves as others have done to us.
This pain lies underneath all kinds of ridiculous behavior, from bar fights to road rage to attacking others when one feels "dissed." We feel judged by others. We see our own judge in them. So we try to silence our judge by silencing them. We "take it personally": what this really means is that we identify with the judgment. If we stand firmly within ourselves, know that we are clean, and that the other person's judgment has nothing to do with us, then we don't need to react. When the other's judgment scrapes against our own self-doubt, then self-defensive rage may carry us away.
Perhaps the worst examples of self-hate I have seen were people living in nursing homes and similar institutions. I once worked in a hospital for people with neurological disabilities. One wing of the hospital was for rehab: relatively short stays for people who expected to get better. In the other wing lived people with serious permanent disabilities who were there for the long term.
In the rehab wing, whenever someone got well enough to be able to go home, we would celebrate. But not everybody got better. Sometimes it became clear that someone's condition wasn't going to improve, and in fact would only get worse. Such people would also leave rehab, but they didn't go home. Instead, they went to the long-term wing.
Of course we didn't celebrate such a person's departure. It would go almost unnoticed - the person was there one day, then gone the next. The empty bed was soon filled. But unlike the other patients on the rehab floor, I could visit the transferees in their new surroundings. Almost always, what I found was a sharp deterioration not only in the patients' physical condition but in their emotional state as well. There was much less activity in the long-term wing. Some recreation was available, but the patients' functioning was much lower and they could not do nearly as much as the healthier ones in rehab. The building was older and the lights were much dimmer, not like the bright new lighting on the rehab floors, and the staff seemed less attentive. For those patients who came from rehab, the contrast was devastating. On rehab they had hope of getting better, seeing home again; in long-term there was no such hope. They were treated like human discards, and so they came to see themselves.
Eleanor was a member of my music therapy group on one of the rehab floors. She was overweight and diabetic, and had lost a leg because of poor circulation. She felt completely useless and became severely depressed. She said that if she ever lost her other leg, her life would be worth nothing. What she didn't know was that soon she would be needing regular dialysis, because her kidneys were starting to fail.
In time Eleanor became too sick to come to the group, so I would go to her room and sing for her there. One day I noticed she wasn't there. I looked for her name on the door and it was gone. Carmela, her roommate, told me she had just been transferred to the long-term wing.
I found Eleanor at the other side of the hospital, in the long-term building. She knew she had no more hope of rehabilitation. Although her mind was clear, they placed her in a dementia ward (there was really little choice; very few long-term patients were clear-minded), and she had no one to talk to. Her depression became overwhelming.
Eleanor identified with the confused and isolated patients she now lived with. She showed them a compassion often missing from the staff. One patient, Miriam, suffered severe dementia and would often yell things no one could understand. With a fond smile Eleanor would reach out her hand to Miriam, who would quietly take it into her own. Miriam could not speak her gratitude, but clearly Eleanor's touch was comforting.
Staff neglect and the drastic change in environment added to the toll of Eleanor's illness. Her mental condition badly deteriorated. She became paranoid, convinced that staff members were speaking about her with hostile intentions when they might just be casually conversing in the halls. Eleanor would yell and curse at staff members, accusing them of lying and abusing her. This lost her even more sympathy and increased her isolation. Only during music did her mood ever improve.
I was walking towards the old building one day when I heard screaming. It was Eleanor, sitting in the lobby, waiting for her dialysis. The pickup was late and she was upset. She shouted at the security guard, calling him a liar and a son of a bitch. The guard lost his patience and shouted back: "Now you've done it. You've lost your privileges and you'll have to wait upstairs in your room." He roughly took her chair and started wheeling her into the elevator when I told him I knew where she lived and offered to take her up myself. He was only too happy to get rid of her.
Sitting next to her in her room, I could practically feel the tension in her body. She kept talking about how much she hated herself. Her body was failing her, her mind also, and she didn't know how to react anymore. I just sang to her, a song I had taught her only earlier that day:
Lean on me
When you're not strong
And I'll be your friend,
I'll help you carry on....
Eleanor sang with me, remembering most of the words. It made her feel good, she said. For the first time in a very long while she smiled. I made her promise to remember how that song made her feel.
Eleanor died the next day. She developed an infection, apparently from the stress and invasiveness of the dialysis. She died from complications of diabetes, but her strong self-hatred was also undoubtedly a factor. In spite of it, she could break through to some good moments. When others rejected Miriam and made fun of her, Eleanor showed her love. I also found comfort in knowing that Eleanor could still feel a little love for herself through music. But those were isolated, tiny undulations in the atmosphere of rejection, by self and by others, in which she lived.
It is very difficult to resist our tendency to adopt and internalize the disapproving or rejecting voices we hear. We can't fight this tendency directly. There are lots of books and professional advice that seem to think we can - just tell the judge to get lost (putting it mildly). It isn't that simple. Fighting the judge only gives it reality. Even trying to disengage from it is still a form of engagement, unless we really have somewhere else to go.
The Bible actually has something to say about this problem. It is woven in symbolism, which is the Bible's way. Let's begin with the book of Job, a rich text that can be understood on many levels. One way of looking at it speaks directly to our issue.
We have been calling the severe superego an "inner judge." But judges are supposed to be fair and impartial. This judge never cuts you any slack, hears only the evidence against you, and stacks the deck. It's hardly even a judge; it's more like a prosecutor. The Bible, written many centuries before Freud, does not speak about a superego. It does speak about a prosecutor. The prosecutor's name is Satan.
"Satan" originally meant the "adversary," the "one who opposes." In the Bible he appears as a symbolic figure, one's opponent on the path. His greatest appearance takes place in the opening dialogue of the book of Job. The entire book is a dialogue, between God and Satan, Job and his friend, God and Job. Let's listen to these dialogues, and for our purposes let's imagine them all taking place within Job's soul:
Job, we are told, was "blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil" (Job 1:1). That made no difference to his prosecutor. Satan tells God it doesn't matter what good Job has done or how good he seems. Just keep probing, and you'll see how worthless Job really is. So God probes. He deprives Job of his possessions. Job doesn't change. He deprives Job of his health. Job remains faithful, but he does complain. How can such things happen to an innocent man? he wants to know.
Job's friends come to comfort him - but they side with the prosecutor! Job is suffering - therefore he can't be innocent. He must have bad karma. God doesn't punish the innocent. The discussion begins in a civil manner, but the friends become impatient with Job's stubbornness. How dare he resist the prosecutor! Job himself must be evil! "Is not your wickedness great? There is no end to your iniquities" his friends tell him (Job 22:5), ignoring everything good Job ever did in his life - just like the superego, who doesn't care even if you are a saint.
Job continues arguing with God. He never does get a clear answer about why those bad things happened to him. But one thing is plain: God repudiates the prosecutor. "My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has," God tells Job's companions who condemned him. God loves and values Job. Wherever that voice inside Job's head comes from that keeps picking at him and accusing him, it does not come from God.
Then where does it come from? We have seen, ironically, that the inner prosecutor actually is meant to protect us. Its purpose is to restrain us before we do anything that would incur the disapproval of others, and thus their rejection. The problem is, it does its job too well. Even after we have long outgrown the need to keep the approval of significant others, the inner prosecutor has become so automatic it may still not leave us alone. Its demands also become so global and so contradictory that we have no hope of ever fulfilling them. Trying to resist this accuser, screaming at it, telling it to get lost, may only seem to feed it more energy.
Once again the Bible gives us a striking insight. Without the language of psychoanalysis, and perhaps not even realizing the deeper implications of his words, Paul addresses the issue. He is in Galatia talking about the relationship between faith and action. We cannot get faith through action, or as Paul puts it, through "doing the works of the law." The law alone, specifically the laws of religion, will not bring us directly to God. Then is the law without purpose? By no means! Paul would say. Here is one of the most important lines Paul ever wrote:
Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. (Galatians 3:23-26)
Those who may be troubled by the Christian language, let us remember that for Paul Christ is the teacher of faith, and the means by which he reaches this realization. Now let us focus on the realization itself. Paraphrasing, for "law" let us read "should," specifically, external standards telling us how we should act. The "law" in this interpretation encompasses the "shoulds" that both guard and imprison us. They guard us by keeping us in line so that we behave properly and so that others won't reject us. They imprison us in that their harshness and inconsistency make it impossible for us to succeed, to break out into the freedom of accepting ourselves as we are.
As Paul says in Romans, the law is a good thing. The law wants us to act right and be good. "So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good" (Romans 7:12). But from a spiritual perspective, the law was not intended to represent our final stage of development. It is a stepping stone to something better. As long as human beings are imperfect, we will need guidelines for behavior to insure the functioning of society (so we cannot behave in ignorance of the law, as if we could take grace for granted). But through spiritual development we can reach a stage where we no longer need the law to tell us what to do, because from our own motivation and without struggle we will act right and fulfill the law's purpose. This is not something we achieve through behavior. It results from an inner transformation.
If we no longer view the superego as a "prosecutor" but as a "disciplinarian," our perspective changes. A disciplinarian can be harsh, as we may remember from actual childhood, but we need a disciplinarian while spiritually we are still children. When we reach adulthood and understand more, we can replace the Disciplinarian with something else. Once we know what that is and how to make the replacement, we are on the way to freedom.
The Disciplinarian is harsh because our motive for complying with it is fear. What if we didn't need fear to drive us into acting in ways that are good for us? What if we could find another motive?
The Bible tells us about such change, in another allegory. It is a vision from the prophet Zechariah:
Then he showed me the high priest Joshua standing before the angel of the Lord, and Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him. And the Lord said to Satan, "The Lord rebuke you, O Satan! The Lord who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you! Is not this man a brand plucked from the fire?" Now Joshua was dressed with filthy clothes as he stood before the angel. The angel said to those who were standing before him, "Take off his filthy clothes." And to him he said, "See, I have taken your guilt away from you, and I will clothe you with festal apparel." And I said, "Let them put a clean turban on his head." So they put a clean turban on his head and clothed him with the apparel; and the angel of the Lord was standing by. Then the angel of the Lord assured Joshua, saying "Thus says the Lord of hosts: If you will walk in my ways and keep my requirements, then you shall rule my house and have charge of my courts, and I will give you the right of access among those who are standing here." (Zechariah 3:1-7)
Once again we meet Satan the Prosecutor. Satan accuses Joshua, who stands for the entire people here. That is Satan's nature, to accuse. But God does not side with him. God says to Satan, step aside. My angel will take your place. My Angel will show Joshua a new way of looking at himself and learning how to act. Now under the Angel's direction, Joshua takes off his "filthy clothes" - the old image of himself he has learned to hate - and puts on "festal apparel." Now the Angel, not Satan, directs him how to act: walk in God's ways and do God's will.
Under the Disciplinarian we tried to be good out of fear. With the Angel's guidance, we follow the good out of love.
This is really all there is to it; nevertheless, actually accomplishing this change is not a simple matter. It requires a profound inner transformation. But we will be helped, if we search for it rightly.
Let's look closely at what Zechariah's vision tells us. The prosecutor accuses us mercilessly. We feel unworthy, we feel filthy. God's Angel comes and says, begone Satan, this is a "brand plucked from the fire," who has suffered enough. Your services are no longer required. So Satan leaves, and the Angel says: "Thus says the Lord of hosts: If you will walk in my ways." We don't need the nagging Disciplinarian, but to keep the Disciplinarian away we must learn to walk in God's ways. What does that mean?
The perspective we have developed about seeing God as Absolute Goodness is of tremendous help in finding the practical application of this passage. It shows us how we can replace self-hatred with self-compassion. Specifically, It tells us what to look for to replace the Disciplinarian in our minds. If our sense of goodness is well developed, we will have a standard of behavior that can replace the Disciplinarian. It will be gentile and compassionate, yet guiding and firm. The basic excercise is: identify the disciplinarian/judge/prosecutor/superego, then do a shift in consciousness to your sense of goodness, the awareness of what goodness, not the superego, requires. This is your true conscience.
The exercise is easily stated, but both parts take a lot of work. Identifying the superego is not always a simple matter. It has many disguises. One of them is conscience, which we have seen is really something very different. But the superego may be present whenever we experience a sensation of discomfort with ourselves. Sometimes the superego works in secret, and all we know is we feel anxious or depressed, or simply a restlessness within the soul. We need to allow these feelings to speak, and tell us their self-critical message if one is present. Often we hear the superego speak through the words of others. When others' words sting, usually it is because we identify with them. We take others' critical words and use them as weapons against ourselves.
It is important to be self-observant, to get to know the superego and the many voices with which it speaks, by identifying one example at a time until the complete picture comes into view. Likewise, we need to practice our awareness of goodness, so we will have something solid and reliable to replace our internal critic. Practical exercises can help. We practice the perception of goodness, until it becomes meaningful to consider how Goodness Itself would solve the problem that our superego has attempted to address. This practice acquaints us with the qualities of goodness culminating in non-self-interested love, the one form of goodness that has true saving power.
As in Zechariah's vision we can think of the Angel of God - the Angel of Goodness - replacing the superego. Any time the superego gets us down, depresses us, or attacks us in anyway, we can become aware of it and say, Disciplinarian, thank you for your help, but I don't need you anymore. Please leave. I turn instead to the Angel of Goodness. And the Angel of Goodness will respond that any correction, if needed, must come with compassion, because compassion, not self-attack, belongs to goodness. If we have gotten ourselves into trouble, it may be that in some way we have failed to express goodness, we have not lived up to our nature as God's image. If so, the correction is to see it and turn to goodness to find out how to change it. This is a very different and much kinder way than attempting to flog ourselves back into shape.
Like any spiritual practice this must become a daily exercise, and life itself will give us many opportunities to use it. The basic shift we need to make is to place ourselves in the awareness of goodness as a substantial reality. This is the purpose of the exercises. From within this awareness, replacing self-condemnation with goodness makes sense. Every time the Angel of Goodness replaces the Disciplinarian, we come closer to God and we strengthen our faith. We also get a taste of the freedom of accepting ourselves as we are. Even in the worst cases, if we think we are totally worthless, our appreciation of goodness can save us, because if we are striving for goodness, that itself is good and that itself makes us worthy. This will work only if our meditations on the meaning of goodness have given us a deep sense of what it means. A well-practiced sense of goodness gives the idea the feeling of reality and makes it more than just an empty word.
The result of this inner work is a transformation of our motivation from fear to faith. We progress from the superego, whose motto is: "Do the safe thing because it will protect you," to our true conscience, whose motto is: "Do the right thing because it is good."
When our motive for action is not fear but the love of goodness we are entering the realm of faith, because the love of Goodness Itself is the love of God.
Note: These statements are not affirmations. They are a prayer. Do not
simply repeat the words to make yourself believe them. Say them with
a desire for the awareness of their meaning.
(Remembering that God is All Goodness:)