Why You Can't Stop Striving: The Ego Is Multilayered
We usually start a spiritual journey following a major life failure or crisis: failing to achieve a life purpose or being exhausted from the striving. Spiritual teachers tell us to surrender and let go, but we struggle to do so. We want to be liberated from the suffering of striving, but imagined rewards at the end of striving are too tempting to give up. We now suffer from inner conflict, oscillating between striving and striving not to strive. Why does our striving persist?
The Insight That Stopped My Striving
For several years I was caught in the frustration of not being able to stop striving. I understood from books and recorded talks on spirituality that the key to true peace and happiness is non-striving and the acceptance of what is.1 But I could not stop resisting life and striving for a life purpose. I had a goal to be enlightened and share insights with the world.
During those years I told my friends and family that I would be starting a blog to share my insights, but almost two years passed without writing a single post. They asked me what happened to my plan. I was still striving and resisting what was happening, so I knew I was not enlightened. I thought that if I was not enlightened, whatever I would say would be false and not worth sharing. I did not want to write about something I had never experienced and therefore did not truly understand.
I was frustrated with the slowness of my development almost daily. One day I went to a harbor to clear my frustration. Looking at the sea calmed me. Unlike me, it did not seem to hurry and be frustrated with its own movement. I tried to console myself by saying, “Insights are happening in the course of the universe. And I have no control over how fast they come.” Although it made me feel somewhat better, I knew deep down that I would soon be drowning in frustration and self-criticism again: I had said the same thing to myself many times before.
Then, moments later, another thought came: “My desire to be enlightened and share insights with the world is also happening in the course of the universe. I (my body) did not create this desire. So I am not responsible for fulfilling it.”
I had had many insights before, but this one was entirely different. It did not merely lead to a modification of my worldview; it led to a fundamental transformation by removing its core. I started to feel less and less like the center of life and stopped seeing everything in relation to my goals and desires. My preoccupation with life purpose and meaning went away, and my striving subsided. A profound sense of peace emerged along with joy and wonder at whatever was happening. I stopped trying to force life and started to flow as life.
The Core of the Ego Is the Bodily Desirer
Before awakening, we are preoccupied with fulfilling our desires. We spend most of our waking hours devising strategies for self-fulfillment and implementing them (Figure 1). As we devise more effective strategies and gain more control over external forces, a sense of self-efficacy grows.2
However, our pursuit is accompanied by constant strain on our body and self-criticism. We strain our head to think hard, but it does not constantly come up with better strategies. We force our body to keep working, but it does not always move. So we criticize our body for failing to be an effective source of thoughts and actions. The constant and perpetual frustration can lead to the realization that our thoughts and actions do not originate from our body but are happening in the course of the universe.
However, dissolving the idea of the body as the thinker and doer will not stop our striving.3 As explained in the Origin of Meaning Part 2, the ego is the concept of the body as the source of perceived internal forces, including but not limited to thoughts and actions. In fact, the thinker and doer are outer layers of the ego. The core of the ego is the desirer because thoughts and actions serve desires (i.e., desires are always behind thoughts and actions; see Figure 1). Thus, as long as we believe that our desires originate from our body, the core of the ego remains, and we continue to feel cut off from the rest of the world. Accordingly, we remain exclusively identified with our desires and keep striving for self-fulfillment.
Figure 1
Striving for Self-Fulfillment
From Personal Desire to Universal Desire
The impression that the desires and forces of the world originate from different sources (bodies) is compelling. When your desires clash with other forces, it probably wouldn’t occur to you that those forces originate from the same source as yours. Indeed, it is one of the most baffling facts of reality that all apparently conflicting desires and forces come from the same source.
Awakening is the realization of one source or ground of all desires and forces, the underlying unity beneath the appearance of conflict and division (see Figure 3 in the Origin of Meaning Part 2). When this happens, conflicting forces cease to be enemies. You stop trying to defeat or eradicate them. You start to embrace them as your own, and their fulfillment becomes yours too.
The world is no longer a zero-sum game. When your desires become impersonal, their outcomes become impersonal too. You are at peace with whatever happens. This is not the denial of desires you experience. On the contrary, you express those desires fully. But you are not imprisoned by their outcomes: You do not cling to or resist them. This is full engagement without attachment. If anything, desires you experience would be more likely to be satisfied because you are living as the world, and not as someone in fight with it. You are no longer carrying a sense of lack and striving and can therefore bring forth a truly fulfilling world.
As it turns out, this was a misunderstanding. It is inaccurate to consider non-striving the path to peace because both non-striving and peace are consequences of awakening. I kept striving for non-striving partly because of this misunderstanding.
Self-efficacy is the same as an internal locus of control.
When the thinker and doer get dissolved but the desirer remains, it often causes nihilism (passive or helpless striving). An intense desire for self-fulfillment remains, but the outcomes are now viewed as being beyond one’s control and at the whim of the universe, thus causing a sense of helplessness.
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