The First Enemy.

The Apostle Paul says the last enemy is death.  It made me wonder what the first enemy might be.

Maybe the first enemy is ego.  

I understand ego as the voice inside us that incorrectly concludes from our limited sense experience that we are small, alone, and vulnerable in a dangerous world.  Ego projects our personality, which shapes our thinking and acting, adopting the strategies and stories we use to justify and reinforce our identity, our understanding of ourselves.  Since this is all based on the lie of our disconnection, ego serves only to drive us towards the one thing it most fears: death.  Ego and personality thus keep us anesthetized, asleep, and unconscious, separate from the truth and all but dead.  

The consequence basing our existence on ego is a narcissistic nihilism that thinks and acts only for itself and its group.  It functions only out of a narrow, immediate self-interest and desire for self-gratification.  Ego is disordered and misdirected desire.  Every thought and act is distorted and biased according to what the ego wants to gain. 

Ego sees and treats others as competitors and enemies.  Ego takes, wastes, consumes, exploits, objectifies, kills, extracts, and destroys creation.  Its entire agenda is to provide for itself.  

Until ego, the first enemy, is overcome and released, nothing else matters.  It is the primary, if not the only, spiritual task of every human.  Until we recognize that this enemy is even there, and then address it, we remain blind, inert, defiled, deaf, and spiritually dead.

We recognize the first enemy by becoming self-aware.  This is what a tool like the Enneagram is for.  It is designed to make us see how enslaved we are to the personality we have developed as the ego’s exoskeleton.  It sort of separates us from the illusion of our separation, which the ego is feeding us.  We come to understand that our ego is not who we truly are.  

The first step of recovery programs applies here.  We have to step back from ourselves and realize that our lives in our present condition are unmanageable, that we are in a death-spiral, and that we need to change our direction and our way of thinking and seeing the world.  That is, we need repentance.

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