Silver Crosshair

I learned when I took psychology classes in college that the reason a person forms a ’superego’ is because each child is judged and assessed by their parents, so that they won’t touch the hot stove or they won’t run out into the street. And then the child forms their own inner-parent telling them not to do those things, probably more to protect themselves from the wrath or the punishment of the parent more than being run over by a car, because that’s not usually what happens.

It’s not so much the parent saying to you, “Don’t put your hand on flame or on a hot stove because you’re going to get burned, or don’t run out into the street because you might get hit by a car.” That’s not creating an overbearing ’superego’. What creates an overbearing ’superego’ is that the parent is including in that all of their prejudices and projections. In other words, they’re saying, “Don’t put your hand in dirt, it’s poisonous. Don’t put that in your mouth, it’s poisonous.”

So that what happens is, the parent ends up communicating not just reasonable discernment, but they end up communicating much more than that. And that’s why it should be called ’superego’, because they end up communicating their prejudices, their fears, their emotionality. Which, again, as we’ve observed in all of these series, as we’ve listened and experimented, we realize that we have a circumstance that occurs in front of us, and then we turn around and load every similar happening that’s ever happened to us into that single incident that just happened.

The frustration of fifty years comes to bear on this poor, little, simple circumstance. And that’s the pattern that’s common with the personality; I suppose what we’re saying is that Deity Yoga Practice is a great way, an efficient way, and perhaps even a complete way of changing that.

Yogi Sean is the student of Swami Ramananda and the author of Dancing in the Fire of Transformation, The Everyday Sanyasin, and Experiments in Awareness, a workbook for yogis.