By Father Stephen Freeman, June 9, 2015 As verbal beings, we live in a world of icons. We experience the world in an iconic fashion. A major difficulty for us is that we have lost the vocabulary of iconic reality. We have substituted the language of photography. The dissonance between reality and our photographic assumptions has led us to doubt both. Man is an iconographer and needs to re-learn what that means. +++ Franz Kafka
The problem of “ego” is so recurring in different religions, through successive periods of history and under various disguises, that we know we are dealing with some foundational and core issue, and one that must be almost unconscious. It is an issue that cannot be dealt with by simply being “moral” about this or that, or joining the right group; but by a fundamental “dying” which almost all of us are afraid to do. As
The ego is that part of the self that wants to be significant, central, and important. It is very self-protective by its very nature. It must eliminate the negative to succeed. (Jesus would call it the “actor” in Matthew 23, usually translated from the Greek as “hypocrite”.) The shadow is that part of the self that we don’t want to see, that we’re afraid of and we don’t want others to see either. If our
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