Today, we have the idea of a two-story psyche, so to say. Down below lies the unconscious, while the conscious individual is above. This individual has a sort of flashlight in his hand: consciousness. Now, if I ask you what were you doing at 10:30 P.M. on such and such a day, you might not be able to recall for the moment. However, if you look in your date book and see “Party with So-and-so,” it comes back very vividly. Here is some- thing that’s not in your consciousness now but is available; Freud calls that the preconscious.

If, however, I asked you what toy you played with on the third day of your life, you would not be able to find that out. That memory is way down in the unconsciousness, in what Freud calls the subconscious, the realm of thoughts and memories that are totally unavailable to the con- scious mind. The important thing is that all of the primary imprints from the first four years of your life are down there, and by that time your little mind is all set.

Now, down in the subconscious is an “I want” machine that Freud calls the id. The id is what you’re born with. When you’re just born, the id within you doesn’t know the date. It doesn’t know whether it is the period of the ordination caves in the early Neolithic or the height of the modern age; it doesn’t know whether you’re born in Timbuktu or Washington, D.C. All it knows is that you are a human animal and that you have human needs. In other words, it is sheer organism, wanting something.

The environment says, “Don’t, don’t, don’t.” This interplay is the wish-prohibition conflict we talked about earlier. So you begin to take a lot of “I mustn’ts” down into the unconscious; the society’s “I mustn’t” coun- ters the id’s “I want.” What Freud calls the superego provides the stream of “I mustn’ts.” The superego is the internalization of the parental, societal voice, balancing out the id by saying, “Don’t do this, do that.”

According to Freud, ego is the function that relates the individual to reality. Reality in this terminology is nothing metaphysical whatsoever. It is empirical reality: what is here around you now, what you are doing, what your size is, what your age is, what people say to you and about you. Ego is a function that relates you to reality in terms of your personal judg- ment-not the judgments that you have been taught to make but the judgments that you do make.

You can judge a situation in terms of how you know you ought to judge it, and then you realize, I don’t think of it that way at all. You may consistently differ from the judgment system that your environment has given you. Only if you have made the transition to adult responsibility are you able to make your own judgments and let society’s judgments drop. Of course, if you are not really detached, they’re not going to drop; they will keep drumming back at you with feelings of guilt.

Traditional cultures in the West differ here from those in the Orient. Oriental religious instruction tells one to cancel ego. In this tradition, one is told to behave in terms of the societal ideal dictated by the superego. There is no systematic development of the ego in relationship to reality or the individual situation.

Often, in conversation with someone from the Orient,if you ask a question having to do with now, the response is a deluge of all of the clichéd answers you can imagine. It is very, very difficult to get a reality judgment in terms of the immediate situation. Since the ego is not devel- oped in the Oriental traditions, you don’t get the same kind of response that we would expect in the West, with the individual taking responsibil- ity for his own judgment, his own discernment.

When you turn to the Oriental systems and read the law books-the

Manava-Dharmaśāstra of India, for example-you can’t believe what’s

done to people who don’t follow the rules. In Sun-tzu’s book The Art of

War, he declares that for small faults there should be great penalties; then

there will be no great faults. The fact is that in Oriental religious vocabulary, ego is identified with id. So the individual system becomes “I want” versus “thou shalt.” All ego is, according to this way of thinking, “I want.” So the message is, cancel ego. We can find a similar message in traditional biblical teachings, which are full of “thou shalt, thou shalt, thou shalt.” Both Oriental and orthodox Judeo-Christian instructions demand absolute obedience. What about a situation where your judgment says that something entirely aside from the”thau shalt is required?

As we have seen, the structure of Oriental society was laid down in the hieratic city-states of the Bronze Age, in and around Mesopotamia. The fundamental idea was that the heavenly order should be the model for the order of life here on earth. The macrocosm, the great cosmos, is an or dered cosmos. The society-the mesocosm, as it were-aspires to reflect that celestial design, as does the life of the individual, the microcosm. This the Great Harmony.

is We have also seen that religious imagery serves certain functions in mythic systems: to present the sense of awe and mystery before the fact of the universe of being; to give an image of the universe itself, which is that of the mathematical order of the cosmos, the sun and moon in their cycles, the year and its cycles, the eon and its cycles; to relate the society to those cycles; and to relate the individual to society, that cosmos, and that mys- tery. These are the functions of the mythology, and, if they are successful, you get a sense of everything-yourself, your society, the universe, and the mystery beyond as one great unit.

Now, the individual in this system must fill a role within the order as dictated by the knowers of the order, the priestly group. They understand the order and decipher its pattern, while the individual participates as the priests dictate. This pattern is called, in Sanskrit, dharma. It is the order of the universe; the word dharma comes from the root dhr, which means “support.” The support of the universe is this order. As the sun should not wish to be the moon, as a mouse should not wish to be a lion, so the indi- vidual born into one caste, one category of society, should not wish to be anything else. The individual’s birth determines his role, his character, his duty, and everything else. In such a society, education consists of being

trained to one’s proper role. In other words, what Freud would call the superego, the societal ego ideal, is to be the sole ideal. And the instruction is so severe on this point that individuals are never asked, “What would you like?” They are told; they are commanded from beginning to end, even in those most intimate moments of life, moments that are for Occidental people moments of per- sonal choice, personal decision, personal discovery. These passages are dictated: one doesn’t even know whom one is to marry; others decide for one.

There isn’t that test of the growth of individual judgement in deciding what potential spouse one prefers, the society decided for you.The ego is completely erased.