I Think Therefore I Am, I Think

I was thinking today about people and their egos, more specifically me and mine. This turned into a bit of trip down memory lane, so hang on to your hat (it has been a bit cold in Austin, so hats are back on.) It also requires some thinking about philosophy and religion.
For me a very formative time on all this happened in late high school. I lived in a small farming town in Idaho, which was about 40 percent Mormon, with somewhat smaller groups of Nazarenes, Methodists, Baptists, etc.
I was thinking hard about both philosophy and religion. Some of us were rebelling in this farm town by trying to be intellectuals, aided and abetted by one English teacher, Lewis Watson, who was a sort of a 1950s era existentialist slowly turning into a Buddhist. (A very interesting guy, perhaps too much so for a rural high school, he dropped that, dropped out in general, built a house out of stone, wrote a book about it, and lived very simply, largely on the proceeds of the book, whose cover you see here. More on him one of these days.)
Perhaps as a result of him and the whole 1950s-1960s zeitgeist that I was beginning to read more about under his guidance, as well as encountering on my own in national magazines and books, I was thinking about some of the issues involved in terms of the Mormonism I grew up with, the Existentialism which I had begun to read novels and books about, and Buddhism, which was becoming a hip, intriguing alternative in the 1960s.
I had had some pretty strong religious experiences, so I found myself sort of past being agnostic, but deciding what to make of those experiences was less clear. A Mormon interpretation made sense, since the single strongest experience I had had came while singing to myself a song by a famous Mormon 19th century poetess, Eliza R. Snow, called "Oh My Father."
But I was doing a lot of meditating, or praying, about specific ideas and having experiences, or feedback--if you are more faithful about it, that I found I could interpret in either Mormon or Buddhist terms. One of the big issues for me had to do with the idea of the individual ego, whether it goes on and even grows in knowledge and communion with God, eternally, as Mormons think, or whether the ideal is to lose your ego, and its demands and heartbreaks, and look for a peaceful blending in with an eternal or cosmic all. I could see the attractions of both, and could sort of interpret a lot of my experiences of religious ecstasy in terms of either.
The Existentialist part is that I found that I liked the Mormon vision better and chose it. You could call that an existentialist choice, or the exercise of faith, or both. Part of the Western tradition, that has a particularly strong emphasis in Mormonism, is the desire to make progress, so I sort of shelved the really basic question for a while. I have headed in a largely, if eclectically, Mormon path since.
But I have been coming back to the question of ego, how to keep it from getting out of control (which one sees a lot of in the Ivory Tower of academe), and how to balance a hopefully healthy sense of self, with a more selfless desire to focus on others and their needs, which is pretty basic Christian thinking, in a way. But I am also thinking, this time more in terms of the Tao te Ching, which I have been reading off and on for a couple of years, which I read as dwelling on the importance of not letting all the things of the world pull you into an ego trip. (Funny how 1960s jargon stays with us boomers.)
One part of this is that an academic career, if it goes well, can really feed the old ego. Students, in particular, can really build you up -- it was real fun to see how glad many grad students were to see me back in town. Which is also useful, up to a point, because it gives us the confidence to try to do things that push the boundaries of what we know a bit. But it can set us up to expect too much and be greedy. Like I found, a bit to my surprise, that I was somewhat hurt when a student with whom I had worked quite a lot decided to do their dissertation with someone else. That is, and should be, their choice, based on who they think can help them the most, and really, my only desire should be, and hopefully will be, to help them out in any way I can.
In working this kind of thing out, it is surprisingly helpful to think about ego again, in both abstract and personal terms. One of the consolations of philosophy, particularly the Buddhist and Taoist strains, is that it can help us back away from some potentially poisonous thinking that a hurt or hungry ego can get us into. Not to mention the Christian idea of selfless love and service. (To my admittedly biased view, this is what Christianity ought to be good for, guiding us in the right direction on things like this.)