Early in this experience (my Search for Soul, though I didn’t know what it was at the time), I felt unutterably betrayed and abandoned, only I wasn’t sure by whom. I was totally lost, without even myself as I had been and without my self, who was I? Remember my dream of being lost in the woods with all forms of identity stripped from me? It was more prophetic than I could have imagined.
I was alone and I didn’t know who I was alone with. I walked, I 
talked, I called myself by name, I even answered to that name. I functioned in the “real world,” but my ego-sense was gravely disrupted. If external things and situations could no longer tell me who I was, then who was I? What was happening to me? Why wasn’t my life working any more? Why had everything become so difficult?
Fear, perplexity, and uncertainty roiled in profusion. No matter how hard I struggled I continued to be sucked down in a frightening spiraling free-fall that seemed to have no end.
In her book, Emotional Alchemy, Tara Bennett-Goleman says of this condition that we “have no ground to stand on.” She continues, “The intensity of the experience overwhelms and breaks up our usual habits and patterns of perceiving and reacting.” For sure, nothing was “usual.” I also knew that I had no ground to stand on, that I was “up in the air;” what I didn’t know was, was I falling or was I flying?
“[L]ife,” Bennett-Goleman says, “offers this opportunity of disorienting shock, rapid transition and loss as a way to shake us loose from the weightiness of the identities we cling to.” No stretch of the 
imagination could persuade my ego-identity to see this as any kind of opportunity and it definitely didn’t want to be shaken loose from its idea of who it was.
It struggled valiantly but fruitlessly. It’s not easy for the ego to learn, much less understand, that while it’s done a great job, there comes a time when it must step aside. It’s done a lot of difficult work becoming a “someone” and it is rarely willing to quietly resign what it sees as its hard-earned position.
I disagree with those who say that to become spiritually awake and mature our ego has to be killed, though. What must occur is a transformation. A way of life must die, that’s true, but killing suggests aggression leading to erasing, removing, eradicating. No wonder the ego resists.
Transformat
ion indicates a growth in knowledge and understanding that allows something to still exist but in a changed form or relationship. While we’re living in this physical world we need a strong and mature ego.
We daren’t kill it.
Spirit, no matter how powerful, cannot function in the physical world without the consciousness of the ego as intermediary.
This is not simple quibbling over vocabulary. Never forget the power of words. The terms we apply to things and processes affect how we respond to events and how we develop through our experiences. Certain terms actually define our reality for us. Words and thoughts of violence and aggression can cause our egos to be fearful of being erased. Fear causes them to resist any change that suggests this might happen.
The ego must be transcended without destroying it. Transcendence and
ego transformation and the birth of our Authentic Self calls for a spirit of cooperation, not a contest of elimination between ego and the Soul/Higher Self. Ideally they should make a good team. The ego should be considered and even honored for its labors to become an individual, a “someone.”
I don’t believe ego is necessarily at odds with the Authentic Self, anyway, but is a more or less accurate reflection or aspect of that Self. Ego is just usually unaware of that relationship. I had another dream, the only truly recurring dream I’ve ever had, that explained that perfectly and yet, I didn’t “get” it. I’ll post it at a later date.
So, as with physical births, this process is more difficult and painful for some than for others, but by understanding what’s happening, I (ego) can learn to cooperate rather than resist. I can be both mother and midwife to my Authentic Self, to my Soul’s physical expression.
I will become who I was meant to be from the beginning.
Search for Soul 