‘I’ totally independent of its own source in higher beings
and in a larger, divine-spiritual awareness. Thus it was that
the ego itself came to be worshipped as a god in its own
right – or rather to submit itself to a deified paternal ‘super
ego’ wielding judgemental power over the ego itself, and
ruling men and all other creatures of the Earth in the way a
king ruled others. This God was seen as having created all
beings and ‘made’ the world in the way a man might make a
bow and arrow, through the active application of focussed
ego-awareness. Since the ego experiences itself as ‘owning’
its own awareness and as the independent agent of its
actions, understanding was lost of the natural way in which
all creative activity, including ego-activity, is something that
emerges within the womb of a pre-egoic awareness, one
that is not the private property of any agent, ego or God.
The deification of ego-awareness was heralded
historically by the transformation of the Hebrew god
Jahweh, hitherto both a tribal god and one of the group of
gods known as the Elohim, into a monotheistic Father God
and a pure abstraction of egohood or ‘I’-ness. Only much
later did Karl Marx understand the whole development of
ego awareness as one which ran parallel with the transition
from “primitive communism” – harmonious property-
sharing tribal communities – to a sequence of social and
economic orders all based on different forms of private
property ownership, whether in the form of slave societies,
feudalism or capitalism. Right from the beginning, this led