Ego and Making Art

My personal experience as a young person was of being someone who had very little identity or ego. I seemed to not be able to put aside my ego/identity because it wasn't formed enough yet to purposefully influence. For me it was almost as if giving up ego was so natural and irresistible, that I was not in control of purposefully suspending it or using my ego - there wasn't much difference I could sense between one action and its "opposite". It wasn't until I could sense what "I" wanted as a separate ability as I gradually developed a sense of self - that I was able to put this ego sense of self aside purposefully.

I believe that, as an artist, suspension of ego "just happens" in the process of being the conduit to the image coming through. Art was my first ability that I spent quite a bit of time doing, so this is probably partly why I had a natural talent to merge and blend and give up ego.

What made it imperative that I develop an ego was to be able to communicate in relationships with people. Previous to that ability being developed, I was very successful in guessing what people wanted me to do and doing it before I realized I was responding to someone else's desires or goals for me. Strangely enough, I would experience their desire as my own - but I was "shape-shifting" as I later decided to call it.

This ability of mine was so exaggerated that it was almost to the point of freaking people out. Because I would "read their mind" successfully without being told in an eerie psychic fashion, showing up at their doorstep unannounced when needed with the right stuff in my hands for helping them, and so forth.

Wow - it's really raining here right now. Sounds like I'm right next to a stream.

In the late seventies, Psychology Today, (an American magazine which is still published) did a survey to find out if the training and schooling that psychologists were getting was actually resulting in "good psychologists." Recent graduates from various programs and universities were interviewed by top psychologists and evaluated for their suitability for the field. Turns out that those people who were trained in art were considered to make the best psychologists by this study.

Having been to art school myself, I can see how this happened. Art makes a person more sane, partly because of a suspended "ego-less" sort of conduit sensation that people commonly experience while making art.