One of the great conundrums, and persistent sources of frustration, for spiritual seekers is the struggle to let go of, subdue, overcome — or whatever you prefer to call it — the ego. How often have you said, or heard others complain at spiritual gatherings and discussions, "I understand ego transcendence, I yearn for it, I work at it diligently, yet that ego keeps raising its ugly head and tripping me up — often at the very moment when I thought I was making progress. Why can't I do what the sages say: 'Just drop it?'"

I once asked a Hindu scholar, who spoke voluminously about the goal of ego detachment, why it's so difficult to accomplish the task. I hoped for a key or magic answer. No such luck. He gave the usual mantra that I heard and read about so many times: "The deceptions of the ego are so numerous and clever that ego transcendence can be a lifelong struggle, or even a quest over many lifetimes."

While we have little choice but to accept that assessment, it always gave me the troubling feeling of being a perpetual neophyte. Eventually that didn't sit well with me. Nor did it seem to make much sense when the principles of detachment or ego transcendence, once said, are so obvious, clear and seemingly within reach — sometimes you may even feel that it's staring right at you and that you can almost palpably embrace it. But, like a mirage in the desert, it vanishes and we conclude: "Easier said than done."

Then one day I decided to drop all assumptions and conclusions about the ego and take "the beginners mind" approach as a psychologist. I asked myself, "What if our beliefs have blurred our perception? Is it possible that we have overlooked something in psychological development that could provide a clue to unlocking the mystery of the ego's stranglehold on consciousness? With that in mind, I proceeded to carefully re-examine psychological development from the beginnings of self-awareness, when we first perceive ourselves as a separate entity, through all the stages of development. In the course of my sleuthing I stumbled on the exciting and startling conclusion that psychological birth is a double-edged sword — we need it to function in the manifest world, but it takes us down the road of fierce attachments to a false ego self that becomes our default setting.

I will explore the specifics of that process in a number of future columns. It's a subject that I cover in depth in Chapter Four ("Psychological Birth and the Spiritual Self") of my book "Escape Your Own Prison: Why We Need Spirituality and Psychology to Be Truly Free."

For the moment, though, I just want to emphasize that my discovery of the developmental psychology underpinnings of ego attachment reinforced my conviction that spirituality needs psychology as much as psychology needs spirituality. The parting of the two at the inception of scientific psychology, dating to the turn of the last century, has diminished and limited both domains. Each spins in its own orbit with the self-congratulatory delusion of complete knowledge.

But that may be about to change. A World Congress on Psychology and Spirituality, organized by the Association for Transpersonal Psychology (USA), the Infinity Foundation (Princeton, USA), and the Shruti Foundation (India), is convening in New Delhi, India, in January 2008. Hopefully, the gathering of leaders in spirituality and psychology forecasts that a healing and rapprochement of the two camps is now genuinely under way.

Psychology has much to offer for a broader understanding of many thorny issues in spirituality — and psychology has the tools, knowledge and methodologies to make a significant contribution to spirituality. A close examination of Eastern spiritual traditions, as well as world religions, will reveal that they have no comprehensive in-depth psychologies, despite their proclamations to the contrary. Psychology in these traditions is largely the application of psychological concepts to some adult cognitive processes and aspects of adult consciousness. Even in these domains, psychology, rather than bringing its own definitions, categories and developmental perspective, piggybacks on or is drawn into the limited conceptualizations within spiritual traditions. Not surprisingly, the psychology of spiritual and religious traditions predates scientific psychology. As a result, there is virtually no developmental psychology incorporating psychological stages from birth through adulthood to be found within these schools. They basically present two broad categories: children and adults. Childhood is implicitly dismissed as unimportant. Moreover, childhood is characterized as one monolithic glob. There is no recognition of stages of development, or even the influence of environmental factors in shaping behavior, ego or consciousness. A good example of the typical disregard for Western psychology within spirituality is "The Textbook of Yoga Psychology," which summarily dismisses psychology from Freud onward.

While, admittedly, most of today's popular psychologies are flawed by the absence of a spiritual dimension of higher consciousness beyond the ego, spiritual and religious traditions are flawed for their lack of a developmental perspective.

Further evidence of the neglect of developmental psychology is the fact, revealed by history of childhood researcher Lloyd deMause and others, that prior to the 19th century we know little about childhood — no one routinely wrote about childhood, as if there was nothing of importance in childhood to explain or contribute to an understanding of the psychological self, the spiritual self or the evolution of consciousness through stages of development (the very notion of stages was non-existent). Consider the dearth of information about the childhoods of towering figures like Moses, Jesus, Buddha and others, other than tidbit anecdotes and legends — surely nothing that we would consider today as the vital ingredients for constructing a psychological biography of an individual. Much of this vacuum is the legacy of the prevailing view about human psychology that persisted from antiquity through the 19th century, namely that who you are is a matter of destiny — it's wired in. Experiences and biography, therefore, were of little interest, other than curiosity. True, modern psychology may have overplayed the experiential card, but underplaying or ignoring it, which is common to religious and spiritual traditions, has obliterated an essential part of the whole — the human experience and cosmic experience are one.

The Dalai Lama has recognized that, and others should as well.

I case you missed last week's column:

"'The near enemies' within that hijack spirituality"

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("Escape Your Own Prison: Why We Need Spirituality and Psychology to be Truly Free" is now available at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com and other major book outlets.)

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Bernard Starr, Ph.D., formerly professor of developmental and educational psychology at the City University of New York, now teaches "Spirituality in Film" and leads "The Spiritual Forum" at Marymount Manhattan College. In addition to his work in radio, he is a longtime contributor of commentary and opinion articles to numerous major publications. He is also the main United Nations representative for the Institute of Global Education that founded the Mucherla Global School in Mucherla, India. His book "Escape Your Own Prison: Why We Need Spirituality and Psychology to be Truly Free" has been published by Rowman & Littlefield. He can be reached at {email OmniCns@aol.com}OmniCns@aol.com{/email}. © Copyright 2007 by Bernard Starr.