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Ken Kaisch 9/25/26 Ken Kaisch 9/25/26

The Group Self and the Sacred

Why we need community for the journey inward

WHAT THIS NEWSLETTER OFFERS

After reading Inside the Invisible for a while, you will begin to notice a quiet
groundedness beneath the noise of daily life — greater calm, clarity, and a
growing awareness of God in ordinary moments. This newsletter will not give
you new beliefs. It will help you see with new eyes.

I have known exactly one person in forty years of this work who tried to do serious inner work entirely alone, with no community, no teacher, no one to answer to – and I watched it go badly, in a specific and instructive way. Not dramatically badly. Quietly. He began, over a couple of years, to mistake his own private conclusions for settled truth, because there was no longer anyone in his life positioned to say, gently or otherwise, 'Are you sure about that?' Solitude had become an echo chamber with a population of one. He wasn't a bad man. He was simply a man with no mirror left.

Every contemplative tradition I have ever studied insists on the same uncomfortable point: the interior path is not meant to be walked alone, and the traditions that forgot this learned it the hard way. Monasteries. Sanghas. Chavurot. Sufi orders gathered around a teacher. None of these are historical accidents or mere convenience. They are structural admissions that the individual self, left entirely to its own devices in matters of the spirit, will eventually deceive itself subtly, sincerely, and with total conviction.

Here is why community functions this way: it is a mirror the solitary self does not have access to. Other people see your blind spots because they are, definitionally, blind to you and not to them. A teacher, a small group, even one honest friend who has permission to tell you the truth – these are not comforts added on top of the spiritual life. They are part of its actual machinery. And there is a real difference between community as support and community as accountability. Support tells you that you're doing fine. Accountability is willing to tell you when you're not, and stays anyway.

A Deeper Community

This is one of the reasons I intend to host video gatherings alongside this newsletter – not as an add-on, not as a marketing gesture, but as a small, deliberate instance of exactly the principle this issue is describing. A newsletter, however honest, is still one voice reaching you in solitude. A gathering, even a modest one, is a room. And the interior work this whole series is pointing toward genuinely goes further, and goes truer, inside a room than it does alone with a screen.

I want to distinguish two things that get flattened together far too often, because the flattening is exactly where community starts to fail people spiritually: community as comfort, and community as truth-telling. A support group tells you that you're not alone, that your struggle is understood, that you belong regardless of how you're doing this week. That matters, genuinely, and I am not diminishing it. But a group that offers only comfort will eventually stop being able to tell you the one thing you most need to hear – that you are avoiding something, that you are deceiving yourself, that the pattern you keep repeating has a name and the name is not flattering. Accountability is a different kind of gift. It requires people who have earned the right to say the hard thing to you, and who love you enough to say it anyway, and it requires you to have given someone that permission in advance, because nobody keeps that kind of honesty going for long without it.

Every tradition I have studied builds this distinction into its structure deliberately, not accidentally. The desert fathers and mothers of early Christianity, who fled to solitude precisely to escape the corruptions of urban religious life, still organized themselves around spiritual elders – a stunning admission from people who had chosen the most radical solitude available to them in their era. They discovered, the hard way, that unsupervised solitude produced not saints but delusions, visions that flattered the ego rather than dissolved it, extremes of self-punishment mistaken for holiness. The correction was not to abandon solitude. It was to submit the solitude to a relationship – to keep at least one honest voice in the loop who could say, when necessary, 'that is not God speaking. That is your own hunger, dressed up.'

The Logic of Community

Buddhist sanghas function on the same logic from a different theological direction. The historical Buddha, at the end of his life, was asked directly what would sustain the community after he was gone, and by several accounts his answer pointed not to doctrine alone but to the sangha itself – the community of practitioners holding each other accountable to the practice, correcting each other's drift, refusing to let any individual's private interpretation harden into unchallenged authority. Sufi orders gather around a living teacher for a similar reason: the ego is remarkably good at producing convincing spiritual experiences that are actually just the ego in a more sophisticated disguise, and only someone outside your own head, who has walked further down the path than you have, is positioned to catch it in time.

“Real accountability is uncomfortable in a way that mere support never is.”

Here is the honest cost of all this, and I don't want to soften it: real accountability is uncomfortable in a way that mere support never is. It requires you to be seen by people who are permitted to see clearly, which means it requires you to be known in ways that leave you exposed. Most people, if they're honest, would rather have ten friends who make them feel good than one who occasionally makes them feel caught. But the spiritual life, pursued in true isolation, does not actually protect you from being caught. It only removes the person positioned to catch you before the pattern has done more damage. The traditions did not build community into the contemplative path because they undervalued solitude. Most of them prize solitude enormously. They built community in because they had already watched what solitude alone, without a mirror, eventually does to even sincere seekers.

Let me tell you what this looked like in one particular case, because the abstract version is easy to agree with and the specific version is where it actually costs something. A man in a meditation group I sat with for several years – I'll leave out identifying detail – began, over a period of months, describing experiences in his practice that grew steadily more elaborate: visions, messages, a growing sense that his practice had elevated him past the need for the group's more basic instruction. Nobody in the room was a trained clinician, and nobody wanted to be unkind to someone clearly finding real meaning in his practice. But one member, an older woman who had been sitting for thirty years, finally said the thing nobody else was willing to say: 'That's not deepening. That's your ego finding a more interesting costume.' It landed hard. He left the group for several months, offended. He came back, eventually, and later told me it was the single most useful sentence anyone had said to him in a decade of practice – not because it was gentle, but because it was true, and because someone loved him enough, and had earned enough trust, to risk saying it plainly.

The Danger of Community

I want to be equally honest about the failure mode on the other side, because accountability without genuine care curdles into something worse than the isolation it was meant to prevent. A community that specializes in correction without warmth produces people who perform compliance while their actual inner life goes further underground – hidden from the very group that was supposed to help them see it clearly. This is the shadow side of every high-accountability religious community I have ever encountered, and it is worth naming directly: surveillance is not the same thing as mirroring, and shame is not the same thing as truth-telling. The difference, in practice, usually comes down to whether the correction is offered by someone who has also let themselves be corrected, in front of you, at some real cost to their own standing. Accountability that only flows one direction, from the group down to the individual, is not spiritual community. It is simply another mechanism of ego, this time operating at the collective scale we examined back in Issue 8.

What actually makes a community capable of this kind of honest mirroring, in my experience, is smaller and more specific than most people expect. It is not size – some of the most transformative small groups I have ever witnessed had four or five people in them. It is not doctrinal agreement – I have seen theologically mismatched groups hold each other with more real honesty than doctrinally uniform ones. What it requires, consistently, is longevity and mutual vulnerability: people who have stayed in the room together long enough, and been honest enough about their own struggles in that same room, to have earned the standing to say the hard thing to each other. You cannot manufacture this quickly, and you cannot manufacture it through a newsletter alone, however honest the newsletter tries to be. It has to be built, slowly, with actual people, in an actual room, over actual time – which is precisely why this issue's practical element asks for something as modest and as difficult as a single real conversation, rather than anything grander.

Creating Your Own Community

One practical note on how to find this kind of community without waiting for it to arrive by accident: it is almost always smaller, plainer, and less impressive than people expect when they go looking. It is rarely the largest, the flashiest, or the most exciting group. It is usually two or three people willing to actually show up, repeatedly, and tell each other the truth. Stop looking for the perfect spiritual community and start looking for the one honest person willing to meet you regularly. Everything else can be built from there, slowly, the way everything durable in this series has been built.

If you've spent this issue thinking you don't currently have a community capable of this kind of honest mirroring, I want to say two things directly. First, you are far from alone – this is, if anything, the single most common gap I encounter in the people who write to me through this newsletter, and it is not a personal failing so much as a structural feature of how isolated modern life has become, particularly for adults past the age when institutions like school or church automatically supplied community for you. Second, and more importantly: this is precisely why the video gatherings exist, and precisely why I keep asking you, issue after issue, to bring one other person into this material rather than reading alone. I am not asking you to build the entire monastery this week. I am asking you to find one honest mirror, because one is enough to begin, and community, like everything else in this series, is built the same way the ego and the group self were built in the first place – slowly, through repeated contact, not manufactured all at once by wanting it badly enough.

Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up the other; but woe to the one who is alone when they fall and have no one to help.

– Ecclesiastes 4:9-10

This is not primarily practical advice about labor. It is, in context, a statement about the spiritual danger of isolation – the fall that has no one to notice it, let alone lift you back up.

THIS WEEK'S CHALLENGE

Reach out this week to one person with whom you could actually discuss the themes of this series. One real conversation. One hour. Not a text exchange – a conversation. Human accountability is not a nice-to-have. It's structural. This issue explains why it has to be.

The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.

P.S. These newsletters form a structured course, designed to be read in
sequence. If this issue arrived out of order, visit the archive to start from the
beginning: insidetheinvisible.com/archive →

FROM THE AUTHOR

Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual
Transcendence

Are you looking for clarity in difficult times? Longing for a deeper sense of
purpose and meaning? This book is for you.

Get the Book on Amazon →

KNOW SOMEONE WHO'D VALUE THIS?

If this issue moved you, consider forwarding it to one person whose inner life
you respect. Send their email address to:

ken@insidetheinvisible.com

Ken Kaisch 9/18/26 Ken Kaisch 9/18/26

The Self at War With Itself

When the individual and the collective collide

WHAT THIS NEWSLETTER OFFERS

There was a man in my parish – I'll call him Robert, because that was not his name – who came to me the week he decided to report his employer for something the rest of the department had quietly agreed not to see. He was not looking for absolution. He already knew what he had to do. He was looking for someone to sit with him while he counted the cost, because the cost was real: colleagues who would never speak to him the same way again, a reputation as 'the guy who,' a group that had, without ever voting on it, decided he no longer fully belonged. He did it anyway. What struck me, sitting across from him, was that he wasn't torn between right and wrong. He was torn between two selves that both had legitimate claims on him, and only one of them could win that day.

This tension – individual conscience against collective belonging – is not a minor friction in human life. It may be the single oldest unresolved argument our species has ever had with itself, older than any philosophy written about it. The conscientious objector. The whistleblower. The prophet standing in the temple courtyard saying the thing the institution cannot afford to hear. Every tradition has its version of this figure, and every tradition treats the figure with genuine ambivalence, because the same mechanism that produces moral courage – the individual self overriding the group self when the group is wrong – is structurally identical to the mechanism that produces moral atrocity, when an individual overrides a healthy group conscience for private gain. The tension itself is neutral. What you do inside it is not.

What almost nobody tells you is that this conflict cannot be resolved by simply deciding, once and for all, which self gets final authority. 'Always trust the group' produces obedient people who will do terrible things in uniform. 'Always trust your individual conscience' produces a different kind of casualty – people so certain of their private rightness that they become incapable of the correction only a community can offer. The traditions that have thought hardest about this – and I include the tradition I was ordained into – do not resolve the tension. They teach you to hold it. To stay a member of the body and still, when it matters, say the uncomfortable thing inside it.

“When you go along with your group against your own private judgment, what are you actually protecting?”

Consider how differently history remembers the same underlying act depending only on which way it points. The soldier who refuses an illegal order is a hero in the history books written afterward and a traitor in the court-martial proceedings written at the time. The employee who reports fraud is a whistleblower to the public and, inside the company that quietly closes ranks against her, a disloyal opportunist who couldn't be trusted with an inconvenient truth. The reformer inside a religious institution is a prophet to the generation that eventually vindicates him and a heretic to the generation that has to live through the disruption he's causing. Notice what this tells you: the moral content of overriding the group self cannot be judged by the reaction it produces in the moment, because the group being overridden will almost always experience it as betrayal, regardless of whether the override was righteous or catastrophic. You cannot outsource this judgment to how the room reacts. The room is, by definition, not a neutral judge of whether it should have been challenged.

Our Tendency for Spiritual Bypassing

This is also, I think, where a great deal of spiritual bypassing quietly happens – not in the dramatic cases, but in the thousand small daily choices where staying comfortably inside the group self is simply easier than the discomfort of speaking a truth the room doesn't want. I have done this myself, more than once, in exactly the institution I gave my life to. Sat in meetings where something was clearly wrong and said nothing, not because I lacked the individual conviction, but because the cost of overriding the group self in that particular room, that particular day, felt higher than I was prepared to pay. I don't say this to excuse it. I say it because if a parish priest with years in this work still has to fight this same tension on ordinary Tuesdays, you should expect to fight it too, and you should not mistake the difficulty of the fight for evidence that something is wrong with you.

There is a useful, if uncomfortable, diagnostic question buried in all of this: when you go along with your group against your own private judgment, what are you actually protecting? Sometimes the honest answer is genuine humility – recognizing that the group might see something you don't, that your private certainty could simply be wrong, that staying inside the correction of community is itself a spiritual discipline. That is not the same thing as capitulation, and conflating the two is a mistake in both directions. But sometimes the honest answer is smaller and less flattering: you are protecting your standing, your comfort, your place at the table. Learning to tell these two motives apart – principled deference from simple cowardice wearing deference as a disguise – is some of the hardest interior work this series will ask of you, precisely because the ego is extremely skilled at making the second one feel exactly like the first.

And the reverse diagnostic matters just as much. When you override your group and trust your individual conscience instead, what are you actually protecting? Sometimes it is genuine moral clarity that the group has lost and you, for whatever reason, have not. But sometimes – and this is the harder confession – what you are protecting is your own sense of being the exceptional one, the clear-eyed prophet in a room of the compromised, which is simply the individual ego wearing a halo. The traditions that survive intact across centuries have almost always built in some mechanism for this exact check: a spiritual director, an elder, a rule of life that requires you to test your private certainty against something outside your own head before you act on it. Not because your conscience is untrustworthy by nature, but because the ego's capacity for self-deception does not politely exempt itself from moments of apparent moral courage.

The Other Way to Bypass – Paralysis

There is a third possibility I haven't named yet, and it may be the most common of the three, which is exactly why it gets talked about least: paralysis. Not choosing the group, not choosing your conscience, but simply freezing in the gap between them, letting the moment pass, and telling yourself afterward that you were being prudent, or waiting for a better opportunity, or not wanting to overreact. I want to be honest about how often this was my own pattern, before I did enough of my own work to see it clearly. Paralysis feels, from the inside, like caution. It is usually something closer to a third self-protective strategy dressed up as wisdom – a way of avoiding both the cost of defying the group and the cost of the group possibly being right and you having missed it. The traditions don't have much patience for this option, incidentally. The book of Revelation's harshest words are not for the openly hot or openly cold, but for the lukewarm – the ones who never quite committed either way.

What I have come to believe, after decades of watching this play out in other people's lives and my own, is that the tension between the individual self and the group self is not a problem to be solved once. It recurs, differently shaped, at every stage of a genuine spiritual life. Early on, the temptation is almost always toward too much deference – staying small, staying agreeable, letting the group's comfort override your own emerging clarity because you haven't yet trusted yourself enough to risk the cost. Later, if the inner work is going well, the temptation often flips: having finally found your own voice, you can become intoxicated by it, quick to break from any group that doesn't immediately validate your new certainty, mistaking every disagreement for oppression. Neither extreme is the destination. The destination, if there is one, is a self mature enough to belong fully and still, when it actually matters, say the thing the room does not want to hear – and humble enough to know the difference between when it actually matters and when it's simply your ego wanting the room's attention.

I'll add one more layer to the diagnostic question, because it's the one people most often skip: notice not just whether you defer or override, but how fast you decide which one to do. Genuine discernment, in my experience, almost always takes longer than either reflexive deference or reflexive rebellion. If you already know, within seconds, exactly which side you're on before you've actually weighed the specific situation, that speed itself is worth suspecting. Both healthy conscience and unhealthy ego can feel identically certain in the moment. Time, and a second honest voice, are usually what separates them.

There Are No Easy Answers

It is worth saying plainly that this tension is not a modern invention, whatever our particular political moment likes to imagine about itself. It is arguably the oldest recorded ethical dilemma our species has, and it shows up in the founding stories of nearly every tradition we'll examine across this series – Abraham asked to act against every instinct of family loyalty, Socrates choosing the judgment of his own reasoned conscience over the city that raised him, the Confucian tension between filial duty and moral rectification of a corrupt ruler. Every culture that has thought seriously about ethics for more than a generation has had to build some account of what happens when the individual and the collective make competing claims, because the tension is not a bug in human social life. It is a permanent structural feature of having two selves at all, and no culture in history has ever fully resolved it, only developed better and worse ways of holding it.

I don't have a tidy resolution to offer you for this issue, and I think that's honest rather than a failure of craft. The traditions that have sat longest with this tension don't resolve it either – they simply get better, over years of practice, at recognizing which situation they're actually in before they act.

We must obey God rather than any human authority.

– Acts 5:29

Peter says this to the very council that has legal and religious authority over him – the group he belongs to, that has every claim on his loyalty. He does not leave the community over it. He stays, and says the thing anyway. That combination – fidelity and defiance held together – is harder than either one alone.

SCIENCE SPEAKS

In the 1950s, Solomon Asch ran a now-famous experiment: he asked subjects to judge the length of lines, a task with an obvious correct answer, after seating each of them among actors instructed to confidently give the wrong one. Roughly three-quarters of subjects went along with the group's wrong answer at least once, even when the correct answer was plainly visible. A decade later, Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments showed how far ordinary people would go against their own stated values under institutional authority. Neither finding means people are simply weak. It means the group self exerts real, measurable pressure on perception and behavior – pressure strong enough to override what an individual, alone, would clearly see and clearly refuse.

THIS WEEK'S CHALLENGE

Identify one place in your life right now where individual desire and group belonging are in real tension. Don't resolve it. Just write down, honestly, what each side is asking of you. When have you chosen yourself over the group, or the group over yourself? What did it cost you either way? Our challenge is to interrupt self-centered behavior – which requires learning, precisely, where the self ends and the other begins.

I hope you have a splendid week. I look forward to continuing our time together in the next issue.

May God make his face to shine upon you, this day, and always.

Faithfully yours,

FROM THE AUTHOR

Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual
Transcendence

Are you looking for clarity in difficult times? Longing for a deeper sense of
purpose and meaning? This book is for you.

Get the Book on Amazon →

KNOW SOMEONE WHO'D VALUE THIS?

If this issue moved you, consider forwarding it to one person whose inner life
you respect. Send their email address to:

ken@insidetheinvisible.com

Ken Kaisch 9/11/26 Ken Kaisch 9/11/26

How the Group Self Is Built

Identity is always assembled in community

WHAT THIS NEWSLETTER OFFERS

Twenty-six years old, fresh out of seminary, and I remember exactly how long it took me to learn how to be a priest in that particular parish: about six weeks. Not the theology – I already had that. The unspoken rules. Which pew nobody sat in without provoking a quiet, decades-old feud. What we called the building fund, and what we never, ever called it. How to tell the story of the parish's founding so that it landed as sacred history rather than as the fairly ordinary real-estate transaction it actually was. Nobody handed me a manual. I absorbed it the way you absorb a language – by being immersed in people who already spoke it fluently and wanted me to speak it too.

That is how every group self gets built, and it is worth naming the mechanism plainly, because once you see it you cannot unsee it operating on you right now. A group forges its self through shared narrative – the story it tells about where it came from and what it's for. Through ritual – the repeated actions that make belonging feel embodied rather than merely believed. Through a common enemy or threat, real or imagined, which turns out to be the fastest and most reliable glue there is. And through language – the words, the inside jokes, the shorthand that marks who is inside the circle and who is still standing outside it.

None of this is sinister by default. Your family built its identity this way. So did your church, your college, your country, your favorite sports team, the group chat you've been in for a decade. The group self is not optional equipment; it's how humans have organized survival since before we had language sophisticated enough to argue about whether we should. The trouble starts, as it always does with identity, not with the construction but with the ossification – when the story hardens into the only permissible story, when the ritual becomes more important than what it was meant to point toward, when the common enemy stops being circumstantial and becomes structural, a permanent feature the group needs in order to keep knowing who it is.

“The group self turns pathological in exactly the ways the individual ego does, just at a larger scale and with more casualties.”

This is where the group self turns pathological in exactly the ways the individual ego does, just at a larger scale and with more casualties. Tribalism. Scapegoating. The quiet, reflexive dehumanizing of whoever is standing on the other side of the line the group has drawn. And here is the part that should genuinely unsettle you: the group self is not simply a bigger, louder version of your individual ego. It has its own logic, its own defenses, its own capacity for cruelty that individuals inside it would often never commit alone. Ordinary, decent people do things as members of a group that they would be horrified to do as individuals – not because the group corrupts them exactly, but because the group self has its own survival instincts, and those instincts do not always answer to the individual conscience that's supposed to be running the show.

Scapegoating deserves more than a passing mention, because it is arguably the most reliable and most dangerous of the group self's pathologies, and it operates by a mechanism worth naming precisely. A group under internal strain – economic, moral, spiritual – does not usually resolve that strain by examining itself. It resolves it, far more often, by locating a single person or a single subgroup and designating them the carrier of whatever the group cannot bear to look at directly. The scapegoat does not need to be guilty of anything. Guilt was never really the point. The point was relief – the sudden, genuine sense of unity a group feels once it has found something outside itself to blame. The philosopher and literary critic René Girard spent much of his scholarly life tracing this mechanism across mythology, religion, and history, and his central claim is uncomfortable precisely because it is so well evidenced: nearly every founding myth of nearly every ancient culture contains, somewhere near its origin, a killing or an expulsion that the group needed in order to become a group at all. Whether or not you take the larger theological claims built on this observation, the psychological one is worth sitting with regardless: your own group identities have very likely been unified, at some point, by finding someone to blame rather than something to change. Naming who that was, in your own history, is not a comfortable exercise. It is a necessary one.

The Tension Between the Group and the Individual

Which brings me to a tension I have not yet named directly, and should: the pull between individual autonomy and group loyalty. Every group self, healthy or not, asks something of its members that a purely autonomous individual would never volunteer for on their own – conformity of belief, conformity of behavior, a willingness to subordinate private judgment to collective coherence, at least some of the time. This is not automatically a bad trade. A marriage asks it. A congregation asks it. A functioning community asks it constantly, in smaller ways, every time a member accepts an outcome they privately disagreed with. The question I want you to sit with is not whether groups should ask this of you – they will, and some version of the asking is unavoidable if you want to belong to anything larger than yourself – but whether you have ever consciously decided how much you're willing to give, or whether you have simply been giving it, by default, since childhood, without ever once being asked.

So here is the question I want to leave sitting with you this week, uncomfortably, on purpose: which of your group identities have you never actually examined? Not the ones you're proud of. The ones you've simply always assumed – nationality, denomination, family loyalty, political tribe – never once asking what story you were handed, and whether you'd choose it now, awake, if you were building it fresh.

The Four Elements of the Group Self

Let's slow down on each of the four mechanisms, because naming them quickly makes them sound simpler than they are, and simplicity is exactly what lets them operate on you unexamined. Shared narrative is the origin story a group tells about itself – where it came from, who wronged it, what it's owed, what it's destined for. Every nation has one; every denomination has one; every family has one, usually organized around a founding hardship or a founding triumph that gets retold at holidays until the retelling itself becomes part of the family's identity. The narrative doesn't have to be false to do its work. It only has to be selective, which every narrative necessarily is, and the selectivity is where the shaping actually happens – in what gets included and what quietly never comes up.

Ritual is the second mechanism, and it works on a different register than narrative – not through the mind but through the body. This is why a group can lose its narrative almost entirely, forget the theological or historical reasoning behind a practice, and still keep performing the ritual faithfully for generations. The ritual has become the carrier of belonging even after the explanation attached to it has evaporated. I've stood in more than one congregation where I could have asked half the room why we do a particular thing at a particular point in the service, and gotten a shrug – but every single person still knew exactly when to stand, when to kneel, when to answer. The body had learned the group self before the mind had, and kept it long after the mind's explanation had gone quiet.

The common enemy is the mechanism nobody likes admitting to, because it exposes something uncomfortable about how quickly and cheaply group cohesion can be manufactured. A shared threat – real, exaggerated, or invented – binds a group faster and more tightly than almost anything else available. This is not a flaw unique to bad groups. It is a structural feature of how group selves form, which is precisely why it needs to be named and watched rather than pretended away. A group with a healthy identity can name its history honestly, including the parts that implicate it, without needing an external enemy to hold itself together. A group that cannot survive without one has usually stopped examining itself and started merely defending itself instead.

And then there is language – the shorthand, the inside references, the words that mean something different inside the group than they do to an outsider hearing them cold. Every profession has this. Every family has this. Every religious tradition has an entire vocabulary that functions, whether anyone intends it to or not, as a border crossing: you either speak it fluently, which marks you as belonging, or you don't, which marks you as still outside, however welcoming everyone is trying to be. I have watched newcomers to a congregation do everything right – show up early, volunteer, give generously – and still take years to feel fully inside, simply because the language took that long to become fluent rather than translated.

What I want you to notice about all four mechanisms together is that none of them require malice to operate, and none of them are optional for group survival. A group with no shared narrative dissolves. A group with no ritual has no way to transmit belonging across generations. A group with absolutely no capacity to name a threat cannot defend itself when a real one arrives. A group with no shared language has no efficient way to coordinate. The mechanisms aren't the problem. The problem, as it always is with identity in this series, is what happens when the mechanisms stop being examined and start being worshipped in their own right – when the narrative can no longer tolerate revision, when the ritual becomes more sacred than what it was built to point toward, when the enemy becomes structurally necessary rather than circumstantially real, when the language becomes a wall instead of a bridge.

I think of a family I sat with more than once, where the founding narrative was a grandfather's immigration story – genuine hardship, genuinely survived, genuinely worth honoring. But by the third generation, that story had calcified into an unspoken rule: nobody in this family is allowed to struggle publicly, because grandfather struggled and never complained. Three generations later, the family had extraordinary outward stability and a quiet, unaddressed epidemic of untreated depression, because the group self's founding story had turned into a prohibition against exactly the honesty the family most needed. The narrative that built them was, by then, the thing slowly hurting them. Nobody had chosen that outcome. Nobody had voted for it. It simply accumulated, generation over generation, the way group selves always do when nobody stops to examine the mechanism doing the building.

Transmission across generations, worth distinguishing for a moment, happens through two quite different channels, and it matters which one you're dealing with. Families transmit their group self mostly by accident – through what gets repeated at dinner, what gets left unsaid, what a child absorbs simply by being present in a room where certain things are sayable and certain things are not. Institutions transmit theirs far more deliberately. Every religious tradition I know of has some version of formal initiation – catechesis, confirmation classes, ordination vows – precisely because an institution cannot afford to leave its group self to accident the way a family often does. These deliberate transmission mechanisms are not inherently sinister; they are, in fact, one of the more honest things an institution can do, because at least the transmission is visible, examined, agreed to out loud by the person receiving it, rather than absorbed unconsciously the way most family identity is. I would rather belong to a group that made me sit through instruction and ask me, explicitly, whether I accepted its terms, than one that simply assumed my agreement because I'd never been anywhere else. If you want a genuinely useful exercise this week, beyond the one already assigned: ask yourself which of your group identities you were formally initiated into, with your conscious agreement, and which ones you simply absorbed before you were old enough to be asked. The difference tells you something real about how much of your identity you actually chose.

Which of These Four Owns You?

Here is the harder, more personal version of this issue's question, and I'd rather ask it plainly than let you skate past it in the abstract: which of these four mechanisms holds the strongest grip on you specifically? Some people are held mostly by narrative – they could recite their family's or their nation's founding story without a moment's hesitation, and questioning that story feels, to them, like a kind of betrayal simply to consider. Others are held mostly by ritual – the sensory, embodied comfort of the familiar service, the familiar meal, the familiar gesture, in a way that would survive even a complete loss of belief in the narrative behind it. Others are held by the common enemy – a felt sense of who 'we' are that only really activates in contrast to who 'they' are, and goes strangely quiet without an adversary in the frame. And others are held mostly by language – belonging that lives almost entirely in vocabulary, in knowing the right references, in the comfort of never having to translate yourself. Most of us are held by some blend of all four, in proportions we've never actually stopped to weigh. This week's practical element is asking you to weigh them, honestly, for exactly one group – because you cannot examine what you've never named.

I think often of the difference between a group that has a creed and a group that has become its creed – the first can hold its founding statements up to the light periodically and ask whether they still say what the group needs said, while the second experiences any such questioning as an existential threat rather than ordinary maintenance. Watch for this distinction in every group you belong to. It tells you more about that group's actual health than almost anything else you could measure.

There is a redemptive version of this same mechanism worth naming before we close, because Part II in this series is not simply a warning. Groups that stay healthy tend to share one trait that unhealthy ones lose: the capacity to revise their own narrative without losing their coherence. A family that can say, at the dinner table, 'we used to believe X, and we were wrong, and here's what we understand now' has not weakened its group self. It has matured it. A denomination capable of formally repenting a historical wrong, a nation capable of teaching its own atrocities alongside its own achievements, is not dissolving its identity by doing so – it is demonstrating that its identity was never actually dependent on an unrevisable story in the first place. This is worth remembering as you do this week's practical element, because the goal is not to indict every group you belong to. It's to find out which of your groups can survive being looked at honestly, and which ones, worryingly, cannot.

Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves.

– Genesis 11:4

Ken Kaisch 9/4/26 Ken Kaisch 9/4/26

You Are Not Only Yourself

The self the ego doesn't know about

WHAT THIS NEWSLETTER OFFERS

I was in the room when Marion died. Her three children were around the bed, and her husband was holding her hand, and I want to tell you something that no seminary class ever prepared me for: the grief that moved through that room did not belong to any one of them. I watched it pass between them like a current – a sob starting in the daughter, landing in the father's shoulders, surfacing again in the son's silence. Four people. One grief. I have stood at enough deathbeds now to tell you this was not sentimental projection on my part. Something was actually happening between them that was not reducible to four separate people having four separate feelings at the same time

We have spent six issues examining the self you built to survive – the ego, assembled from parental approval and social feedback and the sheer necessity of having a coherent 'I' to present to the world. That self is real and it is yours. But it is not the whole story, and if we stop there, a great deal of your actual experience becomes unexplainable. Why do you feel something distinct and undeniable when your team scores, when your country is humiliated, when a stranger's grief becomes briefly, inexplicably your own? The individual ego has no account of this. It only has an account of itself.

The Group Self. My colleague Zilvinas Svigaris and I have spent the last year working through this exact puzzle for our forthcoming book Awakening WE, and the starting point we kept returning to is embarrassingly simple once you see it: human beings are built with two selves running simultaneously, not one. There is the individual self – the ego we have been examining – and there is a group self, every bit as real, every bit as capable of directing your behavior, and almost entirely unexamined by comparison. We are, as a species, caught in a strange evolutionary position. We are not ants, wired for pure colony-function with no individual self to speak of. We are not solitary predators either, complete unto ourselves with no genuine need of the group. We are the animal that is fully, uncomfortably both.

You already know the group self is real, even if you've never named it. It's why a room full of strangers can become, for ninety minutes, a single organism at a concert or a funeral or a protest. It's why 'my country,' 'my team,' 'my family,' 'my church' can produce feelings – pride, shame, grief, fierce loyalty – that make no sense if you are only accounting for you. The group self is not a metaphor for something happening in a bunch of separate individuals. It is a second, genuine locus of identity, built the same way the individual ego was built: through belonging, feedback, story, and the desperate childhood need to not be cast out of the tribe.

“If you only examine the individual ego, you will misdiagnose half of your own behavior.”

Here is why this matters for the question this series is asking. If you only examine the individual ego, you will misdiagnose half of your own behavior. The rage you feel on behalf of your group, the shame you carry for a nation's history you didn't personally make, the loyalty that overrides your own better judgment – none of that is explained by the self we spent Part I dismantling. It requires a second self. And that second self has to be examined with the same unflinching honesty, because it is capable of the same damage, and the same grace, as the one you already know. Often, even more so.

Let me press the evolutionary point a little further, because it's easy to nod along with 'we are caught between individual and collective' without feeling its strangeness. Look at an ant colony. An individual ant has, functionally, no self to speak of outside the colony; remove her from it and she will wander in circles until she dies, because there was never a coherent 'her' independent of the whole. Now look at a Bengal tiger. It is almost entirely solitary – territorial, self-sufficient, requiring no pack, no tribe, no collective identity to hunt, mate, or survive. Humans are neither of these things, and we are not simply 'a bit of both' in some comfortable middle position. We are unstable – built to require both a coherent individual self and a genuine collective self, with neither one able to fully substitute for the other, and both capable of catastrophic malfunction if the other is neglected. A human raised with zero individual self becomes an instrument of whatever group claims him. A human with zero group self becomes something we don't even have very good language for – not simply 'independent,' but something closer to unmoored, cut off from a dimension of identity the species was built to need.

50,000 Strangers. You have felt the group self activate in settings that had no history behind them at all, which is its own kind of evidence. Fifty thousand strangers in a stadium, most of whom will never speak a word to each other, become – for the length of a single wave rippling around the upper deck – a coordinated organism with no leader and no rehearsal. A crowd gathered for a cause becomes something none of the individuals in it would have predicted about themselves that morning. This is not group self as metaphor. It is group self as a real, rapid, almost reflexive mode of identity your nervous system is fully capable of entering, given the right conditions, in a matter of seconds.

I want to name an objection some of you are already forming, because it deserves a real answer rather than a dismissal: isn't this just sociology? Group dynamics, in-group bias, crowd psychology – hasn't this all been studied for a century without anyone calling it spiritually significant? Here is my answer. Every contemplative tradition that has lasted more than a generation has built serious, load-bearing structures around exactly this phenomenon – the sangha, the ummah, the body of Christ, the minyan. They did not build monasteries and congregations and prayer circles because community was pleasant. They built them because they had independently discovered, centuries before Tajfel ran a single experiment, that the group self is real, that it is not reducible to the individuals composing it, and that the spiritual life ignores it at its peril. What the traditions called sacred, the social psychologists later measured. Neither discovery cancels the other. They are the same discovery, reached from two directions.

There is also a competition for loyalty buried in all of this that I don't want to let you walk past too quickly, because we'll spend the next two issues inside it directly. Your individual ego and your group self do not always want the same thing. Sometimes what keeps you in good standing with your tribe requires you to betray something your individual conscience knows to be true. Sometimes what your individual ego wants – recognition, advantage, being right – requires you to fracture a group loyalty that has genuinely sustained you. You are going to feel that tension more, not less, the more honestly you do this work, because examining the group self does not make the tension disappear. It just makes it visible enough to navigate on purpose instead of by reflex.

Zilvinas came to the dual-self framework from a different angle than I did – he'd spent years working across systems theory and researching education before we ever sat down together, watching the same pattern show up in everything from tribal societies to modern institutions to the strange, leaderless coordination of a flock of starlings. I came to it from forty years of watching individuals in a room slowly discover that half their suffering was never theirs alone to begin with – it belonged to a family system, a congregation, a nation's unexamined grief, and no amount of individual therapy or individual prayer was ever going to resolve a wound that was never only individual in the first place. We began writing Awakening WE because we kept independently running into the same wall from opposite directions: you cannot fully answer 'Who am I' with only one of these two selves in the frame. You need both, or the answer you get back is only half true.

So, carry this with you into the rest of Part II, because it changes the stakes of everything that follows: the work of this series was never just about freeing you from your individual ego. It is also, unavoidably, about examining the groups you belong to with the same honesty – because you are not going to find your way to whatever lies beneath both selves by dismantling only one of them and leaving the other unexamined in the dark.

The Promise and Danger of the Group Self. One more distinction before we move on, because I don't want you to leave this issue thinking the group self is simply a larger, diluted version of the individual ego, scaled up like a photograph enlarged past its resolution. It isn't. A group self can outlive every individual who was present at its founding, carrying a story and a set of loyalties forward across generations that no single member ever personally chose. It can act with a coherence and a momentum that overrides what any of its individual members, alone, would actually will. And it can heal in ways an individual cannot – a nation issuing a formal apology, a denomination publicly repenting of a historical wrong, a family finally naming a pattern out loud at a reunion nobody wanted to attend. These are not things an individual ego does. They are things only a group self, examined and addressed as its own genuine entity, is capable of. That is the strangeness, and the real weight, of what we're beginning to examine in Part II: you are not one self trying to understand itself. You are two, and the second one has been running large parts of your life since before you had language sophisticated enough to notice it.

One last thing before the science, because I don't want the evolutionary framing to leave you thinking this is purely a matter of biology, cold and mechanical. The traditions that discovered the group self centuries before psychology had a name for it did not describe it in clinical terms. They described it as something closer to communion – a real participation in something larger than the individual, not merely a useful survival adaptation. I think both descriptions are true at once, the way the science box below and the Corinthians passage after it are both true at once. What Tajfel measured in a laboratory with arbitrary painting preferences, Paul was describing, centuries earlier, as the literal body of Christ. The mechanism is the same. What it's for is the real question, and it's the question this entire series exists to keep asking.

SCIENCE SPEAKS

Social psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner spent decades documenting what they called social identity theory: the discovery that people will form group loyalties, and act on them – favoring their own group, disadvantaging an out-group – on the basis of almost nothing at all. In Tajfel's 'minimal group' experiments, subjects randomly assigned to arbitrary groups (based on a coin flip, or a preference for one abstract painter over another) still showed measurable favoritism toward their own group within minutes. The group self does not require a real history, a real enemy, or a real shared story to activate. It only requires a 'we' and a 'them.' Once that line exists, the group self takes it from there.

If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.

– 1 Corinthians 12:26

Paul is not offering a metaphor about niceness. He is describing, with real precision, how a group self actually functions – as a single body with distributed nerve endings. The mystical claim and the psychological claim turn out to be the same claim.

THIS WEEK’S CHALLENGE

Think of a moment when you felt part of something larger than yourself – a crowd, a congregation, a family gathered around a hospital bed, a team. Don't analyze it yet. Just sit with the quality of that experience for five minutes. What was different about 'you' in that moment?

When have you felt genuinely part of a 'we'? What made it real, and what did it cost you to belong?

The intensive works primarily on the individual ego, stage by stage. But the WE insight shapes the framing of every stage: you are not doing this work for yourself alone.

Well, that’s enough for today. I hope you have a splendid week, and I look forward to continuing our time together in the next issue.

May God make his face to shine upon you, this day, and always.

Faithfully yours,

FROM THE AUTHOR

Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual
Transcendence

Are you looking for clarity in difficult times? Longing for a deeper sense of
purpose and meaning? This book is for you.

Get the Book on Amazon →

KNOW SOMEONE WHO'D VALUE THIS?

If this issue moved you, consider forwarding it to one person whose inner life
you respect. Send their email address to:

ken@insidetheinvisible.com

Ken Kaisch 8/28/26 Ken Kaisch 8/28/26

When the Ego Meets the Sacred

Why religion so often reinforces what it claims to dissolve

WHAT THIS NEWSLETTER OFFERS

Here's a question I've chewed on for most of my adult life, first as a parish priest, later as someone who has watched a great deal of religious life from both the outside and the inside: why does organized religion so often leave the ego fully intact – or, worse, make it stronger?

You've seen this. Maybe you've lived it. The person who grows more certain, more rigid, more quietly (or not so quietly) superior after their conversion or their deepening involvement in a faith community. The congregation that becomes a battleground for status and control, dressed up in spiritual language. I'm not saying this to knock religion – I gave a good chunk of my life to serving the institutional church, and I believe its structure offers real good – but we do the spiritual life a disservice if we pretend this problem isn't real and isn't widespread.

Early in my ordained ministry I sat on a parish committee where two of the most committed members spent an entire meeting arguing about a five-dollar plumbing part and who could get it cheaper. Nobody in that room would have called it ego. Everybody would have called it faithful stewardship. But I watched it happen and recognized the machinery underneath the pious language. Later I saw the identical machinery running in boardrooms with no religious language attached at all. Same mechanism, different costume.

“Genuine encounter with the Divine tends to destabilize the ego, not comfort it.”

Here is the mechanism, plainly. The ego is extraordinarily good at what psychologists sometimes call co-opting – taking hold of anything valuable, including genuine spiritual experience, and repurposing it for its own maintenance. Give the ego a religious vocabulary and it will use that vocabulary exactly the way it uses everything else: to feel superior, to feel safe, to feel certain, to have a story about itself it doesn't have to examine too closely. 'I am saved and you are not.' 'I understand the deep truths and you're still asleep.' Notice how easily spiritual language slides into ego language wearing a costume –and notice, honestly, whether you recognized any of your own recent thoughts in that last sentence.

There's a related trap worth naming directly: spiritual bypassing. The use of transcendent-sounding language –'everything happens for a reason,' 'I've moved beyond anger,' 'I'm at peace with it' – to avoid doing the actual, uncomfortable inner work real transformation requires. It isn't always dishonest. Sometimes it's simply easier to talk about transcendence than to sit with genuine grief, genuine anger, genuine confusion. But easier is not the same as true, and the traditions worth trusting are the ones honest enough to say so out loud.

Here is the distinction to hold onto: genuine encounter with the Divine tends to destabilize the ego, not comfort it. Read the actual accounts. Moses at the burning bush, terrified and arguing with God rather than comforted, protesting he isn't the right man for the job. Isaiah, undone, crying 'woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips' rather than feeling spiritually superior. Paul, knocked flat on the road to Damascus, blinded for days, needing another man to lead him by the hand into the city. None of these are comfortable experiences. None of them leave the ego feeling more secure in its story. That is precisely the tell. If an experience of God leaves you feeling smugly certain and superior to everyone around you, examine, without flinching, whether you encountered the Divine or simply borrowed new material for your ego's ongoing project.

This is the real difference between believing in God and being encountered by God. Belief is something the ego can hold, manage, and use. Encounter is something that happens to the ego, usually against its will, and tends to leave it smaller and quieter afterward – which, if this series has done its job so far, you'll recognize as exactly the direction we're heading.

This is where the mystics come in, and where this series will spend a great deal of time in the weeks ahead. What sets the mystics apart from ordinary religious believers isn't better theology. It's that they took the possibility of actual encounter seriously enough to let it change them, cost them, sometimes cost them dearly. Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart – we'll meet all of them in Part III, and you'll find they were far braver, and far stranger, than the tame versions of them handed down in most church history classes.

For now, plant this: the spiritual life worth pursuing is not the one that leaves your sense of self feeling flattered. It's the one that leaves it a little unsettled, because something more real just walked through the room.

Here is a practical marker you can actually use, since abstractions like this are easy to nod along with and hard to apply on a Tuesday. The next time you come away from a sermon, a worship service, a retreat, or a private prayer time feeling unusually certain, unusually superior, unusually sure you now see what others don't – pause. That feeling, more often than not, is the ego collecting a trophy, not the soul meeting God. Genuine encounter tends to leave you quieter, humbler, and less sure you have it all figured out. If you walk away from church feeling more sure of yourself, look again. Don't take the good feeling as proof of anything.

SPIRITUAL EXERCISE – Examine One Belief

Pick one belief you hold about God or spirituality – something you'd say fairly easily if asked. Then ask yourself honestly: does this belief cost me anything? Does it ask anything difficult of me, or does it mostly let me feel settled and certain without requiring change? There's no wrong answer here. Just look honestly.

THIS WEEK'S CHALLENGE

Has your religious or spiritual life, on balance, made your ego stronger or weaker over the years? Sit with that question before you answer it. It deserves more than a reflexive response.

Part I of this series ends here, and I hope it's left you with the first productive discomfort – a sense that the self you've built your life around isn't quite the whole story. Next week we widen the lens to something most spiritual writing skips entirely: the 'we' beneath the 'I.' See you then.

I hope you have a splendid week. I look forward to continuing our time together in the next issue. May God enfold you and make his face to shine upon you, this day and always!

FROM THE AUTHOR

Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual
Transcendence

Are you looking for clarity in difficult times? Longing for a deeper sense of
purpose and meaning? This book is for you.

Get the Book on Amazon →

KNOW SOMEONE WHO'D VALUE THIS?

If this issue moved you, consider forwarding it to one person whose inner life
you respect. Send their email address to:

ken@insidetheinvisible.com

Ken Kaisch 8/21/26 Ken Kaisch 8/21/26

The Ego and the Body

How identity lives in flesh –and what that tells us

WHAT THIS NEWSLETTER OFFERS

Last year I had a serious health scare – nothing serious in the end, but serious enough, for about a month, that I didn't know it would turn out fine. I noticed something during that month that I haven't been able to stop thinking about since: the fear wasn't really about pain, and it wasn't even primarily about dying. It was about disappearing. As if a threat to my body were a direct threat to whatever I meant by 'me.'

You've likely felt some version of this – an illness, an injury, or simply the slow accumulation of aging, watching a body that used to do things effortlessly start needing more care and more patience. Why does a threat to the body register so directly as a threat to the self? The two aren't obviously the same thing. And yet in the moment of fear, they feel identical. No exceptions, in my experience – not for the devout, not for the skeptical, not for anyone.

“(The body) tells the truth whether you’ve given it permission to or not.”

Here is my working answer, built over years of sitting with people in exactly this fear: the ego is not a purely mental construction floating free of the flesh. It is deeply embodied. It lives, quite literally, in sensation – in the tightness in your chest before a hard conversation, in the flush of embarrassment, in the exhaustion of a day spent defending an image. The body is not a house the self merely occupies. It is where the self does a great deal of its actual living, whether you've been taught to notice that or not.

This is why somatic experience –simply feeling what is happening in the body, without immediately interpreting or explaining it –can be such a direct doorway inward. The mind is a skilled editor. It smooths contradictions, tells convenient stories, argues itself out of inconvenient truths. The body is far less cooperative with that project. It knows things the mind would rather not examine, and it tells the truth whether you've given it permission to or not. I've watched articulate, self-possessed people insist through a gritted jaw that they were 'absolutely fine' – the body testifying, in real time, against the very sentence coming out of the mouth.

SCIENCE SPEAKS

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio spent decades studying what he called 'somatic markers' – bodily sensations (a tightening gut, a lightness in the chest) that function as a genuine channel of information, often arriving faster and more accurately than conscious reasoning. Separately, polyvagal theory, developed by Stephen Porges, maps how the body's own nervous system continuously and automatically assesses safety or threat, shaping emotional state well before the thinking mind catches up. Both lines of research point the same direction the contemplative traditions have long pointed: the body is not a lesser, cruder cousin of the mind. It is a genuine organ of knowing, and ignoring it means ignoring information you actually need to make good decisions.

The traditions have taken very different positions on the body across the centuries, and a few are worth holding side by side. Historic strands of Christian thought sometimes treated the body with suspicion, as a source of temptation to be mastered –which sits oddly alongside the central Christian claim of the Incarnation, that God himself took on a body and called it good. 'The Word became flesh and dwelt among us,' John tells us –not became an idea, not became a moral teaching, but became flesh. That is about as strong an endorsement of embodiment as any tradition has ever offered, and a suspicion of the body has too often crept into Christian practice that the Incarnation itself should have ruled out from the start.

Hindu traditions offer a different account: the physical body, annamaya kosha, is one sheath among several layers of the self – real, and mattering, even as the tradition points beyond it. Buddhist teaching treats close attention to bodily sensation as one of the most direct available paths to seeing the constructed nature of self clearly – nothing to escape, everything to examine. Three quite different theological starting points, converging on the same practical instruction: pay attention to the body. It is not in your way. It is, in a real sense, the way.

Here is where I want you as we move forward: the body is not an obstacle to spiritual practice. It is one of the most immediate and available sites for it. There is nothing more immediate, more constantly available, more honestly yours in this very moment than the breath moving in and out of you right now. Every contemplative tradition I've studied, without exception, eventually arrives at the breath as a starting point –not because it's a clever technique, but because it's the one thing you're always doing, always available, requiring no special equipment or environment. It's already there, waiting for you to notice it, whether or not you ever do.

One practical point I want named directly, because it doesn't get said often enough in spiritual writing: this is also why physical health, in a modest and unfussy way, is a spiritual matter and not merely a wellness-culture add-on. I don't mean the anxious, image-conscious relationship with the body that our culture sells constantly – that's just the ego wearing gym clothes. I mean something simpler: sleep, movement, and rest as ways of respecting the instrument through which all of this inner work actually happens. You cannot hear a whisper over the noise of chronic exhaustion. Tend the body not because it needs to look a certain way, but because it is where you actually live, and a resentful, depleted body will not carry you far into anything real.

SPIRITUAL EXERCISE – Five Minutes of Breath

Set aside five minutes. Simply feel the breath entering and leaving your body – no counting, no technique, no trying to breathe a particular way. Just feel it. When your mind wanders to something else (and it will), gently bring attention back to the sensation of breathing. That return, not the perfect focus, is the whole practice.

THIS WEEK'S CHALLENGE

Notice, honestly, whether you tend to trust your body's signals or override them. When was the last time your body told you something – exhaustion, tension, unease – and you talked yourself out of listening?

I've come to believe the body is a far more honest teacher than most of us give it credit for. Give it five real minutes of attention this week and see what it has to say.

I hope you have a splendid week. I look forward to continuing our time together in the next issue. May God enfold you and make his face to shine upon you, this day and always!

FROM THE AUTHOR

Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual
Transcendence

Are you looking for clarity in difficult times? Longing for a deeper sense of
purpose and meaning? This book is for you.

Get the Book on Amazon →

KNOW SOMEONE WHO'D VALUE THIS?

If this issue moved you, consider forwarding it to one person whose inner life
you respect. Send their email address to:

ken@insidetheinvisible.com

Ken Kaisch 8/14/26 Ken Kaisch 8/14/26

The Ego's Shadow

What the self costs you without your knowing

WHAT THIS NEWSLETTER OFFERS

Here's something you may not want to answer, even privately: how much of your mental energy, on an average day, goes toward maintaining a particular image of who you are?

Most people have never run the math, because the accounting happens below the level they usually pay attention to. Try it anyway, just for a moment. The rehearsed explanation for why you were late. The text revised twice before sending, so it lands exactly right. The flash of irritation when someone else gets credit you felt was yours, and the effort it takes to keep that irritation off your face. The private comparison – am I doing better or worse than her, than him, than who I used to be – running almost constantly in the background, uninvited. All of that is the ego at work, and none of it is free. It costs attention, and attention is close to the most precious resource a human being has. You are spending it right now, on this, without having chosen to.

Here's the mechanism, stated plainly. The ego functions like a bouncer at the door of your awareness, deciding what gets let in and what gets turned away. What confirms the story you've built about yourself gets waved through easily. What threatens that story gets challenged, minimized, argued with, or blocked before it fully registers. This is why two people can sit through the identical conversation and walk away having heard entirely different things. Each ego filtered the exchange according to what it needed to protect, and neither one noticed the filtering happen.

“The ego functions like a bouncer at the door of your awareness, deciding what gets in and what gets turned away.”

This filtering generates an enormous amount of quiet suffering that most people never trace back to its source. Comparison is the first cost – that itch of measuring yourself against someone else, which almost never produces peace no matter which way it comes out. It has gotten heavier in the age of the endlessly scrolling feed, where the comparison never stops, just gets fed fresh material every few seconds. Your grandparents compared themselves to actual neighbors. You compare yourself to a curated highlight reel from thousands of people you've never met, and the ego, not being terribly discerning about the difference, suffers accordingly, all day, without your permission.

SCIENCE SPEAKS

Researchers Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski built an entire program of study – Terror Management Theory – around a simple, well-replicated finding: when people are reminded of their own mortality, even subtly, they respond by clinging more tightly to their identity, their group affiliations, and their worldview, often becoming harsher toward anyone who threatens those things. This is the exact mechanism the contemplative traditions described in their own language centuries ago: the ego, sensing its own mortality, defends itself all the harder. Modern psychology didn't discover something new here. It confirmed, with careful measurement, what the mystics already knew from the inside.

Grievance is the second cost – replaying an old wound, keeping it fresh, because some part of the ego believes that letting it go would mean the original offense didn't matter. I've sat with people nursing a thirty-year-old grievance with the same freshness as if it happened yesterday, and when I ask what they're afraid would happen if they set it down, the answer is almost always some version of: it would mean what happened to me didn't count. The ego would rather suffer than risk feeling insignificant. That's not a character flaw. That's the ego doing exactly what it was built to do, in a situation it was never built for.

Underneath both costs sits something more foundational: a fear of dissolution. The ego, at bottom, is terrified of its own ending, because its entire structure is organized around the assumption that it is the thing that must persist. This series is going to keep gently, and then not so gently, pressuring exactly that assumption.

This is why the ego's relationship to death is so fraught, and why so much of your daily anxiety, traced back far enough, connects to mortality in ways you rarely notice consciously. A threat to your reputation, your competence, your standing – these register in the nervous system with an intensity wildly disproportionate to the actual stakes, until you realize the ego is processing them as threats to existence itself. Your body does not distinguish between 'I might lose this argument' and 'I might die.' It responds to both the same way, because as far as the ego is concerned, they are the same event.

The writer of Ecclesiastes understood this better than most modern psychology textbooks manage to: 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity' – not because life is worthless, but because the ego's endless project of self-maintenance is, in the end, chasing after wind. You cannot secure a self that was never meant to be the final thing you are. Here is something I want to plant now and return to later: there is something in you the ego is hiding from you, precisely because that something does not die, does not need defending, and does not require the constant maintenance the ego has convinced you is necessary. You'll have to trust me on that for now. We'll get there, and it will be worth the wait.

One thing before you set this down, because I don't want you walking away simply feeling worse about your own ego's habits. Naming the cost is not the same as assigning blame. You didn't choose this filtering system any more than you chose the color of your eyes – it was assembled, as we discussed two weeks ago, mostly by people who loved you and mostly for reasons that made sense at the time. The goal this week is clear sight, not self-flagellation. People who turn this kind of honesty into another occasion for self-punishment have missed the point entirely – that's the ego finding a new costume, this time the costume of spiritual self-improvement. Notice the cost. Do not add a new layer of shame on top of it. That layer is not humility. It's the same old defense, wearing a robe.

SPIRITUAL EXERCISE – The Comparison Watch

For one hour today, notice every single time you compare yourself to another person – their looks, their success, their marriage, their kids, their spiritual progress, anything. Just notice. No judgment, no trying to stop it. You are only gathering data on how constant and automatic this process actually is.

THIS WEEK'S CHALLENGE

Ask yourself honestly: what is your ego most afraid of? Not in the abstract – specifically. Name the actual fear underneath your most persistent anxiety this week.

This is a heavier newsletter than most, and I know it. I'd rather be honest with you about the cost of the thing we're examining than pretend the ego is a minor inconvenience. It isn't. But naming the cost clearly is the first real step toward not paying it forever.

I hope you have a splendid week. I look forward to continuing our time together in the next issue. May God enfold you and make his face to shine upon you, this day and always!

FROM THE AUTHOR

Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual
Transcendence

Are you looking for clarity in difficult times? Longing for a deeper sense of
purpose and meaning? This book is for you.

Get the Book on Amazon →

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Ken Kaisch 8/7/26 Ken Kaisch 8/7/26

What the Ego Is Good For

A defense of the self before we examine its limits

WHAT THIS NEWSLETTER OFFERS

I want to slow down this week and do something unusual for a series that's ultimately going to ask you to loosen your grip on the ego: I want to defend it, without hedging.

After last week's newsletter, several of you wrote in with some version of this question, and I suspect more of you were thinking it without writing: if the ego is such a problem, why does every human culture on earth build one? Why didn't evolution, or God, or whatever mechanism shaped us, just skip this step? Fair question. Most spiritual teaching skips past it too quickly, so let's not.

Here's the truth, stated flatly: without a functioning ego, you cannot be a responsible adult. Full stop. Personal responsibility requires a self that persists over time – a self that can say, 'I did that yesterday, and I own the consequences today.' Remove the ego entirely and you don't get a saint. You get someone who can't hold a job, can't keep a promise, can't be trusted in a relationship, because there is no stable 'I' around to be trusted in the first place. Every culture builds an ego because a functioning ego is the precondition for functioning in society at all.

I once counseled a young man who'd gotten swept up, in his early twenties, in a group that preached ego-dissolution as the whole of spiritual life – no boundaries, no personal responsibility, just 'flow.' Within two years he'd lost his job, alienated his family, and could not explain, even to himself, why any of his choices mattered. He wasn't enlightened. He was untethered. What he'd lost wasn't his ego's tyranny – it was the scaffolding that would have let him do any real spiritual work at all. I'm telling you this now, early, because it matters that you're honest with yourself about what happens when people skip the defense I'm making this week and go straight to demolition.

“You cannot give yourself away in love if there is no self to give.”

There's something deeper here too, and popular spiritual writing that treats the ego purely as an obstacle usually misses it. Genuine relationship – real love, the kind that costs you something – requires a self to do the giving. You cannot give yourself away in love if there is no self there to give. A puddle doesn't love. A person loves, and a person, to love, needs enough of a boundary around themselves to know where they end and the other begins. The ego – the very thing this series is going to spend twenty-some weeks teaching you to hold more lightly – is also the thing that makes real human intimacy possible in the first place. Hold both of those facts at once. Don't resolve the tension by deciding one of them isn't true.

So when the great contemplative traditions call the ego an illusion, or say it must be released, or describe it as something to die to – and they all say some version of this, Christian mystics, Buddhist teachers, Sufis – they don't mean it's useless. There's a distinction that gets flattened in almost every popular rendering of this material: the difference between dissolving the ego and transcending it.

Dissolving means erasing it – no functioning self at all, unable to show up for your responsibilities or your relationships. Nobody serious recommends that. Anyone who tells you that's the goal has misunderstood their own tradition, badly. Transcending is different. It means the ego stops being the final authority on who you are – stops sitting on a throne it was never built to occupy – while still functioning as the practical, everyday self that gets you to work on time and keeps your promises. Less like demolishing a house, more like discovering the house was never the whole property. There's a great deal more land and a couple of barns out back that you didn't know were yours.

Sit with that distinction this week, because almost every misunderstanding people bring to the spiritual life traces back to confusing these two. They hear 'let go of the ego' and picture a personality-erasing spiritual lobotomy, and understandably, that terrifies them, so they back away from the whole conversation. That is not what's on offer. What's on offer is closer to promotion than erasure – a demotion for the ego, from king to trusted advisor, and a promotion for something underneath it that has been waiting quietly the entire time.

Jesus never asked anyone to stop being a self. He asked Peter to be more fully Peter, Mary Magdalene to be more fully herself, restored rather than erased. The demand of the Gospel, as I read it, was never annihilation. It was reordering – putting the ego back in its proper place, several rungs down from where it had installed itself without asking.

This is worth holding a moment longer, because it changes how you should read everything that follows in this series. When later issues talk about the ego 'dying,' about 'letting go,' about the self being 'an illusion,' hear those phrases through this week's lens, not through the flattened, caption-ready version that circulates in a lot of popular spirituality. We are not building toward a version of you with no boundaries, no preferences, no capacity to say no. We are building toward a version of you whose boundaries, preferences, and capacity to say no are no longer the whole of what you take yourself to be – held rather than gripped, and available rather than defended.

I don't want this series leaving you convinced your whole personality is the villain of the story. It isn't. We're after something far more precise than that, and precision matters enormously in this kind of work. Sloppy thinking here does real damage. See you next week.

I hope you have a splendid week ahead. I look forward to continuing our time together in the next issue. May God enfold you and make his face to shine upon you, this day and always!

FROM THE AUTHOR

Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual
Transcendence

Are you looking for clarity in difficult times? Longing for a deeper sense of
purpose and meaning? This book is for you.

Get the Book on Amazon →

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Ken Kaisch 7/31/26 Ken Kaisch 7/31/26

How the Ego Was Built

The self you defend was assembled by others

WHAT THIS NEWSLETTER OFFERS

Here's a question I asked constantly in my counseling office, and it never once failed to produce a long pause: if your sense of self is so important to you — worth defending, worth losing sleep over, worth a decade of therapy — where exactly did it come from? Who built it?

The honest answer is uncomfortable: you didn't. Not mostly. A newborn arrives with no ego at all. She doesn't know she's a 'she.' No name, no nationality, no personality, no story. For a brief window she is simply open — experience with no filter deciding what counts. Anyone who has held a newborn has felt this. There is a purity there that adults spend the rest of their lives, whether they know it or not, quietly grieving the loss of.

Then the construction starts, and it is a construction — assembled piece by piece, almost entirely by other people, almost entirely before you were old enough to have a vote. A smile gets rewarded. A cry gets soothed or ignored, depending on the household. A joke lands at the dinner table and gets repeated because it works. Somewhere around age two or three a child starts hearing 'good girl' and 'bad boy,' and without anyone explaining the rules, she starts sorting her own impulses into two piles: safe to show, and better hidden. That sorting mechanism, running quietly for the rest of her life, is what we call the ego.

“We defend loudest what we suspect, somewhere underneath, is least secure.”

I want to be precise here, because it would be easy to hear this as an indictment of parents, and it isn't one. Most of what gets built this way is necessary. You needed to learn that hitting your sister has consequences. You needed to learn that showing up on time matters, that your words land on other people, that impulse and action are not the same thing. The ego, in this sense, is a real achievement — a survival toolkit built under real conditions, for a world that would otherwise chew you up before you learned to read.

SCIENCE SPEAKS

The developmental psychologist Charles Cooley coined 'the looking-glass self' in 1902 — the claim that we come to know ourselves largely by imagining how others see us, then internalizing that imagined view as our own identity. Decades later, D.W. Winnicott's work on the 'good-enough' mother showed that a child's developing sense of self depends on a mix of attunement (being seen and responded to accurately) and rupture (being misread or left waiting) — both necessary, in the right proportion, for a self resilient enough to hold together under pressure. Attachment researchers since have found the same pattern from a different angle: a child's earliest bond with a caregiver becomes the template the nervous system uses, for the rest of that person's life, to answer the question 'is it safe to be seen?' None of these researchers were writing theology. Notice what they confirm from an entirely different direction: the self is relationally assembled, not internally given. Scripture said this first, in its own language. It's worth knowing the data backs it up.

Here's the part that took me years to sit with honestly. Because this self was built by others, under real dependency — a small child cannot survive without the approval of the adults around her — we learn, early and deep in the bone, that survival is tied to maintaining a particular version of ourselves. Not the true version. The approved one. Once that wiring is in place, defending the approved version becomes a matter of felt survival decades later, long after the actual stakes are gone. A financially secure fifty-year-old can still feel something close to panic when a colleague raises an eyebrow in a meeting. The ego does not know the war is over. It is still guarding a wall it built when it was three years old, against an enemy that has been dead for forty years.

I worked with a retired executive some years ago — by any reasonable measure a success — who could not tolerate being interrupted mid-sentence without a flash of anger that embarrassed him afterward, every time. We traced it back, slowly, over months, to a father who talked over him constantly at the dinner table, whose approval he never managed to secure. The three-year-old inside that sixty-year-old was still fighting to be heard at a table that had not existed for half a century. This is not a rare story. It is closer to the default one, just with different furniture each time.

This is also why the self gets defended so hard — far harder than the actual stakes ever justify. I'd put it plainly: we defend loudest what we suspect, somewhere underneath, is least secure. Something you built yourself, out of borrowed material, under pressure, feels far more fragile than something you assume was simply handed to you as bedrock. If you found yourself getting defensive reading the last few paragraphs, on behalf of your parents or on behalf of your own hard-won self-understanding, that defensiveness is not a distraction from this newsletter. It is the newsletter, live, in your own chest.

None of this makes the ego your enemy. Scaffolding isn't the enemy of a building — it's essential, right up until the building can stand on its own, at which point the scaffolding has to come down or it starts getting in the way of anyone actually living there. That's the position to hold going forward: the ego did its job. It got you through childhood. It was never designed to be the final word on who you are, and treating it as the final word is exactly where the trouble starts.

A small scriptural anchor before we move on, because it belongs here. Genesis tells us that after each act of creation, 'God saw that it was good.' That includes the raw material your ego was assembled from — your temperament, your early hungers, even your fears. The construction itself is not a mistake or a fall from grace. What matters is what you do with the building once it's up, and whether you ever get curious enough to ask who's actually living inside it.

If you're a parent, or spend real time around young children, hold this one differently than the rest of us. You are, right now, literally part of someone else's construction crew. That's not a burden I want to hand you carelessly — it's simply true, and better carried consciously than by accident. You cannot give a child a perfect ego; none of us got one, and none of us will build one. You can give a child the repeated experience of being seen accurately and loved anyway. That, more than any parenting technique in print, is what builds a self sturdy enough to eventually loosen its own grip.

SPIRITUAL EXERCISE — Who Decided This?

Write three sentences, each beginning 'I am...' Write the first thing that comes, honest and unfiltered. Then, for each one, ask plainly: who decided this? A parent? A teacher? A moment in sixth grade? A culture that rewarded one trait and punished another? You are not trying to disown the answer. You are trying to see the hand that built it.

THIS WEEK'S CHALLENGE

Pick the 'I am' sentence that felt most tender to write. Ask yourself honestly: if this belief about myself were proven false tomorrow, what exactly would I be afraid of losing?

This one touches close to home for me too. I spent a good chunk of my own life defending a version of myself that a well-meaning, conflicted household handed me before I was old enough to object. Seeing the scaffolding for what it was didn't destroy me. It was, oddly, a relief. I hope some version of that relief finds you this week.

I hope you have a splendid week. I look forward to continuing our time together in the next issue. May God enfold you and make his face to shine upon you, this day and always!

FROM THE AUTHOR

Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual
Transcendence

Are you looking for clarity in difficult times? Longing for a deeper sense of
purpose and meaning? This book is for you.

Get the Book on Amazon →

KNOW SOMEONE WHO'D VALUE THIS?

If this issue moved you, consider forwarding it to one person whose inner life
you respect. Send their email address to:

ken@insidetheinvisible.com

Ken Kaisch 7/24/26 Ken Kaisch 7/24/26

The Self You Think You Are

An introduction to the question that changes everything

WHAT THIS NEWSLETTER OFFERS

Who are you?

Not your name. Not your job. Not the story you'd tell at a dinner party, edited for the room. I mean right now, this second — who is reading these words? Who decided whether to keep reading or check your phone? Notice that decision happening. Now: who noticed it?

Most people can't answer that. Not won't — can't. I've asked some version of this question for over forty years, first as a parish priest, then as a clinical psychologist, and I'm telling you plainly: almost nobody has actually stopped and answered it. They answer easier questions instead. What do you do for work. Married or single. Christian, Buddhist, none of it. Those are fine questions. They are not this question, and if you noticed yourself reaching for one of them just now, that's not an accident. That's the mechanism this entire series is about, showing up in the first paragraph.

A woman sat across from me years ago — sharp, accomplished, the kind of person who'd answered every question life put to her with competence and grace. I asked her, almost offhand, 'Who are you, underneath all of that?' She opened with her résumé. I stopped her. She tried her relationships next — wife, mother, daughter. I stopped her again. Third attempt, she went quiet. After a long silence: 'I don't actually know.' That silence was the most honest thing that happened in my office that year. It is the beginning of all real spiritual work, and I mean that as a clinical claim, not a devotional one. Everything before that silence is management. Everything after it is the actual work.

This series spends the next twenty-seven weeks doing something you have almost certainly never done: taking 'Who am I?' seriously as a working question, not a philosophy-class parlor game you nod along to and forget by Tuesday. Here is what I believe, stated plainly so you know exactly what you signed up for: the self you take yourself to be is not the deepest thing you are. Discovering what lies beneath it does not improve your life. It changes what you are. That difference matters, and I'll be returning to it. It changes how you handle your next hard conversation, how you carry grief you've been managing instead of feeling, how you meet your own death when it comes for you — and it is coming, regardless of how well you've arranged not to think about it.

“The self you take yourself to be is not the deepest thing you are.”

Here is a distinction you'll need for everything that follows. There is the self you perform — assembled for your boss, your spouse, your kids, your feed, and even for yourself on the days you're trying to feel okay about how things are going. Most people, at some point, get tired of that performance and go looking for what's underneath it — the 'real me,' the self behind the mask. Most spiritual advice stops exactly there. Take off the mask, it tells you, and you'll find your true self.

That advice is incomplete, and the incompleteness matters. The self underneath the mask is still a construction. A more convincing one. Better lit, better rehearsed — but built, the same as the mask was. Every mystical tradition I've studied, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi, arrives by a different road at the same claim: beneath even that deeper self, there is something that was never built at all. Something not defended, not performed, not maintained. Something never born, and therefore not subject to ending. Finding that is the actual goal of the spiritual life. Not an eventual bonus for the devout. The point. Everything else — the moral effort, the good deeds, the theology you've collected — is preparation for that one discovery, and most of it, honestly, is a way of postponing it.

So there are three layers here, not two, and I want you holding all three from week one because the rest of this series is built on the distinction. The performed self is the one you manage for other people. The assumed self is the one you privately believe is really you, underneath the management — your temperament, your history, your wounds, the story you'd tell a therapist. And beneath that, a third thing, which this series calls the ground: not a better story about yourself, but the awareness in which every story, performed or assumed, is simply appearing. Most people spend a lifetime working on layer one. The genuinely reflective spend a few years working on layer two, usually in therapy or in a good confessor's office, and mistake that work for the finish line. It isn't. It's the middle of the map.

I expect some resistance to that last claim, and I want to name it before it does its quiet work on you. If you've done real inner work — years of therapy, an honest look at your family of origin, a serious meditation practice — some part of you is right now assembling a case for why you've already arrived at layer three, or at least don't need this newsletter to tell you it exists. Notice that case being built. That's layer two, defending its position as though it were the ground floor. It is not accusing you of anything. It is simply what layer two does when it senses a further floor beneath it. I'd know — I've caught myself doing it in my own inner work more times than I care to admit.

I expect that lands as a large claim for week one. It's meant to. I would rather you feel destabilized now than comfortable and unchanged in week twenty-seven. Comfortable and unchanged is the default condition of most religious life, and I spent three years in seminary learning everything about Christianity except how to actually meet the God it claims to be about. I decided in my thirties I wasn't going to keep doing that. This series is what came of that decision, and it is not written to keep you comfortable. If you wanted comfortable, there are gentler newsletters than this one.

So where do we start? Not with an answer — with a practice of noticing, because you cannot think your way to this one. Thinking is the exact activity that keeps generating candidates: I am my job, my history, my opinions, and none of them survive real pressure. The move available to you instead is to turn attention toward the one doing the thinking. Not to analyze it. To notice it is there, before you explain it away.

Try this for ten seconds, now, not later: notice that you are aware. Not aware of any particular thing — notice the plain fact of awareness itself, underneath whatever thought happens to be passing through it at this moment.

You can't get a grip on it. It has no edge you can locate. And it is, at the same time, more certain than any thought you've ever had — more certain than the thought 'I am thinking about this awareness right now,' because that thought needed the awareness to arrive first. Descartes stopped at 'I think, therefore I am.' That's one step short. Before the thinking, there is awareness, noticing that thinking is happening. That noticing is where this series is headed. By Part III it will stop feeling like a philosophical curiosity and start feeling like the most practical thing you've ever learned to do — practical in the sense that it will change what you do with your hands and your face the next time someone insults you in a meeting.

A word on the shape of this journey, because it helps to know where you're going before you start walking. Part I, these next six weeks, looks at the ego without flinching: where it came from, what it's actually good for, and where it starts costing you more than it gives. I want to say this now, before we start dismantling anything: the ego is not the enemy. It kept you alive and functional. We are not here to destroy it. We are here to see it clearly enough that it stops running the show by default — which it currently does, whether you've noticed or not.

Part II widens the lens to the 'we' as well as the 'I,' because you are not only an individual self. There is a collective one running underneath, and it explains a great deal about why otherwise reasonable groups of people do unreasonable things together. Part III takes us into consciousness itself, where Christian mystics, pre-Nicene sources, and Hindu and Buddhist teachers compare notes — and where we take an honest look at what contemporary neuroscience and philosophy of mind admit, to their credit, that they still cannot explain. Part IV is the destination. I won't spoil it. It involves a shift in where you're centered that no self-help book has ever managed to deliver, because self-help books are, almost without exception, tools for improving the very self this series is asking you to see through.

One thing before I let you go. This series is built to be read in order — each issue leans on the last, the way a real argument does. If you're new here, welcome; you need no prior background. If you've read my other newsletters for years, some of this early ground will feel familiar. Stay anyway. We are going further this time, and staying there longer than is comfortable.

I don't take it lightly that you're willing to spend twenty-seven weeks on this with me. I couldn't have written this series in my thirties. It took most of a lifetime of getting it wrong to have anything worth saying about getting it right. Let's find out together what's underneath the noise — and let's not pretend that's a comfortable thing to go looking for.

I hope you have a splendid week. I look forward to continuing our time together in the next issue. May God enfold you and make his face to shine upon you, this day and always!

FROM THE AUTHOR

Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence

Are you looking for clarity in difficult times? Longing for a deeper sense of
purpose and meaning? This book is for you.

Get the Book on Amazon →

KNOW SOMEONE WHO'D VALUE THIS?

If this issue moved you, consider forwarding it to one person whose inner life
you respect. Send their email address to:

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Read the 1st Newsletter Series Here