‘Awakening the mother mind’: Exploring the relationship between ego and the climate crisis

with a high chance of survival. Furthermore, it is illustrated how colonialism and institutions like religion exacerbate egoism in the world. The ego is defined, its growth origins traced, and its effects on the Earth highlighted. Finally, the article concludes by suggesting how to diminish ego and awaken the mother mind within every one of us. Secondary data analysis method is used throughout the article. Contribution: This article applies existing and timeless ideas to figure out solutions to the climate crisis. It also analyses gender issues through the lenses of analytical psychology. Different disciplines are applied to explore the concept of the ‘mother mind’. It is unique in that it places the burden on the individual, stressing that the solutions are found within an individual.

began, and how humanity came to be. The myth begins in a comparable way to that of the Bible in the book of Genesis, but immediately takes a turn when it introduces a goddess. According to Credo (Mutwa 1969), nothing existed in the beginning -no Sun, no Moon or Earth, no signs of life. There was only darkness. This nothingness lasted for a long time, but no one knows how long it lasted. Eventually from that nothingness, the great mother goddess Ma arose. At the command of the Eternal Spirit, whom the Zulu people call Umkulunkulu, she created herself in human form, and then she created the stars, the Sun and the Earth. When Ma was finished, she sat down on a mountain to rest; but while she rested, she started to feel lonely and longed for a companion. The Eternal Spirit promised her a companion, of whom Umkulunkulu called [male], and so she waited. After a significantly long while, a voice called out to her, addressing her as beloved. She ran towards it excitedly as she thought it was her mate -a 'male'. It was, but in the form that she had not expected. The voice was that of the tree of life. Ma rejected the tree of life, but the tree of life pursued her and eventually captured her by knocking her to sleep with a stone that we now know as the Moon. And then, after countless years, Ma felt movements inside of her, which grew greater and greater and caused her cruel pain. These pains lasted a long time, but finally, after a 1000 years of birth pains, the great goddess delivered a nation of human beings, who later spread to populate the Earth.
Ma is a goddess. She is the mother that birthed human beings and made the world as instructed by the Eternal Spirit. If she birthed the human race, it is safe to assume that her nature, which is feminine, is found in every human being. The tree of life is the masculine that joined with Ma to produce human beings. Every human being carries within them the nature of the tree of life too -the masculine.
The ego emerges only later in the myth as human beings who were birthed by Ma began procreating. According to Credo, after humans were born by Ma, peace reigned upon the Earth for 10 000 years. Human beings were only allowed to slaughter certain beasts, as permitted by the Great Spirit, in accordance with their needs. However, evil was lingering on the horizon, and thus humanity's downfall was near. A beautiful woman named Nelesi gave birth to a deformed child. The gods ordered her to kill the child because he was evil. She refused to kill her only beloved son and ran away to hide with him. One day, when Nelesi's son was grown up, she found him creating something. When she asked what he was creating, Za-Ha-Rrellel (as he was called) replied that he was making a weapon of conquest. Nelesi protested this, but Za-Ha-Rrellel killed his mother. This is how the ego, the conquering mind emerged in Credo Mutwa's myth. Legend says that Za-Ha-Rrellel was not long in conquering the world. He convinced people that he was sent by the Great Spirit Umkulunkulu, to erase evil, and that the gods were wrong because they kept people in a life of ignorance and savagery.
The mother mind is the divine feminine mind, which is responsible for creation. The warrior mind is the masculine mind which is deformed by working too closely with the ego. Any one of the two minds is prone to evil if it functions on its own. The deformed child in the myth represents ego (a onesided mind). Za-Ha-Rrellel represents the warrior mind working hand in hand with ego. Nelesi should have agreed to have her deformed child killed.

Exploring Credo Mutwa's myth through the lens of anthropology -The rise of ego
The rise of the ego began in the Neolithic era. The Neolithic revolution was the critical transition that resulted in the emergence of agriculture, taking Homo sapiens from scattered groups of hunter-gatherers to farming villages and from there to technologically sophisticated societies (Goudie 2000). Before the Neolithic, however, was the Palaeolithic era (HIST 2020). The Palaeolithic era is interpreted as one that Credo Mutwa's myth imagines: there was a time when peace was upon the earth, when there was no destruction and animals were allowed to be killed only in accordance with human needs. Anthropologists say that the Palaeolithic era was characterised by hunters and gatherers -men hunted animals for meat and women gathered edible plants (Engels 1884). Humans lived a nomadic lifestyle, guided by the seasons. They viewed themselves as part of nature, built temporary houses using materials available in their surroundings. During the Palaeolithic era, social structure was based on family and the priority of the family was to find food -a subsistence lifestyle (HIST 2020). There were people who could make tools and other necessary objects for their survival, but food was their priority. The striking characteristic of the Palaeolithic era was that there was a wide and deep knowledge of nature; this is because for human beings to survive, they had to understand their surroundings. For the purposes of the argument this paper makes, it is important to note that during the Paleolithic era, nature was not viewed as something to conquer and own, but only as a force to protect oneself against only when necessary, and as something of use to satisfy human needs-not wants.
Then the Neolithic revolution followed, and ended the Paleolithic era (Roth 2006). The hypothesis has always been that the Neolithic revolution was triggered by ecological forces, that is, climate change; however, this article agrees with the new evidence that suggests that Neolithic era was a product of the human mind (Mann 2011). The developments during the Neolithic revolution can be summed up as follows: systematic agriculture and animal domestication.
As women during the Palaeolithic went out to gather edible plants, they realised and developed a vast knowledge of plants including how they grow, what environment they preferred, when and how they looked when ripe. As they studied these plants, they realised that to simplify their lives, they could collect seeds from some of these plants and grow them near their homesteads. Instead of going out far into the bushes, they could farm these plants and propagate them in a systematic way (Roth 2006). With the development of farming plants, followed the need to domesticate animals. With the rise of systematic agriculture, human beings now needed animals to help with their agricultural activities (HIST 2020). For example, oxen were needed to help pull the plough. This development changed the system of huntergatherer. It changed who gathered the food. The system of gathering changed from exclusively female to male. The need for animals to help, necessitated that men help domesticate and herd animals that they previously hunted, so that these animals could assist with the labour involved in farming.
The Neolithic era did not happen everywhere at the same time. Some societies developed earlier and differently from others.
How did the Neolithic era exacerbate 'The ego?' The most obvious change that can be picked from the above discussion is the development of agriculture, domestication of animals and technological development. These developments created an imbalance between the sexes -an imbalance between the feminine energies and masculine energies. Masculine energy is attributed to the ego, but this will be discussed later in the article. It was during the Neolithic era that notions of retaining the land and building permanent homesteads began (We Plants Are Happy Plants 2018). Every tribe of family hung on to land that they called their own and would not share with anyone. Hanging on to land meant more conflicts because one had to protect one's land, and their harvest from thieves and wild animals and other enemies. In our context as the Bantu, this is a period marked by warswhen tribes went around attacking and conquering other tribes and displacing them from their land (Lye 1967). If they could not displace them, they would use the conquered tribe as slaves. This development of coerced labour is another significant marker of ego rising. Notions of storing wealth came up. Because there was plenty of harvest, as compared to the little that they gathered in the Palaeolithic era (clans gathered what was enough and never more than what they needed), now there was a need to store the surplus. One of the devastating changes that came with the Neolithic era is the reduction in the knowledge of plants and other species that existed before. Human beings' knowledge and vocabulary of nature were significantly reduced because now human beings focused on the few plants that they farmed and animals that they managed to domesticate. With the reduction of the vast knowledge of nature came a separation, a separation between human beings and nature. Human beings began to feel the need to conquer nature because it was now viewed as an object. This was the beginning of humans seeing the Earth and its other inhabitants as objects and not subjects. An object is something to use, but a subject is something one experiences as being connected to (Lambert 1997). We shall understand why the changes listed above are viewed as signals of a rise of the egoistic mind among humans, when we delve into the nature of the ego, how it manifests itself and why it is attributed mostly to men.

The ego
Ego is defined as part of an individual human being that sees itself as above, below, or against others (Horn 2008). It is important to mention that the ego is not an evil element of the human mind. It is only evil if it becomes too great and overpowers the individual. The ego, as explained by Freud, is a part of a person's psychology that deals with the demands of the outside world (Good Therapy 2015). The ego is rational, and functions as a problem solver. It must also negotiate the demands of the id and the superego. The id represents instincts while the superego functions as the perfectionist conscience (Stey 2011). According to Freud, the ego develops as a child separates from his/her parents and develops a sense of awareness and individuality. Jung (1969), having been influenced by Freud in his younger years, regarded the psyche to be made up of separate but interacting systems: ego, personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. Jung believed that the ego represents the conscious mind which carries thoughts, and memories, and is responsible for feelings of identity.
People with a well-developed ego, one that functions well as an advisory between the id and the superego, have these characteristics: they tend to deal with challenges well and are good at producing solutions to challenges. The ego is strategic, linear, focused, logical, still and thought-driven. It is these strengths that give a person with a healthy ego the confidence to deal with challenges and produce solutions (Freud 1965).
Why is the ego mostly attributed to men? The ego is not an exclusively male trait; it is also present in women because women too need it to survive. Humans had it during the hunter and gatherer stage because it was necessary for survival. A person with a low ego or high ego had low chances of surviving, together with their offspring (Becker 1997). During the hunter-gatherer times, women gathered, and men hunted. Women's role of gathering was less dangerous, and so they needed small egos. Women travelled in groups, did a lot of chatting and communicating on the way and went about their task in a leisurely and relaxed way as compared to that of men; ego did not play a huge role. Men, however, had to face the dangerous task of hunting for meat. Hunting was and is still not an activity done in groups. A hunting warrior often had to move alone because he needed silence so as not to scare his target away. A hunting warrior needed a huge ego if he was ever going to survive in the wild. He needed an affirmation of his identity, confidence that he was the best and could deal with anything that might happen to him while hunting. He needed a huge ego to be successful in the task of hunting. He needed to think in a straight way and block out any noise and distraction from outside. Furthermore, it was the hunter who arrived with the biggest catch that gained respect and status from his clan (Hill 2009). This also meant http://www.hts.org.za Open Access that chances of him getting a partner (woman) were remarkably high. Women bear children, and because human children are very demanding, women always went for the man who was best at hunting. The clan filled with men who had huge egos had more food. It was the man who brought the biggest kill who had the opportunity to procreate and build a clan.
A study that lasted for years was conducted on a group of Chimpanzees, and the results of this study were presented in a book titled Chimpanzee Politics ( de Waal, 2007). It was found that there is a link between social status and sex, meaning the higher the chimp was on the social ladder, the more sex he had (Waal 2007). Because humans are closely related and similar in many ways to chimps, it can be assumed that human societies thrive on a similar structure, especially during the Palaeolithic era. A trait in human beings that had an advantage and contributed to their survival eventually took over as a gene and had an evolutionary impact on humans (Hutton 2018). That is why most men have bigger egos than women.
Men tend to focus on one thing at a time (Fisher 1999). Men are good at narrowing their attention, blocking out extraneous stimuli and channelling their attention on the matter at hand. When faced with a problem, men tend to focus on the immediate problem, without much context, and then proceed in a straightforward and uncomplicated way. This is a trait inherited through evolution from our Palaeolithic, hunting ancestors. It is not an evil trait. However, when an imbalance and a lack of control of the ego happen, problems arise.
It is possible to have an imbalanced relationship of the id, ego and superego. Sigmund Freud compares the relationship between the ego and the id with that of a horse rider (Freud 1965). It is possible to have an extremely low ego or a high ego. These are not ideal situations. Freud uses the example of a horse rider to explain how this imbalance can occur. He says, 'Just as a rider may not always be in control of a horse, the id's primal urges may sometimes be too powerful for the ego to keep in check'. The horse represents the id, and the rider represents the ego. Sigmund Freud's analogy can also be understood in another way to mean that the ego too (the rider) can be in too much control of the id (the horse); in that case the ride is difficult. When there is an imbalance, problems of personality arise; for example, people with extremely low egos find it difficult to deal with reality, to face challenges and to cope with life's demands. For the purposes of this article's argument, we shall not deal in detail with low egos. Much focus will be invested on people with a big ego.
When an individual has a big ego, they tend to exhibit certain personality traits. These people are said to be egotistical. Egotism is the excessive love of and worship of oneself (Yeshe 2006). Egotistical people think highly of themselves and expect other people to feel the same. They believe that their way of thinking is the only correct way and impose their ways of seeing on others. They have low levels of empathy. People with too much ego must always be the centre of attention because it reinforces their extreme sense of importance -they thrive off recognition. They have a tendency to compare themselves with others because they always must be better than everyone else. A person with a huge ego does not make genuine connections with others; instead they build artificial and superficial relationships that only serve their end goal, which is to shine and be recognised. Because of the habit of using people as ladders, they tend to neglect social relations with people who do not serve their goal. The most lethal trait of egoistic people, lethal both to themselves and the environment, is that they struggle to perceive reality. Instead of seeing what is real and dealing with it, they both avoid the situation and act as if it does not exist, or instead of confronting it, they project the bad happenings onto others (Satre 1937). Carl Jung's concept (1969) of the psyche proposes the theory of animus and anima. Carl Jung states that every human being has two mentalities: a masculine mentality called 'animus' and a feminine one called 'anima'. The anima is the mother mind. To emphasise this in biological terms, human beings are divided into two persons. Their brains are divided into the right and left hemispheres (Sperry 1952).

The mother mind
The left hemisphere is the warrior mind, which deals with the world and the right hemisphere is the anima which expresses itself through the left part of the brain. The ideal human, according to the French epistemologist Gastorn Bachelard, is one who is in touch with both these sides (Shueibi 2017). This article interprets the anima to be the nonego, to be the mother mind that Credo Mutwa alludes to, because the traits that Carl Jung says it carries, are similar to what Credo Mutwa says the mother mind is like.
Femininity is more exercised in women but it also dwells inside every one of us (Canham-Gezane 2013). Femininity represents creativity, innovation, non-linear thinking, intuition and vision. The feminine represents inner wisdom, change, rebirth and authentic empowerment. Femininity values beauty, love, communication, support, spirituality, spontaneity and connectivity. The anima, the non-ego or the mother mind thinks contextually, a way of thinking that is referred to as web thinking (Fisher 1999). It is a thinking style that has little to do with logic, but more with inspiration.

The link between the ego and climate crisis
Climate crisis refers to the sense of urgency about climate change (Goudie 2000). The climate is not just changing, but the change is causing a crisis. It is causing the crisis of rising sea levels, intense drought, water scarcity, severe fires, flooding, melting of polar ice, severe storms and declining biodiversity. What is climate change then? Climate change refers to the long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns. These shifts can be natural; however, human activity has been the main cause of climate change since 1800, due to burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas (Hulme 2022).
Ego is expressed through human personality and personality is manifested through a human being's activities. The warrior mind, the ego, the animus, as discussed above, carries traits that, this article argues, exacerbate climate change. An egocentric person is out to conquer the world and it is this conquering mentality that destroys mother earth. An egoistic warrior is not interested in seeing the whole of reality, or acknowledging other beings as real and deserving of preservation. The mother mind, however, sees and comprehends the whole. It recognises that all that exist deserve to be accommodated when making decisions, and it is not always for its benefit that it reaches a conclusion. Just as a mother does not always make decisions that serve her alone, but that serve the child too, the mother mind functions in a similar way.
As mentioned above, the invention of agriculture is where it began to go wrong. It was not only the positive that sprang from the Neolithic; the Neolithic era was the beginning of civilisation as we know it, so there also sprung institutions like religion, governments -institutions that contributed to the situation we are in today. These institutions succeeded in suppressing the feminine and promoting the masculine. The masculine has been running things for years. The masculine print can be spotted in every institution. Today the masculine mind is dominant in both males and females, but not on equal basis. Movements like feminism, that although have in some ways positively impacted women's life, functioned to exacerbate the masculine mind, to activate it in women. It is the situation now that the number of females who identify with the warrior mind has increased.

Religion, ego and climate
Religion influences culture. It is impossible to analyse human activity without involving the force that influences and drives most humans -religion. Religion rose during the Neolithic era. It is suggested that the human impulse to gather for sacred rituals arose as humans shifted from seeing themselves as part of the natural world (Mann 2011). However, this was not a major shift. In the African context, the major shift happened during colonialism. Ancient civilisations had many gods that stood for various aspects of life. Most ancient civilisations were polytheistic (Dalal 2009). With much strife, monotheism took over. Egypt had a brief flirt with monotheism when Akhneton was in power, but this led to many conflicts and when he died, they immediately returned to polytheism. It is ancient Judaism that receives the most attention regarding the creation of monotheism (Max 1952). Israel was polytheistic at one time, but they successfully transitioned to monotheism officially during the leadership of Moses.
Monotheism is one of the aspects of religion that have a negative impact on the environment. Monotheism is an egoladen concept, because it claims that there is only one God, and that God is the only standard of character that should be lived up to. The monotheistic God lacks in representation. If God is invented by human beings, then the God invented represents the psyche of the humans that invented him. The God of monotheism was not invented by balanced/mindful people, but by single-minded egotistic people, who saw only their reality as true. If God is male then he cannot be female, and if he is not female then femininity is seen as evil, because it is not found in God. However, feminine energy (mother mind) is necessary in maintaining the Earth, because feminine energies offer characteristics that the masculine cannot, and vice versa.
Monotheism created a universal, all-powerful and allknowing God (Royce 2022). This God is intolerant of other gods -gods of the sea, weather, forests, sensuality, among others. He is the only God and should not be questioned. The challenge found in this concept is that if God is modelled to be one thing, he cannot be the other, thus leading to exclusion of other aspects of life because they are not associated with the divine. The God of monotheism is intolerant. Monotheism causes conflicts by encouraging name calling, segregation and persecution. Monotheism oppresses freedom of thought.
Recall that ego says 'I am always right and anyone different from me is wrong'. Such is the egoistic tendency of monotheistic religion. The God of monotheistic religions is clearly a reflection of the hyper-egos that created him (Mckenna 2022).
Monotheism successfully spread around the world by employing manipulative ego tactics. In our African context, it is during the scramble for Africa when Christianity and colonialism presented themselves. The scramble for Africa began in 1880, when European nations rushed to acquire the most economically viable parts of the continent (Schmidt 2015). It was during this time that the Earth began to be truly, and to a great degree, exploited and hindered by human activity. Missionaries and traders functioned as allies in the rape of Africa. Here is where ego comes in: the trader's motive was obviously an ego-motivated journey because they came to Africa for the straightforward reason of economic gain.
In the case of missionaries, their activities were motivated by a philosophy known as scientific racism (Schmidt 2015). The missionaries/Europeans ranked the various human races in order from the most primitive to the most advanced. This ego-motivated philosophy, helped to justify European expansion and conquest, because according to it, Africans and other tribes were inferior. As Africans were busy getting cured of their primitiveness, the European traders were busy exploiting Africa for its resources. Europeans weakened indigenous groups in Africa and their culture. Indigenous people had their own system which had conserved their part of the Earth for as long as they inhabited it.
Christianity functioned very well as a suppressor of the feminine/mother mind in Africa. It was not only in Africa that the feminine was suppressed. Eckhart Tolle (2005:155-156) alludes to it in his book, A New Earth, when he gives an example of a 300-year period in Europe when millions of women were tortured and killed by the 'Holy Inquisition', an institution founded by the Roman Catholic Church to suppress heresy- [I]t was enough for a woman to show love for animals, walk alone in the fields or woods, or gather medicinal plants to be branded as a witch, then tortured and burned at the stake (Tolle 2005:155-156).
Although Africans were not burnt at the stake, this very attack on the feminine and primitive was done on Africans, by the European colonisers.
The suppression and attack of the mother mind by religion, especially monotheistic religions, led to an imbalance of the feminine and masculine. The mother mind was almost completely ousted, and so the elements that Credo says the mother mind contains, that is, thinking with the pelvic area, thinking broadly, and feelings of oneness with nature, were reduced.

How to diminish ego and awaken the mother mind: Implications on climate change
There are countless ways suggested by scholars, thinkers and artists from all over the world on how to diminish ego. How can ego be diminished in our collective cultures and within humans?
The reduction of ego automatically means the awakening of the mother mind/non-ego, because there will now be a balance between the two and no suppression of the other.
• Transformation of political systems is one way to diminish the collective ego. Women should be given positions of leadership to balance out the male egos concentrated in leadership. Men should stand slightly aside and open their minds to the perspective of females; there must be a balance when making decisions that take us forward as humanity. Women, being ambassadors of the feminine energy on the Earth, are the perfect candidates to give spiritual guidance and contextual answers to the problems we face. • The mother mind can be awakened by listening to indigenous tribes and awarding them the opportunity to give solutions to problems facing their lands, which in most cases have been taken from them. They know their land better than anyone from outside. Rather than labelling them as primitive and painting them as savages, human beings should have the humility to listen and understand. Hearing a story different from ours will dissolve boundaries and prove to modern egoistic people that the world is large and complex, and it does not fit the little box created in human minds as a result of ego. • The modern human being must redefine his/her ideas of wealth and success. Instead of defining people who have countless possessions as rich, one could, for example, explore alternatives of what wealth is. A rich person can, for instance, be defined as someone who is successfully living a nondestructive life and is in harmony with his and/or her environment. The awakened individual is a successful person. • Last but not least, is to forgive our dysfunctional past.
Even though we have been wronged as individuals and as a collective, we must not succumb to the hurt and nurse our bruised egos. We must forgive what happened and try to map a new (less dysfunctional) way forward. Forgiveness is one powerful way to diminish one's ego.

Conclusion
The slow rise of ego means the slow ruin of our climate and its inhabitants. It is this realisation that can get us seriously started on how we can fix the damage done. Ego is an exclusively human trait; it is found in humans and so much of the crisis we are in is caused by human activity. If we can fix our mindsets, our personalities, then the Earth will automatically start healing because we are its caretakers. When the caretakers heal, the Earth will heal. How we brought ourselves into this situation should be used to guide us on how we get ourselves out of it. Humanity arrived in this crisis by slowly abandoning its sense of partnership and society, by becoming more individualistic, drifting further and further from its relationship with nature. However, it is not by fully returning to our old systems that our problems will be fixed, because those systems too had their own flaws. It is by reflecting on elements that helped ancient systems thrive and incorporating them into our modern system. It is obvious that the ancients did not frown upon the feminine as much as the modern world does. If we can cease to treat the feminine as nonsense, stop treating the anima like an imbecile, then the feminine will reward us by offering insights and creative perspectives on how to solve the climate crisis. Let us become mindful people, who have equal access to the masculine and feminine energies within us.

Data availability
There was no field research conducted in compiling this article and there were no restrictions on the secondary data presented in this article.

Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any affiliated agency of the author.