The ego complex is a psychic immune system. An immune system separates past and future conditions of the body by maintaining a present. The political system is the immune system, a method of compromise between opposing forces. It is the certain knowledge of the future failure of the immune system that provides the clue as to its relationship with the whole body that it separates.

The maintenance of the system is problematic; it requires constant effort to keep the opposing forces from devouring each other. It is a balancing act in which at any given moment you may fall off the wire. Maintenance is work, the expenditure of a finite amount of energy, to maintain the working body. To work is to eat and eliminate, to incorporate the good and abject the bad. The life-time of this working body is limited, and at the limit it stops working. We know it stops working, from having seen a corpse.

The idea that fuels the work is that the working body is the only body; that when the work stops, there is the void, empty infinite space. The idea implies that existence is work and that if you do not work, you do not exist. The working body is the conceptual body, the elemental body. The body that does not work is the imaginal body, the essential body. Time for work.