The ego
… the blueprint for dysfunction that every human being carries within: the ego.
Spirituality and religion
Many people are already aware of the difference between spirituality and religion. They realise that having a belief system – a set of thoughts that you regard as the absolute truth – does not make you spiritual no matter what the nature of those beliefs is. In fact the more you make your thoughts (beliefs) into your identity, the more cut off you are from the spiritual dimension within yourself. Many ‘religious’ people are stuck at that level.
ego and its associations
Ego is no more that this: identification with form, which primarily means thought forms. If evil has any reality and it has a relative, not an absolutely reality – this is also its definition: complete identification with form – physical forms, thought forms, emotional forms.
heaven
We need to understand here that heaven is not a location but refers to the inner realm of consciousness. This is the esoteric meaning of the world, and this is also its meaning in the teachings of Jesus. Earth on the other hand, is the other manifestation in form which is always a reflection of the inner.
Chance encounters and coincidences
So when you become aligned with the whole, you become a conscious part of the interconnectedness of the whole and its purpose: the emergences of consciousness into this world. As a result, spontaneous helpful occurrences, chance encounters, coincidences, and synchronistic events happened much more frequently. Carl Jung called synchronicity as ‘a casual connecting principle.’ This means there is no casual connection between synchronistic events on our surface level of reality. It is an outer manifestation of an underlying intelligence behind the world of appearances and a deeper connectedness that our minds cannot understand.
Being on with life …pg. 115
How to be at peace now? By making peace with the present moment. The present moment is the field on which the game of life happens. It cannot happen anywhere else. Once you have made peace with the present moment, see what happens, what you can do or choose to do, or rather what life does through you. There are three words that convey the secret art of living, the secret of all success and happiness: One With Life. Being one with life is being one with Now. You then realize that you don’t live your life, but life lives you. Life is the dancer, and you are the dance.
one with the Source
Everything, a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being, is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth… … Underneath the surface appearance, everything is not only connected with everything else, but also with the Source of all life out of which it came.
having and the ego
The ego tends to equate having with Being: I have, therefore I am… How you are seen by others becomes the mirror that tells you what you are like and who you are. The ego’s sense of self-worth is in most cases bound up. You need others to give you a sense of self, and if you live in a culture that to a large extent equates self-worth with how much and what you have, if you cannot look through this collective delusion, you will be condemned to chasing after things for the rest of your life in the vain hope of finding you worth and completion of your sense of self there.
the present moment
Most egos have conflicting wants. They want different things at different times or may not even know what they want expect that they don’t want what is: the present moment.
negative emotions
This thought form and the emotions it creates, such as anger, resentment, self-pity and so on, they strongly identify with and it immediately takes the place of all the other identifications that have collapsed through the loss. In other words, the ego quickly finds a new form. The fact that this new form is a deeply unhappy one doesn’t concern the ego too much, as long as it has an identity, good or bad.
non-reactions
Somebody becomes as enemy if you personalise the unconsciousness that is the ego. Non reaction is not weakness but strength. Another word for non-reaction is forgiveness. To forgive is to overlook, or rather to look through.
awareness and the thinker
Whenever you notice that voice, you will realise that you are not the voice, but the one who is aware of it. In fact, you are the awareness that is aware of the voice. In the background there is the awareness. In the foreground, there is the voice, the thinker. In this way you are becoming free of the ego, free of the unobserved mind.
religion and the truth
If you believe only your religion is the truth, you are using it in the service of the ego. Used in such a way, religion becomes ideology and creates an illusory sense of superiority as well as division and conflict between people. In the service of the Truth, religious teachings represent signposts or maps left behind by awakened human to assist you in spiritual awakening, that is to say, in becoming free of identification with form.
what you resist, persist
In certain cases, you may need to protect yourself or someone from being harmed by another, but beware of making it your mission to ‘eradicate evil’ as you are likely to turn into the very thing you are fighting against. … Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persist… War is a mind-set, and all action that comes out of such a mind-set will either strengthen the enemy, the perceived evil, or if the war is won, will create a new enemy, a new evil equal or often worse than the one that was defeated.
Gossiping…
Even if he or she is the president or the pope, you feel superior in that moment because you know more. Many people are addicted to gossiping partly for this reason. In addition, gossiping often carries an element of malicious criticism and judgement of others, and so it also strengthens the ego through the implied but imagined moral superiority that is there whenever you apply a negative judgement to anyone.
Anger…
One of the most common ego-repair mechanisms is anger, which causes a temporary but huge ego-inflation. All repair mechanisms make perfect sense to the ego but are actually dysfunctional.
When you are being criticised…
A powerful spiritual practice is consciously to allow the diminishment of ego when it happens without attempting to restore it. I recommend that you experiment with this from time to time. For example, when someone criticises you, blames you, or calls you names, instead of immediately retaliating or defending yourself – do nothing. Allow the self-image to remain diminished and become alert to what that feels like deep inside you.
Playing roles
How you speak to an adult maybe be different from how you speak to a child. What is that? You are playing roles. You are not yourself…. A range of conditioned patterns behaviours come into effect between 2 human beings that determine the nature of interaction.
pg 98 – 100 parent-child relationship
“If you think you are so enlightened,” Ram Dass said, “go and spend a week with your parents.” That is good advice. The relationship with your parents is not only the primordial relationship that sets the tone for all subsequent relationships; it is also a good test of your degree of presence. The more shared past there is in a relationship the more present you need to be; otherwise you will be forced to relive the past again and again.
pain-body
It maybe shocking when you realise for the fist time that there is something within you that periodically seeks emotional negativity, seeks unhappiness. You need even more awareness to see it in yourself that to recognise it in another person. Once the unhappiness has taken you over, not only do you want an end to it, but you want to make other just as miserable as you are in order to feed on their negative emotional reactions.
how to let go of the ego
There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet: human unconsciousness. The realisation is true forgiveness. With forgiveness, your victim identity dissolves, and your true power emerges – the power of presence. Instead of blaming the darkness, you bring in the light.