Dissolving Ego

Wow.  It’s been a while since I blogged last.  Interesting how I go through these cycles when it comes to my expression.

The past few weeks have been a period of internal challenge.  As my higher self rises up, parts of me question what I’m doing, what I’m thinking.  I made a list of all the things I’d wish for if I had unlimited wishes.  

Then I started questioning all of them.

Then I got to the final question: “Supposed you were granted every one of those wishes.  Who would you be and what would you do?”  And I realized I would still be yearning.

Buddha is right.  Desire has no limit.  If all my wishes were granted, I’d start coming up with new wishes.  And the initial “hit” from each wish granted would be less and less until it was all just… “meh.”

I’ve been feeling a lot of “meh” lately in my time alone.  So I started diving in, being grateful for that feeling, being thankful to be at a place where I could finally experience the truth, that following the ego will lead to an empty, unhappy life.  I could be wealthy, have all the success in every area I could desire, but if the ego is in charge, my life would still be an empty building with nothing inside, surrounded by an empty landscape as far as the eye can see.

That’s the ego.

In an egoless existence, life has meaning.  Happiness in everywhere.  The house may be small, but it’s full of rich joy and fulfillment.  An egoless existence doesn’t want and never lacks.  An egoic existence never ceases to desire and is in perpetual lack.  Everything I manifest just turns to ash.

And my higher self began challenging me, because I have been “trying” to live an egoless life, but all my practices of grounding and meditating always had a deeper egoic ulterior motive – I as sabotaging myself.

By spending time alone going inside, I came face to face with the ultimate emptiness of my external pursuit.

A simple, minimalist life free from ego is far more full than a busy, abundant life lived through ego.  An ego free life doesn’t require a genie in a bottle granting wish after wish.  Just me.  Through the ego, higher purpose is just a to-do list; without the ego, higher purpose is embodied, one can feel his place in the movement of the universe, his infinite value.

None of this realization would have been possible had I not taken a large step back and allow myself to come to this place. Evolution is not supposed to be simple, easy and fun.  It involves challenge and suffering. And it requires to courage to face that discomfort.  The ego doesn’t go down without a fight.

SPOILER ALERT: The World Will Not End

It’s fascinating to see the human ego in all its folly.  We humans consider ourselves very smart, but the physical manifestation of human intelligence – our ego – is hilariously stupid and illogical.

The “End of the World” myth is a classic example of this.  The concept that the world is going to end because of our doing (nuclear war, ozone layer, overpopulation, global warming, moral depravity bringing about divine judgment) is so obviously egoic and logically false it’s hard to understand how otherwise “smart” people get sucked into such cult-logic nonsense.

The logical pattern is the same.  The ego realizes it is mortal.  The ego also believes it is the center of the universe.  Therefore, if the ego dies, everything else must die with it.  The most terrifying concept for the ego is the truth - when you die, the world will keep going along just fine and won’t miss you.  That logically sound and factually accurate reality is too much for the supposedly “rational” ego to handle, and it goes into delusion.

And just because millions of people all fall into collective delusion doesn’t make it any less delusional.  The world is not going to end.  Each person in it will end, and the world will go on as if nothing happened.  Because as far as the universe is concerned, nothing happened.  I’ll die.  You’ll die.  We’ll all die.  And the universe won’t care. 

This is the natural order of things, and it’s actually quite beautiful.  It’s only our grotesquely distorted ego that finds something wrong with the cycle of life.  And so our egos create stories about the entire world ending, and then we come up with false logic to justify our ego delusions.  And yet, despite all this, the universe continues to not care one bit about our crazy theories or our egos or our lives.  Life goes on.

With the theories of the end of the world always come an ability for the human ego to control the outcome.  We will all die from nuclear war unless we give up control to my ego, which will save us.  The earth will get revenge on us for using fossil fuels unless you bow down to my ego.  God will stamp you out and send you to hell unless you consent to handing over your life decisions to me.  See the pattern here?  It’s all about ego and control.

The truth is, there is no control.  The ego is an illusion that has no control over anything.  The force of life moves as a giant river and the human ego doesn’t amount to even one atom in that river.  Your life is infinitely valuable, but your ego is entirely worthless – literally it has zero value and holds no real physical or energetic space.  And yet we constrict the force of life and seek to control others in violation of the laws of God and nature in service of the worthless at the expense of the infinite. 

Armageddon is the ultimate illogical extension of valuing the worthless (ego) over the infinite (life).  It is what cult leaders use to manipulate followers into committing mass suicide.  It is what politicians use to consolidate power over weak-minded countrymen.  It is what religious leaders use to control followers and turn people away from spiritual truth and the force of life.

Armageddon is not real.  The world is not ending.  Life will continue long after your ego is gone.  As terrified as your ego is of dying, neither you nor the rest of the universe will miss your ego when it dies.  Ego is nothing more than an evolutionary aberration as our species moves toward a higher state of evolution.  Some people have trained themselves to dissolve the ego – eventually evolution will do this to the entire human species, or whatever the next step in the evolutionary ladder will be called.

So in the mind of the collective ego, yes, the world will end.  But only for the ego, which was never real to begin with.  So a collective illusion will end.  Life will not. 

But the stories about the end of the world are powerful.  They play on fear.  They play on the illusion that the ego is real and must be preserved.  They perpetuate distortions, which is where fear exists.  And because fear has a strong biological response associated with it, we assume that fear is real.  But just because an ego-based collective delusion produces a strong emotional response doesn’t make it real.

For those who value the force of life and true consciousness, it’s important to look at the delusions for what they are.  The world is not coming to an end.  Your death is not something to be feared or viewed with dread – in fact the opposite.  Death is a welcome friend.  Your purpose here is not to avoid death or sit out your days in comfort, it’s to live out your higher calling in service of the force of life – freedom, love, beauty, truth.

We are not living in order to not die.  We are living because we will die, and our mission here is to earn that noble death through a good, purpose-driven life.  And when that day happens, the world will go on, the universe will not care a single bit, and the only thing that will end is your physical body (which will likely be more trouble than it’s worth by that time) and your illusion of ego.

Sorry, the world will not end.

Higher Self vs. Lower Self

I’ll talk about my story, because many people on this spiritual path deal with similar challenges.

There are two versions of myself, battling it out for my energy.  There is my true self that follows my heart and there is my anxious, doubtful self that has been raised to suppress my true self.

My true self knows how to find silence, how to connect to higher planes of energy, how to create some amazing things.  It does things that are not intuitive, that are often difficult to explain to other people.  Sometimes it takes me through pain and suffering and periods that can elicit doubt.  But it’s always right, it always leads me to where I need to be and doing what is best for me and everyone.

My true self was very quiet when I was younger and only began speaking up when I was at the point where I’d had enough, where I knew there was something better for myself but I wasn’t going to find it going through the linear path.  The more I went down this path, the more clear this voice became and the more in charge of my life he became.

The anxious version of myself was a product of my environment – family, school, social, work and other external sources, and the internal feedback mechanism that reinforced these patterns.  While it’s a painful and unhelpful version of myself, it’s familiar so it “feels right.”

For a period of time I believed the anxious version of myself got me some early success in life, but now I don’t see it that way.  It facilitated my achieving some externally-based benchmarks – good grades, good university, passing some professional certification tests.  But was that really success?  No, not really.  Grades mean nothing.  Being in an elite college is overrated.  A certification for a career I never liked that has created mostly unhappiness and rewarded me with very little is actually counterproductive.

So the anxious version of myself fooled me into thinking I was gaining something from being like this when in fact it really did nothing good for me.  This is a realization that just came to me.  Kind of powerful.  That’s going to sink in.

But when things get uncertain or difficult, the anxious part of me would make my life miserable – all kinds of worry, lack of sleep, insecurity.  But recently things have been happening that are providing visible, tangible proof that yes, things are getting better.  Much better.  My heart, my higher self, is right, and the anxious part of me hasn’t done much good in my life.

It’s been a pretty long stretch where the voices saying I was wrong, or I was a bad person, or I was on the wrong path, were getting louder and louder.  Then boom – confirmation that everything my higher self had been saying was right.  The people saying I was a bad person, or foolish, are wrong.  The parts of me listening to them are wrong too.  My heart was 100% right.

Yes, I am exactly on the right path.  People who tried to ruin my life are falling by the wayside – either realizing their error, finding better things to do, or getting their asses kicked by karma.  That part of me that listened to them is also disappearing. 

Happiness doesn’t come from going down the predictable path of success.  I never found success on that path.  But switching paths, as I began to do about seven years ago, and really in earnest about four years ago, can take a long time to yield success.  And in the process there was a lot of pain and challenges. 

I knew in my heart this was the right path and things would turn around and get much better.  And in some ways it has been getting much better and opened up massive spiritual powers, even in the beginning.  And in others it’s been a slog.  But by listening to my heart things have become consistently better.  But there was always a cloud over all of it, some big, nagging problems that allowed the doubt to continue.

Then this weekend those stuck things unstuck.  The cloud lifted and the truth came to my vision so even my ego self couldn’t deny the truth of it  My heart was right.  Against everyone and everything, my heart was right.  And my anxious self is completely wrong.  Everything is going exactly as my higher self said it would. Even the crazy stuff.

My motto is “follow you heart, let everything else go.”

And it’s 100% right.

Through all this time I felt stressed, was anything really bad happening?  No.  the worries were over nothing.  The things that actually happened were aligned with my heart.

I Am Responsible For All My Suffering

I’m using this weekend as an opportunity for meditation, observation and reflection.  I need to clear out my energy and get clear about things, and then chart a new course. 

Last night, after a good workout at the gym, I came home and meditated.  But it was different, I felt a different connection with my crystals, and particularly my crystal ball.  I haven’t used my obsidian crystal ball in a long time, but last night I held it and was communicating with the archetypes.  They were helping me to gain clarity and understand my purpose.

One of the first realizations that came up was that my home is in Thailand, and it feels like it’ll be a very long time before I can even go back just to visit.  The archetypes explained that Thailand is an important part of my destiny and that I’ve lost connection. This made me feel very sad, because it’s true, I’ve lost a lot of connection – and I do feel like I’m away from my heart’s home.  But at the same time, I love my family life here in the US and really love my son, who is still young, and the time we spend together.  (Of course I love both my sons, but my older son is pretty much on his own now.)  And of course I’m going to be here for a long time, working and taking care of my son. Does this mean I have to put my purpose on hold for years and years?

The archetypes agreed this wasn’t a good solution and something needed to be done.  They also explained that it is because my “heart” is anchored in Thailand that my money has been flowing to Thailand instead of staying here, which has caused me tremendous stress.  Yes, a lot of that problem has been resolved with my wife working, but this only created other problems and stress and feeling things are not right.

The archetypes agreed this isn’t a good arrangement and agreed to re-anchor my heart and root energy so it’s with me now and not elsewhere.  Then they began explaining my purpose in life, why it’s been my destiny to go through suffering and stress.  Through most of my life I’ve been conflicted – my ego has been in strong opposition to my heart and true life path.  This has led to so many problems which I’m still struggling with.  My ego is constantly worrying because it fears and resists everything my heart is trying to do. 

I felt really sad hearing this.  It’s like I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming to this place.  Am I going to have to keep suffering?  Why does everything have to be a struggle?  Do I have to be exhausted and have so many root issues?  Why can’t I have some peace and relax?  What do I have to do to get out of my way?

The answer – no, you don’t have to suffer.  You have to release your fears, surrender and follow your heart.  But how do I know I’m following my heart?  I’ve done so many foolish things when I thought I was following my heart and it turned out I was full of shit.  Answer – some of those things were things that had to be as part of your destiny and we are sorry it had to be so painful for you.  Those things weren’t mistakes, you just couldn’t understand and weren’t ready to surrender.  Other things had to happen so you would be ready to dissolve your ego and fears and surrender.  And other things, yes, were foolish mistakes on your part, but those things ended up having little consequence apart from the pain caused by your own ego.

“You see,” they said, “your pain has been entirely of your own choice.  It is because your ego has been defiant and stubborn in its fear, and you have chosen to value that fear above your own heart’s desire, that you have suffered.  Your fate was never to simply live a stable, comfortable life.  You look at the uncertainty and different nature of your life and compare it to the many comfortable, stable and happy people you know and you feel sad.  You feel disconnected.  But you feel disconnected from what your ego imagines you should have, not what your heart knows is your truth.  The pain is your ego’s interpretation of your unique path as failure because it looks so different than everyone else’s.”

So how do I finally release this ego, this fear, and allow myself to surrender?  “You just do.  All you need to do is clear out your energy and surrender to your true path.  It is your ego that is the source of your suffering.  Release the ego and everything will follow.”

At this point I felt very sad but I also felt a sense of peace.  My ego is very negative, full of shame and judgment.  I’ve believed it got me through all the rough times, but looking at it now I believe it was what was responsible for my getting into those situations in the first place. 

This is why I needed this reflection.  Everything related to ego needs to go.  So no, I don’t need to chart a new course, because that would just be another ego adventure, and that needs to go.

Today I worked out.  A lot.  And then I went to beach and walked and sat and contemplated and walked some more. I saw police having a confrontation with someone and then saw paramedics come in and actually diffuse the situation.  There’s ego and heart playing out in real life in front of me.  Ego – the cops and the suspect, neither one backing down.  Heart – the Fire Department paramedic breaking through. 

This is the lesson, this is what is meant by “follow your heart, let everything else go.”

All the problems in my life now, or in my past, are a manifestation of my ego resisting – either clinging to something I should let go or fighting something I should surrender and accept.  All the fear and anxiety – just ego.