Denial of Ego

In spiritual work its a common theme for aspirants to seek to weed out the ego. This is only partly right.  On the one hand we have enshrined ego within the self in such a way that it crowds out the higher self and its expression and the great benefits that it can bring within awareness, while on the other hand, seeking to destroy ego is against nature.  In truth, ego can never be destroyed. It was put here in order to serve the grand experiment in individuality.  Your individuality is not some demon to be destroyed or banished, but a channel through which the divine consciousness may flow. 

What happens in all awakenings or moments of supreme transcendence is the self collapses within itself, or feels as though it does.  This is a seeming brought on by an over-emphasis upon ego.  Its a necessary condition that is a result of this particular arrangement of the self.  Without ego propping everything else up within you, its absence winds up feeling like a collapsing of all you know that you are. In truth, moving the ego out of its central role is merely a powerful shift of a kind you are not used to feeling, so it winds up feeling devastating.  But its necessary. What emerges out of this new arrangement is that the ego is now more peripheral.  It is not gone or dead as some have suggested.  It remains.  However, in this new position ego cannot become the central deity within the self since this was never what ego was meant to be or can be.  

Ego identifies phenomenon that is like itself, which is to say it identifies other particles of being.  It sees, for example, a house as a distinct element in an integrated landscape of entirely connected elements. It sees the atom, the molecule, the fish, the star, or idea. Ego, however, does not have the power to know how to see how all things are connected.  It merely identifies, and it does a very good job of doing this. Without it, everything would be part of an undifferentiated tapestry with no distinct detail. You would feel all the suffering of the world as your own, and when your neighbor stubs her toe, you will feel it as your own.  Your own nervous system would be entirely overloaded with sensory data.  Ego serves as an important filter to keep this overload from taking place. Even in the midst of “feeling it all” in the moment of transcendence, there is still a filtering happening even though to you it feels as though you are getting way more material than you ever did before. Without ego, you could wind up hearing every thought on the planet, or how every molecule shifts within the cell of an antelope.  

Being able to feel in this way is an important means to relating to the world, but without ego, you would get lost in a world of objects.  The purpose to all of this is to learn how to use consciousness in a balanced way so that you feel the boundlessness of all creation while also seeing the individual effects as being a part of this infinite realm that is your corner of the universe. This, then, is the true challenge to all who awaken. Nothing is a problem, for everything has its place and purpose.  There was no mistake in the divine plan no matter how much fault you see or feel with the world. When you cease seeing fault, you begin to glimpse the perfection.  Some will say that as they heal and awaken they still see the world as imperfect.  This is true, but what is also true is that the world also begins to change as you change. The healing of the world is a massive undertaking and it is why one person alone will not achieve such healing.  This is why as each person mirrors the healing within, it has an effect on the whole. Individually and together, the world changes.  Already the change is underway, and this movement is building steam with each person who awakens.  This is the single most productive thing to have emerged in decades, perhaps even centuries! 

You will save yourself much time and angst by neither worshipping ego nor seeking to destroy it.  If you can learn balance in all parts of your life, you will keep from the extremism that keeps you from seeing the nuanced presence of the divine in all life.  Life exists within the balance.

Initiate

How do I tell you the story of my initiation?
Its poetry that constantly contradicts
yet seeks to grasp some wisp of mystery

If I said in my awakening I was suddenly transported to a place on the Astral plane in Tibet where I was initiated into the great secret brotherhood where the dimensions of reality were opened to me as I was brought into the great Hall of Mysteries, what would you think?  Or what if I said I had the foremost teacher from whom I have learned postures, positions, methods and techniques. Would this impress you?  Would it give me caché?  Perhaps.  But no amount of this will say anything.  What resolves in the person?  What is their fruit? The truth is that the divine does not seek to impress. The divine simply Is.  It is that which bestows perfectly what is true. When we look outside at effects, we only see symptoms but not the inner life.

The truth, to my experience, is that the divine is knowing, gnosis.  It does not create any phenomenon unless the self needs it for translating it into some form that it can understand.  Like dreaming, we attach images in a symbolic way, an association, but it is only that.  It is mind's need for form.  But you can experience beyond form.  You can experience directly, and what you feel is what the divine is, which is bliss.  You do not need anything from outside. You realize you are perfect, and the more you open to the divine, the more you are able to glimpse your own perfection.  You do not need methods or associations with phenomenon to tell you that this is so. All practice only serves to focus the awareness here.  That is all. As a result, any method will work if it anchors you in the way that works for you.  It is entirely without form, it is the Mother of all form.  It is formlessness, it is also creator of form.  But in focusing on form, you must understand what makes up this form.  In your own self, in your own awareness of who you are, you are the sum total of what you have done here on this planet most immediately. You carry within you all of the creations that have led you to this point.  This also means you carry within you the karmas, too, which are a living record of those things that you have identified with egoicaly for the most part which you have not yet conquered in yourself.  if you are perfect within, then karma represents the work yet to be done to achieve full realization of this perfection. As you do the work of letting the karma go, the divine unfolds within your awareness. Until then, the karmas serve to frame and focus your awareness, and you define things based on what they are telling you.  As you let them go knowing fills you more and more.  Secrets of the universe, they flow through you.  They simply are. You feel them like bodies in a train station, moving at light speed.  You can choose to pluck one of them out and learn from it.  This is creation. This is an act of beginning to manifest something.  What you are attracted to, what you select, will be based on your own magnetic self in a universe which is also magnetic.  Like attracts like.  If you do not like what you choose, if what you choose winds up bringing you problems, then you must look inside to see what it is that is ruling you. This is the path to true self knowing.  No teacher can give you this.  A teacher can reflect back to you where you are, can even push you beyond where you are but only because you have accepted that you are ready for it, whether done consciously or unconsciously.  It will come. Only in this way do you reach a refined state.....which is always asking yourself those questions which will help you to change how you see the world, of beginning to dismantle the illusion that the world is just out there and happens to you.  You realize you are a participant, a creator of your experience. You are responsible, and because of this, you ask yourself "what else remains for me to do?  I think I will look at my life and see what hurts me or bothers me most, for this is where my karma lies.....and this is also where the work waits to be done."

As a result, all who awaken are themselves in the slip stream of the cosmos.  It is there for you, waiting to help, waiting by your door each day for you to begin.  You do not need a pedigree. You can enter into knowing perfectly and immediately if you ask the hard questions. being humble, being curious, being open. Thinking you have it all perfect denies the fact that you are here in a world of pretty heavy karma.  This is where we all are. We are all doing the same thing, working through our own issues. We all have much to learn.  But the great opportunity is that we can. With awakening present, the process is accelerated.  You have been whispered a truth about the world and you can never go back, you can never be the same again.  You live for the divine, even if your own ego gives you trouble.  It is natural.  Don't beat yourself up.  Keep working.  This is where devotion is so helpful. You do not become devoted to a religion necessarily. You become devoted to this whisper that changed your life.  You say to yourself, "I remain open, I make no assumptions.....please lead me and show me....I am just a child learning a whole new lesson about the universe...." and in this way, you can begin to see perhaps more clearly because you do not carry ego so closely.  You are open to more than what your ego will tell you, and because of that, you are not so close to karma.  You listen to this other voice which is the divine.  Everything the ego will tell you is about individuality.  If you lean to heavily on it, it will seem as though you are separate.  You are indeed individual, but you also have the gift of knowing the divine universe.  So you carry both in balance, and you find a new synthesis for them to live within you without contradiction.  Two sides of the same coin.

So as you awaken, you realize you are part of a lineage, yes, but it is not a lineage of the world of effects and creation and manifestation. If you are silent, its secrets will flow through you.  You can instantly know.  This is hard for some to take or even understand. But knowing will fill you.  It will make you more insightful, perhaps. It makes things easier for you, a great gift. So how important is a teacher except in how you utilize teaching in your own process? How good is the piece of paper you have been given that say you completed a course? The paper only says you did something, completed something.  That degree is only as good as what you then use that knowledge for in your own growth.  What the divine offers is no course, no teacher, only a presence which is everything.  Within it, the universe dwells.

How do you reflect this in your life?  What is it that you create?  What is it that you are becoming within its light?  Everything else is what lies in the world of phenomenon, duality. How are you bringing heaven to earth?  These are what matter most. And when you do this, you cease having love for other things....cars, houses, physical attainments as proof of your worth and anything you have is a reflection of what is within.  Its a reversal of how the world moves for you.  You are only rich because you feel so rich, because you know that the divine loves you and that these are merely outward expressions of something deeper.  If you have riches built on a fear of lack, you will simply build a life based on that, and it will rule you.  You will be rich and you will be unhappy because you only see how your riches are flowing out of your life and you must have more as the stop gap against chaos or loss.....instead of allowing yourself to feel full of the divine and having that fullness reflect in your own life.

You do not rely on physical riches, you rely on the one thing that matters most because you know riches are a result of something, an effect. This can easily come about through greed and avarice, not through anything holy.  But what is attained in a holy way, free from loss, free from lack of perfect trust in the divine, will always be satisfying.  It can never be taken away.  So this also means that you could live a very simple life with few riches physically because you are satisfied and trustful in what these riches are. For another person, you might choose to live a different life where different kinds of riches are required.  In this case, you will perhaps require a house and not a hut. You might need to drive to do your work, so you need to buy the car, the insurance, the upkeep.  But this is not a rat race unless you so make it. It is what fills it that matters most. A life filled with fear of loss will keep you running down the road to work in fear of losing it all, and this is how your life will be filled.  If you run down the road in bliss and joy over the next great adventure in what the divine will bring you, then the quality of that life will be very different.  They both wear the same clothes, but both have very different lives. The same is true for the person only seeking the best teachers, the bests schools. It will either be a piece of paper that impresses others and garners kudos and recognition, or it becomes a life where the degree only means so much with what it is used for that matters most.  One is bereft of the divine, one is full of it.  One is a path to loss and hardness while the other is sweet and effortless.

So the truth is, I was initiated with a whisper, a great secret from the universe.  In that one simple moment, I was changed forever.  My mind grew, my experience enlarged.  I knew things about how things worked, I questioned, I sought to move beyond my old limits, my old conditioning.  I continue to do this.  Moment by moment the initiation lives within me. It was simple, actually.  There were no ceremonies, no great teachers.  I had the universe.  That is all.  It continues to whisper to me as a living presence in my life. It is without form, and it is entirely invisible to those who do not have the eyes to see.  It is quiet, simple, and in its silence, the rush of a million rivers pass through its space.  I am an observer to the great miracle of what we all are deeper down. My creation is this, what I am trying to tell you right now.  The only true initiation occur within you, no intermediary, no judge or jury.  Because it is love, it is freely given.  The great realization, the great initiation is that you are just coming to the reality of this fact in your life.