by Matt Kahn
With intuition leading the way, you also might find yourself naturally expanding the usage of your personal love statement. While it is wonderful to offer yourself the exact words you’ve always wanted to hear, it becomes even more powerful when you speak such supportive words to those you encounter. Imagine how incredible it would be to offer anyone you meet a compliment or a moment of encouragement, as a way of giving to both hearts the very gift you’ve always wanted to receive. You might be surprised to realize the words you’ve been waiting to receive are often the same ones others wish to hear. The fact that you can assist in the healing of another just by speaking out loud the words that mean so much to you reveals an interconnectedness of spirit throughout all time and space.
One inspired choice at a time, there is no longer a fear of making the wrong choice because every decision has been surrendered to the highest authority of love. Whatever arises in the lives of those around you, including yourself, reveals the next moment of healing in the evolution of the whole.
To fully step across the threshold and enter the most exciting stages of spiritual growth, please repeat the following healing mantra:
I hereby surrender the fate of all of my choices to the highest vibration of love. I allow love in its purest, most powerful form to fully inhabit this body, to speak every word, to choose every option, to orchestrate all behaviors, to maneuver through each encounter by recognizing each moment as a chance to speak to others the very words I’ve always wanted to hear.
I do this, knowing that as I share my personal love statement with all I encounter, I am using my time on this planet to repeatedly speak out loud what I remember not ever receiving from the past I so thankfully survived.
From this moment forward, I offer my personal love statement as a gift of evolution for all. This helps me remember that no matter where the finger of blame tends to point, I am only crying out for the grace of my own loving attention.
Now that I have given love permission to make every choice on my behalf, on some level, I accept that an important stage of my journey is complete.
And so I am free to be the love that I am for the healing, awakening, well-being, and ascension of all. And so it is.
4
Ego, Suffering, and the Overstimulated Nervous System
I REMEMBER WHEN I began to see the importance of love, not just as an instrument of healing, but as a potent transformer of consciousness. It was during a very auspicious conversation I had with my guides, at which time I asked the question, “What is the core of human suffering?”
I asked this question because, in the very beginning of my journey, I became very familiar with the inner workings of ego and came to see it as a central cause of despair. Ego is much like believing you are the character in every scene of a movie, while forgetting that you are really the aliveness within the body of each character acting out various roles. Whether caught up in the storyline of family dynamics, defined by the ups and downs of your work environment, or happy only when those around you are satisfied, an attachment to ego often creates the pain that you hope to resolve. Even though I could see how much chaos the ego created, there was something inspiring me to look even further.
Perhaps I was drawn to look deeper because there is such a widely accepted spiritual belief that we must develop strategies to transcend ego or try to escape it in some way. While it made sense that so many people would attempt to overcome the very source of their suffering, I didn’t feel this was a complete understanding of ego, or even a loving approach. As a result, something motivated me to ask for further clarification.
I asked because I intuitively knew the wisest approach must always be rooted in love. Even when attempting to open the door of liberation or to extinguish the flames of personal despair, a spiritual goal can often become so all-consuming that it becomes easy to go about your journey in a goal-oriented manner.
This reminds me of trick-or-treating as a child on Halloween. My friends and I, dressed in our favorite costumes, were so focused on getting as much free candy and covering as many neighborhoods as possible, we didn’t take the time to even give much eye contact or a “thank you” to those who filled our bags. In the same way, you can be so blinded by the number of mystical experiences you collect or how much understanding you hope to find that you may not even take the time to wholeheartedly receive the gifts that have been given to you.
In the heart of surrender, your highest aspiration is to fulfill each goal in the most loving possible way. If there is an imbalance, it will be healed with love. If there is confusion, it will be clarified with love. If there is anything to choose, it will be chosen by love. If there is anything to awaken, it will be awakened by love. This helps you see every precious step on your journey as something beyond a means to an end. It’s certainly not about finding the right answer in the back of a textbook or even how well you can articulate what you’ve learned. Instead, the beauty of your highest wisdom is reflected in how often love influences your decisions.
What Is Ego, Really?
Because the common approach to ego is attempting to control or destroy it in some way, and because love is the missing element in this approach, I knew there had to be something underneath this typical understanding of ego. Whether the goal is turning negative thoughts into more positive ones, silencing the mind, or trying to uncover limiting beliefs with great effort, this approach often leads the most sincere seeker to convert spiritual exploration into a battle for control. Of course, any type of battle can only inflate ego to a more painful degree.
Since love is the highest vibration, everything you encounter—including your worst enemy, your most dramatic experiences, and even the ego itself—must be met with openness, compassion, and care in order to come into contact with the wisest teachings of the Universe. Otherwise, you will find yourself at odds with yourself, discovering new forms of suffering, while attempting to meet your spiritual goals in an overly aggressive manner.
When asking my guides to reveal the core of human suffering, I was initially told, “Ego is a fictitious character that is personified through the roles played in life.” From this answer, a few undeniable questions came to mind: I wanted to know why this tendency existed, how to unravel the deepest pains it seemed to cause, and what role it played in the path of awakening.
So I asked my guides, “What is ego, really?” I was told, “Ego is the imaginary identity of an overstimulated nervous system.” This answer really struck a chord in me. I wasn’t sure what it meant, so I kept asking more questions.
Underneath it all, I came to discover that the source of a closed heart, a noisy mind, low self-esteem, or an out-of-control ego is an overstimulated nervous system. If an overstimulated nervous system is the root cause of suffering, the logical question is, how did it become overstimulated?
The primary function of the nervous system is to help maintain a sense of linear order throughout the simultaneous and multidimensional nature of life. Such order is maintained by expelling unknown possibilities orbiting your energy field so you don’t have experiences that constantly contradict the integrity of your personal experiences. Until something new has been introduced and accepted by your subconscious mind, it can be overlooked or seem invisible even if it is appearing right in front of you. Just as a group of people can witness the same event and each person sees something that the others may not have seen, each of us views life through a unique lens of perception depending upon how the nervous system maintains order throughout our consciousness. What is known to be true for one person may be invisible or unknown to another. While it appears as if we all inhabit the same planet, everyone lives in their own version of it. The assumption that the world you see is the only one existing is a limiting belief held together by an attachment to ego. As this insistence is confirmed by your perceptions, it creates a tendency to feel dissatisfied or frustrated with life—no matter how justified your ideas seem to be.
When your consciousness is limited through
patterns of overstimulation, the nervous system deletes from your perception anything that contradicts your most stringent beliefs. As consciousness expands, engrained beliefs dissolve. In their absence, your nervous system relaxes to welcome the arrival of greater possibilities. These possibilities were there all along but were unrecognizable as long as they were a greater expression of consciousness than you were able to perceive.
One vital reason the nervous system expels potential possibilities out of your view is to assist you in having experiences that you are able to handle. If the blinders suddenly came off, your consciousness would expand so quickly that you’d be disoriented and confused by the multidimensional nature of reality. In many ways, you’d be unable to function in such a state. It would be like living in a hallway of mirrors, not knowing which reflection is yours. While the radiance of your true nature always lives in every form, your nervous system regulates experiences, allowing your consciousness to welcome the arrival of greater possibilities, but in a way that is both natural and ever-revealing.
Even though some have stumbled upon transcendent experiences and had the blinders of unconsciousness suddenly removed, the majority of awakenings are gradual and work in harmony with your nervous system. It is much like a flower enjoying the miracle of blossoming—one petal at a time.
Throughout the history of mysticism, these rare forms of awakenings become spiritual folklore. They can lead many to imagine these dramatic breakthroughs are necessary milestones for the furthering of their journey. When you are captivated by a desire to awaken so quickly, your motivation to explore your spirituality can be tinged with a sense of desperation, insincerity, and overachievement. Ironically, this sense of urgency only serves to overstimulate the nervous system to a greater degree. When this happens, your level of consciousness is constricted to eliminate from view the very experiences being chased.
No matter how many years you have spent immersed in spiritual discourse, the living realization of truth cannot be fully revealed until the nervous system is relaxed. Even on a mystical level, the degree to which a nervous system relaxes also determines who sees angels, ghosts, alternate dimensions, or even receives intuitive messages.
Meanwhile, those entrenched in conditioning may scoff at the possibilities they have yet to see that have always existed around them.
A Psychological Cocoon
Nervous systems become overstimulated in order to create a psychological cocoon. As the butterfly of your innocent nature incubates throughout the earliest years of your life, you gain personal experiences in preparation for a deeper adventure. Whether the process begins in adolescence or spontaneously unfolds in adulthood, the cocoon of incubation fulfills its mission by flaking apart through the impulse of spiritual evolution. If the purpose of the ego is to fall apart, then everything in life occurs as critical stages of development in order to usher a greater cosmic reality into view.
It’s important to remember that those who haven’t had flashes of transcendence aren’t missing out or left behind in any way. They are just in the process of unraveling the cocoon of ego to the point where a more profound reality can be acknowledged.
Even for those who have experienced spontaneous flashes of realization, only to feel as if these experiences faded away or were somehow lost, the nervous system is simply returning to well-established patterns of conditioning. This can almost feel like you’re going backward in evolution, as if everything that was so inexplicably clear when realization dawned has returned to the way things were before you began your spiritual path.
While these types of experiences can feel quite disheartening, they offer you vital feedback from your nervous system, confirming that while you may have experienced a vacation from the human condition, the patterns of overstimulation have not been fully released out of your energy field. If you were unaware of the role the nervous system plays, you might take this personally or feel like you are failing your spiritual mission.
On the other hand, once you recognize the overstimulated nervous system as the means through which life’s clearest view is obscured, you travel even deeper into the grace of your journey. The further you go, the more the nervous system unravels, which gives your body permission to rest. This causes the cocoon of ego to continually flake apart, as your heart flowers open.
How Does Overstimulation Happen?
To help you understand more about how the nervous system becomes overstimulated in the first place, let’s consider the behavior of babies. First, you may notice how they are already living in a state of pure consciousness. In such a state, they are constantly adjusting to sensations of a brand-new world. Every time an unrecognized possibility enters the energy field of a baby, they tend to cry. Crying doesn’t necessarily suggest an experience of pain or upset, but the function of the nervous system clearing unrecognized possibilities out of the cells of the body.
In your pure state of being, sensory experiences come into your field and are immediately reflected back out in a natural rhythm. Each time this occurs, the subconscious mind is recruited to work as a recorder of patterns. Its role is to constantly track trends in your energy field while looking for ways to reduce the workload of the body. This is done so the life-force energy within your field can function at its highest level of efficiency.
Imagine a baby hears an unfamiliar sound. The sound wave immediately passes through the energy field of the baby, whose nervous system reflects it back out spontaneously. It’s almost as if the baby cries to match the sound it hears. This causes the subconscious mind to notice that every time a wave is reflected out, the energy expenditure spikes. Because a baby is going to constantly respond to most experiences as unfamiliar or foreign, its subconscious mind tracks how often those spikes appear. The more often a baby responds to the multisensory nature of life, the more the nervous system steps in to reflect it back out.
This causes more energy spikes to be registered by the subconscious mind. Eventually, the subconscious mind makes a decision. Since the energy keeps spiking so often, why not make the highest point of each spike the newly conditioned state of the energy field?
This decision is made so that less energy is expended spiking up and going all the way back down to life’s natural state of being.
As the spiking of energy establishes a newly conditioned state of being, your natural state is obscured as your perception of life becomes exaggerated. This invites a world of polarity, or opposites, that are seen through a lens of distortion. In a world of polarity, instead of being aware of the things you see, everything is labeled and defined in comparison to other things. From this point of reference, the miracle of existence becomes an idea called life. This is how your true nature becomes lost in the main character of a play. Throughout each scene, the innocence of your being loses touch with reality through daunting and complicated patterns of survival and is often overwhelmed by a constant state of alertness, during which the threat of deficiency and disappointment become outcomes that you regularly anticipate. This is also when the deep-rooted sense of feeling separate from love enters your reality.
Patterns of Codependency and Addiction
As this conditioned distortion sets in, the experiences coming into your field are no longer reflected back out. Instead, they are recorded into the memory of your cells. Soon, the culmination of cellular memory creates a personal sense of identity, or “I,” to enhance, defend, and protect in response to others. Once the innocence of a baby becomes the conditioned temperament of a child, more cells are occupied with encoded memories to maintain the nervous system’s overstimulated state. In that level of consciousness, there are two primary patterns that are regularly acted out: codependency and addiction.
Codependency is when the quality of your experiences is dependent upon the actions or behaviors of others. It is a belief that you cannot be happy until others are satisfied and causes you to live for others while denying yourself in the process. Addiction is a habitual need for certain experiences or f
eelings in order to maintain a perceived sense of control in your life. The degree to which you build codependent relationships or exist in addictive behaviors suggests how overstimulated your nervous system may be.
Parents may read this and imagine that if they were able to protect their babies from this conditioning process, they could spare them from the plight of human suffering. The truth is, each of us came to this planet for a wide spectrum of experiences while being guided by the perfection of the Universe—from start to finish.
Equally so, having an understanding of the way in which conditioning is created never serves as a replacement for the gentleness, compassion, and loving support every child deserves.
The Path of Radical Honesty
One of the most immediate ways to unravel the nervous system is by being completely honest. Honesty is your innate ability to stand completely exposed, allowing the world to do what it may, and say what it will so that you may know who you are—beyond the realm of ideas. When there is nothing to hide or withhold, the truth is spoken freely and at no one’s expense. No matter the subject of discussion, the truth contains no form of judgment. The truth celebrates how intimately you know yourself by how open and available you’re willing to be. Knowing this, life’s most essential wisdom always remains the same—you’ll feel better once you’re totally honest.
Many stray away from the value of what I call radical honesty out of a fear of facing the reactions of others. On a cellular level, whenever a person has an emotional reaction, their nervous system is releasing layers of conditioning. In the heart of surrender, you will see, time and time again, whatever you or anyone else is feeling is more patterns being healed.
