You will experience a new kind of spiritual awakening as you become aware of ego’s influence in your life. Real freedom is a result of freeing oneself from the power of the ego. However, ego will try to tempt you with many counterfeit freedoms along the path of your sacred quest.
AUTHENTIC VERSUS COUNTERFEIT FREEDOM
You will recall that in my earlier discussion I described freedom as an unconcern about oneself. When you have succeeded in taming your ego, freedom, in this sense, is accessible when your inner world is not focused on being offended, being separate or feeling special. Detachment from self-absorption, from the ego, is authentic freedom.
The opposite of authentic freedom is counterfeit freedom. This is the freedom that the outside world tries to sell us. It is just as much of an illusion as is the existence of ego as a separate entity. Counterfeit freedom, like ego, is nothing more than a false idea.
The idea is fed by the ego when it convinces you that to be truly free you must “get” something external to yourself. This is the freedom that society offers and your ego seeks in order to strengthen the illusion and keep itself alive.
To get to the joy of authentic freedom, you first have to examine the kind of freedom you have been pursuing. You need to see what kind of freedom you are continually being encouraged by your culture to pursue. You need to recognize the freedoms you believe you enjoy, which are inauthentic.
Here are several of those freedoms that are being offered to you. Notice how they contrast with the authentic, pure freedom that comes from transcending the ego and knowing God.
Chemical Freedom
The United States has been the most chemically dependent country in the history of the world. Using a chemical in order to be free is the ego at its very worst—an illusion feeding an illusion. Using chemicals results in hallucinations and delusions in your daily life. The cost of this approach to freedom is freedom itself.
The price of brief experiences of freedom found in the physical ecstasy of drug use is being paid by far too many human beings. Babies are born addicted to crack cocaine; young girls and boys prostitute for drugs; families and lives are destroyed and broken; escalating crime affects everyone; productivity declines; poverty increases; living conditions become inhuman.
The search for freedom through chemicals has trapped users into lifestyles of never getting enough of what they don’t want. The ego is telling the user, You’ll be free when you experience the fantastic high that comes with this chemical or this bottle of booze.
But the pleasure is only physical. It lasts only a moment or two. Then there is the ego, demanding more. You never arrive with this approach to freedom. You must always strive for more of what you have come to despise.
Is this kind of life authentically free? If you were free, you would experience a sense of arrival. You would say, This is it! I need nothing else.
When you transcend the ego, you will simultaneously begin to cultivate a friendship with the loving presence that resides within you. Then you will announce to yourself, This is it. I need nothing more. I want more love, more life, more purpose, all of which feel attainable with the partnership of my higher self and knowing about my sacred path. I want authenticity; I do not want a drug fix or a hangover or to impoverish myself to feed my habit.
The idea that a chemical provides freedom is a counterfeit idea. All you will get from that counterfeit idea is a need for more and an internal boost to your false self, your ego.
Sexual Freedom
The practice of sexual freedom has produced the exact opposite of authentic freedom. The idea of sexual freedom has created a counterfeit freedom that has immense appeal to the ego.
The pursuit of sexual freedom has resulted in shattered lives. I am not taking a moral position on sexual promiscuity. I am pointing out that it is the work of your false self to convince you that this kind of sexual activity has something to do with freedom. A key test of whether you are on the inner path of the higher self or the outer path of the ego is the amount of peace and harmony that a pursuit brings to your life.
Our pursuit of sexual freedom has brought the largest increase in sexually transmitted diseases in the history of humanity. Clearly, sexual freedom has created a lot of disharmony. God is peace. Ego is disharmony. The biblical admonition could just as easily have been written, “Lord deliver me from ego.”
Ego-driven sexuality is the outer reflection of our longing to know our spiritual self. Ego convinces us that sexual freedom will bring the peace and bliss and ecstasy that we know is somehow available to us. When we accept ego’s solutions, we get a counterfeit freedom.
Authentic freedom allows you the freedom to know and experience the love of God within you, and to share it in the physical world as an expression of that love rather than as an end unto itself. This kind of freedom is found by facing in the opposite direction from ego, where your higher spiritual self is waiting to be known. Sharing both your physical self and your higher self is true sexual freedom.
Pleasure is a glorious experience and I encourage you to have as pleasurable a life as possible. But don’t mistake that pleasure for freedom. Ego-inspired freedom is always based on a false sense of security because the ego itself is a false idea.
Financial Freedom
Remember that the ego thrives on consumption. The false belief is that the more you have, the more you will acquire and ultimately the more freedom you will experience. You can buy freedom, says your ego, and you are free to spend money you don’t even have yet. Ego insists that all you have to do is want it and that your specialness entitles you. You don’t even have to earn it, only want it.
Any freedom experienced this way is counterfeit and generally involves credit cards. You are not liberated—you are actually in a form of bondage to creditors. Owing usurious interest rates, mortgaging your future and your happiness, infecting your life with worry and fear—these definitely do not bring authentic freedom in any form.
Objects cannot give you freedom. This is an ego-designed trap to keep you chasing and consuming, always feeding this false idea. Your ego insists that you will find “it” as long as you continue working toward increased financial success.
But what is “it”? When I was a young boy I thought it was being on the hockey team. I made the hockey team and that wasn’t it. Later I thought a date with Penny would be it. She was great, but she wasn’t it. I thought having my own car would be it. Then being in the Navy. And then being out of the Navy and in college. Then I thought having a degree would be it for me. But, with each acquisition, it was still out of reach.
So I thought it would be my wife, then a child and perhaps more children. These were all wonderful events in my life, but they weren’t it. Later I thought it would be my first professorship, then my first book, and then, for sure, my first bestseller would be it. It, however, kept eluding me.
Authentic freedom cannot be purchased or found outside of you. There is no discovering the elusive “it” in money, fame, prestige, possessions or even family.
These are three of the most common pursuits of the ego in its effort to sell you on its idea of freedom. Authentic freedom is actually the freedom of knowing who you are, why you are here, your purpose in life and where you are going when you leave here. It is knowing that your identity is not located in the physical world but in the eternal, changeless world of God.
Self-realization is authentic freedom. Self-realization is not an acquisition but an understanding that, once found, cannot be lost. All of the fruits of false freedom can and will be lost eventually. They demand specialness and separateness from you, and they all will turn into dust in your hands.
Authentic freedom is permanent. It is beyond all comings and goings. And it comes with a knowing rather than a belief. Once you know within that this inner experience of your higher self is the source of your freedom, you automatically have it. You are free from anger, hatred and bitterness. In essence, you are free to love. Your life will be filled with
joy because you will have attained self-realization.
The self in self-realization is not the ego. So know that losing counterfeit freedom is no loss at all. Your sense of authentic freedom is egoless. You are no longer self-absorbed.
Freed from self-absorption, you enjoy authentic freedom. This new kind of freedom will provide you with a knowing that forever precludes any question of uncertainty. Instead, you will know freedom as an inner connection to the divine—your personal loving connection with God.
SUGGESTIONS FOR TRANSCENDING THE EGO AND KNOWING HIGHER AWARENESS
The following suggestions will help you get in touch with and transcend your ego. In the next seven chapters I will offer more specific ways of freeing your sacred self from the power of ego self.
Make an attempt to know your ego. Try to determine when it is operating as the dominant influence in your life.
Ask yourself, “Am I listening to my false self or my higher self?”
The more you can be aware of the presence of ego and how it is manipulating you, the less influence it will have over you. For example, if you are boasting to someone about yourself, or in any way feeling superior about your appearance, abilities or possessions, recognize that this is your ego at work trying to convince you of your separateness from God and of your superiority to other human beings.
As you become aware of your ego, make a shift away from self-absorption into your higher awareness. As Cicero put it centuries ago: “In nothing do men more nearly approach the Gods than by doing good to their fellow man.” The awareness of your ego at work is the first step to taming it.
Start keeping track of how frequently you use the pronoun “I.” Self-absorption is the ego at work. It keeps you from the kind of blissful inner freedom that characterizes your sacred quest. By catching yourself when you persistently use “I,” and then making a decision to take the focus off of yourself, you will be transcending your ego.
You may be surprised at how frequently this self-referencing takes place. The more you can check yourself by cutting back on “I,” the more personal freedom you will experience.
Begin to view your ego as an entity that sits on your shoulder with a purpose. This invisible companion is always with you. It tries to convince you of your separateness from God, your superiority over others and your specialness in the universe. The more you listen to this entity, the more you are off your sacred path.
As you begin to recognize the signs of ego’s presence, gently say to yourself, “There you go again. You allowed me to take the bait and I got trapped in my self-importance.” You will find that most of your thoughts and actions are prompted by this invisible entity perched on your shoulder.
It wants you to feel outraged when you are wronged, insulted when you are not stroked, offended when you don’t get your way, hurt when you lose a contest or an argument. As you recognize and name this entity, you eventually will be able to ignore it. Ultimately it will no longer play the dominant role.
First you recognize it. Then you acknowledge that it is at work. Finally, you retire it with a full pension!
Practice listening to others and keeping the focus off of yourself. Concentrate in your conversations on what the other person is saying and what they are feeling. Then, respond with a sentence that begins with “you” rather than “I.”
For example, if someone is telling you about a hospital experience, don’t respond with a story about your hospital experience. Instead, say something that either paraphrases what they said or that convinces them that you really heard both their words and their feelings. You might say, “You really had a scary experience, didn’t you?”
This is called active listening. You will be pleasantly surprised at how much you will learn and how purposeful you will feel. This is a way of restraining your ego and allowing your higher self to participate.
Actively resist the habit of letting your ego run rampant in your life. Nisargadatta Maharaj told a questioner in one of his dialogues: “Resist old habits of feeling and thinking; keep telling yourself ‘No, not so, it cannot be so; I am not like this, I do not need it, I don’t want it,’ and a day will surely come when the entire structure of error and despair will collapse and the ground will be free for a new life.”
The more you resist allowing your ego to be authoritative, the sooner the day will come when your higher self fills the space previously occupied by the demands of your false self.
Practice daily meditation or quieting the mind to shatter the illusion of your separateness. The more time you spend shutting down the inner dialogue, the more you come to realize that you are not separate from God nor any of the billions of souls that are extensions of the God force.
You will begin to treat others as you would love to be treated. You will have the inner knowing that you are connected to everyone in the universe. Meditation, more than any other practice, breaks down the illusion of separateness.
Try to remove the word “special” from your consciousness. Special implies better than or more important than. It denies the existence of God that is in all of us. We are all special—therefore, none of us need the label “special.”
You are divine, eternal and purposeful, and when you recognize this, you will not need to compare yourself with anyone or to waste your time checking on how others are being treated. This is the hard work of the ego. It is constantly prodding you to prove your specialness.
Have the inner knowing that the living spirit is in all things, and that is what you have to offer. When you know this, you are secure and serene, with no need for compliments or reassurances that you are special or in any way distinct from others. We are all children of God. No favorites. No outcasts. All one.
Keep a journal. In it, describe what offends you about other people. Try to discover what being offended does for you. If you can be objective about it, viewing it from the perspective of the witness, you will find that what offends you is really a judgment about how others should be behaving. Yet, by itself, being offended in no way alters the offensive behavior.
So try to take an instance of your being offended and merely witness it. Just notice that you feel offended and observe how it plays out in you. As you get proficient at observing your ego at work, you will find that this act of observation will defuse the inner angst.
With the technique of observing yourself, you will come to see that what offends you is your ego at work, hammering into your mind over and over that the world should be different, that people have no right to treat you in ways that you find offensive. Your ego insists that you have a right to be offended, hurt, miserable.
These judgments are that false idea of yourself, working hard, convincing you that the world ought to be as you are rather than as it is.
Give more of yourself and ask less in return. This is a wonderful way to tame the ego. For example, Leo Tolstoy, toward the end of his life, had gone from being self-absorbed to becoming a servant of God, learning many of the lessons on the path of the sacred quest. He wrote: “The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.” So simple. So profound.
When serving others becomes a priority, you will start asking, in the form of a mantra, “How may I serve?” You have found spiritual enlightenment, and you will know bliss. Donate your time to a children’s hospital and help those tiny souls struggle with their infirmities. Notice whether your ego wants to pump you up and take credit.
Suspend the false idea of yourself as a separate entity in need of special caressing. Become the one who does the caressing. When you cherish others first, you will know what it is like to be cherished through your own selfless acts. Try not to tell others about your philanthropic deeds, even when your ego pushes you to publicize your activities.
Remind yourself every day that the highest worship of God is service to mankind and that it is through those acts that your sacred self will be realized. You do not need to convince others or yourself that you are divine. Do it in deed. Your inner awakening of joy and bliss will
be reward enough.
Stop the external search for freedom and come to know the flavor of authentic freedom that is communion with your highest self. Every time you find yourself seeking out something else in order to feel free, ask yourself out loud, “Will this be the thing that finally liberates me?”
Picture yourself having that which you so desperately crave. Create the feeling within you of having the car, house, drug, promotion or whatever it is that you imagine is your ticket to freedom. Are you now free? Or are you merely one step further removed from being authentically free?
The exercise of visualizing yourself with what you desire, and then asking yourself if you are free, will put you directly in touch with what it means to be authentically free. Authentic freedom needs nothing to prove its existence. Counterfeit freedom demands something in your hand to validate its existence.
Knowing this will disengage you from the directives of the inauthentic ego, which fears that inner celestial light of authentic freedom.
Higher awareness demands a new agreement with reality. You’ve read about banishing doubt, cultivating the witness, shutting down inner dialogue and freeing your higher self from ego. You can practice these four keys to higher awareness anywhere, anytime, regardless of who is around. I guarantee you that if you do, you will begin to see a new, miraculous awakening happening in your life.
As you apply these keys to higher awareness, keep in mind that your sacred quest is really all about having your highest self make the daily decisions of your life rather than being dominated by your ego.
In Part III I will present the major conflicts that arise in the dichotomy between the holy spirit within and the false idea of ego. In each chapter I will provide you with distinct insights for allowing the higher self to surface as the dominant spiritual force in your life.
When you feel yourself attaining your sacred self, these will no longer be considered conflicts. You will have the knowing that you are awakening to your divine mission. You will know God on an experiential level perhaps for the first time since you left no-where and arrived in now-here.
Your Sacred Self Page 17
