All of these beliefs are deeply ingrained within you. It is very difficult for you to even imagine not having them because the efforts of your ego and the egos of so many others have been working overtime convincing you that this is the only way to be. Facing outward brings about a sense of inner conflict and agitation that keeps you pursuing the gold stars that the ego offers.
A feeling of peace would challenge those long-held traditions and could mean the death of your false self. Your ego is in a survival contest with your desire for peace, and it will not loosen its grip willingly. It gets louder and louder, but remember that it will wilt when it faces the light of God on the path of your sacred quest.
These are a few of the more obvious payoffs your ego uses to keep you in a confrontational rather than a peaceful mood. I have provided some alternatives to the persuasive tactics of your ego. Keep in mind that you can restrain this ego simply by the power of your own will. All it takes is a determination to live by the dictates of your higher self and a willingness to act on that determination rather than succumb to the easier path of the ego.
SOME IDEAS FOR PUTTING PEACE IN YOUR LIFE PERMANENTLY
Remember, you must offer peace to have it. You must teach peace to know it. Make it a practice to offer peace in as many quarters as possible.
Thinking of yourself as a peaceful person is the first step, but it is only the first step. The thought must translate into action in order for you to know peace. Work at curbing your inclination to create confrontation and disruption in the lives of others.
A simple practice of pausing and asking yourself whether your ego, which loves turmoil, or your higher self, which loves peace, is about to act will help you to send out a peaceful response, even in situations where you are feeling impatient or misunderstood.
In those situations you will be able to state simply, for example, “You are really having a rough day,” to a hassled clerk, rather than, “I’ve been waiting for fifteen minutes already and I’m really feeling abused.” Send out peace by catching yourself and then consulting your loving presence for a response rather than relying on your ego.
Remember that your past must have taught you the wrong messages if they do not bring you peace and happiness. Do not be afraid to let go of those beliefs if they do not promote a sense of peace for yourself.
For example, if you’ve been taught to win arguments and debates at all costs, but those behaviors have not brought you a true sense of peace, try abandoning that posture and encouraging others to feel joyful rather than defeated about being in your presence. See if their joy brings you a stronger sense of peace than winning the debate.
Practice releasing the emotions of fear and guilt and replacing them with love, forgiveness and kindness. You will experience peace when you let go of those emotional responses. If you are feeling guilty about your past conduct, remind yourself that you are inviting turmoil to be with you.
Release the guilt by forgiving yourself and vowing to avoid that kind of conduct in the future. You do not need the guilt, unless you are going to allow your ego to continue its dominance over your life.
For example, make a list of all the things that keep you from loving yourself. Your list might include being overweight, jealous, nervous, addicted, incompetent or uncoordinated. Then, regardless of how much effort it takes, reverse your mental sentences and state that you love yourself while being fat, addicted, and so on.
This will help you to feel peaceful about the choices you’ve made and to realize that you are not that body or those desires. You are the invisible chooser. As you become more peaceful with the chooser you will begin to replace the unhealthy choices in a spirit of love.
Examine everything that offends you and see if you can get your ego out of the picture. If hunger and starvation in the world offend you, try shifting to a new awareness.
Somehow, in some way that I do not comprehend, these things occur in divine order, and so too does my desire to change it exist in divine order. Shed what offends you, and act on your desire to make corrections.
When you are offended, you are actually thinking, “This is awful, it shouldn’t be happening. How could God allow it?” Get your own ego out of the picture, then act upon that which you are for. There will be no need to fight.
Similarly, if you find someone’s behavior offensive, you are interpreting that behavior from your own self-absorbed position, which is that they shouldn’t act the way they do. You choose to be offended, hurt or angry by their behavior.
But they are acting the way they are. Your being offended is your ego talking to you to keep you anxious and upset. If you don’t take it personally, and if you see the behavior for what it is, you can work to eradicate the evils of the world unimpeded by your ego’s encouragement to be offended.
Keep in mind that grievances bring turmoil while communication brings peace. If you want peace in your life, rid yourself of your grievances.
The way to shed these grievances is to let go of your own self-absorption and to practice forgiveness rather than revenge. As you let go, you will feel a sense of peace overtaking you. If you are angry toward someone in your life, no matter how difficult you may find it, work at communicating with that person about your aggrieved feelings.
Your resistance to communicate is your ego’s strategy. If you allow it to fester, you will keep the turmoil alive and never experience the bliss that peace brings. When you resist communicating with someone, remind yourself that this is your ego at work, and that you are determined to have peace. A few moments of discussion or even forgiveness will send the turmoil away and will weaken the influence of your ego.
Your embarrassment or inner anguish over being wronged is just what your ego wants you to experience, since it will keep you away from your sacred quest and keep you in the clutches of your anxiety-loving ego.
Keep this little sentence ready to consult: “Judgment and peace are antithetical.” A Course in Miracles says, “The strain of constant judgment is virtually intolerable. It is curious that an ability so debilitating would be so deeply cherished.”
You must make a daily effort to look upon others without condemnation. Every judgment takes you away from your goal of peace. Your ego loves your judgments, because with them you remain in a constant state of anguish and remorse. Keep in mind that you do not define anyone with your judgment; you only define yourself as someone who needs to judge.
Judging others with condemnation removes the possibility of your experiencing love. If you can practice just being still, rather than condemning, you will get to the bliss I am writing about. You do not have to pretend that you love something that you loathe. Just get still and let the judgment subside.
Peace is not found in being right or being hurt or angry. By all means, work toward righting the wrongs you perceive, but do it with an understanding that an angry heart keeps you from knowing God on the path of your sacred quest.
Peace will come to you when you are a healer rather than a judge.
Give yourself the gift of a silent retreat every day. Even if it is only for a few moments. Go back to that key to higher awareness, shut down the inner dialogue and know the difference between the constant chatter and the bliss of the unified field. When you begin to have silent time on a regular basis, you will covet it and insist on it being a part of your life, regardless of how busy you are. This is the surest way to ease control away from ego and move into the inner vision of peace that is your birthright.
Once again, the greatest technique for bringing peace into your life is to remind yourself to always pick being kind when you have a choice of being right or being kind. This is the single most effective method I know for having a sense of peace. And remember, you have that choice in all of your interactions.
Keep uppermost in your mind that there is a place within you where there is perfect peace and where nothing is impossible. If you give yourself the right to pray regularly, you will get to that place. Peace is yours just for the askin
g.
When your higher self is present, it always promotes peace. If you have a question about whether it is your ego or your higher self prodding you, the answer becomes obvious when you ask yourself, “Will this bring peace or turmoil to my life?”
In the Yoga Vasistha, we are reminded of the need for peace:
This worldly life is not conducive to true happiness,
So reach the state of equanimity
In which you will experience peace, bliss, and truth.
If you stay within the unsteady mind,
Then there is no peace, there is no happiness.
This notion of an unsteady mind will be helpful to you. Unsteady translates into turmoil; equanimity is peace. This state of equanimity is unreachable with your ego. You must purchase the ticket to bliss from your higher self.
If you continue to look for that passage via ego as your travel agent, you will stay in that unsteady mind eternally. Your higher self—and only your higher self—promotes peace. It desperately wants you to know the bliss of this inner state of equanimity.
9
FROM DECEPTION TO TRUTH
The truth shall make you free.
—JOHN 8:32
I know I am strengthened as I seek to make truth my personal reality.
The words of Saint John are enormously significant for me. I work each day at allowing my higher self to be where my ego has been dominant for so many years. When I am successful, I am able not only to speak the truth but to think truth and be truth. Then I feel the bliss and fulfillment of being on my own sacred quest.
The intention of this chapter is to help you move truth into your life by identifying behaviors and rationales that are keeping you from that divine truth. A commitment to truth means a huge step in the direction of curtailing ego, which thrives on deception and phoniness.
Essentially, embracing the truth is welcoming your higher self and coming to know God. All that is not authentic will drop away automatically.
Your ego works hard to convince you that you are separate and better than everyone else, and you know that it does not take kindly to your embracing anything that threatens its existence. But remember that this is your inauthentic self, your false self. Deception is going to play a big role in your life when you embrace ego as your guide.
Therefore, in order to abandon your reliance on that false self with all of its deception, you will have to make a new agreement with truth. I encourage you to actually write yourself a contract in which you agree to include truth as your companion in your thoughts, in your conversations and in your life.
This is a big challenge and perhaps difficult for you. But it is guaranteed to lead you to the path of your sacred self. Begin by looking honestly and fearlessly at who you are beneath all the surface trappings that you have surrounded yourself with.
THE TRUTH BELOW YOUR SURFACE
You have a human story line, as does every person who has ever lived on this planet. That story line begins with your conception, continues through your childhood and all of your personal triumphs and tribulations, right up to this moment.
Your ego tells you this is your kingdom, your true identity, and therefore you must do whatever it takes to make this story turn out to be a good one for you. But you already know, by virtue of having read this far, that this is not so.
There is a divine whisper within you telling you that this is not your ultimate home and that the things this life offers are unfulfilling to a part of you. You sense that the real you does not value appearance, possessions, achievements, physical strength, talent or intellect because all these things eventually atrophy and disappear. You know that there is an eternal aspect of you beneath the surface and that for this part of you, only the truth will suffice.
It is similar to the truth Michelangelo knew as he sculpted the statue of David. He described knowing that the statue of David was already inside the block of marble. Part of his artistic life was spent chipping away the excess to reveal God’s creation. Try to visualize your inner life in this fashion.
What exists within you is not some kind of hideousness that needs to be lied about. There is nothing imperfect about you that requires you to create a whole world of deception in order to make you worthy in the eyes of others. There is a loving presence residing within you. It is as perfect as Michelangelo’s David, just waiting for you to allow it to emerge.
YOUR EGO DESPISES TRUTH
I have worked very hard on this matter of truth in my own life. For a large part of my life I have had only a very casual relationship with truth. It was never my intention to be malicious or harm anyone, but I allowed myself to reach into my ego’s large repertoire of deceptions. This casual relationship with truth kept me from knowing my higher self.
I had learned to listen to my ego rather than to my higher self whenever it was convenient to explain away my own weaknesses or inadequacies. If I wanted to have an affair, I found it easy to explain it away as my entitlement to the pleasures of the moment. Lying to protect that pleasure was simply what my ego demanded. The ego was very strong in this direction.
A friend told me that he had once come home at 5:00 A.M., still drunk after a night of partying. His wife had locked him out, so he went back and partied some more, finally arriving home at 8:00 that morning. He told his wife that he had fallen asleep in the hammock in the back yard and had really been in the yard all night. When his wife told him that the hammock had been removed three days earlier, he responded at the behest of his ego: “That’s my story, and I’m sticking with it.”
That is ego at work, encouraging a false identity with lies and deception if need be to maintain the image.
I found myself on the spiritual path as the result of a calling rather than as a conscious choice. As this happened, I saw that deep within me I did not accept myself as a divine being. I was at the mercy of my false self, which told me to project an image to the world and did not want me to know God or the truth that is embodied in that knowing. Consequently, I was deceiving myself to maintain that false self.
Gradually, it became intolerable to live with the lies, even the small distortions. The truth terrified my ego in the beginning. Then, as I tamed my ego, truth became an enjoyable feeling of freedom. Truth does literally set us free, as Saint John told us in the New Testament.
Truth sets you free because you no longer are focused on yourself and what kind of an image you are projecting or protecting. In fact, you are no longer of this world even though you are in it. You find your identification in the world beyond, with that which is eternal.
I’ve had many discussions with my good friend Stuart Wilde on this subject. He tells me that it took him eight years of daily corrections and reminders to move away from distortions and live the absolute truth. Eight years of correcting himself and learning to be independent of the good opinion of others. His ego kept telling him that what others in this world thought was more important than anything. This meant that he had to create the scene as he felt “they” wanted it.
I did the same thing. What I thought of as little white lies or meaningless exaggerations were in fact the work of the ego constantly reminding me that I needed to protect myself by giving the world what ego said was wanted. Why? Because deep down, according to ego, I was hideous. That has all changed dramatically since I made an agreement with God that truth is my way to higher awareness.
My experience of this change is echoed in the words of Stuart in The Whispering Winds of Change:
Over the years, as your spiritual energy grows, lies go from a part of everyday life to unfortunate necessities, to uncomfortable experiences, to extremely painful burdens that you will do anything to be rid of. If you have taken to the spiritual path you will know what I mean…. Transcendence is partly the process of moving from phony to real.
I am confident that as you travel the path of your sacred quest, you will have a similar experience. This transformation will take place in yourself as you witness and recapitulate yo
ur personal experiences. You will begin to find even the smallest distortions too burdensome. Then you will know that your higher self is winning the conflict with ego.
MOVING FROM PHONY TO AUTHENTIC
We see and hear lies all the time. The media is filled with advertising claiming all manner of things that have nothing to do with reality. According to advertising, you can recapture your youth if you drive a certain car, find love if you wear the advertised fragrance, gain new energy if you eat a certain cereal or regain lost intimacy if you use a certain deodorant. Our government promotes its policies with lies and spends money it doesn’t have. It distorts unemployment figures for politically advantageous sound bites on the evening news. Legislators tell us that we cannot have health care because we cannot afford it, yet they legislate themselves comprehensive care. We are supposed to believe that there is no money available to assist the poor and ill, yet we eagerly finance wars in faraway places.
We’ve all become used to lies. You may even have convinced yourself that to tell lies is a worthwhile activity. When you adopt distortion and deception, the problem is that you will always need more of the same to keep covering your tracks. The same is true for our society. Ultimately, as we move toward a more spiritual base, the lies will decrease, both in our culture and in our personal lives.
At first, when you discontinue lying, it stings. It is like a new remedy on an old, open wound. Your willingness to think, feel and act truthfully will expose some warts. The warts are you. The mistakes are you. They are not unique and they do not say anything ugly about you. The sting and the discomfort will be soothed as you let go of the need to deceive.
The ego will suffer whatever anxieties it will, but you will bask in the warm light of the truth.
I want to share a letter with you that I received recently. It illustrates how truth can come into your life in ways you might not imagine when you allow yourself to consult your higher self rather than succumb to the demands of your ego.
Your Sacred Self Page 19
