Your ego is not open to making contact with God because it would be immediately put out of business. Therefore, it is incumbent upon your ego to keep you in a constant state of fear.
Your ego does not like crisis because crisis will very often get you to look within and open yourself to a higher appreciation of your spiritual self. Thus, your ego promotes a rather smooth-flowing river of misery with fears about your inadequacy and shortcomings.
Your ego is in direct conflict with your true purpose for being here. You are here to give and receive love. Your ego protects you from that vision by keeping you in a belief system that declares you are separate and special. This feeling that you are different than others and at the same time competing with them to validate your specialness means you cannot easily extend your love to them.
By hanging onto the fears of your insufficiency, you can avoid taking any risks. This will prevent you from making the changes that will bring you into contact with your spiritual self. As long as you have self-doubt and all of its attendant fears, you are guaranteed to stay in servitude to your false self.
Your ego thrives on guilt. Your higher self knows that you should forgive yourself, learn from mistakes and release feelings of fear and anxiety.
But ego hands you guilt so that it will thrive. Guilt is the inner fear that you should pay a price for any and all mistakes you have committed in your life. Thus the ego convinces you that you must feel guilty, and it keeps you removed from your true spirit.
Your ego doesn’t reject love. It merely provides you with excuses for why you should be skeptical of your divineness. Your ego is exceedingly polite in this matter.
The polite background ego voice whispers that love is a high ideal—but one that is loaded with danger. There is a good chance you will get hurt, so you should proceed cautiously. It warns you to not give too much love because you may be taken advantage of. Because you are so special, it tells you, others want to take advantage of you.
All of those ideas keep you in a state of fear—not panic, just fear. A steady stream of anxiety about giving and receiving love is enough to keep you under the influence of ego.
Ego promotes inauthentic love. In your relationships with others, your ego convinces you that your partner is just what you need to fill the emptiness within you. This is a great ruse that will forever keep you from knowing love and peace.
By definition, if you are incomplete, that is all you will have to give away, because you can’t give away what you don’t possess. You will give your partner an incomplete person who is afraid of being discovered! There is no way authentic love can flourish in this kind of dishonest atmosphere. You will be unable to know love and to receive it without questioning it.
SOME IDEAS FOR BRINGING LOVE RATHER THAN FEAR INTO YOUR LIFE
Make a copy of this passage from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Tape it to your mirror and read it every morning. It will help stimulate the inner opening to the love you seek and dissolve fears if you are willing to do what the poet suggests.
I exist as I am, that is enough.
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.
One world is aware, and by far the largest to me, and that is myself.
And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness,
I can wait.
Remind yourself that God created you in perfect love that is changeless and eternal. Your body is changing, as is your mind, so you are not that body or that mind. You were created as a spirit that is pure love. That is where you want to keep your attention focused.
As you recognize and affirm this aloud each day, you will lose your fear of inadequacy and incompleteness. Constantly recalling the affirmation of being a creation of God beyond the world of the manifest will chase the fears away.
Forgive yourself and welcome love back into your life. When you can do this, a kind of balancing occurs. Rather than atoning for sins with guilt, you are more committed to promoting joy and service. You will begin to do what you originally came here to do.
Notice the acts of kindness other people do rather than their wrongdoing. This is how the loving presence views you. We are all good, decent, loving souls who occasionally get lost. When you can focus on the good in another and hold that in your mind, you are acting from your higher self. This can help dissipate fear and anger.
Remind yourself of how much you have to give away and of how precious and valuable your giving is. You have the same force running through you that allows the planets to move, the earth to orbit, the seeds to sprout and the flowers to open. There is not a separate God for each person. There is one universal intelligence flowing through all of us.
That is the force of love. Remind yourself of that every time you doubt your own divinity. Affirm to yourself that you are divine and that you love and are loved and will not be pressured by your false-thinking ego to not know this. Remind yourself that the same force flows through you that flowed through Jesus Christ and Buddha. This should help whenever you feel your ego sneaking in attempting to put fears of inadequacy and doubt into your mind.
Show others that verbal assaults are meaningless. Do not give others your energy by arguing against them. Simply pass when others attempt to have you choose guilt.
Know that you have returned from darkness to the light and that you are allowing your higher self to show you the way. Admit that you had been ruled by ego previously but are no longer ruled. If others continue to insist that you should feel guilty, simply refuse.
Accept that you are enough. When ego begins to try to attract you to taking on fear, say loudly, “I am enough!” You do not need to be anything that you are not. You do not need to prove yourself. You do not need to indulge your ego with fears and to keep your real self at a distance.
“I am enough” affirms that you choose love and chase doubts and fears away.
Acknowledge to yourself the ways you have chosen the false self to guide you and that you are choosing a different guide. With the higher self as your new guide, you have permission to arrive and relax. You no longer have to prove yourself but can begin in joyful earnestness to travel the path of love.
This inner atmosphere will erase judgmental thoughts that were planted and nourished previously by ego. Instead of being frightened or offended, as fear-based ego suggested, you use the moment to contemplate love and compassion. Then there is no fertile ground for thinking you are better, more intelligent or luckier.
Take the risk of intimacy whenever possible. Tell someone that you love how you feel, even if fear is present. Do it anyway! By taking action against your fear of intimacy, you invite your higher self, your loving presence, to replace ego’s nonloving fear tactics.
Snuggle up and risk saying how much you love and appreciate someone. Tell that person that you are willing to be vulnerable in order to know him or her better. These open-hearted ways of expressing yourself can defeat fear of intimacy. Use any excuse you can to express your love, and try to ignore the vehicle of expression. It is the substance of what you are and feel that counts, not the vehicle that you use.
If those fears ever start to return, stop and ask yourself the question I wrote about earlier: “So what’s not to like?”
You cannot have a better past, so abandon the idea right now. You did what you knew how to do, given the circumstances of your life. Those mistakes of the past were driven by your ego, which wanted to keep you in its grasp. You listened to your false self and recoiled in fear over the idea of anyone knowing your true self.
You moved away from love, but now you are back and making the choice for love. You know deep within you that at your primal level you have been designed for love and happiness. You simply let that false self direct you away from the loving presence that is your essence.
You can choose to return to the brilliant light of love that
is always with you. Who you are is that unclouded love. Go there often and all of your fears will be replaced by the love that is always with you.
Let your thoughts remain on love, and let your actions stem from this love. This is the realization of your higher self. It is the realization of your sacred quest. You can truly make the decision to be free from fear and doubt.
There is no greater freedom!
11
FROM OUTWARD APPEARANCE TO INNER SUBSTANCE
Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them.
—ARISTOTLE
My judgments prevent me from seeing the good that lies beyond appearances.
The most frequently quoted prayer in the Western world includes these words: “…thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.” Ego is determined that your conceptions of heaven and earth be separate. For ego, having heaven on earth means being the richest and most famous person in this kingdom. For your sacred self, “heaven on earth” means there are no such distinctions.
Earth, ego insists, is where you should be primarily concerned about appearances and acquisitions. The major focus of your life here, according to ego, has to do with appearances, and your physical appearance takes precedence over inner feelings. The pursuit of your career, the quality and amount of your possessions and the trappings of success are what ego wants you to direct your energy toward. These are absolutely more important to ego than the inner life.
But we all have an awareness of the emptiness and futility of ego’s way. You are reading this book partly because you know that in order to have a deeper, richer experience of life you need to know how to make a shift away from ego to the inner self that the loving presence offers.
GOING BEYOND THE WORLD OF APPEARANCES
To understand the way the ego works, you must realize that this false vision of yourself believes that earth is home. If you identify yourself as no more than an earthling, as the ego wants you to, then your happiness and fulfillment will be in the form of the physical things in the manifest world.
But there is an aspect of you that knows that these things do not provide the spiritual fulfillment that is the promise of the sacred quest. Planet Earth is not your only home. What it offers you is only partially satisfactory to the invisible you within the form of your body. That inner aspect knows that this life on earth is not its ultimate destiny.
However, most of us have been convinced by the sturdy and determined ego that appearances are what life is about, and that rewards are a result of appearances. The inner self knows that this is all very fleeting because the rewards you receive for youthfulness and physical strength, for example, will diminish as those physical qualities deteriorate.
The nonphysical you is eternally observing the physical transformation of your body. This realm of the higher self is dominated by an inner self that is aware of the realities of earth and of heaven. It is immune to the pleas of the ego to focus all of its energy on the earth plane.
Here is how Nisargadatta Maharaj describes it: “The world is the abode of desires and fears. You cannot find peace in it. For peace you must go beyond the world.” And this is what heaven on earth is truly about—an experience of inner peace without the idolatry of possessions and appearances.
The insightful response to the prayer “…thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven” is found in the awareness that heaven is not of this world. It is in the world of God, the realm where you have destroyed all that you have amassed and where you find the peace that Sri Nisargadatta refers to.
Your higher self is beyond this world of life and death where appearances are touted as all important. Consider the following two ways that those appearances have triumphed over the inner self.
Judging others by their outer appearance. It is a common trait of the ego-driven person to judge others by the external measures of their possessions, appearance and conduct.
Frequently, judgment is polite and without mean-spiritedness when you classify and choose not to encourage friendliness with someone based on their position on your status scale. Nevertheless, it is a technique useful to the ego to keep you from knowing your higher self.
All of the judgment concerning appearances is simply a tool for upgrading oneself by comparison with another. Ego gets you to reconfirm your separateness, and it loves to keep you in a state of separation from others. In that way it manages to prevent you from feeling connected as you are in reality.
When you consult your higher self, you learn that you are a part of the same divine essence that connects all of us to the source of spirit. Your inner self confirms that you are no better than another and that you do not need to judge or to compare yourself against others. There is one God, one source with many different manifestations.
When you have this awareness, you simply cannot see others in terms of what they possess or how they appear, or even how they conduct themselves. Instead, you relate to them in terms of the divineness that is flowing through them, which is a manifestation of the energy supporting the physical world. On the path of the sacred way, you experience that force flowing through you and others.
You are able to send them love and kindness, without noticing appearances because you sense the sacred energy that flows through both of you. Your higher self leads you to remember the truth about someone, even when they have forgotten it themselves.
Those beings you encounter who are ego-directed are not judged in any way. You are able to simply witness lovingly as your body interacts with theirs, sensing the loving presence within, even when they do not. You and God are partners when your higher self is allowed to lead.
In that partnership you are serenely aware that this home called earth is a temporary stopover. This is the place where inhabitants and their possessions never remain the same. They undergo a continual progression of physical change. Heaven, by contrast, is changeless and eternal—there is an absence of judgment, an absence of possessions and of positions.
“On earth as it is in heaven” ought not to be an expression of empty words but an awareness that your higher self urges you to discard all thoughts of being separate from others and from God. “On earth as it is in heaven” means to begin to live without the false ideas that the ego promotes.
Certainly, many will conduct themselves in ways that show they are not driven by their higher selves. Your task at those moments is to remember the inner self, which they have forgotten they have within themselves. Avoid your inclination to accept ego’s invitation to judge them. They, too, are creations of God. They, too, have the source of goodness flowing through them even if they have forgotten it or allowed their egos to dominate their lives. But seeing the conduct of those who are monopolized by their egos is not a reason for you to do the same.
These people will learn from their behaviors. But you need to consult the spirit that is within you for your response. This is the way of taming your ego and experiencing the peace that comes with the refusal to judge others. This is not to say that you should endorse the crass conduct of others or that they should not be held responsible for their behavior. What you want to do is consult your higher self rather than your ego, and refuse to judge or elevate yourself as a result of any comparisons.
Judging yourself based on your appearance. If you’ve allowed your ego to convince you to judge others by their external appearances, it is likely that you bestow the same spiritual disservice on yourself. When you examine your own life with evaluations based on external appearances and conclude that you haven’t measured up to your potential, you can be sure ego is rejoicing.
When you need more of anything to feel positive about yourself, you are always in a race without a finish line, and you cannot achieve spiritual bliss. The way out of this trap of self-repudiation is to recognize that the earth habitat is not your complete home. Edgar Allan Poe reminds us: “All that we see or seem /Is but a dream within a dream.” When you know that your lifetime is a dream within a larger dream, you can stop
using outer appearances as a meaningful gauge.
Begin to understand that the ego belief system is similar to your nighttime dreams, where you believe the dream is real while you are dreaming and on awakening see the illusion. All life is a projection of your mind—it is a dream within a dream. With this kind of awareness, you can consult your higher self rather than acquiesce to ego demands for bigger, better or more expensive things to validate your existence.
Heaven on earth begins happening when you abandon the false idea that you need to prove to anyone that you have acquired the necessary credentials to be considered a success. I can recall in my own life, years ago, when I first came to this realization.
I was in a counseling session with a man I’ll call Richard, who had achieved all that most of us in the Western world would consider necessary to be called successful. He was a multimillionaire, had several homes and traveled all over the world. But he had lived the life of outward appearances exclusively. He knew no other way, so he did not have choices and was instead trapped by his lifestyle.
During the months I worked with Richard, it became clear to me that appearances do not create peace and that peace is truly what the higher self offers. Richard constantly needed to compare himself with others and try to go them one better. His ego was working overtime getting him to verify his superiority.
So he was trapped in a life of striving to prove himself by having affairs with younger women, by buying the most expensive clothing and fragrances and by neurotically obsessing about his hair loss. He was estranged from his grown children, and he constantly worried that his wife would discover his philandering and divorce him, leaving him penniless and feeling worthless. Richard had listened to his ego his whole life, and although his successful facade had grown, he was a wreck.
He lived in terror of being invalidated by loss of the appearance of being a successful man. He longed for a more satisfying experience of life but had no idea that his quest was being forsaken by his own false self. Slowly, he began to discover the inner journey and began paying less attention to the call of his ego.
Your Sacred Self Page 22
