As we worked in the counseling sessions, I discovered the illusion that ego was perpetrating on both Richard and myself. I too was being directed by ego from my life experience of being taught that success was measured in externals. I watched Richard and knew that I could easily end up having the same fears and shallow values. I felt he had been sent to me so that I could see that. Even to this day, some twenty-five years later, I think of Richard when I am inclined to put appearances over inner substance.
Richard died a few years ago. He, like all of his possessions, is recycled into some other physical form. His spirit is alive and in the place where there are no grades, no possessions, no separations from the source. Heaven on earth means grasping that awareness now and letting your ego retire.
In one of Robert Frost’s lighter moments, he penned these words:
Forgive me my nonsense
as I forgive the nonsense of those
who think they talk sense.
The emphasis on measuring one’s life based on external acquisitions or accomplishments is nothing more than nonsense. This emphasis on appearance shows up in your life in many ways.
HOW THE PURSUIT OF APPEARANCES SURFACES IN YOUR LIFE
The pursuit of appearances is one of the most common ways that your ego overtakes your daily existence. In order to transcend these inclinations away from inner substance, you must be able to identify these tendencies as they occur. Here are a few of the most frequent examples of this kind of thinking and behavior.
Being more concerned with your appearance than with your purpose (obsession with jewelry, cosmetics and clothing; spending large amounts of your time and money dressing up your body for the sake of appearance).
Pursuing grades, awards and external symbols of success instead of the joy of participating and learning (using your trophy case or collection of merit badges as your source of validation; believing that your children’s grades are the most important thing they will receive in school; encouraging your child to please the teachers at the expense of the child’s inner peace).
A conversation style that reveals how much your ego has control of your life (spending a lot of your time talking about your accomplishments and victories over others or over the system; discussing other people and their deficiencies and persistently pointing out your superiority—for example, saying that you would never do such a thing and can’t understand why anyone would; using your actions as the gauge for how others should conduct themselves).
Being preoccupied with spending money (using the cost of things as an indicator of value; always asking how much something costs or how much someone was paid and judging how much they are worth; using money not only as an indicator of success and status but as the central thought system in your daily life).
Believing you are just your body (being dissatisfied with your appearance and constantly fishing for compliments to validate your sense of physical inadequacy; assessing yourself and your happiness on the basis of physical changes such as sagging, wrinkling, turning gray or slowing down—these are signs that your ego has convinced you that you are exclusively your body and that you are deteriorating rapidly).
Allowing the advertising industry to control you. Advertising in all of its forms is generally used in an effort to convince you that you are incomplete and that you need to purchase something in order to be fulfilled. Consequently, you are bombarded almost every moment that you are exposed to media advertising, which urges you to consume something so you can be a more fulfilled person. Consistent reading, listening to and watching these messages is evidence of ego control.
Pointing out the deficiencies in others (spending time describing what you consider to be physical imperfections, such as a large nose, an unpleasant voice, a snooty personality or an ungraceful aging process).
The habit of noticing so-called deficiencies is a tool that your ego uses to convince you that you are better than the people you are criticizing. Of course this continues to prevent you from seeing the loving presence that is an invisible resident in those “tattered coats upon a stick,” as Yeats described people who are seen independent of their soul.
Striving for recognition by pursuing higher positions of authority (anguishing over not receiving what you think of as your “just due” in the job marketplace; feeling hurt and depressed when your efforts are not rewarded with a better position, title or contract).
Often, those rewards serve no other purpose than providing the ground for ego to proclaim your worldly superiority.
The daily stories reporting the astronomical salaries of entertainers and athletes are highly visible evidence of this ego activity. It is irrelevant that the amounts are beyond their ability to spend even after a huge percentage is paid in taxes. The issue is one of ego-oriented status requirements, which leads them to the false belief that they are being insulted if anyone in their field of endeavor is being paid more than they are.
Most of these performers will refuse to play and actually sit out, allowing their egos to convince them of the rightness of their action. They may be unsatisfied, unhappy and miserable, but it has become more important to assuage the ego than to play the sport they love and receive a compensation that is way beyond sufficient, regardless of what anyone else is earning. This inner turmoil over not receiving recognition or compensation delights ego because any inclination to direct attention toward a higher self is distracted when we are coping with turmoil.
Eating disorders. Most eating disorders are, initially, efforts to meet a standard of appearance that someone believes will bring happiness. Ego has convinced people with eating disorders that their true essence is located in the value of their appearance to others.
These people have become preoccupied with appearance to the exclusion of most of the other areas of their lives, and they ultimately destroy their bodies trying to make them perfect in the eyes of others.
THE PAYOFF FOR YOUR EGO
The process of transcending excessive concern with external appearance and shifting to an emphasis on inner substance comes with understanding why your ego controls your life. Below are some of the more common reasons this occurs.
The primary function of ego is to keep you from knowing your higher self. All appearances are masks that you wear to hide from your divine self, which has no concerns with appearances, acquisitions or positions of power.
If your higher self ruled your life, your ego could no longer function in the manner it does.
The state of anxiousness about career ensures that you will not look inward. Continual preoccupation with career and other roles prevents knowing your inner light. All those thoughts about important decisions to get you to a predetermined level of vocational prowess are really ego thoughts seeding you with anxiety.
You attempt to fill the void that ego tells you is within your being. If you believe that you are what you own, you are superficially centered on things external to yourself. The emphasis on ownership keeps you perpetually in the acquisition mode. The ego wants you to feel incomplete so that you are on an interminable shopping excursion trying to fill the void.
If you always believe that you need more stuff in order to be valid, you will never look to the nonstuff that is your true validation. Thus, your ego keeps you shopping for more, to ensure its survival.
Your ego wants to be the master of everything in your life. It knows that your wiser higher power has answers for you that are permanent and will provide you free passage to your sacred quest. This need to be in charge of everything is a control center for ego. If ego did not have control, it would fear that you might discover the truth of your authentic self.
Ego makes you resistant to taking risks and making changes. Ego does not want you entertaining any ideas about the benefits of taking risks and allowing change in your life. Those are radical ideas from ego’s viewpoint. Ego believes it is much safer for you to concentrate on appearances than to experiment with the value of inner bliss.
This message has helped
to create the culture you live in, which predominantly agrees with the self absorbing idea of appearance over inner value. The resulting spiritual deficit is at the root of all of our social problems.
SOME IDEAS FOR TRANSCENDING APPEARANCES
Take a few moments to become very still. In silence, start to release your attachment to the importance of outer impressions. You might visualize yourself building a huge bonfire and imagine tossing things into the fire. Throw in your jewelry, clothes, automobiles, trophies, everything, even your job title. With each item that goes into this imaginary fire, feel yourself being freer and freer.
Again I recommend that you read Marlo Morgan’s Mutant Message Down Under. She tells about shedding all of her possessions and being taken on a trip by spiritual aborigines where she realizes that the emphasis on appearance keeps us removed from our higher self.
Remove the labels attached to your life. Make an attempt to describe yourself without using any labels. Write a few paragraphs in which you do not mention your age, sex, position, title, accomplishments, possessions, experiences, heritage or geographic data. Simply write a statement about who you are, independent of all appearances.
It is difficult at first to describe your eternal, changeless and divine self—that part of you which is not identified with the senses. The observation that we suffer from the peculiar blindness that sees only the visible may be the reason for our difficulty. When you remove the labels, you will see the invisible part of yourself.
Look for the loving presence in others. Take a day to attempt to see the fullness of God in everyone you encounter. Rather than seeing only another physical being, tell yourself that the Christ in me is meeting the Christ in you. Or spend a day silently reciting the word “love” whenever you encounter another human being. This has such a powerful effect that you may choose to use it as a silent background mantra throughout your day.
When we can replace our physical self with the spiritual energy that is in all, there is absolutely no room for judgment.
Defend the absent. When you are in discussions that revolve around taking potshots at individuals who are not present, practice defending the person in his or her absence. Make a habit of being the one person in the group who defends the absent persons. You can wonder out loud how that person would explain the ways of being that are being criticized, and suggest that there may be more than what is seen on the surface.
These kinds of statements serve to restrain your ego’s need to compare and feel superior, and they serve your higher self, which wants to help others. This is a particularly beneficial lesson to teach young children, who have a tendency to gang up and “rip” the absent. Always ask, “Who here is defending the person who isn’t here to defend himself?”
Remember that you build a muscle by picking up heavier objects. This applies to your spiritual weight lifting too. You will build yourself up spiritually by attempting tougher and tougher assignments. One of the toughest assignments is to disregard the ego message to evaluate yourself with the criteria of appearance and possessions. But know that each time you are able to be less judgmental toward others or yourself, you are becoming stronger by having taken on the heavier spiritual weights.
Exercise compassion and love. The presence of those who have no possessions can provide an opportunity to practice love and compassion. Use those instances to recognize the fullness of God within these people, even if you choose not to contribute money or other assistance.
Others’ suffering, regardless of whether it is self-imposed or the result of some addiction, represents a spiritual deficit within the community of human beings. You can improve that deficit with kind thoughts of love and compassion in place of ego-induced fear or criticism.
Cultivate your calling. Make an attempt to shift your career objectives from self-absorption to a calling. That’s right, a calling. Remind yourself that this is an intelligent system and that you are here to be love and have love by serving. Use your talents and special interests to fulfill your service with your calling.
Your life work will take on a dramatic shift toward abundance, and you will feel on purpose and on the path of the sacred quest.
Affirm. Make affirmations a daily practice. Create your own or begin with these: Feed before you are fed. In a restaurant, ask everyone else to order and assist them before placing your own order. At the dinner table, assist each person with their helpings before loading up your own plate. Give before you get. Make an effort to be more giving and less oriented toward receiving.
Send anonymous contributions or gifts. Bring unexpected gifts to friends, family or strangers. Give a book you’ve enjoyed, flowers from your garden or any small token to others for no reason other than the giving. Pay the toll of the car behind you to practice giving without receiving.
Reduce the importance of grades. Take the pressure off your children by removing the emphasis on grades. Teach them to pursue their own interests and talents for the purpose of knowing themselves and serving others. This will aid them in finding their higher selves and discovering that they have the source of all knowledge within. They need to learn early that their worth is not found in SAT scores or college entrance exams.
Practice generosity. Remember, if you are not generous when it is difficult, you will not be generous when it is easy. Many people who give willingly of their possessions and their money are not doing it because they “have it to give.” They are coming from a special heart space that is attracted to serving and sharing.
In some way, all of us have it to give. Perhaps not in the same amount, but all of us can give something in the service of each other and in service of our higher selves.
Have many moments of mindfulness. Perceive how miraculous you are in any given moment and attempt to bring your awareness to the moment. Everything in your life is an opportunity to practice mindfulness.
By being mindful of your surroundings, paying attention to all that you encounter with an attitude of awe and awareness, you transcend the ego’s need to gather, accumulate and consume. Instead you put your focus on the individual moments of life and experience them through your spiritual self. Your life unfolds in moments. Paying attention to present moments teaches you about your spirit in a profound and ego-restraining manner.
To know what is truly meant by the words “earth as it is in heaven,” you must go beyond the realm of this world. C. S. Lewis wrote these profound words, which I find useful in the contemplation of the nonphysical realm: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
Nothing in the manifest world will satisfy the desire to know the way of your sacred self. The way to that world where judgment is impossible, possessions are not even a consideration and bliss is perpetual is not along the path of ego. That path leads away from the experience of earth as it is in heaven.
12
FROM STRIVING TO ARRIVING
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
To bow and accept the end
Of a love or of a season
—ROBERT FROST
I know that I am already whole and I need not chase after anything in order to be complete.
The message of this chapter can be summed up in two words: Lighten up! Your higher self demands nothing of you. You do not have to prove yourself to God. You were created as an extension of the highest spiritual force, the very essence of the universe. You did not arrive in now-here incomplete in any way. You do not have to strive to prove anything. Unless, of course, you choose to listen to the omnipresent false self, which stipulates that if you don’t stay busy pursuing something you are a failure.
It can be difficult to finally just lighten up and understand that life is what happens while you are making other plans. This is it! Each and every instant of your life takes place in the present moment.
Using your present moments to chase after future
moments is an ego-based activity. Your ego wants you to feel incomplete so that it can control your life. When you are finally able to say that you have arrived, you will know what it feels like to be free. You will have gotten free of your false self, which would keep you in perpetual motion chasing after more and more until your final breath.
Your higher self does not want you to be lazy or without purpose but to realize the power in knowing that you have arrived. When you know that this moment is your entire life, you are not focused on past or future moments, and you release the stress and tension that accompanied the striving lifestyle. With that release, you become more productive and peaceful than you were when you looked behind or ahead of yourself and did not allow your mind to rest in the still center of the present moment.
Contrary to what your ego attempts to convince you, you will not simply vegetate, become homeless or an irresponsible drifter when you stop striving. What will happen is that you will lighten up and become so engrossed in your mission that you are more vibrant. With this power, you discover that you are free to serve whatever you are intuitively drawn to.
When you stop striving and start knowing that you are on a divine mission, and that you are not alone, you will be guided to the experience of arriving. That experience will introduce you to the bliss of being in the realm of spirit, where there is no worry or guilt. Being fully in the now means that you will experience heaven on earth because you are completely absorbed in the soul of the holy instant.
By exploring some new concepts from the perspective of your soul, you will learn about the things you want to change in order to move closer to arriving and away from striving.
Your Sacred Self Page 23
