When you believe that your past drives your present, you accept the false belief that the wake is moving the boat. The reality is that the wake is nothing more than the trail left behind, as is your past behavior. As long as you believe that you can’t escape the past and that it is driving your life today, you are in the clutches of your ego and are unable to take the risks and responsibilities that go with becoming a spiritual being.
Ego uses the fear of death as a motivator to keep you pursuing hedonism, acquisitions and additional power. The idea of death as a natural act of shedding the worn-out body is terrifying to the ego. It knows that you will be unable to invite your higher self into your awareness if it can keep you striving for more and believing that that is what your life is meant to be.
Ego insists that you must be impatient or you will lose your place along with your credibility. In this way it is reinforcing its program of teaching you that you are separate from everyone, so you need to always try to get ahead of them. Because it is you versus them, it is impermissible for you to be patient. This keeps you constantly striving.
SOME IDEAS FOR TRANSCENDING THE STRIVING TRAP
You can stop the inner push of ego when it is campaigning for you to strive for more. Use the simple and pleasing realization that you need do nothing. “I need do nothing” is a helpful affirmation to read each day. This simple reminder will invite your higher self to become more active in your life.
When you encounter a personal dilemma about what you want to go after in your life, turn the decision over to your sacred self. Create a sentence that you repeat silently and aloud each time you begin trying to figure out what to do—something like, “Decide for me, I leave it in your hands.” Then let go and listen.
Your answers will come as you develop the internal willingness to allow your higher self to guide you. This may sound like a cop-out, but I have found this technique helpful in many problem areas of my life. When I say, “I am asking you to decide for me,” I find that answers appear readily.
Miraculously, the right person will show up and say to me precisely what I needed to hear, or a book will arrive in the mail with underlined passages that are just what I was looking for, or the phone will ring and I will be guided to the right source. In order to do this, you must be able to let go and just allow your higher awareness to exercise itself.
Practice stepping back and witnessing your ego in action. Don’t attempt to do something about your striving ego. Don’t fight it, subdue it, control it or destroy it. That would just make the ego real.
You must remember that your ego is not real. Ego is a false belief that you have about yourself being separate from your higher self and from other living things. By witnessing your ego, you are choosing love and being connected to the loving presence.
Be still and know. These four words will help you to get past striving and to know the bliss of being here now. When you allow yourself to be still, you will understand the futility of constant striving and chasing after more.
Think of how amusing it is to watch a puppy or a kitten chasing its tail. The animal doesn’t realize that arriving is impossible when the tail itself is propelled by the desire to catch it. The desire keeps the tail just out of reach.
Your false belief keeps you striving for happiness in the form of something more. When you feel yourself caught in the incessant striving, recall the four words “Be still and know.”
Make an effort to wake between three and six o’clock in the morning and spend twenty minutes meditating. I have found this to be the most creative time of the day for accessing my higher self.
Commit yourself to this meditation time no matter how difficult it is to get out of bed. Fight the temptation to go back to sleep, and get up and go to a place you’ve chosen where you can be undisturbed and quiet. Meditate for twenty minutes. Then go back to sleep if you want to.
In the midst of a tumultuous meeting or a frantic encounter with your children, get up and excuse yourself for a moment. When you’ve removed yourself physically from the tumult, give yourself five minutes to get centered and ask God this question: What is my purpose here and how may I serve you in the midst of this confusion?
After a few moments of silence, return to the meeting. You will discover that the calmness and acknowledgment of the presence of God help you to see your role more clearly. You will know that you are already whole and recognize the test for what it is. You may also recall the two rules for being peaceful: Don’t sweat the small stuff, and It’s all small stuff.
Make it a practice to go for a walk alone as often as possible. This is one of the simplest and quickest ways to get in touch with your sacred self. You can enhance this experience by creating your personal mantra to repeat in time to your footsteps—a sentence like “Divine design shines through me” or a single word such as love, beauty or peace.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an avid solitary walker. On the wall of his personal library was this quotation: “I think it is the best of humanity that goes out to walk. In happy hours, I think all affairs may be wisely postponed for walking.”
Keep in mind the advice offered in A Course in Miracles: “Only infinite patience produces immediate results.” Learn to be patient with yourself and those around you.
As you get into your car, visualize how you want the drive to be and practice being patient with everything that shows up along your route. Being patient can take place within your mind by simply having an inner dialogue of respect for the natural unfolding of events. A simple background silent mantra also fosters patience.
Impatience is a learned response that is a killer in many ways. You can remove this ego-driven tendency by witnessing yourself in frantic motion and allowing your higher awareness to replace the impatience with love and acceptance.
Spend special moments in awe of the miracle that life truly is. Awe is the loving appreciation for God’s work and the presence of the divine intelligence.
By giving yourself uninterrupted moments for appreciation, you allow yourself the freedom to arrive rather than strive. Being in a state of awe or bewilderment, you choose to be free of ego demands and allow the loving presence to be felt. When you celebrate the present moment this way, you are truly arriving and being in that moment.
One of the great teachers in my life was Paramahansa Yogananda, a man who came out of India to teach the ways of the higher self to the people of the West. I have read many of his speeches and have found great comfort in his writings as well as reading about his life. One of my favorite sayings applies to the contents of this chapter. I offer it to you to ponder as you move toward an awareness of arriving rather than striving.
Seek spiritual riches within. What you are is much greater than anyone or anything else you have ever yearned for.
That is the voice of your higher self reminding you to quietly accept yourself and turn off the yearning. You are never going to get it all, you are it all already.
13
FROM DOMINANCE TO TOLERANCE
To accuse others for one’s misfortunes
is a sign of want of education.
To accuse oneself shows that one’s
education has begun.
To accuse neither oneself nor others
shows one’s education is complete.
—EPICTETUS
I am aware that I do not need to dominate anyone in order to be spiritually awake.
Your higher self wants you to be at peace. Your ego wants to keep you in a state of turmoil in order to maintain its mastery and control over your life. You’ve probably listened to your ego most of your life.
The result of listening to ego is that most of us allow ego to talk us into choosing dominance rather than tolerance as our style of interacting with life. Making the change from dominance to tolerance requires disciplining ego and listening to your sacred self.
I am writing from my personal experience in this matter, and it is one of the toughest assignments my higher self has presented me
with. I have spent many years being dominated by my ego, and I have unwittingly made dominance and judgment, rather than tolerance, a cornerstone of my relating.
The suggestions in this chapter are all from my personal experience of transcending my ego-driven instincts. Making the transition from dominance to tolerance is especially difficult because the desire for ego satisfaction is so strong. Ego is extremely persuasive after a lifetime of enjoying the benefits of its dominance. It does not want to relinquish control.
Your higher self will gently take over when you no longer control others. You will begin experiencing unconditional love, and in the process you will finally find the peace that you crave.
To move toward the tolerance that your higher self encourages and away from your ego-driven need to control and judge, you will want to examine the qualities that sustain a tolerant approach to life.
REPLACING DOMINANCE WITH TOLERANCE
Listed below are the major characteristics of tolerance. With tolerance, notice that you become more in tune with your higher self as you forsake the stubborn demands of ego. Realize that what ego has done to you, you have done to others.
Learning about these vital ingredients for creating a tolerant attitude is a way of educating ego and yourself. In the process you can let go of the habitual ego responses that lead you away from true fulfillment.
Letting things be. To become more tolerant and less controlled by your false self, start practicing being satisfied with what is. Your ego is never quite content. If you choose one thing, your ego will persuade you to consider something else.
If someone you love acts meekly toward you, your ego wants that person to be more assertive; if that person is assertive, your ego decides to dislike assertiveness. If you eat too much, you start thinking about how nice it would be to be thinner; go on a diet, and all of your thoughts will be about food. If you stay at home for a long period, your ego starts telling you how nice it is to travel; go on the road, and you start thinking about how nice it would be to stay home. You’re in a relationship and begin to imagine it would be nicer to be uninvolved; you’re not in a relationship, and you start wanting to be in one. Your children are running around the house and you start thinking about escaping; you aren’t at home and think of nothing but your children.
If you identify with this kind of inner dialogue, rest assured that ego has temporarily separated you from your sacred self. In its ongoing program to convince you of your separateness, it needs to separate you from oneness with the center of your being. Then it can keep you in that state of trying to dominate and control others as a way of trying to achieve your balance and bliss. Trouble is, you cannot get there if you are separated from the awareness of your higher self.
As you begin listening to your higher self in quiet and contemplative moments, you begin relaxing and taking the pressure off. You stop the false thinking that everyone in your life needs to be dominated or controlled by you or that others must live up to your expectations for you to be happy.
People are the way they are, and your need to dominate or change them in any way is the edict of your false self. Your ego is, as usual, trying to convince you of your separateness. It also doesn’t want you to catch on to how it is controlling your life, so it convinces you that if you don’t dominate others, they will get the best of you.
Ego projects its controlling attitude on others to keep you from seeing it at work within you. At the same time, it causes you to view tolerant people as controllable. Clever ego gets you coming and going. It gets you into dominant behavior to hide its way of controlling you and at the same time it makes you dislike the tolerant, controllable persons. Why would you ever want to choose tolerance with this model?
You won’t choose tolerance if you are unable to get free of those false ego beliefs. But when you gain the awareness that all of us are connected in this universe—with the same divine intelligence running through each and every one of us—and that the higher self is knowable and real, then all the surface satisfactions of dominating, controlling and judging others become unappealing.
Your higher self has absolutely no need to dominate anyone or anything. This is the ticket to freedom. Right now, though, in this very moment, your ego is working to convince you that higher self and tolerance are ridiculous ideas. Ego will argue that tolerance means permitting criminal behavior and health and social problems. Its favorite example is that it would mean permitting the Hitlers of the world to commit atrocities while we tolerantly look on. Your higher self can see beyond this logic, so of course you can too. If you are willing.
Your higher self knows that letting go of intolerance does not imply endorsement of evil. The evils that exist in the world are independent of your opinion about them. We will eradicate evil and bring peace to the world, not by judging others but by radiating love. If you let go of judgment and the inclination to dominate and control others, you are able to replace hate and intolerance with love and harmony.
When Mother Teresa was asked if she would march against the war in Vietnam, she replied, “No, but if you have a march for peace, I’ll be there.” When you become peaceful within, that is what you will have to give away. When you are dominated by your ego, you dominate others. If there is no inner harmony, there is no outer harmony. Ego needs the illusion of enemies in order to control you. When you are controlling others, it is because you have permitted ego to be in control.
The paradox here is that you will affect the world in the ways that you wish when you cease trying to improve conditions with intolerance and judgment. It is only when you are not controlled by ego that you can choose to not control others. What you believed was power when you dominated others was actually the external activity of ego controlling you.
Your impact on the world at large begins with the smaller world of yourself. You will foster freedom and peace when you are free of ego’s control and know the peace of your higher self traveling the path of the sacred quest. One of the first steps along your path is learning tolerance by practicing seeing the world as it is rather than as you demand it to be.
Listening. Your ego wants you talking. Your higher self wants you listening. Ego is intolerant. Your higher self is highly tolerant. Therein lies a major difference in attaining your sacred quest.
When you meditate and get very quiet, you learn the art of listening. It is as if God is talking to you rather than you talking to God. Then you begin to know what it feels like to trust your inner guidance. You are even able to listen with compassion to ego’s talk. You hear ego’s chatter as the expression of fear and as its desire to protect you by keeping you safely separate from others. You are introducing tolerance into your life.
Ego wants to keep you talking in the false belief that it is safer and better to show others how you are different and separate from them. The more you talk and use yourself as a reference point, the more inclined you are to boast and display intolerance, which satisfies ego’s agenda.
But protecting ego this way is an exercise that prevents you from the true freedom of knowing your higher self, which begins happening when you begin listening. So ego intensifies its chatter whenever you attempt to meditate or listen to your inner self. It is through listening, even to your intolerant ego, that you will learn tolerance.
It is also through listening that you abandon your self-absorption and your need to dominate or be ego-dominated. When you gently draw out others by really hearing their stories, you are showing love and respect. This goes for ego too. Refusing to listen or showing contempt are intolerant attitudes of the highest order.
Ego’s need to chatter and display its superiority is convincingly demonstrated in the following story from The Heart of the Enlightened, edited by Anthony de Mello. What the story reinforces is the success that comes our way when we listen tolerantly.
Once upon a time there was an inn called the Silver Star. The innkeeper was unable to make ends meet even though he did his very best to draw customers by making the inn
comfortable, the service cordial, and the prices reasonable. So in despair he consulted a sage.
After listening to his tale of woe, the sage said, “It’s very simple. You must change the name of your inn.”
“Impossible!” said the innkeeper. “It has been the Silver Star for generations and is well known all over the country.”
“No,” said the sage firmly. “You must now call it the Five Bells and have a row of six bells hanging at the entrance.”
“Six bells? But that’s absurd! What good would that do?”
“Give it a try and see,” said the sage with a smile.
Well, the innkeeper gave it a try. And this is what he saw. Every traveler who passed by the inn walked in to point out the mistake, each one believing that no one else had noticed it. Once inside, they were impressed by the cordiality of the service and stayed on to refresh themselves, thereby providing the innkeeper with the fortune that he had been seeking in vain for so long.
There are few things the ego delights in more than correcting other people’s mistakes.
As you cultivate the influence of the higher self in your life, you will find it easier to gently let go of ego’s demands that you dominate conversation or impose your views on others. You will find pleasure in stultifying your own self-aggrandizing impulses and in listening to others for a change. You will begin to enjoy your conscious efforts to be tolerant through the spiritual practice of active listening.
Giving. You can neutralize the impact of your ego quite readily through the act of giving. The process of giving involves more than handing over a few presents. Real giving involves being aware of the needs and wants of others.
Think back to the moment when you were most in love. That experience of strong, passionate love made you automatically aware of the needs of your partner. That awareness is also found in the love a parent has for a child.
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