Lesson 37 – Transforming Your Ego
“The Ego, however, is not who you really are. The ego is your self-image; it is your social mask; it is the role you are playing. Your social mask thrives on approval. It wants control, and it is sustained by power, because it lives in fear.”
DEEPAK CHOPRA
YOUR EGO
As long as we lead our lives from the position of our outer personality, or what might also be called our ego, our lives will consist of only a small number of fragments of our true self. In this fragmented state of existence, we only interact with others when we want something from them. Rarely do we unconditionally offer something without expecting anything back in return.
From the position of our ego, we become grabbers and takers, not givers. We don’t have that much to give yet since we haven’t experienced our whole and complete selves. Our wholeness is grossly lacking, and we explore numerous activities, taking and grabbing, hoping somehow to fill the glaring emptiness within our limited frontal existence. However, that won’t work.
To be in the world yet not get sucked into it so that we become lost in who we are, we find that we must step behind our limited outer personality into a new position from which we can begin to see (as an impartial observer) what we have become and what it is that we are made of. A position that allows us to widen our understanding of who we are so that we can see the incredible connectedness that we have with all of creation at every level.
From this new position, we will find that whatever we do ultimately affects everything around us, and everything around us ultimately affects us. There is no escape from this interconnectedness that exists behind the scenes of the ego and its outer world.
GAINING INSIGHT INTO WHO WE HAVE BECOME THROUGH CONSCIOUS SELF-OBSERVATION
If we want to discover a new place within ourselves, a whole new world behind our outer personality, we must first leave the old world behind. To do so requires that we disengage the observation center of our frontal being, the extremely active conscious mind. Only when our mental machinery stops do we make a remarkable discovery: if we previously thought that the power to think was a tremendous gift, the power not to think is even more so!
Just try it for five minutes. Sit as you are and quiet your conscious mind so that no thoughts or images pass through it. In attempting this simple exercise, you will start to see what you are made of.
You will find that you live in a clandestine turmoil, an exhausting whirlwind, where there is room only for your thoughts, your feelings, your impulses, your reactions – always yourself, a tremendous force who oversteps boundaries everywhere, veils everything only with your thoughts, hears only yourself, sees only yourself, knows only yourself (if that) and whose perpetual themes, more or less alternating, can give you the illusion of leading a novel and unique life.
Your frontal being is a complex mass of mental, nervous, and physical habits held together by a few ruling ideas, desires, and associations – an amalgam of many small self-repeating forces with but a few significant vibrations.
By the time we reach age eighteen, we become set in our ways for life, our primary vibrations established, and around them indefinitely, will come to be coiled in thicker and thicker, more polished, more refined layers, the sediments of a curiously fragmented framework with a thousand faces which we call our self (really our little self). Yet, indeed, we are shut up in a construction that might as well be made of concrete without a skylight or any windows, and we become suffocated by what makes up who we are.
EXPANDING BEYOND THE BARRIERS OF YOUR MENTAL SCREEN
Your first task is to learn how to breathe freely again so that you can break away from the limitations imposed by our mental screen, which only allows a single type of vibration to filter through into your tiny life. You yearn to know the multicolored full spectrum of vibrations that make up the actual world (much vaster than yours), and you desire to understand the other beings that live within it (who also are asleep to their real identity). You also realize that you have an absolute and undeniable need to discover your other self, your true Self (worth so much more than you can currently imagine).
When you sit down with your eyes closed and attempt to silence your mind, you are submerged in a torrent of thoughts – they crop up from everywhere like frightened animals. There is only one way to achieve a quiet mind: to try again and again, patiently and persistently, until you win the battle and achieve your goal.
ACHIEVING A SILENT MIND
You need to have firmly established a passageway between your current outer mind and the ‘something within’ your inner being. The consciousness and its powers you aspire to reach through this passageway are already within you. You do not need to create them or go through any process to acquire them. All you need to do is learn to make your mind silent and connect to the centers of your intuition and heart so that you can make this remarkable discovery through first-hand experience.
Until then, you will not know who you are, and even less will you know what you are capable of. Your first goal is a practice focused on quieting your mind, but it is not the whole solution.
Once you reach a degree of relative silence through meditation, a problem exists. Once you set foot outside the place where you perform your meditation, you immediately fall back into the habitual clamor of the outside world and once again face the eternal separation of the within from the without, your inner life from your life in the outer world.
You also need to develop a complete life whereby you live the truth of your being every day, at every moment, not just the time taken during your meditation practice. You may be tempted to increase the time of your meditation so that you can achieve more excellent spiritual seclusion and separation from the outer world, but this will not take you to where you need to go. You will only find that it is still challenging to apply the gains made while in the higher dimensions of your meditations to your outer life.
When you attempt to transform parts of your external world through the insights gained through your inner conquests, you will find that these conquests were subjective and cannot be applied to making any changes on the material plane. You lack the objective power to ground your higher insights in the three-dimensional physical world.
Consequently, you will find it immensely difficult to transform your outer life and body as a result of your inner work. You still need to put all of the components in place to manifest on either the spiritual or physical plane.
On the physical plane, your outer personality still obeys the old typical imperfect influences, and the truth that starts to emerge within your being will continue to be separated by a painful gulf from the ignorant mechanism of your external nature. It is as if you were living in another, more significant and subtler world and had no divine hold, and probably little hold of any kind, upon your material existence.
The first step toward providing a solution is to practice silencing your mind where it is the most difficult—in the midst of daily life—while going to and from work, while at work, everywhere that you go, and wherever you spend your time.
Instead of living haphazardly, dispersed in a multitude of thoughts that are not only pretty uninteresting but exhausting, you need to gather yourself together and collect the scattered threads of your consciousness – at every moment! As you do, your life will acquire much greater interest since the minor circumstance becomes an occasion for victory – you finally are going somewhere rather than your usual nowhere. You now find yourself practicing a method of being, not a way of doing.
THIS METHOD IS THE TRANSITION TO A NEW LEVEL OF CONSCIOUSNESS THROUGH OPENING YOUR HEART AND INTUITIVE CENTERS
In the beginning, this new method of being can become a painful no-man’s land. You are in the process of leaving your old mentalized life behind, but you have not yet fully arrived in your new position, your new center behind your frontal being, which quietly witnesses everything that you are and do. You have now become fully immersed in a period of trial, much like that of the initiations of olden times.
The main ordeal during this transition is dealing with an inner void. After having lived your life for so long in a state of mental fever, you suddenly find yourself a bit lost and begin to see life around you as strange, terribly noisy, and tiring. You begin to get knocked about everywhere, against opaque and aggressive people, heavy objects, and brutal events—the world seems enormously absurd.
If you realize these strange feelings, you are developing sure signs of the beginning of an interiorization process. As you continue meditation, your new silence becomes like a dark well or a neutral experience with nothing going on. As you persist in your practice, you may even glide into a short sleep, unlike any ordinary sleep, but one where you have passed into another level of consciousness. Yet, there is no link between your old and this new one, and you come out of sleep not any more advanced than when you entered.
You now face a dilemma where there is nothing outside and nothing within either—neither this side nor that. Here, you must be very careful not to become enclosed again in a false illusion. It would help if you went further. Whenever you begin a process such as this, you must, in the beginning, make up your mind to go to the very end with it, whatever it may cost, for if you let go of your new but thin thread, you risk never finding it again. You have indeed come upon the trial.
You are now a seeker and must realize that as you are being born into another life, your new eyes and senses are not yet formed. You are not realizing a diminution of consciousness but rather a passage to a new level of consciousness.
Your only resource in this circumstance is to stick to your original aspiration – your need to know who you are and what you came here to become – and to make it grow and grow, precisely through this terrible lack of everything, as a fire into which you throw all your things, your old life, your old ideas, your old feelings. You must have the unshakable faith that behind this passage, a door will open and that your faith is not senseless.
THE AWAKENING OF YOUR INTUITION
Eventually, something becomes enlivened within you, a kind of foreknowledge that knows before you do, sees before you do, and sends its vision to the surface in the form of a need, a seeking, an inexplicable knowing. Your knowing is an intuition not only waiting for experience to justify it but leading toward experience.
THE DESCENT OF THE FORCE OF KNOWLEDGE
Little by little, your void becomes filled. How it gets filled cannot be described logically since everyone’s experience is somewhat different. Yet, we can describe general experiences incurred by most people who utilize this approach to make a powerful connection and quiet the chaos of the mind so this Force can descend through them.
When peace has been established in your mind, and your aspiration or need has grown and become constant and piercing, like a hole within, you begin to feel around the head and, more particularly, in the nape of the neck. This unusual pressure may give the sensation of a false headache. In the beginning, you can scarcely endure it for long, and you will probably desire to seek distraction, so try to think of something else.
Gradually, this pressure takes a more distinct form, and you will feel a veritable current descend—a current of force not like an unpleasant electric current but rather like a fluid mass.
You will find then that the pressure or the false headache at the start was caused simply by your resistance to the descent of this Force and that the only thing to do is not to obstruct its passage but to let it descend into all the strata of our being from top to bottom.
Here is when this Force becomes consciously grounded in your lives – when it becomes a veritable Force for manifesting and healing. This current, at first, is quite erratic and irregular, and a slight conscious effort is necessary to reconnect with it when it is blurred. Once connected, it becomes continuous, natural, and automatic. It gives the enjoyable sensation of fresh energy, like another breath more ample than that of your lungs, which envelops you, bathes you, lightens you, and at the same time fills you with solidity. The physical effect is almost exactly that of walking in the breeze.
You will not notice the natural effect till; for one reason or another, through distraction, error, or excess, you are cut off from the current; you find yourself abruptly empty, shrunken as though you lacked oxygen all of a sudden, with the very disagreeable sensation of a physical shriveling; you are like an old apple squeezed of its sunshine and its sap. Then you might ask yourself how you have been able to live before without this Force. You discover the first transmutation of your energies, and instead of going to the common source below and around you in universal life, you draw it from above.
This energy taken from above rather than below is much more precise and sustained, without breaks, and much more alive. In your daily life, amid your work and the numerous other things you participate in, the current of force is, to begin with, entirely diluted. But as soon as you stop for a moment and concentrate on it, it becomes a massive inrush, and all else comes to a standstill.
Gradually, you find that the current sensation disappears, as though your whole body, from head to foot, were charged with a compact and crystalline mass of energy—a solid, cool block of peace. And if your inner vision has begun to open, you find that all is bluish, vast, tranquil, without a ripple.
With this realization, you have plunged into the Source. This descending Force is the very Force of the Spirit – The Purposiveness. As you touch this Force of Purposiveness on a more and more regular basis, it will no longer be necessary to close your eyes and withdraw from the surface of your life to feel it. Every minute, it will be there, no matter what you are doing, whether you are eating, reading, or speaking. It will gather a greater and greater intensity as you get used to it, and it is such a formidable mass of energy that it is only limited by the smallness of your receptivity or capacity.
FINDING THE WITNESS WITHIN
If you approach the silencing of your mind as described above, you will not need to take on an external guru or master to guide you.
Most forms of yogic practice involve awakening an ascending Force within. This thermogenetic process carries with it real danger and profound disturbances, so the presence and protection of an enlightened Master are indispensable.
The traditional yogas aim at the liberation of consciousness, where the whole being is craned towards the heights in an ascending aspiration. They seek to shatter appearances, emerge above in peace or ecstasy, and escape having to deal with the physical plane. Hence, the awakening of this ascending Force.
But the aim of life is not only to ascend but to descend, not only to whisk away into the eternal Peace but to transform Life and Matter, and first of all, our small life and the little bit of matter it contains. It would help if you aimed to illuminate yourself from the summit of your being and then descend through each level of your consciousness gently, peacefully, and irresistibly.
This approach is never violent. Its power is quiet and gentle and strangely measured out, as though it were guided directly by the Wisdom of the Spirit. This will universalize your entire being, right down to the lowest layer.
When Peace is established, the higher Force from above can descend and work in you. It usually descends first into your head and liberates your inner mind centers, then into your heart, the navel, and other vital centers, and finally into the sacral region and below. It works at the same time to create perfection as well as liberation. Gradually, it takes up your whole nature, part by part, and deals with it, rejecting what has to be rejected, sublimating what has to be sublimated, and creating what has to be made. It integrates, harmonizes, and establishes a new rhythm in your nature.
You will begin to see that Universal Nature deposits certain habits of movement, personality, character, faculties, dispositions and tendencies, beliefs, and values in you and that these things are what you usually call yourself but are, in reality, only your outer personality.
The appearance of stability is given by constant repetition and recurrence of the same vibrations and formations because it is always the same wavelengths that you hook into or, instead, which hook themselves into you. This occurs according to the laws of your conditioning and education, always coming as the same vibrations recurring through your centers.
In reality, all is in a state of constant flux, and all comes to you from sources much vaster than yours – Universal in scope. Thus, your small frontal being is surrounded, overshadowed, sustained, traversed, and moved by a whole hierarchy of worlds.