2.27 Your Ego Must Also Be Transformed To Hear The Voice of Intuition Clearly
“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
New Age Leader
TEMPERING 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 be made up of only a small number of fragments of our true self. In this fragmented state of existence, we find that we interact with others only when we want something from them. Rarely do we unconditionally go out and offer something without expecting anything back in return.
From the position of our ego, we become grabbers and takers, not givers. We really don’t have that much to give yet, since we haven’t really experienced our whole and complete self. Our wholeness is grossly lacking and we explore numerous activities, taking and grabbing in the hope that we will somehow fill the emptiness that sits glaring 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 to who we really 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 really are so that we can see the incredible connectedness that we really 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 that everything around us ultimately affects us. There is no escape from this interconnectedness that exists behind the scenes of the ego and it’s 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 that exists behind that of 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 to not think is even more so!
Just try it for five minutes. Try to sit as you are and quiet your conscious mind to a point where no thoughts or images go through it at all. In attempting this simple exercise, you will start to see what you are really made of.
You will find that you live in a clandestine turmoil, an exhausting whirlwind, where there is room only for your own thoughts, your own feelings, your own impulses, your own reactions – always yourself, a tremendous force who oversteps boundaries everywhere, veils everything only with your own 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.
In reality, your frontal being is nothing but 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 major vibrations.
By the time we reach age eighteen we become set in our ways for life, our major vibrations established, and around them indefinitely will come to be coiled in thicker and thicker, more polished, more refined layers, the sediments of a curious fragmented framework with a thousand faces which we call our self (really our little self). Yet truly, we are shut up in a construction which might as well be made of concrete without a skylight or any windows and we become suffocated to what really makes up who we really are.
EXPANDING BEYOND THE BARRIERS OF YOUR MENTAL SCREEN
Your first task is to learn how to breath 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 small life. You yearn to know the multicolored full spectrum of vibrations that make up the true world (much vaster than yours), you yearn to understand the other beings that live within it (who also are asleep to their real identity) and 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 find that you are submerged in a torrent of thoughts – they crop up from everywhere like frightened animals. There is only one way to succeed in achieving a quiet mind and that is 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 that you aspire to reach through this passageway are already there within you. You do not need to create them or go through any process to acquire them. All that 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 really are and even less will you know what you are capable of. A practice focused on quieting your mind is your first goal, but it is not the whole solution.
A problem exists once you reach a degree of relative silence through meditation, and that is once you set foot outside of 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 and 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 a greater 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 still is difficult to apply to your outer life the gains made while in the higher dimensions of your meditations.
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 in nature and cannot be applied to making any changes on the material plane. You lack any 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 your outer body as a result of your inner work. You still don’t have all of the components in place to manifest on either the spiritual or the physical plane.
On the physical plane, your outer personality still obeys the old normal imperfect influences and the Truth which 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, larger 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 living – 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 which not only are quite uninteresting but are exhausting, you need to gather yourself together and collect the scattered threads of your consciousness – at every moment! As you do, your life will begin to acquire much greater interest since the least 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 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 within a period of trial, much like that of the initiations of olden times.
The main ordeal that you face during the period of this transition is that of 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, tiring and you begin to get knocked about everywhere, against opaque and aggressive people, heavy objects, brutal events – the world seems enormously absurd.
If you are realizing these strange feelings, you are developing sure signs of the beginning of an interiorization process. As you continue your meditation practice, your new silence becomes like a sort of dark well or a neutral experience with nothing going on. As you persist in your practice, you may even glide into a short sleep, not like any ordinary sleep, but one where you have passed into another level of consciousness, yet there is no link between your old one and this new one and you come out of the sleep not any more advanced than when you had entered.
You now face a dilemma, one where there is nothing outside and nothing within either. Neither this side not that. It is here that you must be very careful not to become enclosed again in a false illusion. You must go 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 now are a seeker and must realize that as you are being born into another life that your new eyes and your new 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, exactly 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 there is a door which will open, and that your faith is not senseless.
THE AWAKENING OF YOUR INTUITION
Eventually something becomes enlivened within you, a kind of foreknowledge, which knows before you do, sees before you do and which 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 in a logical sequence since everyone’s experience is somewhat different. Yet we can describe general experiences that are incurred by most people that 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 relatively established in your mind and when your aspiration or our need has grown, and has become constant and piercing, like a hole within, you begin to feel around the head and more particularly in the nape of the neck, an unusual pressure which may give the sensation of a false headache. At 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 which descends – 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 spasmodic, irregular, and a slight conscious effort is necessary to get reconnected with it when it is blurred. Once connected, it becomes continuous, natural, automatic, and gives the very pleasant sensation of a 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.
Actually you will not notice the real 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 gong 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 clear and much more sustained, without breaks, and above all much more alive. In your daily life, in the midst of your work and the numerous others things you participate in, the current of force is, to begin with, quite diluted. But as soon as you stop for a moment and concentrate upon it, it becomes a massive inrush and all else comes to a standstill.
Gradually, you find that the sensation of the current disappears, as though your whole body from head to foot were charged with a mass of energy compact and crystalline – 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 the 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 or 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 work with the awakening of an ascending Force within. This is a thermogenetic process which carries with it real danger and profound disturbances so that the presence and protection of an enlightened Master is indispensable.
The traditional yogas aim at the liberation of consciousness where the whole being is craned towards the heights in an ascending aspiration. It seeks to shatter the appearances and emerge above in the peace or the 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 that it contains. You should aim toward illumining yourself from the summit of your being, 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 and it is this which 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 descends usually first into your head and liberates your inner mind centers, then into your heart center, 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, creating what has to be created. 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 your self but in reality is 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 rather which hook themselves into you. This occurs according to the laws of your own conditioning and education, coming always 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.