Observing the ego

I told a friend of mine, Anna, how my ego fights against me wanting to give my customers more value for their money. It wants me to squeeze every resource/purchase to the utmost, even to the point where it might dilute the quality of the products I deliver.
My friend is educated in psychology and anthropology, so it amazed me when I saw how close her methodology of personal growth is to the one I have arrived at from non-dualistic studies.
She wrote:

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Yeah, I think I know what you mean. :)
I cannot say this never happens to me.

Actually I can see this from two points of view. One is the Ego, greed, etc.

But nowadays I am also more and more in the cognitive science point of view, with the concept of modularity. It is now a widely accepted knowledge that there are a lot of subprograms running in the brain, some quite specific, the modules. The modules in their functioning are not much influenced by my will, at least quit not as much as we think they should, us being conscious beings.

If I am sitting in a silent waiting room, and two people are discussing, I basically cannot prevent myself listening to and understanding what they are saying. If I am shown a face I know, I cannot prevent myself recognizing the person. Some subprograms can be created. Driving a car becomes a subprogram after a certain amount of practice, a big part of it is done without conscious supervision.

I think this "you have to squeeze the most out of it" is also a subprogram. I think not very sophisticated. It can work in a very stupid way. I remember I have spent some time calculating if I should buy 1 parisian metro ticket or 10, knowing that if I buy 10, it costs less / ticket, but I may not find the tickets when I need them, because now I quite seldom go to Paris. I did seriously think about it, and that involves only about 2 euros. And in contrast I forgot to take the steps to get some money back for my airplane ticket to the field, 200 euros. That is quite stupid and irrational, but these subprograms are usually specific and rigid.

Knowing all this, and having had a lot of opportunity of observing an interesting sample of homo sapiens (myself), and some other interesting samples too, I now see this in this way:
- I don't need to feel guily of doing of thinking stupid things, because this is how my brain architecture works
- I do have a control on the output of those subprograms. If I consciously don't care about some, those subprograms will work less, present their output in a less loud way. So in this indirect way I do have control on the subprograms themselves. I think they shrink.
- I cannot eradicate them. Just acknowledge them, not give them too much importance, but not denying them either.
- And I think that Consciousness may grow somehow independent from those subprograms and make choices about what is important.

So this is the motto I have these days. "This is not me. It is my subprogram." :)

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It is clear to me that she is doing exactly what I am doing, having learned from A Course In Miracles and Ken Wapnick to observe the ego, and not be upset, and not do anything about it. This will make it lose power over time.
Because the Ego can't observe itself. It can't observe anything, it is totally reactive. Only the HS (Higher Self or Holy Spirit) can observe, so perforce if you are observing, you are looking from the HS's viewpoint.

Games and Prejudice

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
           -- H. L. Mencken

Once the game is over, the King and the pawn go back in the same box.
           -- Italian Proverb

Doubting

As I began to doubt the World, a natural consequence was a growing inability to hold on to viewpoints, opinions, beliefs. Because we live in an ego world, high certainty is seen as a strength, so it took me years before I realized this was a good thing, not a bad thing.

But in order to get past The Dream, you literally have to ditch everything you believe in eventually, including every singly thing taught in school or by science, so you might as well get cracking.       :-)

45 lessons

Here is a wonderful article about how to live a forgiving life.

"The Disappearance Of The Universe "

I have sort of assumed that people reading this blog already know and love Gary Renard's book The Disappearance Of The Universe. But well, some are bound not to. So just a brief plug: The Disappearance Of The Universe is a supremely important (but surprisingly entertaining) book, which took the gears of my spiritual progress up at least two notches. I regard it as the single clearest book I have read about how the mind and the Universe really works. (Preview.)

USA Amazon link

UK Amazon link

There is a nice (though abridged) audiobook version.
You can also get it in ebook (Kindle) edition, just like the Course itself, which is wonderful.
If you're interested in ebook reading and devices, I have just started a blog about it: eReader Joy.

By the way, if you can't afford the book, contact Gary Renard (or me), he has a scholarship program which I have donated to before. Tell him I sent you.

Zero- or total tolerance

I think there are two basic attitudes in undoing the ego. Maybe they are different stages, I don't know.

One is zero-tolerance of ego.

The other is total tolerance of ego.

Very oddly, I suspect they both work well.

There is order looking right at you

I was just settling in to watch a good movie, it seemed better than expected.
And it did not seem to be all that related to the movie, I’m actually not sure, but I just suddenly felt relaxed and had the feeling that:

“It’s all right.”

It felt profound.

To dot the i, I watched five more seconds, and the main character comes on, and the first line out of his mouth is: “You know, just when you think there is no order anywhere,  there is order looking right at you.”

One of my old theories about art/aesthetics, is that art is a higher, um, order of order. Things organized in harmony, which shows we can think in oneness.

Is it too hard to do?

I have learned during this lifetime, that yes, sometimes the right thing to do is hard. But often, if it is very, very hard to do, it's just not the right thing to do, at least for now. 

It could be your Higher Self trying to block you from making a mistake, for reasons you can't see or understand.

Adyashanti tells a story which is a good example. As a young man, he was into bicycle racing, and was very good at it, and he was very competitive.
But then he got dramatically sick, for months, and couldn't do it.
When he got well, he just biked for fun. But then he got better yet, and soon he was into full competitive racing again.
And: he got dramatically sick once more.
This time he got the message.

We often can't see or understand the whole picture, but our Higher Self can. And while its messages are often subtle, sometimes they are not!
So, don't give up easily, but think twice if something just seems way too hard. If it's the right thing for you at that time, it should not be that hard.

Message from Carol

Straight over to my friend Carol Howe:

Hello, everyone,


It's been a long time since I've touched base and want to wish you all well as we travel through these very intense times.  So many are commenting on their experience of time decreasing and demands upon that time increasing - a circumstance that calls for our using the spiritual practice of choice to maintain peace of mind and a clear, non-judgmental head! To that end, I want to remind you about Bill Thetford's biography, Never Forget To Laugh, since its purpose is to foster hope, good will, and peace of mind.


The website  contains much information of interest - articles about Bill, reviews of the book, many testimonials, three sections to read free, and other stories about Bill not included in his biography.  Several more segments of this extra material will be added in the next few months.  Please feel free to avail yourselves of this opportunity to find out how A Course In Miracles led Bill to an awakened state and offers assurance that we can follow him.


Never Forget To Laugh will soon be available on the Amazon Kindle and other ebook readers.  Stay tuned!


With kind regards,
Carol
www.carolhowe.com   

Eye of the Beholder

"People often say that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder,' and I say that the most liberating thing about beauty is realizing that you are the beholder. This empowers us to find beauty in places where others have not dared to look, including inside ourselves."
           -- Salma Hayek

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By the way, "Eye Of The Beholder" was the title of a horror comic story I read when I was very young (I had a period where I was a big fan of horror comics). It was about a young man whose young, beautiful wife died. And he went to a magician to ask to get her back somehow. And the magician fulfilled his wish, while reminding him that he could only do so much.

The Bride turns up at his door, beautiful as ever, and they are both tearfully happy about the reunion. But things are wrong, animals freak out around her and so on. Near the ending, he hugs her to comfort her.
But then as he is hugging her, he sees the reflection of them both in the mirror. The mirror is not fooled, he can now see that he is hugging a months-old rotting corpse.

Nice reading for kids.       :-)
But I think that horror stories have the important mission of, with aesthetics to sweeten the medicine, showing us the real face of this unreal life.

Loori

"Cause and effect are one thing. And what is that one thing? You. That’s why what you do and what happens to you are the same thing."
- Zen teacher John Daido Loori

Theory of art expanded

Theory of art expanded:

Art has two major attractions: the connection to the Higher Self (and through it to Source), and the more superficial beauty qualities (prettiness). The latter determines largely the commercial viability, the former, the spiritual viability.

The distaste some have for (some) "pop" art is when the latter qualities overwhelm the former. It will seem attractive but meaningless. Sugary, junk food.

The reverse can be true, in which case you may have an artist who is very strongly appreciated but only by very few people, and many are turned away by the lack of prettiness.

Julie sez it

"In the past few months there have been several times when I was overcome by a happiness so intense that I literally felt that it might be more than I could bear. I've never known any happiness that could compare with this and I don't see how any happiness could. It feels like it could kill me and I wouldn't care if it did. I see now, Jed, what you *didn't* say in your book and I see why you didn't. There's a reality to this that you didn't go into and now that I know it, I know why. There's the place where all the paradoxes disappear and where no questions remain, but there's no point in trying to describe this place. You gave the one perfect answer to all the seemingly unanswerable questions: Come see for yourself. I'm here now. I see it now. It was right there all the time. It looks like the price of truth is everything, but it's not. How could I not have known? The price of truth is nothing."

- Julie in Jed McKenna's book Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment, pages 279-280

I am happy that this little passage made it into Jed McKenna's second book. Because I think actually while McKenna's books are unique and excellent, they can be so depressing because (unlike The Disappearance Of The Universe) they might give the overall impression that the long and hard journey is *not worth it*. It's pretty much only in Julie's (rare) real life story of awakening that we see in the end that it *is* worth it, that there *is* some place to go to, that the goal is not Nothing.
In the end of the book we also meet Julie (meeting Jed) after she is done, and it is beautiful to see how much is has affected her, unlike the seemingly jaded Jed. (Joyful Julie and Jaded Jed.)

The End

"Thanks to a pesky fly, the person dreaming our lives just woke up."

- TenSecondTales

Longest Journey

The longest journey is the journey inward.
-- Dag Hammarskjold

See Bill run. Run, Bill, run!

From the book Never Forget To Laugh, about A Course In Miracles scribe Bill Thetford, page 246. During a spiritual event, somebody:
"... suggested that they each hugged the person next to them. Bill tried to run..."

Funny. It's good for me to hear that Bill had as little time for "huggy-feeliness" as I do.

I don't care for enforced lovingness (note the "enforced" part there). Near thirty years ago, I visited a group of artists/spiritualists. I showed them some photos, including this one of my mom.

One of the women was exactly the tie-dye, huggy-feely kinda person... She looked at it and said: "She looks rather displeased, doesn't she". You know, in the spirit of: "why look so sour, the world would be so much nicer if everybody would be happy, or at least take care to look it".
Later this woman played guitar and sang one of her own songs. She looked me deep in the eyes while singing stuff like "congratulations to you, because you are you"...

A genuinely happy person does not need to "sell" happiness, and he/she has no investment in whether others are happy or not.

I think the basic idea is similar to "The Secret" the movie: if you take care to think only nice thoughts, your life will become nice. It won't happen. In fact, I think this attitude may block you for a long time from facing the horrendousness of the Thought Line which underlies  this world. As Jed McKenna points out: you have to somehow go through the natural depression that comes from seeing this ugly truth, before you can arrive at the other side to see that it was not actually truth, in fact it does not exist at all, thus it can't affect you.

Do you want a perfect world?

Most responsible people want a better world, preferably a perfect world. But I think this is a misconception, at least after we learn that the world is just made up by our collective Mind, and that it's an outer reflection of an inner condition. If the world was perfect, we wouldn't want change, and we would stay asleep forever.

There's a classic Superman story by Alan Moore. A telepathic alien plant has taken over Superman's body and put him in a deep coma. The plant generates a beautiful dream where his home planet never blew up, and he has a perfect life.

But his inner soul knows  there's something wrong, and the dream world starts cracking in the corners. As things go more and more wrong, he gets more and more uncomfortable, and finally makes his way out of the dream world and out of his coma.

Sounds familiar?

A lot of work...

Sometimes I have watched a very good English TV program called Grand Designs, about people, usually couples, who are building an unusual home in some way. Sometimes these people have ambitions waaaay beyond their bank account, so they do most of the actual labor themselves, like renovating a huge building which is really just a rotten shell, and through 18 months of back-breaking labor in all their free hours, they make it into a beautiful home. (And often spectacularly designed too.)

Which is all cool and so on. But I've been thinking "my god, what a lot of work, I couldn't do that". But now I just realized: that work is nothing compared to the work of Waking Up. The mental sweat and effort I have put into it in the past ten years alone feels like building a city.

The thing of course is that a house only lasts a few hundred years at best. When you're awake, it's an accomplishment literally for eternity. (Not to mention is real.)

All is good

I was watching the so far very interesting United States of Tara, and saw a picture of a typical MySpace page, you know, loud, colorful, confusing. And I just changed viewpoint and saw that from say, a teenager's viewpoint the kinds of communications and web pages that *I* prefer might just be boring. Dusty. Dry.

And for some reason I connected this with my dominating viewpoint for god knows how long, that this universe is a Horrific, Painful Trap.
I've been aware for a while that upon Enlightenment, one might change viewpoint on this and see the universe as a "big happy puppy just eager to please you" as Jed McKenna puts it. But... it had never really come across to me that this invalidated my other viewpoint as being real in any way. I just "knew" that  that is what the universe "really" is. False and a mistake, but a very bad and undesirable one.

But I see now that this isn't so at all. It simple "is". Or more precisely, it isn't. And so any idea and emotion you can have about it is as valid as any other.

Who runs my life?

Satiric video, thought-provoking.

Guidance

I was unsure of my next step, so, unusually, I held out my hand and took that of my Higher Guide, and asked what to do.

He said: "relax."

I said: "and...?"

He said: "relax."

I said: "and...?"

He said: "relax."

I said: "and...?"

He said: "trust."

What is a goal?

Please read this post on my mainstream blog. Quote:

"Almost inevitably we see, when we have reached a Goal, that we are no happier now. We need another goal. And I think if one can get to a state where one sort of just "follows the flow" or lives intuitively, life works better."

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