When people use spiritual practice to try to compensate for feelings of alienation and low self-esteem, they corrupt the true nature of spiritual practice.
Instead of loosening the manipulative ego that tries to control its experience, they strengthen it, and their spiritual practice remains unintegrated with the rest of their life.
~ John Welwood
I’ve heard people say that they cling to their painful thoughts because they’re afraid that without them they wouldn’t be activists for peace. “If I feel peaceful,” they say, “why would I bother taking action at all?”
My answer is “Because that’s what love does.” To think that we need sadness or outrage to motivate us to do what’s right is insane.
As if the clearer and happier you get, the less kind you become. As if when someone finds freedom, she just sits around all day with drool running down her chin.
My experience is the opposite. Love is action.
~ Byron Katie
What a tragedy to waste our life imitating someone else’s work, no matter how great, instead of doing our own, however humble. Life has given each one of us a Gift to share. No one else in the world can give it. This earth would not be complete without our smallest Gift. Our duty is not to make the Gift large, but to share it
unconditionally. That is the secret of our joy.
Let us not define our work as others define work, or measure its value by status or income. Our work may be a global business enterprise, or a gentle smile. It may be the Gift of listening, the simple act of being present, letting troubled hearts feel heard. Our work may be our children. It may be food for the hungry, or a song to feed souls. Our work may be a single poem, a single painting, one well-thrown pot, after a lifetime of practice. We will abandon it to the earth, for others to find.
How do we know our Gift, our Dharma, our own unique Heartwork?
Plunging into it 100%, there doesn’t seem to be any doer. When most busy, we appear quite calm, but inwardly we are on fire. The task is self-nourishing. It feeds us with energy, like play. As we work, the difference between mind and heart dissolves. Focused on the small, we feel vastly expanded inside. And when we are lost in the humblest detail, angels from the farthest corners of the universe bend over our shoulders, whispering, “Yes!”
~ Fred LaMotte
You start out as an infant with undifferentiated awareness, and then you are taught who you are by someone who isn’t you.
How would they know who you are? Your impressions of their opinion of who you are forms your ego. A set of habits three times removed from reality.
You’re essentially tricked into thinking your ego is who you are and that fallacy and disconnect from reality is the seedbed of suffering.
Freedom is achieved through dropping the ego and rediscovering your undifferentiated self.
“For the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to those who are like these children.” (Matt 19:14)
When I present an inappropriate version of my self to others and when I assign inappropriate values to the world’s material phenomena, I am living my life through ego. Ego isn’t an object or an unbreakable law of nature. It’s just a bad set of habits we can control and eventually drop all together. The fact that it seems impossible is only in our mind and ironically the very basis of ego. Breaking free of ego is not only possible; it’s relatively easy to do when we break the effort up into small, achievable chunks. The benefits of doing so are profound and actually the point of most of the world’s well-trodden spiritual paths.
We all witness ego-based behavior in others every day. We recognize it when we wish someone would just “be themselves” or when we notice someone’s behavior and actions are completely driven by material possessions rather than appropriate relationships with people. It’s harder to see ego-based behavior in ourselves than in other people, but it’s certainly there if we’re honest and are able to self-inspect. I don’t believe an ego-based life is necessarily evil. Plenty of successful and admired people are driven completely by ego. I just believe it’s essential to move beyond ego to live a life of contentment. And, before we can ever have a chance of letting go of our ego, we must first learn to manage it.
Ego presents itself as a clichéd two-edged sword, which enables us to ignore the interconnectedness of all things simultaneously to our benefit and detriment. It’s easy to bash on ego now, but it did play an important role in our early evolution. During humanity’s earliest beginnings, ego enabled people to ignore less relevant details of daily reality long enough to survive it. Ego caused people to cluster in tribes and prejudge outsiders to better protect their progeny. This prejudice was vital to the survival of our species. Ego emerged as a mechanism that helped us discern differences and focus on very critical particulars like a stalking panther in the weeds or the guy from the other tribe trying to steal our food.
Yet, today with access to advanced social systems, ego and associated tribalism is at the root of most of our biggest social problems. From the living room, to the street corner, to the UN, the usefulness of ego seems to be little more than a holdout with similar efficacy of other ancient implements, like a hay rake or a spleen. Ego is at the root of all sorts of our collective pathologies, including racism, sexism, and materialism. It seems as though the boogeyman of prejudice which once kept us alive is now killing us. To practice what a lot of us preach, I think it’s important to wave goodbye and good riddance to our ancient ego, with compassion and understanding of its contribution as well as its fallacy.
But, I can’t start with your ego. I have to start with mine. Even though “be the change you want to see in the world” has devolved into a bumper sticker, it doesn’t mean it isn’t true. To facilitate personal awakening, as well as for the sake of others, we must shed what amounts to a constant, habitual presentation of an inappropriate persona. To begin this shedding, everyone can start small and ramp up. It can be as simple as ignoring your fear long enough to tell a family member or a close friend you’re sorry or you love them, even if your ego problem has previously caused that truth to remain hidden. You can continue your practice by dropping incessant expectations, which rarely match reality, starting small with morning traffic and stair-stepping on to being honest about your unrealistic expectations of other people. Or, maybe you need to start with a more primary step and get right with your own self. To be sure, you can’t love others until you love yourself.
After practicing those easier, simpler ego-less behaviors, you can then move on to clearing out the more caustic emotional clutter. It’s up to everyone to do their own work with whatever tools or support they can muster. And, when you accomplish even a small portion of this work, you’ll be better prepared to present your appropriate self to those around you. We all know how to do this methodical simplifying and unpacking in the material aspects of our lives. It merely requires mindfulness, focus and effort. It’s a shame that most people spend more time cleaning out their garage and moving papers around on desks than they do taking inventory and gaining control of their mind and emotional life. It doesn’t have to be that way. We’re surrounded by tools and assistance if we just wake up and decide we’d rather be content than irritated.
Perhaps you’ve read some of the stories Matthew the Apostle wrote like, “Small is the gate and narrow the path that leads to life” or, “It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a materialistic person to enter the kingdom of God.” I believe on a certain level Matthew was referring to the fact that the silent, formless, perfect space in which contentment resides is too small and too narrow for our habitual ego to fit. And, I also believe Matthew was thinking about how people hide their inner awareness with the structure of ego, when he wrote, “People don’t light a candle and put it under a basket…they put it on a candlestick so it lights up the house.” These are well known stories many of us read about in Sunday school as children.
When I first read these passages as a child, I distinctly remember thinking there’s no way I can stay on the narrow path or fit through the eye of a needle, so I’ll probably never succeed in what Matthew described people should do. Later as an adult, I better understood their metaphoric meaning, but rejected the plausibility of the message, as unfortunately more and more adults continue to do. There’s an assumption that was attached to Matthew’s message somewhere along the way that there’s some sort of future prize or payment, which can only be earned with impossible behavior. And, layered on top of that message is another assumption that anything remotely good is separate from us, “out there” somewhere, inaccessible to anyone until they die. I now believe these notions of unachievable goals and an inaccessible heaven drown out Matthew’s simpler and more powerful message.
Matthew’s metaphors provide us with more than unachievable objectives. It was centuries later when puritanical and Calvinistic influences indoctrinated Western minds with the “work hard on an impossible task for a prize after you’re dead” mindset. Today, those influences are still deeply embedded in the perception of just about everything we consume, including our religion. But, Matthew wasn’t influenced by the puritans or Calvin. And, Matthew wasn’t talking about earning some future payment or prize by doing an impossible task. He was talking about rediscovering what we already have by merely letting go of a set of bad habits.
Using every day, household metaphors and simple language, Matthew told his friends, and us through centuries of transcription, that the world and all its distractions feed our insatiable ego. And, that ego hides an illuminated awareness, which resides within us all. And, when we set that ego to one side (death to bad habits) we are in a better position to wake up to that illumination (born again).
The narrow and small spaces and removal of the light-covering basket, are meant to explain that dropping our ego and presenting appropriate behavior to the world takes effort and it’s rare when we meet someone who’s actually done it. But, it’s not impossible and the payoff isn’t just after we’re dead. The kingdom is literally at hand – here and now. If we care enough about contentment and compassion while we’re alive in this world, we’ll make the required effort and practice moving in that direction. I believe practicing new habits and dropping the mental baggage of our ancient ego does take a lot of sustained effort. And, I believe it’s the same effort required to balance on Matthew’s narrow path, fit through the eye of that needle and uncover our inner light. This is indeed the point of those stories – we must drop our attachments, cease our material clinging, and say farewell to our inappropriate ego, so our true Self can balance and reemerge.
And, what exactly is our true Self? I believe it’s the Universal Self, which is another name for God. Revealing your true Self is another way of saying, “let your light so shine.” A way of living that reveals your individuation of God to those around you instead of your stale, inappropriate ego. It’s a process that prevents YOUR ego “basket” from hiding YOUR God “light.”
And, what then is the ultimate objective? What precisely do the narrow path and needle’s eye metaphors represent? Heaven? Nirvana? Rumi’s Love? Gautama’s awakening? Saint Paul’s contentment while he was chained up in a dungeon?
Everyone has an opinion, but I for one choose all of the above. I believe all of those stories, metaphors, and historical experiences point to the same, unified truth; that setting aside our mind-numbing expectations and our relentless remorse clears our view to experience the Universal Self, the Kingdom of God, the illumination which resides in all of us. We can wake up to the fact that our origin and we are one-and-the-same. We are indeed the offspring, the children of God.
And, if you don’t believe in God, it doesn’t change any of this. There’s still an energy of awareness within you that can either continue to be hidden by fake characters you invent, or synced up with reality and presented transparently to those around you. You might use different spiritual language or no spiritual language at all. You might simply refer to what I’ve described as being an authentic person. But, I believe you will agree that authentic people are more content than egocentric people. And, living a life of contentment is preferable to being irritated all the time.
Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
I sincerely believe Frankl’s space is indeed Matthew’s path and the needle-small space in which our authentic self can narrowly balance and tightly fit. But, to do so we can’t take our ego with us. Dragging along our ego doesn’t provide us with time to appropriately respond to external events and it covers up our true, illuminated Self with a bushel basket-sized, inappropriate persona.
Whereas, compassionately setting aside the ego leaves the same shining, formless awareness that is within us all. And, if we try, we can see how our formless awareness resides in that imperceptibly small space between expectation and reality. It is indeed the space between the world’s stimuli and our response.
With practice that space can grow as an insulator between action and reaction, giving us time to practice saying and doing the right things. The same things we want others to say and do to us.
When anarchy reigns supreme, men must resort to the first law of nature, self-preservation. The ethics of social progress demand that, at such a time, the intelligent and safe elements of society band together to restore law and order. The means to be used must be commensurate with the disorders threatening.
~ Henry Cook
The first step toward contentment is to stop the process of continuously dreaming up expectations which fail to match up with reality. If we drop our expectations and accept life as it is, then we’ve taken the first step toward true contentment.
Happiness is a form of entertainment which comes and goes like the wind. Contentment in all things like St. Paul described from his dungeon, is possible regardless of whether or not particular circumstances in the moment are good or bad. Contentment abides.
When we get rid of expectations of how life is “supposed to be” — from standing in a long line at the grocery store, to not getting that bonus at work, to our eventual faltering health — we can step back and observe life unfold perfectly instead of attaching to it with our wishes.
Then we’re able to see that life is perfect with all its good and all its bad. How can it be anything but perfect? It’s what really happened. It IS reality.
My suffering starts when I wish it was any other way.
