PART III
TRANSCENDING OUR EGO IDENTITIES
The blossom vanishes of itself as the fruit grows
So will your lower self vanish as the Divine grows
within you.
—Vivekenanda
8
FROM TURMOIL TO PEACE
All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.
—MEISTER ECKHART
I know I can connect my mind with the divine mind and guarantee myself peace in any moment.
The question I am most frequently asked concerning the role of the sacred self and the ego is “How do I know whether it is my ego or my higher spirit beckoning me at any given moment in my life?” Part III, beginning with this chapter, is written to guide you to your personally authentic response to this question.
At any given moment in your life, you are choosing between two pictures or evaluations of yourself. Your choices include the one offered by your soul, or higher self, which I think of as the voice of God, and the one offered by the ego, or your false idea of yourself. You decide how you view yourself and how you view others as well. Essentially, you accept either ego’s picture of yourself and others or that of your higher spiritual self.
The first answer to the question posed above is, “If it brings you a sense of peace, then it is your higher self at work.” Your higher self is always nudging you toward a resolution of the conflicts that you experience in your life, so that you will have room for serenity and harmony. I encourage you to pay strong attention to those feelings.
The only peace in your world, in your personal life, is the peace of God. If you are living with inner turmoil, continually quarreling with yourself and feeling anxious and fearful, then you are allowing ego to dominate your life. If you feel serene and peaceful, ego has been replaced by your higher self.
So you can always ask yourself, “Will this bring me peace or will it bring turmoil?” If the answer is turmoil, either in your thoughts or in your physical world, then you must examine how and why you are allowing ego to dominate your life. If the answer is peace, then you know what to do and how to think. And you know that your higher self is actively working for you at that moment.
REPLACING TURMOIL WITH PEACE
In every moment of your life, you have the option to choose peace for yourself. Your false self thrives on your inner anxiety because that is what it thinks it needs to stay alive. Ego promotes thoughts like these: I cannot be happy or content; I must be a sinner and an evil person; If I am feeling peaceful then I will simply vegetate; I must constantly look at how others are living and performing in order to assess my value. This constant state of comparison keeps the turmoil alive.
The ego wants you in a constant state of agitation to keep you from embracing your higher self. It convinces you that if you are not always on edge, you can’t grow. But you must keep in mind that experiencing this inner turmoil is a choice that you have made by allowing your false self to dominate your life. When you make the choice for peace, you are literally allowing God into your life. Rather than vegetate, you will discover that you can be busy, purposeful and blissful and still have peace.
We all long for the peacefulness of being without turmoil and angst. There is a feeling of an inner glow when we know that we are on course, on our sacred path. So why do we frequently choose the opposite emotions, thoughts and inner beliefs, which agitate our minds, cloud our perceptions and distort our relationships?
You need to carefully examine your choices that block your experience of peace, of God. Just knowing that peace is always an alternative is a significant awakening. These tools will help to tame the ego when it demands that you pursue separateness or specialness.
Replacing the turmoil that you so often choose is then a simple matter of allowing your higher self to take over in any situation where you are about to allow turmoil to enter. Your ego will push you in the direction of the fight—away from peace. You must be ready to see it as it is about to happen and invite your higher self to send your ego a not-wanted-right-now message.
I’m fond of this Course in Miracles quotation concerning ego replacement: “You will not find peace except the peace of God. Accept this fact, and save yourself the agony of yet more bitter disappointment, bleak despair, and sense of icy hopelessness and doubt. Seek you no further. There is nothing else for you to find except the peace of God.”
Give these words thoughtful consideration as you read the remainder of this chapter. Just know within that you always have this choice, and that when you opt for anxiety and turmoil you allow your ego to take over. You can instead be peace’s home.
SOME TYPICAL PEACE AVOIDANCE BEHAVIORS
When you have an absence of peace at any time in your life, know that your ego, the false idea of yourself, is responsible. Here are some of the more common and acceptable behaviors that contribute to the absence of peace.
Confronting and arguing. Nothing will bring about an inner feeling of turmoil faster than allowing yourself to be seduced into fighting or arguing. You always have a choice. Always! To argue or not to argue. To confront or not to confront.
When you opt for arguing or confronting, you’re allowing the ego to push your higher self into the background. Here is your ego speaking to you: “You are separate from your spouse/that clerk/those bureaucrats. You need to show them how special you are and that you can’t be pushed around. Go ahead and tell them your point of view and don’t listen to what they have to say.”
Behind this approach to life is the ever-present need to be right. When you give up the need to be right, you no longer need the turmoil.
Competing and comparing. When you compare yourself with others as a measurement of your performance or feelings of success, you are at the mercy of your false self. You have bought into the erroneous idea that God plays favorites and that you will in some way be better when you are ahead of someone else.
Ego is talking to you in a style that you’ve probably been taught to believe is important to your success in life. Ego tells you: “If he/she can, so can you. You are much smarter/prettier/stronger/more spiritual/more stable than he/she is. You must assert your superiority and show her/him the truth. You are the best. Now get out there and prove it to everyone. You must purchase something they can’t afford, to demonstrate how successful you are.”
This inner dialogue, originating with ego, guarantees that peace and inner harmony will not be within your reach.
Chasing and striving. The popularity of movie chase scenes speaks to an inner part of ourselves. The more intense the chase, the more popular the movie, the more secure ego feels. Up stairs; over cliffs; cars, planes, trains; through guns, robotic devices, violence and crash scenes. Over the fences and through the woods to ego’s house we go. This is also the movie of your inner life when ego is in charge. Chase after success, prove that you are better than all those lazy bastards who are expecting something for nothing.
Go after the symbols of success and the merit badges of striving and your rewards will be more badges, more badgering from your ego and a void inside where peace might otherwise reside.
Here is the talk of your false self: “You are special. The way to prove that is to maximize your achievements. You are different than everyone else. Now prove it by getting that promotion, regardless of what your feelings are saying. You should be offended when someone else gets ahead of you. Do you want people to think they are better than you? Chase those incentives. When you get all of them, you’ll be the best. Remember, if you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?”
The ego loves to see you striving. It doesn’t want you to be content, peaceful and knowing the God within you. Then you might not need ego, so it prods you to forget that rubbish and keep on striving. Ego instructs you to forget about arriving, whispering that there’s a casket waiting for you when you arrive.
Worrying. The more your inner world is focused on worry, the less time you have for experiencing peace. Wor
ry is the absence of peace, and ego finds it extraordinarily easy to eliminate peace with worry thoughts.
Ego’s worry program informs you: “You should be worrying. There’s a lot to worry about. You could get sick. One of your loved ones could have an accident. You might lose your job. You might get a divorce. You could go bankrupt. Your hair could fall out. You might be audited. You could get a disease.”
Ego thrives on this kind of thinking, happy that you are using up your inner energy to worry, not leaving any room for all that peace nonsense.
Saying, “Notice me!” All of the time you spend practicing this two-word sentence is time spent away from peace and harmony. The need to be noticed and approved of is almost a full-time job for some people.
Ego effectively uses this tactic to avoid the higher self with statements like these: “If they don’t notice you, there is something wrong with you. It proves that you are inferior. Ask others if they think you are special. If they don’t acknowledge your specialness, do something to get their attention. You must be noticed, and you will be if you spend a lot of your life energy securing approval. Beg for it, steal for it, cry if you don’t get it, feel insecure and anxious if it is refused.”
When you need to be noticed and approved of, you will automatically experience turmoil and anxiety. Harmony cannot reside with these ego activities.
Giving yourself deadlines and pressure. When you find yourself feeling the pressures that you have opted for, you are shutting out the potential for peace and allowing your ego to tyrannize your higher self. This is your false self working hard to keep you from knowing the loving presence.
It does it with these sentences: “You must prove yourself by not only doing better than everyone else but also doing it faster and without flaws. Give yourself a multitude of deadlines. Remain dedicated to those pressures no matter the cost. The closer the deadline gets, the more anxiety you should feel. This is good. It will keep your attention where it belongs—on your physical accomplishments and your specialness and separateness rather than on that silly notion of feeling serenity. Serenity is for losers. You have something to prove and you have to get it done now.”
The ego is masterful at convincing you of your need to work faster—that is, if you believe that time is money and that money is everything.
Accumulating and acquiring. The more you have, the more special you are, according to ego. The more special you are, the more you prove how separate you are from all of those others who have less than you have.
There is no peace in measuring your worth in terms of your acquisitions. Therefore, your ego convinces you that peace is not what you want. Ego wants you to believe that things are more important. It tells you: “Store as many possessions as you can, and feel attached to them. You will feel a sense of pride and accomplishment when you polish those trophies and fondle all of those items in your valuable collections. How else will you know you’ve been successful if you don’t have something tangible to show for it? Now get out there and consume, collect, acquire and accumulate as much as you can. These are the true tests of your specialness.”
Chattering to yourself. “Forget about all of that meditation stuff. It will just put you in danger of being seduced by the evil spirits that are the real bedrock of your personality. Keep your mind busy. Think about as many things as possible. Keep those thoughts coming, even if the previous one had nothing to do with the one you are now thinking.”
This is the language of the ego, keeping your mind chattering away all day long, even disrupting your sleep. The more you chatter and keep your mind engaged, the less space you have for peace and harmony. Again, this is the job of the false self.
The false self is busy convincing you that you are something that you are not. To keep this illusion working, it does not want you getting into anything even resembling silence and inner peace. Your ego constantly pushes you toward inner noise and disruption, in the hope of keeping you from knowing the higher self, which thrives on harmony and silence.
Rejoicing in the troubles of others. When you find some happiness in the suffering of others, including your so-called enemies, ego has its stronghold on you. It wants you to think of yourself as separate from everyone else. When others are having troubles, ego has an opportunity to solidify those beliefs.
All of the tabloid gossip that provides people with a sense of titillation or amusement is ego at work. Preoccupation with others’ miseries shows that you do not want to serve them but to savor their difficulties and feel amused at their humiliation.
Your ego confides: “Those people deserve what they get. They are not your friends. They are obviously evil because they are on the wrong side.”
Your ego supports your separateness. Preoccupation with gossip, belief that the bad guys are getting theirs and the horrors of daily life that provide reading and viewing entertainment—these are all data supporting your separateness from those “others.”
These are some of the more typical daily beliefs, attitudes and behaviors that the ego manifests to bring about an absence of peace. If you find these elements present in your life, you will very likely notice that these ego-producing behaviors also result in many physical manifestations.
Keeping in mind that every thought has a physical counterpart, you can see that these ego-produced elements materialize in your body in specific ways. The presence of this constant state of tension that comes with proving yourself, hurrying, chattering, worrying, chasing, acquiring and competing produces the same kinds of results in your physical body. The accompanying tension that goes with all of these ego-engendered thoughts involves tension in the body.
High blood pressure, ulcers, skin disorders, headaches, back pain and even more serious ailments such as cancer, strokes and liver disorders are the payoffs for the dominance of the ego. These disorders manifest because you allow ego to create turmoil to avoid the peace that is found within. This awareness of the ego’s program should help as you move toward restraining ego and getting to know your higher self.
THE PAYOFF PICTURE FOR THE EGO IN PROMOTING TURMOIL
The ego—that false idea that we all have of ourselves—wants to maintain this persistent state of inner confrontation for some very solid reasons. When you understand your ego, you are much more apt to work at restraining it. When you know why your ego behaves as it does, you will then be able to make the adjustments necessary for your higher self to have a greater influence in your life.
Here are some of the most obvious reasons why your ego keeps you in this state of inner turmoil:
Most important, your ego has been with you since childhood. It has been nurtured by almost everyone you’ve ever known. Generations of those nurturers have also been dominated by their egos.
Your ego wants to survive. If it can keep you in a state of inner tumult it will block you from knowing your spiritual self. From the ego’s perspective, God is a huge threat. So it will do all that it can to keep you from experiencing that inner peacefulness where God’s voice is so beautifully clear.
Your ego does not want you to change. The idea of yourself as self-important and special nourishes ego, keeping it healthy and operating at full strength. Even though ego is itself an illusion that you carry around with you, it behaves as if it had a life of its own.
Your ego will make every effort to convince you that you do not need to change. In fact, if you are asking yourself why you shouldn’t feel special, you may be listening to it right now. These are the kinds of thoughts that have kept you from making the changes leading to inner peace. The more you have these conflicts, the happier your ego is.
The ego thrives on fear. When you are afraid, you are at the mercy of ego. Fear will drive you to behave in ways that undermine your sacred self.
Your higher self tells you that there is nothing to fear, that love is the answer to everything and that God is what love is about. Your loving presence assures you that you do not need to feel guilty or fearful and that if you do it will subside
when you experience inner peace.
But your ego wants you to maintain that sense of fear. Living in fear is a manifestation of your belief that you do not trust in the divine force or in your inner knowing. This presence of fear confirms an abdication of your higher self and an admission that God does not know what she is doing. The opposite of fear is not courage—it is love.
When you experience love within, you have no guilt and no fear. You know that everything you are experiencing is in order, including your woes, which are your greatest teachers, and the death of your body, which is ordained for all the world of the manifest. You know that death is a reward, not a punishment. Therefore, you have nothing to fear unless you listen to your ego encouraging fear and dismissing God.
Your ego wants you to be on the move, looking for more things to consume and more possessions to own. The more you are on the move in your life, the less time you will have for knowing your spiritual base. Ego cheers you on to stay busy, keep moving and avoid the inner quest where your ego faces restraint.
Your ego wants you to face outward. It wants you to continue facing the wrong way so that you cannot experience the presence of God in your life. By facing away, rather than inward, you ensure the strong presence of your ego forever.
The consequences are that you will continually feel the pressure to compare yourself with others; the need to defeat others in order to feel powerful or even worthwhile; to have more and better toys; to accumulate more trophies. All of this facing outward is the work of the ego. When you refuse to listen, it shouts that you must be upset when others get ahead of you; that you are worthless when you lose; that being number one is more important than anything; that to settle for less is to admit to being a loser.
Your Sacred Self Page 18