Rather than cursing the past, bless it and forgive yourself entirely. When you know that all of those experiences were a part of the divine design of your life, you can afford to forgive. The time will then arrive when you look back with amazement that you ever could have carried on in such destructive ways.
But for now, just forgive yourself. Bless the past and listen to your soul speak of love and forgiveness.
Rather than continually making an issue of things with your immediate family and friends, try letting go of your ego investment in favor of a more peaceful point of view. When you realize that you are about to be contentious, ask yourself if you want to make an issue of this and experience the painful results or if you would rather create a peaceful atmosphere.
A few moments consulting with the invisible force that wants you to be at peace will shift you away from toxic confrontation. You only need a few seconds to pause and know how preferable peace is. Your ego will intensify and you will have to consciously make the option of peace available to you.
Work to eliminate the minor irritations you carry around. Remind yourself that your ego prefers you to experience a steady flow of misery with these minor irritants.
For example, give the waiter a little slack by sending him love rather than irritability when your order has taken too long to arrive. Remind yourself that your children are tiny and that they will make repetitious demands as their way of getting what they want. Ignore the weather changes that you judge ruinous to your plans; instead, be thankful for any weather.
In other words, be aware of the minor irritations and see them as opportunities to learn more about the higher part of yourself that is peaceful. The minor nuisances are designed by your ego to provide you with a daily level of toxicity. Turn in the direction of your sacred self and a daily intake of purity.
Keep the word Namaste in your awareness. Use it as a greeting and to remind yourself of your connection to everyone. When you honor the place in others that they share with you, you move past the toxic reaction of feeling competitive while removing any possibility of enmity existing within yourself. I think of Namaste all the time, particularly when my old ego keeps trying to convince me that I do not share the invisible force with another.
Work at being able to experience bliss without the need for anything external. As you learn to meditate and quiet your inner dialogue, something wonderful will happen. You will get high without the external substance. You will feel giddy, euphoric and light-headed in a purer way than you ever felt before. You will know this feeling without the toxic ingredient of something that will ultimately destroy your body tissue and alter your brain chemistry.
Your body’s natural pharmacy produces euphoria with the cooperation of a mind you have trained with meditation. As you slip into the state of bliss of the unified field, you will experience your chemistry changing. When you realize that you can have this experience, you will not be attracted to external poisons for their euphoric effect.
If you are tempted to slip under the influence of your toxic ego, remember that there are two ways to have the tallest building in town. One way is to tear down all the other buildings. This method will certainly require violent effort and battle with the owners of the buildings you are destroying. You will probably also lose your building in the process.
The second way to have the tallest building in town is to work on your own building, ignoring the height of the other buildings. Apply this analogy to building your personal happiness.
If you opt for the toxic activity of putting everyone else down in order to build yourself up, you will be in a constant state of turmoil. However, if you select the second option and work on yourself, sending love to those around you, you will assure yourself of a pure heart and a loving existence.
Entertain the thought that you remove habits from your life by coaxing them one step at a time. Try to catch individual toxic thoughts in the moment they are occurring. One moment at a time, one day at a time—and you will be able to achieve the transition from toxic to pure.
If you attempt to change it all at once, your ego will celebrate because you will give up and give in to habits. But today, in this moment, make one internal determination that you no longer will live the toxic life—and you are on your spiritual path.
For example, if you are overweight and make a decision to spend time walking around the block rather than sitting and eating something, you are purifying your thinking. The thought will produce the behavior. You are still overweight, but you have transcended your ego for a moment. This is your building step toward the next pure thought, and the next, until you are trusting your loving presence to lead you.
This is a beginning prescription for becoming aware of the power that you have given to your ego to promote toxicity. Glance at the quotation at the beginning of this chapter and remind yourself that as you develop a pure heart you will come to know God. Practice some of these strategies to develop a pure heart and say good-bye to the toxic influence of your ego.
This concludes Part III of Your Sacred Self. These chapters represent the major conflicts between ego (your false self) and your sacred self. They have played a major role in your life. Their resolution will affect your life.
As you begin to transcend your ego identities in every area of your life, you will heighten your awareness of the divine self within you. As you work to resolve the conflicts between your higher self and your false self, you will know the freedom and bliss that are your destiny.
Rabindranath Tagore is a divine spirit from India whose words always cut right to the heart of the matter. In a conversation with God, he says:
I came out alone on my way to my tryst. But who is this me in the dark?
I move aside to avoid his presence but I escape him not.
He makes the dust rise from the earth with his swagger; he adds his loud voice to every word I utter.
He is my own little self, my lord, he knows no shame; but I am ashamed to come to thy door in his company.
I believe that we can transform the world through this kind of change of consciousness. That change is taking place in you at this very minute. You will radiate it outward as you continue to walk the way of your sacred self. The last chapter of this book concludes with my vision of what our world would be like if we all knew that we were here on a sacred quest.
PART IV
TOWARD AN EGOLESS WORLD
Determine that the thing can and shall be done, and then we shall find the way.
—Abraham Lincoln
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CREATING A COLLECTIVE SPIRIT OF SACRED SELVES
But if on the contrary Man sees a new door opening above him, a new stage for his development; if each of us can believe that he is working so that the Universe may be raised, in him and through him, to a higher level—then a new spring of energy will well forth in the heart of Earth’s workers. The whole great human organism, overcoming a momentary hesitation, will draw its breath and press on with strength renewed.
—PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN
I will radiate my sacred self outward for the collective good of all.
This final chapter will not be an odyssey into all the evils of our society. I do not intend to end this book cataloging all the problems that we have created as a result of allowing our egos to be the dominant force in our world.
This is not to say that I fail to recognize that we have plenty of problems that have grown out of our preoccupation with satisfying our egos. Nor am I blind to the fact that our individual egos have interacted in ways that have produced war, crime, addiction, poverty, social inequities and government tyrannies.
We have created a world ego that reflects, on the global level, the same lack of depth and richness that exists in our individual lives. Throughout this book I have presented reasons for taming the personal ego and suggestions for how to do that. The very same can be said for doing this on a global level. I hope it is as obvious to you as it is to me that the collective ego will be
nefit when we transcend our individual egos.
You as a single individual have a sacred quest. That quest involves coming to know your higher spiritual nature and inviting it to show you the way of the sacred self in your daily life. This means denying the demands of your ego if those demands contradict the guidance of your higher self.
Our world is a collection of individuals urged on by the loving presence within all of us to achieve the sacred quest personally and collectively. The world will become a peaceful, fulfilled, cooperative, loving, truthful, tolerant and pure environment as the individual parts that make up the collective consciousness restrain their egos. As is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm. The whole behaves precisely as do its individual parts.
Many people I speak to tell me that they feel powerless to affect the global community. They believe that, given the scope of the world’s problems, their efforts are so infinitesimal as to be insignificant.
They simply are not seeing that it is precisely through a change in individual consciousness that the world will be transformed. All of the problems that we face as a group reflect those we have individually.
The world is encountering a spiritual deficit that reflects our need to consciously get on the path of our sacred quest. The solution to individual and global problems is to overcome the spiritual deficit. When you make the shift in consciousness allowing yourself to be an agent of heightened awareness, you are contributing to the transformation of our world.
You are not separate from the other souls on this planet. You share the identical energy that embodies the souls of Rwanda and Pakistan, for example. You are the lamp and God is the electricity. It flows through you as surely as it flows through all living things. When you make the decision to choose the guidance of your higher self over your false self, you have plugged in to the divine inner energy. When you run your life based on the principles of the higher self, you are contributing to the transformation of the entire world.
The physical changes that will take place in the world will happen automatically, just as they will in your body when you shift to your sacred self. This is inevitable. The ego fades in the brilliance of the divine light. You find you are behaving in more peaceful and loving ways. So too will this take place on a global level.
You must strengthen your will to choose the sacred path when your ego calls you a fool for believing there could ever be a world without war. If your ego can convince you, you will become part of the collective ego’s falseness. Individuals who choose ego propaganda are individuals who will build more bombs and manufacture more weapons.
Currently there are some six billion people on the planet. About three million are at war or in conflicts and skirmishes that cause them to kill and torture each other. But that means that there are five billion, nine hundred ninety-seven million who are not at war! That is a hopeful statistic which our egos do not want us to consider.
By contrast, the collective ego strives to keep the populace nervously on the edge with reminders to view the world in terms of us versus them. This ego viewpoint not only reinforces the insane escalation of ways to kill each other but is also responsible for most of our social problems.
I am not suggesting that we ignore problems of homelessness, hunger, disease and the like. I am suggesting that our collective ego has convinced us that these problems are out of control. The truth is that we have made remarkable strides in spite of the pessimistic ego, through the care and love of those who are motivated by their sacred self to serve.
Of all the people in the world, 99.9 percent have some place to go each night. All may not have luxurious homes, but on the whole we have figured out a way to house all but a small percentage of the people on our planet. Many of us are working each day to fill the gap and make it 100 percent. Yet the pictures that our ego presents are of rampant homelessness, hopelessness and a fear-based collective consciousness. This is true of hunger as well.
We are making gigantic strides helping those who live on the edge of starvation. This is happening through the efforts of people inspired by their higher selves, not by ego’s pessimism. Obviously, one person dying of malnutrition is too many, and we can and will do something to ensure that we live in a world where such a thing no longer exists. But that will not be accomplished by the pessimistic view of the ego, which insists that we are separate from or better than those living in poverty. Were the entire world to suddenly shift away from the separateness of the ego and listen to the truth of our sacred selves, there would be no possibility of anyone starving.
To say that such a world is an impossibility is to listen to the ego, which is working collectively as well as individually to keep us convinced of our separateness.
UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD EGO
The world ego is an extension of our personal ego. It will lead us as a group into the same morass that our individual egos have, only on a much larger and more observable scale. The world ego does not exist in the physical sense because it is an idea. It is not who we are as a people but what we believe we are as a collection of people. Go back to the characteristics of the ego that I presented in Chapter 7, and simply extend those qualities to the entire world.
The world ego is our false self, and this is the primary characteristic that we need to recognize. We want to believe that we are our physical bodies and that the territories we occupy are so important that we are willing to kill each other in order to maintain those boundary lines.
We have become convinced that our true identities are located in tribal ancestries, traditions, histories, genealogies and the color and shape of our bodies. We have lost sight of our authentic identities because of the labels that our egos have assigned to us.
Our egos have coalesced into a worldwide false perception of ourselves based on an unwillingness to know our true spiritual nature. Although all of our spiritual leaders have reminded us of our divinity and implored and even commanded us to love one another, the world ego has won this battle and produced ancient enmities and uncountable horrors in the long history of humanity.
As a result of listening to the false self and ignoring our connection to the holy spirit, terrestrial humankind has lived in a theater of war that has created societies governed by primitive consciousness. As a people, we are capable of creating societies governed by the divine consciousness that we all share. We are all extensions of the same God, manifested in a physical form with specific identifiable attributes.
We can work individually on our personal egos and find the truth of our highest selves. Then we will extend that sacred self outward and humankind will no longer be ruled by lower instincts and primitive intelligence—instead we will be ruled by the holy spirit that is in all of us. If that sounds like an impossible task to you, then you are once again caught in ego’s trap. Your ego does not want you to believe in such a possibility because it will mean the demise of your false self.
The spiritual solution to the major problems that face the world is to bring into positions of power those who are not motivated and driven by their egos but see the collective good as their primary objective. We need leaders who do not manifest primitive tendencies of consciousness such as hate, envy, greed, bloodthirstiness and intolerance but are grounded in love, tolerance, truth and purity. These leaders are emerging and will continue to emerge as we take responsibility for transcending our own individual egos and knowing the true spirit of God. The world ego will be driven into obsolescence as we become truly aware of our sacred selves.
Your sacred self is waiting to share with you and the rest of the world the knowing that we are all of the same eternal essence, an extension of God. In that knowing is the absence of the belief that we are tribal members willing to kill for the physical distinctions that are such a minor part of our existence.
That notion of separateness is what the world ego feeds on. It is an extension of all the individual egos in conflict with each other, fighting their battles to prove just how separate they are from each other. In
truth, none of us are separate from God. None of us are separate from each other. Living on a round planet symbolizes the impossibility of choosing up sides.
We all share the same oxygen, drink from the same water, walk and reside on the same soil. And whether we like to admit it or not, we are all intimately sharing each other’s continually changing atoms and molecules. The only constant in the physical world is change. Everything that is manifested in a material form is changing at all moments. This continuous shift of atoms means that there is no separateness in the quantum scientific sense or in any other sense. Your sacred self is waiting for you to make the choice to let your ego know this truth.
Your ego wants separateness, and so too does the world ego. As long as the world ego believes so strongly in being separate, there will be conflicts to assuage that ego pressure. The presence of nation-states and artificial boundaries will continue under the domination of the world ego. Nationalism represents the selfishness or egoism of a nation and will prevail as long as the ego is honored as truth.
As we move toward unity we will create a world ordered by the higher self, which sees everyone as an inhabitant of the same kingdom. Then there will be no special interests being served; no forts being built on borders; no more nuclear weapons created; and no passports, customs or even exchange of currency. What will be is the knowing that we are one people. We will know that we are not the separate boundaries that we hang onto to coddle that world ego and promote the ideas that billions of people have needlessly died for.
As we substitute love for fear and allow our sacred selves to appear, the need for separateness will gradually disappear. It is happening right now, despite the efforts of many people driven by their egos to maintain the symbols of separateness, which are gradually melting away. The work of the spirit is subtle and patient.
Your Sacred Self Page 29