One Degree Further

Perhaps there is too much silliness going on here to warrant a serious discussion of the topic. But, if anyone’s interested, I will try to explain a little bit more what I am trying to say.

As the illusion of food nourishes the illusory body, so the illusory ego facilitates our journey through what appears to be our lives.

Irrelevant? No.

I rarely take notice of the blood coursing through my veins. It too is silent and, hopefully, well behaved in its operation. But it is certainly not irrelevant.

In the dynamics of personality, the ego weaves its way through experience, helping to organize the moments of experience into a reality that makes sense to us. Not only affirming what makes sense to our particular personality – our likes and dislikes for example, but also more general information about out environment - such as a knowledge that the carpet on the floor is soft and warm to walk on.

In this way all the scattered information that we meet with takes shape into an apparently whole form. The personality that we have through life seems whole and, at least to us, reasonable. The ego is more like “where the rubber meets the road”. The interface that helps give things a sense of reality. It is more than just the word game that repeats in your thinking-mind telling you what it is that you want.

However, if the ego is left to run rampant, and that word game in the mind leads us willy-nilly through life, if we have no sense of greater self to balance off this relentless jabbering, then the role of the ego has been shifted.

Sometimes when a person is able to eliminate the incessant internal dialog of the mind, they have a shift in awareness that is so startling different that they are open, at least temporarily, to realize some degree of awareness of the true dimensions of the self – which are limitless. Thus the loud jabbering of the ego in the mind gets blamed for standing in the way of deeper knowing.

However, whether it is the ego standing in your way of realizing the full dimensions of the true self, or it is some fear, concern, or other suddenly arising notion that grips your attention, there will always be some excuse for limiting one’s self realization. Nevertheless, as we plod our way into the depths of truth, we need to be able to reconcile those suddenly arising ideas that grasp our attention so. Learning to go on, when we are entranced, is what it is about, I believe. Rather than blaming this or that pop-scapegoat concept.

Therefore, living with all of the various mental enticements that we come upon, we learn to recognize that our personality is far more than just the jabbering that once may have ruled our life. And in realizing the greater dimensions of the true self, one does not rely upon the ego as the identity of the personality, seeing instead that it is part of the greater identity that it exists within.

The ego then goes through a catharsis where it returns to a more quiescent role, not to irrelevancy, but to be the servant of our greater purpose. Then, we are not hung up on it, but using it as the tool of living that it functions so well as.