The Ego

Life on Earth is a tragi-comedy because of the human ego. The ego is a function of third-density consciousness that suffices for the animal-like or archaic tribal existences which see the individual or his chosen group as competing with all the other beings and forces within the visible environment for the limits of available sustenance.

The ego is an imagined construct built up out of first, second, and third density consciousness that is based in the three lower chakras: the red-ray root chakra that connects with the energy of the Earth and is concerned primarily with survival; the orange-ray navel chakra that defines how a person functions in relationship to others; and the yellow-ray solar plexus chakra that facilitates group identity within organized society.

In a world where Earth itself now has transitioned to fourth density through the stepped-up vibration of the photon within our solar system, a third-density construct such as the human ego can no longer function in producing even a semblance of satisfactory life.

The ego as a phase of human evolution in qualifying for service-to-others harvest  is dead. Those who cling to it increasingly find themselves confused and bereft. The New Earth will have no place for ego.

Despite this stark outlook, most people continue to revolve in a limited repertoire of roles and experiences at varying mixtures of the levels of chakras one, two, and three. Nevertheless, to be so imprisoned within limitations far below one’s human potential is bound to be intensely frustrating, especially today when the old ways of clawing and grasping for sustenance only seem to backfire.

A few decades ago, the term used by the existentialists for the state-of-mind produced by such conditions was ennui. To a person with spiritual aspirations, the intense boredom of all those things people who live in ego usually get excited about was insufferable. One asked incredulously, “Is this it?”

Today conditions have changed. With the Earth moving to fourth density, the third-density world is falling to pieces. Everyone is stressed except those who have learned truly to love.

One’s identity when living in the three lower chakras is a construct of a mind that lives only on the surface of consciousness, using perhaps five percent or less of possible awareness. It is a mind that has not yet discovered the soul, which can only be found once one rises through conscious effort to the level of the fourth chakra. This is green-ray heart consciousness.

Before that, however, we are truly asleep. For instance, how many times a day do we use the words, “I,” “me,” “my,” and “mine,” without any idea of what they mean?

If a person thinks that what he calls “I” is different from another’s “I” he is sadly mistaken. In the spiritual heart he can begin to see that what people call “I” is an illusion. Yet the Spiritual Self is always the same for everyone.

In God all seemingly separate selves are one. Thus there is only one Self, the Divine Self of all.

But to even begin to experience it requires a movement to higher consciousness. And that means a decision to evolve.

But the decision must be implemented through a request. It starts with a prayer which may yet come from a level so deep within the ego may not notice.

The ego cannot see any of this, which is a good thing, because its reaction would be to strangle the infant of spiritual inspiration in the cradle.  The ego goes on its merry way, using “I,” “me,” “my,” and “mine,” constantly and indiscriminately until it creates hell on Earth.

Life is then “the war of each against all.” The ego is our own personal devil.

Faced with the resulting pain and sorrow, we can either wallow in it by projecting our anguish onto others, or find in it motivation to seek an escape. This is the first stirring of the awareness of the infinite that transcends all self-limitation.

Other times this stirring may be sparked by experiencing nature. Sometimes from falling in love. Sometimes from a serious illness. Sometimes from meditation or being at a holy place. Sometimes from our own or others’ artistic creativity. Sometimes by other means, “for the Lord works in mysterious ways.” However it happens, it’s Grace.

In the meantime, using the words “I,” “me,” “my,” and “mine “ does give the ego a certain comfort, but it’s the kind of comfort an addict feels when having a swig of alcohol.

In fact, the ego is an addiction. It numbs us to reality. It keeps us from realizing we don’t know who we are.  It resists all signs of the spiritual impulse.

Perhaps there were times and places when a lot more compassion existed among people than today. Today everything is for oneself, nothing for the other. “My” job. “My” girlfriend. “My” house. “My” money. The rat race consists of billions of such “I’s” competing and fighting with each other.

Institutions encourage this competition, because they know it reduces people to isolated, fearful units they can dominate and control. So they encourage the illusion of the ego, with one big ego or group of egos at the top acting in charge.

Life today is a charade of egotistical lies. It is crashing and burning all around us, but few care except to call for more laws, police, armies, regulations.

So why don’t we wake up from this nightmare of fear? Indeed, awakening is possible.

But it is awakening from the ego, not through the ego. It is not by trying to make the ego invulnerable through knowledge, money, a cool image, “therapy,” or whatever. It is dying to the ego.

But it is not killing the ego. That is impossible. The ego is an illusion. It doesn’t exist. You can’t kill or get rid of an illusion.

You die to the illusion. You see how absurd and unnecessary it is. You laugh at it—at yourself, for taking your image of yourself seriously.

A manual for seeing, understanding, and transcending the ego is A Course in Miracles, a lengthy book channeled from Jesus Christ to a group led by two Columbia University researchers in the late 1970s.

The approach A Course in Miracles sets forth to overcome the ego is to engage in a revolution in consciousness based on the deepest possible level of acceptance and forgiveness of oneself and others. The theological basis for so doing is to realize that each of us is, with Christ, a son of God.

The ego, says A Course in Miracles, wants to kill God.

But because the ego is a construct of the mind, escape also can mean quieting the mind through what yoga calls the sattwic state, where thought ceases. The two alternative states of mind, in descending order, are rajas, the active or busy mind, and tamas, the mind of sloth and delusion.

The workaholic lives all the time in rajas. The alcohol or narcotics addict is mired in tamas. Only someone with a highly disciplined mind and active will power experiences sattvas.

The funny thing is that the ego really does not see itself as being particularly grandiose. Its grandiosity is a charade, a cover-up to disguise fear. Its root is identification with the mortal physical body.

The ego sees itself as small, separate, isolated. It came into existence through limiting self-beliefs, through being told it was small, scared, worthless, powerless, deficient, sinful, or sad.

These messages came at an early age. We believed them. We experienced traumas when our youthful exuberance was crushed by the dour, grumpy, pessimistic adult world.

So we ourselves became creatures of acquisition in order to escape our fear. Not all the time, perhaps, but enough to color the tenor of our lives permanently, at least until now.

Our fear and traumas, leading to self-limiting beliefs, became encoded in our Being through the bio-energetic mechanism known as the etheric body. These beliefs have ruled us since then, though we may have made some heroic efforts to discover some other basis for living than the paltry conventionalism that covers the world like a shroud.

So please, examine yourself carefully. Leaving aside your moments of recreation, please ask why you do what you do and why you have always done it that way?

What self-limiting beliefs constitute your ego? To what extent have you acted to protect and promote your ego? To what extent is your psychology a hardened fortress to protect your ego from assault?

How did you get that way? What do you expect to gain from it?

I can tell you—someday this ego of yours is going to kill you. It’s where old age, illness, and even death come from. Then you will come back and do the same things over again, if not on planet Earth, then elsewhere.

But not forever. Nature gets tired after a while of supporting people who do nothing to awaken. Eventually there is a meltdown. It’s been called “hell,” but it doesn’t come because you were “bad” or didn’t go to church, or whatever.

It’s because you’ve had your chance, and now it’s back to square one. You’re holding a place in line someone else needs. In fact, say certain Higher Powers, the Earth has become a “bottleneck” due to selfish people refusing to grow up.

The ego is what binds us to third-density consciousness. In fourth density the ego is replaced by love—of ourselves, the other, and the Divine. Fourth density sees that all is One. This opens the gateway to acceptance, forgiveness, admiration, innocent perception, and enlightenment.

You don’t have unlimited time. It’s time to get moving—now.

There is a particularly interesting website which transmits wisdom from the Divine Mother.

She says: “You are healing the grasping fear that has dominated life on Earth up until now, the grasping and holding on for survival. The small self feels it must survive by holding on and not trusting. So it holds tighter and tighter and tighter, creating more and more pain. We are breaking the pain of fear, the pain of tightly grasping and holding on for dear life.”

This message of hope starts with a single small step: witnessing the mind.

One way to approach conscious evolution is to see all the useless thoughts and feelings that go through your mind all day long. Then dissolve them with understanding from and of the spirit.

Part of this is what Jesus meant when he said to “take no thought” for the morrow. It means to get rid of worry that you won’t get what you want or need.

So why do you want what you want and how do you know what you need? It’s all in the mind.

Our needs are rudimentary. So our ego-based culture has piled onto our small number of normal and natural needs cart-loads of artificially-induced desires and imperatives based on our socially-conditioned ideas of who we feel compelled to pretend we are.

Where we need to start is to get rid of the judging intellect by discarding the dualistic mind that perceives all life as either “good” or “bad.” This can be done in two specific ways: 1) Replace all existing thinking by thoughts of the One, the Divine; 2) Attain inner awareness of the all-pervading Silence through regular practice of meditation.

Have you yet got an inkling that as nice as you think you are, your busy little mind is really a rather nasty know-it-all? That you are ruled by a mental attitude that would have you think you are the judge, jury, and executioner over everything on the planet?

There’s a story we have all heard. Long ago some people named Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of Good and Evil and were expelled from the Garden of Eden.

It meant they set themselves up as the judge of everything. It meant they fell from innocent perception, where they once saw everything suffused in the gentle light of Divine being.

The phrase “innocent perception” comes from a book entitled Love Without End by Glenda Green. She wrote this book about conversations with Jesus in her art studio in Texas in the 1990s. Jesus explained to her that innocent perception is one of the fastest ways to enter into one’s own Sacred Heart.

I will say more about this remarkable book later. For now please just note that innocent perception is the childlike ability to see things as they are, as though everything were brand new. A Course in Miracles calls it the “Holy Instant.”

It’s a function of fourth-density green ray consciousness. Children bring the seeds of this state into life with them for a few months or years until it’s traumatized out of them by sleeping adults.

Actually, the story may be somewhat more complicated. At some remote time in our history, a catastrophe was inflicted upon us by the Higher Powers who, for reasons they thought best at the time, inserted into human beings an organ that caused them to see everything through the distorting lens of unreality. Later this organ was removed, but the effects continued.

This story exists deeply encoded in the parables of ancient Gnostic literature and can be found in its modern form in the writings of G.I. Gurdjieff. He called this organ “Kundabuffer.” As a result, evolution on Earth is even more complicated than it might have been, leaving Gurdjieff to refer to Earth as “an ill-fated planet.”

The Nine, who are the same as the ancient Aeons of Gnostic lore, go so far as to say, through channeled sources, that planet Earth has become a menace to the cosmos, a crisis that now is being altered radically for the better.

This situation has made Earth’s transition from third to fourth density highly difficult and problematic. Kundabuffer has certainly played a part in the problem, especially to the extent that it locked us into ego-consciousness for much of our human history.

Still, we can change with the Earth or not, however we wish. And where we go from here depends on how we make this choice.

We can go up or down in our development. There is no in-between any more. The choice can no longer be put off as we have done for millennia.

Human beings of the planet Earth have been characterized in Gurdjieff’s writings as “slugs.” A slug lives by inertia. It gropes toward food through its own minuscule and pathetic pleasure principle.

To a slug, in the words of a New England fisherman, “Life is a bitch, then you die.”  Unless it has gained some temporary advantage over other slugs through income, genealogy, socio-economic status, etc.

That is what the slug seeks. That is what ego makes us—miserable or happy slugs. If you doubt it, look carefully at the life around you—the slug-heap.

In Love Without End, Jesus has the last word on ego:

“The ego must always be in control, for deep within its nature are feelings of unworthiness and failure, often enveloped within a mystique of privacy. Even though failure and unworthiness are both lies, they can be made to look quite real if enhanced with enough creation. In the end, one’s ego is the source of all failure, because it will bring about its own demise through resistance. This is why an ego cannot tolerate the anxieties of paradox and reversal. Once you know who you are, however, both ego and anxiety will vanish as you are restored to the infinite potential of love.”

Ego is only in the mind. But one day as you sit in meditation watching your mind you will have a sudden thrill of freedom. Neti, neti, I am not this! Thank God!

Copyright 2012 by Richard C. Cook