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I’ve been suffering another flare-up of my Crohn’s Disease. As I lay in bed this morning, unable to sleep, I suddenly had a powerful insight.
In the non-dualistic view, we all share the same underlying perfection. It’s our egos that create the illusion of separation. That means that none of us is special – any feeling along that line is just the ego’s hubris. This seems like something that should have been obvious to me long ago, but I never thought of it in that way.
My illness is something my ego clings to because it makes me special. It gets me sympathy, gives me an excuse not to do many things, and provides a distinctive part of my identity. Don’t get me wrong: if I could make it go away, I would. However, there’s a major part of ego wrapped up in having it.
I’ve been focusing on the positive things that make me feel special, such as my skills, possessions, and accomplishments. I hadn’t thought through how negative things make me feel special in exactly the same way. Again, it seems obvious now.
Anything that makes me feel special is an ego-reinforcing mechanism. I may not be able to do anything about my illness, but I can let go of judging it. It’s no more important than any other illusion, and is just more fodder for ego self-reinforcement.
I plan to create a list of all the things that make me feel special, whether positive or negative. That would then tell me where I’m still making strong judgments about myself.
Filed under: Forgiveness, Non-duality | Tags: ACIM, affirmations, ego, Forgiveness, love, Sedona Method
There’s a Sedona Method exercise in which you sit and simply give yourself love. I’ve always had a hard time with this exercise. For me, it all too often became an ego-reinforcing self-justification: “I’m not so bad. I’m actually a pretty good person. Yeah, I love myself.” It felt a little too much like something from Affirmation Girl.
I’ve long known that this wasn’t the point. The exercise is supposed to be about divine love, feeling the perfection of our underlying Beingness. That is, the point is to transcend our ego, not reinforce it. I still found the exercise very hard to do in that sense.
(As I get better at detecting my ego’s tricks, I understand my difficulty better. After all, it’s like an ego-dream come true: an opportunity to distort an exercise into something that will directly justify and reinforce the ego! It’s a great chance for an ego-preservation exercise.)
I recently realized, largely due to my work with A Course in Miracles, that my guilt keeps me from diving self-love. My self-love efforts have been a type of egocentric self-love, an exact parallel to the egocentric forgiving I discussed last week. Trying to make my ego feel better about my ego is just like trying to make my ego feel better about someone else’s ego: a pointless exercise, even if I succeed.
Thus, a simple change in the exercise helped me a lot. If I sit and give myself forgiveness, there’s much less opportunity for ego distortion. My ego can’t truly forgive, because it can’t let go of judging. So, sitting and forgiving myself, in the sense of realizing that there’s perfection underneath the ego, gets me much more in touch with that divine love.
Egocentric love, whether loving myself or someone else, is just another form of judging. I find giving myself forgiveness to be much more effective at helping me lay down the burden of judgment.
Filed under: spirituality, Suffering | Tags: Byron Katie, ego, Sedona Method, The Work, Zen
I wrote a few days ago that I’m getting better at recognizing the tricks my ego plays. Since then, my ego has launched a particularly aggressive strike: making my head so full of thoughts that it’s hard to focus on spiritual practice.
In the past, I’ve had success quieting my mind using a mixture of a Zen technique and the Sedona Method. The Zen technique is to catch each thought I have, and consciously repeat it. The Sedona Method part I added is to find the want underlying each thought and release it. So, I might catch myself replaying a client meeting that went well, and say, “I’m reliving that meeting, because I want approval. Could I let go of wanting approval?” Doing this consistently has always helped.
This time, it’s as if my ego is launching an all-out attack. Every time I clear my mind, the thoughts come rushing in. Trying to clear my mind is like a battle.
Just today, a member on a Sedona Method board I follow made a very relevant point (it’s message #6 here). (Maybe it’s synchronicity, or not.) He said, “If happiness comes from accepting what it, then that would include our thoughts.”
I’ve had an expectation that, as I follow the path, my mind will become quieter and quieter. An expectation is just a belief, and beliefs are never helpful.
So, my ego’s latest trick is more subtle than I had appreciated at first. I’ve locked myself into an all-out war around clearing my mind. The result? I can tell you it’s not inner peace. In fact, a friend told me yesterday that I looked unusually tense.
I hope I can stop judging my progress. Ironically, usually I would use Byron Katie’s The Work to stop judging. However, she doesn’t explain how one does a turnaround when the subject of your judgment is “my thinking!” With luck, just recognizing the judgment and its underlying belief will be enough.
Filed under: Non-duality, spirituality | Tags: ego, Lester Levenson, Sedona Method
As I thought more about Thursday’s post on synchronicity, I realized how much my ego keeps tricking me into doing detailed analysis like that. I was lucky that time to realize the trap before I had wasted too much time on it.
And, it was just last Sunday that I was feeling stuck and tempted to start reading, looking for new techniques and insights. Again, I was fortunate to realize the nature of the ego trap before falling prey to it.
Yesterday, I started to realize just how much energy my ego puts into defending itself. Its techniques are so incredibly clever that I can’t help but have a grudging admiration. However, I’m getting much better at seeing these tricks for what they are.
This is where the Sedona Method, which started me on my spiritual path, seems to fall short. The Method focuses on letting go of the thoughts, emotions, and desires that are the hallmark of the go. However, it didn’t prepare me well to recognize the tricks my ego would use to reassert control.
Indeed, as you would expect from a profit-making enterprise, Sedona Training Associates has plenty of products to let you keep “learning” more. Unfortunately, this makes it very easy for someone like me to keep learning about the Method rather than practicing the Method more. That’s not to say that the advanced products aren’t helpful for some people. It would just be nice if they had big warnings, saying, “Are you sure you want to buy this? Lester Levenson really thought you should spend more time meditating!”
As I see the ego’s tricks more and more, I’m getting better at recognizing and avoiding them. That in itself is a reassuring sign of progress for me.
A few days ago, I mentioned that I had received what seemed to be a fortune cookie from God. As is typical for me, I’m second-guessing the significance of it.
Getting a degree in engineering only reinforced my rational/physical view of the world. (Please don’t give me that oft-quoted drivel about how quantum physics “proves” that we create our own reality. Because I actually know something about quantum physics, I know how absurd that claim is.)
Until recently, I would have put down any claims of the supernatural to Littlewood’s Law. John Littlewood was a mathematician who defined a “miracle” as an event that was exceptional and of special significance. He figured the odds of an event being a “miracle” at 1,000,000 to 1. Since an event occurs to us about every second that we’re awake, simple math shows that “miracles” should happen to us roughly monthly. Littlewood’s Law would say that something seemingly significant, whether my fortune cookie or something equally improbable, was actually bound to happen sooner or later.
Was receiving my fortune cookie an example of synchronicity? Carl Jung coined the term to refer to events that are related, but outside the direct realm of cause and effect. Jung believed that the “collective unconscious” governed the whole human experience and could cause such things. Except for theological differences, such as who created what, Jung’s collective unconscious is a lot like the idea of an immanent god. The collective unconscious has a vision of the ideal self, and could cause me to get my fortune cookie to help drive me towards self-actualization.
Another argument is called apophenia. Klaus Conrad coined the term to refer to our tendency to see connections where none exists. I’ve been studying spirituality, and many fortune cookies have vaguely spiritual themes. The odds are good that I could find relevance there, just as I likely could by opening to a random page in the Bible. That is, it was pure coincidence, but I want there to be meaning, so I see it.
Where does this leave me? This may sound like a cop-out, but I don’t think it matters which is true. I can’t prove any of the theories, which means I’d just be picking a belief. As I wrote last week, I’m finding all beliefs detrimental to my progress. Instead, I am going to go based on what I can actually know from personal experience.
I know that I’m happier when my mind is quiet and peaceful. I know that most of my ego’s thoughts are negative and destructive. I know that the more loving and less judgmental I can be, the better I feel about other people. Against that knowledge, does it matter whether or not the fortune cookie was a sign from God? Just as seeing a gum commercial can remind me to schedule my dental checkup, seeing the fortune cookie reminded me not to neglect an important part of my spiritual practice.
It would be nice to think that God had a role to play in bringing me that cookie. But not so nice as to be worth cluttering up my mind with yet another belief.
Filed under: Forgiveness | Tags: ACIM, Byron Katie, ego, Forgiveness, Guilt
I’ve been working hard to become a more forgiving person. As I wrote on the day after Yom Kippur, I can see a perfect symmetry between guilt and blame. Once I realized that there’s no difference between forgiving others and forgiving myself, I redoubled my efforts.
However, today I read something in A Course in Miracles that makes me wonder if I’ve been going about forgiving the wrong way. The text seems to say that the way to forgive is not to perceive others’ errors in the first place. In contrast, perceiving the error, and then decided to overlook it, is an egocentric way to forgive.
I have to admit that I’ve tended towards the egocentric approach. I’m not even sure how to not perceive others’ errors. Perhaps I should retract everything I wrote yesterday; maybe I do need some breakthrough in perception.
At least this gives me some new clarity on Byron Katie’s approach. In her book Loving What Is, she makes the non-dualistic point that everything we blame others for is a projection of ourselves. Her “four questions” are a way to illustrate this. Until now, I’ve missed the full significance of this: her technique doesn’t help us forgive, but makes us see that there’s nothing to forgive.
At some level, I think I’ve understood this for some time. However, my ego didn’t (and still doesn’t) want to understand. And why should it? Having my ego nobly overlook someone else’s misdeed is pretty satisfying. (“Look ma! No blame! Aren’t you proud?”) My ego has tricked me again, leading me into the kind of forgiving that gives me the illusion of forward progress, while actually reinforcing the ego instead.
I had a brief flurry of activity with Byron Katie’s “Judge Your Neighbor Worksheet” a couple of months ago. (It’s simply a worksheet with her four questions on it, which you can download here if you don’t have her book.) While the process seemed very productive, I moved on to other things. I’m now sure that was because the process deeply threatened my ego. That’s a good sign it’s worth my time to revisit it!
Filed under: Non-duality | Tags: Byron Katie, Eckhart Tolle, Karl Renz, Lester Levenson, spirituality, Zen
A few days ago I wrote about how I was feeling stuck in my spiritual progress. I realized that part of my frustration is that I’m hoping for some sort of massive breakthrough.
I’ve read many accounts of people who had dramatic shifts in perception, often overnight. Byron Katie, Karl Renz, Echkart Tolle, and Lester Levenson all had quick transitions from deep depression to a peaceful sense of oneness. While Levenson worked to trigger his transition, the others I mentioned all had their breakthroughs seemingly without conscious effort. Apparently, these people got a helicopter ride up the mountain, while I’m taking the walking path!
In talking with a friend today, I began to wonder if I’m reading too much into these people’s seemingly random progress. All of them were in states of very deep depression when they had their breakthroughs. I know what it’s like to be deeply depressed, having gone through a bout of suicidal depression as a teenager. If I had suddenly leapt from that state to my present state of consciousness, it would have seemed like a tremendous enlightenment experience.
I am much more loving and forgiving than I used to be, and less likely to be upset by the vicissitudes of the world. If I came here suddenly from deep depression, it would have been such a transformation that I would have wept with joy. There would be no doubt in my mind that something profound had happened.
What if I have underestimated my progress? I’m waiting for the day where I wake up and suddenly perceive non-duality, see everyone as a loving reflection of myself, and transcend the illusions of my ego. Maybe I’m already close enough to the goal that I haven’t recognized my gradual progress, and maybe my further progress will seem gradual too.
Karl Renz speaks about a definite shift from dualistic to non-dualistic perception, and Jed McKenna similarly makes it sound like there’s a definite point at which one is “enlightened.” Yet I have to wonder whether Renz and McKenna actually made it to the end of the path, or just became stuck in a cul-de-sac. Both of them seem to find their states lonely and empty. I’m therefore hesitant to look towards either of them as role models.
Maybe the point of Zen’s “gateless gate” is that there’s no well-defined endpoint to the path. I know Levenson kept studying and learning long after his transformation. Byron Katie sounds like she had to keep forgiving and consolidating her gains.
As a comment on my post about feeling stuck pointed out, “Expecting something – looking ahead – is another way of avoiding the present moment, yes?” I think that my expectation for a grand breakthrough is, indeed, another ego trick to interfere with my practice.
Filed under: Non-duality, World | Tags: ACIM, ego, enlightenment, goals, God, World, Zen
One thing all non-dualistic teachings share is that the world, as we perceive it, is illusory and won’t provide happiness. Sri Ramana Maharshi said, “The reality which shines fully, without misery and without a body, not only when the world is known but also when the world is not known, is your real form.” The very first lessons in the workbook of A Course in Miracles are about how we don’t see anything real, so what we see is meaningless. Not only do all the traditions share the message, but most make it one of their central and first topics for students.
I’m finding that this presents a dilemma for me. My intellectual grasp on the idea of non-duality hasn’t translated into a shift in perception yet. As a result, I find my ego complaining about the effort I put into life: “You’re living in an illusory world, yet you’re still working hard, raising kids, and dealing with paperwork! What’s the point?”
The irony is that I know I’ll still be doing those things once my perception changes. After all, one of the most famous Zen sayings is, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” I’ll still be in the world; I’ll just realize its true nature and thus not let it get to me in the same way.
For now, I’m finding myself less engaged in parts of the world. I still carry out my work, take care of my family, and see my friends. However, I’m feeling much more detached from the vicissitudes of life. My feelings about the dilemma of goals, which I wrote about a few days ago, are another aspect of the same feeling.
I don’t feel as if I’m in any position to decide whether this detachment represents progress or a dangerous ego-led deviation. On the bright side, it does reduce both the mental clutter and time spent on major projects, leaving me in a better position to make progress on fixing my perception.
I wrote yesterday that I felt I should spend more time in spiritual practice. I know that many people have experienced God sending them messages to encourage them on their path. I have to wonder if I got one today. I met a friend for lunch at a Chinese restaurant. My fortune cookie said, “Clear your mental, emotional and psychic space and you’ll see.” I’m not normally one to go for the “fortune cookie from God” theory, but this sure seems like synchronicity.
(My fortune cookie also taught me the Chinese word for “salt,” which is apparently 盐. While the fortune itself really struck me as relevant, I’m guessing that 盐 and the six “lucky numbers” aren’t divine messages. If they are, God will have to provide some clarification!)
This weekend, I’ve been feeling stuck in my progress. Part of this was brought home from the lessons in A Course In Miracles that I’ve been working on. Both Lessons 49 and 50 suggest that we should feel some sort of peace or connection to God. Frustratingly, my mind has been too noisy to do either.
Back when I was learning the Sedona Method, there was an easy solution to feeling stuck: listen to more advanced courses. I have to assume this is the main reason people involved in any sort of personal growth course buy more materials: because they’re feeling stuck and hoping to find the answer.
As I look hard at my path, though, my pattern in this is hardly limited to the Sedona Method. Whenever I’ve felt stuck, or like I’ve hit a plateau, I’ve looked for more materials to digest. I’ve learned some interesting things as a result, and sometimes been diverted from whatever path I was stuck on. But, these materials rarely, if ever, actually ever helped me through the difficulty I was facing.
I now think that the search for more techniques and wisdom is a particularly devious ego trap. It fills my mind with noise, and thus keeps me from the activities that would most likely help: meditation, prayer, and Sedona Method releasing. (I think these activities are all really aspects of the same thing, but that’s material for another day.) Spending my time reading, and perhaps experimenting with new techniques, lets my ego fool me into thinking that I’m making progress while distracting me from really doing so.
I simultaneously realized that feeling stuck is just another way for my ego to beat up on me. What if I didn’t have any expectations about the rate of my progress? How can I even measure my progress down a spiritual path, if I don’t know what the end looks like? My ego insists on either the satisfaction of tangible milestones, or the disappointment of being stuck. Ironically, my feeling that I’m not overcoming my ego quickly enough is just another episode of The Ego Strikes Back.
Maybe it’s a sign of progress that I finally recognize the trap I’m in. That makes my ego feel better!
A few days ago I wrote about the role of faith in religion, and the lack of a place for it in spirituality. Faith is just one form of belief, and recently I saw something that made me think about belief much more.
On a message board I follow, a poster made this comment: “I respect everyone’s beliefs, and appreciate that others who disagree with me, allow me the same privilege of believing my own beliefs.” That sounds reasonable enough, well in line with my American values of tolerance. But does it make any sense?
It may be that this poster, who happens to be a Christian minister, believes his comment is true. However, it’s probably not. The 9/11 terrorists believed that they were fighting “the Great Satan” in God’s name. Before the Civil War, ministers in the South gave sermons explaining the biblical basis for slavery, believing they were maintaining God’s order. Hitler said he believed he was doing God’s will by perpetrating the Holocaust. Does the poster really respect those beliefs? I know I don’t.
Obviously, I’ve chosen particularly provocative examples of destructive beliefs. That raises the question: are any beliefs good, or even harmless?
The problem with beliefs of any sort is that we accept them without proof. If they were provable, then they’d be knowledge, not beliefs. Somehow, we’ve convinced ourselves that it’s acceptable, or even desirable, to filter our perception of the world through these completely unsubstantiated notions. Sometimes we manage, through the filtering, to find some evidence that seems to support our beliefs.
For example, Hitler had a huge library of books, in which he would underline passages that supported his beliefs. I’m sure he felt his beliefs well justified based on all the “evidence” he found. However, he still had no proof. That may be why he spent so much of his time working to support his beliefs. Maybe that’s also why he felt the need to burn all the books that contradicted his beliefs.
I recently deconstructed a belief that I’ve held for a long time: “Most people are basically good.” It seems harmless enough. But on further analysis, it’s quite destructive. It suggests that some minority of people are not basically good. It supports a framework for categorizing people. The “basically good majority” is better than the “basically evil minority.” And, gee, I’d better be on the lookout for those bad apples so I can judge them.
I have no proof for this belief, and it’s probably wrong. Most non-dualistic traditions teach that we have a core (the divine part) that’s perfect, and an ego that’s intrinsically imperfect. If that’s true, then everyone is perfect at some level, and has an ego that will make errors, varying only in magnitude. And, as I progress down my spiritual path, I’m accumulating experiences that may ultimately prove my original belief false.
My belief shares an important characteristic with the overtly destructive ones I mentioned earlier: they all serve to divide people, to provide some basis for judgment and separation. Beliefs about reincarnation, Heaven and Hell, God, abortion, gay marriage, or anything else – all of them make it harder for me not to judge others.
My personal goal in this life is to find inner peace. All my experiences so far show me that to do that, I need to learn to love everyone, just as God does. Are there any beliefs that don’t run counter to that goal? I haven’t thought of any yet.
The Seeker of Peace 