[Luang Prabang, Laos]
“God said: …Beloveds, you are learning what matters. When all is said and done, what matters? What has been your contribution to the world? There is only one contribution you can make, and that is love. That is the only thing to give. Every challenge teaches you that. As much as you may not want to learn that love is what counts and nothing else does, you are learning that. Willy-nilly, you are learning that.” HL 4459
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“Do not be afraid of the ego. It depends on your mind, and as you made it by believing in it, so you can dispel it by withdrawing belief from it.
…The more you learn about the ego, the more you realize that it cannot be believed. The incredible cannot be understood because it is unbelievable.” ACIM 7-8
The actual shift in human consciousness forces us to reconsider the very basis on which we have been building, up to now, our sense of safety, direction, and support. In the relative world of planet Earth, our sense of safety, direction, and support is based on the bounds and limits of time and space. To satisfy the basic needs of what we call our nature, we think we need to compete with time, space, and people that inhabit this space-time realm. This always implies a sense of conflict that expresses itself through attack, whatever form it takes. At that level of reality, even the sense of sharing and communicating is conditional to the imperatives of the seaming survival in limited time and space.
But is this Darwinian statement the whole of the story? Let us dare to make the hypothesis that as human beings we are not limited by the imperatives of survival but by our belief in those imperatives. Not only we are not limited by these seeming imperatives, but we can start seeing the logic of survival as irrelevant and baseless.
The ego system of safety, self-direction and self-support
Survival is a belief system invented by our mind through the projection of the ego. Ego has to preserve itself by securing, directing, and supporting itself if it wants to «survive». By definition, it relies only on itself since it perceives itself as alone. It supports its own logic of aloneness. How could we possibly experience the world as a seeming irreducible multiplicity if we did not believe in the ego? But since the ego is a fabrication of our mind — it did not create itself ex nihilo — it draws its force of illusion, as a substitute for what we really are, from the power of the mind itself. Once our mind projects the idea or possibility of an ego, the ego must have a seeming life of its own and ensure its survival. This can be possible only if the ego makes us deny what gave it birth: our own mind, our own creative power.
Logically, to fully experience ego we have to deny our own real existence to endorse the ego as our real being or existence, hence as our real security, direction, and support. Even if the ego is not real, only virtual, it can simulate and impose its reality, its make-believe reality by making our mind believe that this mind of ours is non-existent. If we then believe in the ego, if we support it, it will ensure its continuance.
The ego can ensure its continuance as long as we don’t know, don’t remember, don’t recognize our own real inherent and eternal identity. Ego will substitute to our real identity with its temporary identity, making us believe this temporary identity is the only one we have. Ego then offers us its conception of safety, direction, and support according to its logic.
But what must ego do to our mind to make us believe that it is real? It must constantly attack what has given it its existence, namely our mind. This must create extreme anxiety, stress for the ego, this imagined us, since it has to constantly deny what supports its existence. So it transfers its anxiety to our mind and makes us believe that it (ego) will ensure our safety, direction, and support in the competing outside world. By believing in the ego, we think that life in the world is based on lack. In fact, ego has to make us believe that lack is the law of the relative world. Therefore, for the ego, giving is losing unless it is used to get more.
It is obvious then that ego can build only on fear of the loss of its idea of safety. No wonder it is always confused, conflicted and tormented, ready to attack because ready to be attacked.
The boomerang of giving
How can we seriously rely on the ego to ensure our safety, our self-direction, and self-support? Ego does not have the choice to believe in competition, conflict, and attack because it is fighting for what it wants to get and also fighting for what it wants to get rid of. As well as the ego needs to take in order to get, it needs to get rid of what it doesn’t want by giving it away.
But a conflicted mind projected through the ego can be only confused, hence a poor teacher, a poor director, a poor supporter, and a poor security. “The more you learn about the ego, the more you realize that it cannot be believed. The incredible cannot be understood because it is unbelievable.” There is a universal law that does not apply only to the relative, illusory world, but to the real world as well: giving something is how we keep it.
This is an extremely powerful neutral law that works for both the good and the so-called bad. If we give away or get rid of our anxiety and anger (which we assuredly don’t want of) by projecting its cause outside of us, that is the surest way to keep this anxiety or anger inside. What we exclude from our mind through the virtuality of the ego is a complete distortion of the inherent power of our mind. But even distorted, the mind remains very powerful. Giving war away to the outside world is the best way to keep it inside.
We are all aware that our projections will boomerang and return to us and hurt us.
The only security, self-direction and self-support lies in sharing
So if giving something is how we keep it, could we foresee that the best way to ensure our safety, our self-direction, and our self-support is by giving them away, which means by sharing them?
But as long as we believe that we are space-time bounded, limited beings, we cannot really share because we still believe in lack and loss, consequently believing that giving something is losing it.
We constantly seek to create boundaries in our lives because we rely on the ego for our safety, self-direction, and self-support. We create laws and rules to protect our freedom while we forget we are already totally free.
There is safety only in the limitless, the boundless, the spaceless, and the timeless. In the limitless, the only way to feel safe is to contribute. Instead of believing in lack, which is the essence of selfishness, we believe in self-fulness that we are here to extend: “What has been your contribution to the world? There is only one contribution you can make, and that is love.” The only real and essential thing we have is what we are. We have all we need by knowing that we are all we need.
If the ego is a projection of our mind, it must occupy only a virtual part of the mind since the mind is an indivisible whole. The Holy Spirit in us plays the role of a mediator between the ego and our whole mind, reminding the mind that we don’t have to fear the ego because it is the ego that fears us. “It depends on your mind, and as you made it (the ego) by believing in it, you can dispel it by withdrawing belief from it.“
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Normand, deep and wide is what you want. You affirm and reaffirm what is true and wise and beneficent. If I had to pluck just one short phrase from your blog entry today, I would choose:
giving something is how we keep it.
Someone should needlepoint this and hang it everywhere.
You do an amazing job, Normand. And your writing enriches you as well?
Indeed, Gloria, affirming and reaffirming what is true and wise IS absolutely beneficent. Is it not how God proceeds in Heavenletters? Affirming, reaffirming, repeating in so various ways the Truth so it will awake our cells and our DNA. Is not music also affirming, reaffirming, repeating a tune with an uplifting effect?
And yes, writing enriches oneself, and you are a living example of it.
Thanks for your support, dear One.
You’ve got it, Normand!
Normand, your quote from ACIM, about the “ego,” drives home a question that has lingered for me at the edge of my awareness. I hear over and over how bad ego is supposed to be, from many different sources. But when I try to pin down what is really being said in these kinds of statements, I have a hard time knowing just what an “ego” is.
When I look at how the word ego came into use, the meaning seems to relate to self, identity or what we mean when we say “I.” But the quote from ACIM clearly implies that ego is not the whole self, rather, it seems to be some part of the mind or some other sub-part of the self. As you point out in your post, the quote also clearly implies that the ego is not real. The only way I can make sense of this is that the word ego must refer to a mistaken idea of the self.
You call the ego “a fabrication of the mind,” and I have to agree with this. It seems that what is described as “ego” is an idea based on the belief that what we are is truly just a function of our body. This would mean that when the body dies, who we are is annihilated. This is a very fearful thing to believe! Death becomes the great terror, especially since it would mean a total and permanent loss of everything we ever cared about. This idea is a great engine for spawning all kinds of negative beliefs, attitudes and goals. Like the goal of hoarding wealth, the dread we feel about serious illness and the fear of aging. I can easily see how, if one held firmly to the belief that who we are is just our animal body, all the ideas and attitudes this belief produced could be thought of as a thing that could be called “the ego.”
From this point of view, ego is not a real thing as much as a complex of mistaken ideas and attitudes all wound together and self-supporting. If we want peace of mind, I believe it is something we have to unravel and eliminate. So “eliminating the ego” is a matter of substituting beliefs that better serve us and fit better with the true nature of reality. But “substituting beliefs” doesn’t seem right, though. It is not like we can produce new beliefs like we type a new program for a computer. If we want to rid ourselves of ego, it seems we have to seek new experiences that will support better beliefs and make them become real for us. These are complex ideas! I hope I am making myself clear.
I agree with Gloria, “giving something is how we keep it” is a very profound and interesting insight. I particularly like how you point out that it applies to the negative as well as the positive. Much to think about here.
I just discovered your blog recently when Gloria mentioned to me you had one. When I get time, I look forward to reading some of your other posts. Nice work, Normand!
Dear Chuck, what a pleasant surprise to have you here.
Your comment is a very good extension of this blog. In fact, it stimulates me to consider some themes of your comment in forthcoming blogs. After all, the topic of ego is a mine for movies, novels, soap operas and t-shirts.
Indeed, ego is a mistaken idea of the Self. But the idea of a mistake is a device used by the Self to bring back our awareness to the Truth of what we are. We could not experience what it is like to be a separate self (in a body) if the memory of who we really are was still totally accessible to our awareness. The ego is there to make believe in this separate self so the earthly experience be possible. At the same time, we cannot really separate ourself from our real identity. It can be only a virtual separation. Hence, our real memory of who we are is whole, intact, unchanged. The recognition of the mistaken identity and the return of awareness to the Truth is what we call redemption or atonement.
And indeed, as you say, death can be a real terror when you identify totally with a personal self. But, paradoxically, the idea of death and the fear of death is, at the same time, a device that can bring back the memory of who we truly are. Can you conceive an “authentic” personal self without a foundation of guilt and fear? The poison is the remedy.
Thank you Chuck for your comment. And I also congratulate you for the excellent work you do through your blog. You are the perfect person to bring several orthodox rationalistic minds to the threshold of spirituality by broadening their vision of what new science can contribute to this global spiritual awakening on planet Earth.
And I love this you say:
The poison is the remedy!
Homeopathic! I love it!