By now I hope that you have started to question yourself, your ego, and begun to wonder where all that fear came from? What gave birth to the ego and stopped us from tuning in to our latent intuition? Well, I have a theory about that…
Imagine that once you were the only thing that existed. You were completely indescribable because there was nothing to compare you to, and in order to get a grasp of how we looked we’ll use a mirror as a metaphor for our story.
Once upon a time, before time began, there was an indescribably large mirror of light. The mirror (you) had a crazy thought, ‘What if I could experience myself.’ In order to experience what we are, we have to know what we are not, which creates a polarity of opposites. In the moment of this thought, which by the way was likely to be the one and only thought you’d ever had, the mirror shattered right in the center. This is known as the big bang. The first ripple of sound coming from the bang held the largest shards of glass. These shards were now separate and had their own consciousness; they could remember that they were once part of one big mirror. (If you’re a spiritual intuitive you might know these shards to be angels or guides.)
Each ripple of sound, as it journeyed away from the mirror, became more solid until the memory of the mirror was completely lost. However, each shard still carried a feeling of longing and loneliness, which drove them to look for unity within each other. But the shards chose to experience what they are not, and this is why at times they felt so very alone. They would even communicate to each other from the dull side of the mirror, denying their connection to each other. It was too painful see themselves reflected back to each other. They called the dull side of the mirror ‘ego’ and the reflective side ‘love.’ It was impossible to look at their reflection in someone else’s mirror and not remember that they were once part of a whole. But the decision to leave held such pain and guilt that they totally forgot about the big bang, and the broken mirror became just an idea, just a dream. It is impossible to leave yourself. As each shard of mirror was part of a whole, the break was an illusion. We are dreaming duality, but we never left home.
This is the idea of ‘oneness’ or ‘nonduality.’ Believing that we are living a dream doesn’t matter so much for the understanding of this book. However, it does give us an entry point into a conversation about the ego and how it can prevent us from tuning in to our intuition – our essence.
I imagine that our hearts hold a piece of this divine mirror. When the dull side of the mirror is up, the heart feels empty. We then think that whatever we buy, have, do, or choose will make us feel full again. So we buy a new house, car, clothes, food; we study, change jobs, blame circumstance, and do our best to fill the empty hole in our hearts. In fact, this is often why advertising has such a strong effect on us: ‘If you buy this thing, you will stop the emptiness.’ We will do anything to give ourselves a sense of purpose and belonging. When we turn the mirror round and shine our love and reflective side out, we become open and realize that we have always been full. The hole in our heart acts like a lampshade for the love we have to give. Through this opening to love, we inspire others to shine their mirrored love out, too. If we all shone mirror-side out, the mirror would come back to being as one whole.
However we are in a self-imposed trap, and many people don’t feel safe to shine their light; it feels vulnerable to be possibly the only light in the darkness. The dull side of the mirror is our ego; the reflective side of the mirror is our love. The ego is the ruler of our fear; so when fear wins, we simply don’t shine.
Humans are profoundly intelligent. We have intelligent minds and bodies, and have brought about awe-inspiring creations. Everything manmade started in the imagination, and from that place we have brought into being the most terrifyingly destructive things to hurt the planet and everything on it, including us. Yet in our artistic imagination we create such beauty. No matter how intelligent we are, we coexist with an aspect of ourselves that is in itself insane. When you look back at our history, you see the evidence of human insanity. It is the part of us that says, ‘What about me?’
Ego believes we are separate from other humans. Ego feels pain and loneliness; it feels desperation. Ego feels it isn’t seen or heard enough. Ego believes its happiness lies somewhere in the future, in a sense of achievement or recognition. Ego believes it is right and clever, and that it can harm others for its own protection. However, before we all get depressed, we are coming to the end of this aspect of being human. Sadly, one way or another, we will shift our consciousness to see, think, and feel beyond this part of ourselves or else we will die out as a species. We are without a doubt at a tipping point in our consciousness. The way forward is to expand our consciousness into intuitive knowing.
In every human being there is the madness and the sanity. Awakening to be able to hear and be liberated is to intuitively know who you really are outside of the madness. The ego mind is always built on identification. We need to know beyond the ‘I am,’ ‘my name is,’ ‘I am a man or a woman,’ or even ‘that is my house,’ ‘car,’ ‘wife,’ ‘husband.’ We know we are much more than this, but often we simply don’t know how to get in touch with that aspect of ourselves that is beyond the ‘I am.’ However, we cannot dismiss one half of ourself to reach the other. We can’t be in denial of our insanity. The awakening is to know that we are insane and to deal with it in any positive way we can. Mindfulness, awareness, humor, gratitude, forgiveness, self-development – but the first part has to be the acknowledgment of what is ruling your decision in any given moment. Is it your ego or your intuitive knowing that is running your life?
Many people see removing the ego as the way to enlightenment, believing that it creates blocks to us finding divine love. The irony is that the desire to reach enlightenment comes from the ego. It can only be the ego that wishes to seek enlightenment, so in a sense the ego wishes to put us on a ‘path’ to find enlightenment, but then only allows us to seek, not to find. In our very center, we are already enlightened, so there is no path to find enlightenment. You can’t journey toward a place when you are already there.
Instead, treat life as a moment-by-moment removal of the ego blocks that are put in front of your eyes, and which are preventing you from recognizing your fabulous, loving, ‘divine’ nature. Ego also stops you fully seeing the fabulous, loving, divine nature of others. You simply need to wake up to the realization. Almost like arriving in a new town and not knowing you have arrived, as you haven’t been there before. Life is about removing the blocks that prevent us from seeing the true nature of who we are. The block is the ego and the many faces and aspects of the ego. The reason why the ego wishes to seek love and enlightenment, but not to find it, is that if the ego finds love, it cannot coexist with it. You can’t have darkness where there is light; you can’t have a lie where there is truth. If it is the ego’s wish to destroy itself, it simply can’t. It is only ever the ego that seeks self-improvement, as the love part of us does nothing but love what is. You can’t fight fire with fire. So the only way to remove the blocks to finding your divine nature is to see every aspect of yourself as being divine already – and that includes your ego. If you love what you hate, how can you hate it? Fighting it just involves chasing your tail. Fully accepting your shadow makes it smaller; running away makes it bigger.
Humans have an exceptional ability for consciousness and understanding. Yet we don’t know how to live in balance in a dualistic world. As I touched on earlier, polarities are everywhere and all emotions can be placed somewhere on a spectrum that has love at one end and fear at the other.
You might think that the opposite of love is hate, yet love and hate are but horns on the same stag; they are born out of the same impulse. Hate is not the opposite of love. Hate is love corrupted by fear. Likewise, courage is not the opposite of fear, but rather it is love in spite of fear. In fact, love and fear are the only two emotions there are, as every other emotion is born of these two opposites. As I discussed earlier, thoughts and feelings at the love end of the spectrum are of a high, light, positive vibration, while those at the fear end are of a lower vibration and dull, heavy, and dense. Fear is mistrustful. Fear separates and isolates us. Love is joyful, hopeful, trusting, and optimistic. Love brings you closer to the full experience and expression of yourself. Love joins us together, allowing us to see that we are all intimately connected.
Don’t get me wrong; the ego is also a fantastic self-understanding program. Learning what we are not takes us closer to understanding what we are. The ego is in place to protect our vulnerable physical body. The ego resonates with fear, so we don’t go hugging bears, swimming with sharks, or allowing someone else to eat the last brownie. Sadly, the ego also protects us by chopping down trees, catching the last cod, and making sure its needs are met before those of the greater good. But we would still never eat the last brownie, at least, not when anyone is looking! This is the unbalanced ego that currently infects most of humanity.
Take a look at the following words to get an idea of the ego self as opposed to the more spiritual self.
Ego |
Love |
Fear |
Love |
Competition |
Cooperation |
Insecurity |
Self-belief |
Pessimism |
Optimism |
Control |
Freedom |
Greed |
Balance |
Boredom |
Enthusiasm |
Illusion |
Truth |
Despair |
Hope |
Cursing |
Blessing |
The lower chakra points resonate with the ego-based words. You could think about the bottom three chakras – root, sacral, and solar plexus – as connecting with the ego’s need for physical connection through wants and needs. Through the solar plexus the intuitive ego frisks people to see if they are safe for us to be with. This might be felt as a sense of unease in the body or a gut instinct acting as a warning. If you are used to feeling a strong sense of somatic intuition, you might find it’s not as trustworthy a tool as you thought. The gut deals with limitations and protection rather than expansion. The bottom three chakras also stay inside the body and don’t come out the other side. Not all teachers who understand the chakras agree with this, but from my intuitive knowing, I don’t feel that they come out of the back of a person.
From the heart chakra upward – heart, throat, third eye and crown – the chakras are connected more to the love and spirit part of who we are and give rise to mental, spiritual, and emotional intuition.
When the ego is in charge of the decisions you make in life, it can only decide in a limited way, as the decision will be made from the viewpoint of what is ‘best.’ The ego wants to make a decision to avoid as much pain and disappointment as possible. This view puts a limit on growth and the possibility of real, positive change. The kind of change that is sustainable for the greater good. The ego looks for a quick, pain-free fix. This is why the ego opens us up to addictions and limiting thoughts about ourselves. Stress and either too little or too much personal space can take us into ego thinking in a more attached way.
The ego is made up of many sub-personality voices, which we have constructed as emotional masks to protect us. Some of these masks were made in childhood as we learned those aspects of ourselves that were accepted and which were not. As the ego is all about self-protection, it looks for what will be agreeable to the ‘tribe’ and what won’t be. It is not so worried about being authentic, but more about how to get its needs met. In this modern age, in a Western culture, as long as you can make money you can meet your needs. But the ego doesn’t know that; it still believes that if you don’t fit into the tribe, you’ll be kicked out of the cave and starve. Hard to believe the ego hasn’t noticed grocery stores! However it has noticed that grocery stores don’t give food away for free. So the ego has moved into business.
Now the ego is the foundation of the career ladder, and develops sub-personalities for protection and progress. We then believe these sub-personalities and voices in our mind create who we are. We believe that we are only our personality. Yet our personality fluctuates and changes with every circumstance and situation life throws our way. We change because we bring forward a different mask to cope in that situation.
So who are we? We are a composite of the personalities we have created, based on what we have made the events in our past mean, and we are love. If our future is decided by the personalities we made in our past, we can only ever decide to recreate our past as we are making the same choices.
We find ourselves meeting the same types of people and finding the same life restrictions and limits. We find patterns that we can’t seem to move on from. We may even see ourselves living the same life and being the same as our parents. We don’t change our class structure or fall in love with someone who is outside our level of understanding. It would be a tall order to ask anyone to just forget everything they’ve learned about the world and have new ideas based on no evidence. The problem we have is that we have repeated evidence for what we know as we keep recreating it.
However, this situation isn’t as impossible as it sounds. The smallest shift in ideas can move you off the track leading to the same limiting experience. In mathematics we understand that a small change alters everything. Life is chaos and yet has a divine, mathematical order to it. When you change one thing, you change the course of everything: A butterfly flaps its wings in the English countryside and sets off a hurricane in the Caribbean. It all starts with a decision in the mind. Changing how you think, from logic to intuition, changes the course of everything.
The place to start is to know who is talking when it comes to your sub-personality mental voices. It is possibly less important to know where the sub-personality originated because we all have similar archetypes from different causes in our past. We often spend more time thinking about what caused a problem in our psyche than looking at how to move on from it. Looking at our issues only makes them bigger, if we give them too much energy. My reason for having a ‘court jester’ archetype might be completely different from someone else. Thinking that our sub-personalities are bad as such and knowing where they come from often creates judgment rather than gratitude. We also then spend too much time in a position of blame rather than taking responsibility for who we are.
In truth, knowing why we have created a mask through fear should allow us to have self-understanding, realization, and gratitude to ourselves for having found a method of survival. It might be redundant now, but at the time it was the best we could do. We were children learning and we still are, and so are our parents. Some archetypes still have a purpose in our lives and always will. For example, if I didn’t have an inner ‘pleaser’ how would people like me? Would I become selfish? Unfortunately in this dual-based universe, we often look for a negative realization about ourselves. Sadly, this is a way the ego uses self-development as a way to sabotage us from finding self-love.
One way to resolve this is to not fight it. One of the most spiritual realizations is to know that you and everyone else are, to a certain degree, imbalanced. No one is perfect. Forget it and forgive yourself and, if you can, others too. Love what you want to change, that way you allow it to move through you. Trying to change it without love simply makes it stick harder.
Here is a list of sub-personalities or archetypes; it is by no means complete because there are many more, but these are a few better-identified ones:
You can, of course, see positive and negative sides to all these personalities as they coexist within you. Having a personal awareness, connection, empathic understanding, and form of communication with these sub-personalities gives us the opportunity to be able to talk them out of following the same patterns in life. It also means you can tell whether it is your ego talking or your intuition. You know which decisions are from the love part of yourself and which are from the ego. I can’t say that the ego never makes a good move in your life, but it will be done with a much smaller stride than love makes.
If you want to identify your sub-personalities, you can do this by using your imagination. If you remember, the movie screen of the mind onto which the imagination plays is in the right hemisphere of the brain. The imagination is also our link to the subconscious mind. As the sub-personalities are the conscious mind’s voice, it is really difficult to see them from the same place that they speak from. It’s a bit like trying to listen to yourself singing, you always sing more quietly so you can hear yourself. In order to see them you have to allow the subconscious to speak in the right hemisphere of the mind. We can do this via the imagination. Using the imagination doesn’t mean that whatever emerges from our imagining isn’t real; it can be more real than reality.
Many people believe that it is impossible to stop the thinking voice without meditation. In addition, many people believe they can’t meditate because they are still thinking. If you are in the present moment and not thinking of the past or the future, you are in a form of meditation. Sitting in one position for a prolonged session of meditation can become uncomfortable and even painful. Being in awareness of physical pain is still part of meditation; wondering when you can get up and stretch your leg isn’t. Your thinking voice is the same as your speaking voice, and so your inner and outer voice is the same. When I am talking I can’t have a conscious thought at the same time: If I am in a library, or on a silent retreat, I can stop talking easily. We can stop thinking in exactly the same way. The reason we don’t is because the ego mind makes us believe that we can’t stop thinking. Even worse than this, it gives us feelings that if we do stop thinking, something bad will happen. It comes up with some crazy arguments against the idea of stopping thinking. For example, if you stop thinking, how would you know there was a bus coming as you cross the street? And would you forget your house keys? And so on.
The trick is to tell your mind that you have made a promise to be silent, and it just stops talking. Of course, it can start again if triggered by an external influence such as the phone ringing, but on the whole it stops and the observer takes over. The observer looks at the detail around us and makes no judgment. It merely observes beauty with curiosity; it enjoys the sense of life all around us, taking place within us, and being expressed through us.
I like to silence my thinking voice by walking my dog. I go from thinking about what I need to do and telling myself off for what I didn’t do, to feeling the joy of being in nature. Something as simple as crushing a dry, fallen leaf underfoot brings such a sense of satisfaction and joy. My mind observes the sensations, the feel of the breeze, my dog’s big doggy grin, or the sun and the colors in nature. I am completely in the moment and my senses are satisfied with all that there is in that moment: I am perfect and all is well.
It is only the ego that exists in the past and the future. It is all the ego thinks about. When it becomes silent, the only place we can be is in the moment, where we are intuitively listening with the right hemisphere of the brain and receiving all there is to know in the world. We become connected in unconditional love, the universe and me. Then some total idiot comes past too close on a skateboard and I want to kill him: ‘I was connected to the divine cosmic unconditional love right then you idiot!’ Then being human with an ego comes back like a bolt. The truth is the kid on the skateboard is likely to be more connected in meditation than I am. However, I’m sure if you’re the Dalai Lama, unconditional love is sustainable.
So be gentle with yourself. It is possible, with the ego under the control of your awareness, that you can be guided in the direction of your heart until, after a time, the ego comes back with the question: ‘What shall I have for dinner?’
Depending on your life experience, some sub-personalities can feel stronger than the real you. Feelings of low self-esteem, lack of confidence, and even self-hatred can make you feel that there is no point trying to get anywhere in your life. This then becomes a fear of moving forward, which takes two parts: First, fear that you will let yourself and others down and won’t be able to cope with what life brings; second, that everything goes well and that you are wrong about yourself. You don’t know who you are without the story of your failings. Then life gets really scary, as you have to really live and have much more to lose. This can lead to the body even acting out the fear of moving into the future by running itself down with depression and fatigue. Of course, the body ‘failing’ in this way then becomes more evidence not to move forward.
What if fear/ego was a car? Fear can see through the darkness to the road ahead by using the headlamps. It has control over the brakes and, as long as it is driving in the same direction without changing course, it can tootle along. Of course, the roads of life are never straight; there are twists and turns, hills that go up and down, even mountains. However, it is okay because your inner knowing/intuition/observer is in the driving seat. It can see all the dials on the dashboard. It knows if you need more food, water, or rest. It can see the road signs directing you to interesting destinations, places of retreat, and where to refuel. It knows to change down a gear when the going gets tough for an uphill climb. It knows when to stop at the top and look at the view and what you have accomplished.
However, if there is a disconnect between the fear/ego in charge of the brakes and the inner knowing/intuition/observer driving the car, fear can slam on the brakes and make the car stop still. Of course, if the car stays stopped then the car will start to decay. The brakes will jam, rust will start to form, and the car will fall into disrepair. Other transport that once traveled with you on the road of life will have no choice but to overtake and continue on without you. Of course the more attention you pay to the fear, the more time you’re not in the driving seat.
It’s ridiculously simple. The more attention we give to any aspect of ourselves that we view to be negative, the bigger we make that aspect. Sometimes therapy doesn’t help as the focus is on the problem and even looking for the solution focuses on the problem. The more fuel we give fear, the bigger it gets. Luckily, the more fuel we give our intuition and knowing, the bigger it also gets. The problem here is that this approach relies on no evidence. There is often plenty of evidence in our life to believe that we are worthless. But going beyond the feelings of worthlessness takes faith.
Often people find this faith in something outside of themselves, such as religion or God. We all have an aspect of God inside us. We all have an inner creator that comes from our imagination. You may not have experienced an all-powerful incredible you, but you can imagine what it would be like to be that. From that point of imagination, manifestation begins. We start to find the evidence in small ways. Life rarely gives us anything we can’t handle. So the movement toward positive thinking begins to turn around our life experience and the experience of ourselves. It is stunningly powerful. Of course, the ego will come up with some sabotage, such as saying, ‘I don’t have an imagination,’ or ‘I’ve tried everything and nothing works,’ or ‘the doctor says I have a syndrome,’ or ‘My childhood was so bad’ – any number of reasons. The truth is that any emotion, including anger, above despair is an improvement.
There are lots of different self-help answers out there, but the only answer I have found that makes the focus on a problem transformational is to laugh. Laughing is the only thing that seems to cut through all emotions. When I’ve sat with clients while they have been feeling any of these emotions, they can still laugh.
Laugh in the face of your own weirdness and sense of lack of self-worth. Take away the importance of your situation. Of course it is important, but seeing it as important doesn’t make it better. Loosening the grip of its importance also means that the importance loosens its grip on you. In that split second you might just get your foot on the gas long enough for the engine in your heart to roar into life again.
From time to time, we all get to a point in life where we feel blocked. This could be a creative block, such as writer’s block where we just can’t seem to make a start on the blank page. Often life offers us a blank page. We have to make a new career start, find a new relationship, or make friends in a new place. A block usually comes from blankness. The reason that a block is blank is because we are waiting for more information to fill the space. Our intuitive self can provide the information that the mind is banking on finding, thus turning a block into a holding point.
In fact, I would go as far as to say that there is no such thing as a block. Just a holding pattern while we are waiting for more information, like a plane waiting to land until it receives information from the control tower. Our intuition can be the control tower to let us know when to land or even when to take off. Mostly what creates the blank space is a sense of fear about the next step. This is a mini-version of being paralyzed with fear. It just blanks the creative mind out cold. The fear can take on many different guises and in a way it really doesn’t matter what the cause is, as the root cause will always be to stop you finding love.
The truth is you have all of the answers you need for your life inside of you. That might sound clichéd but sometimes the reason it is hard to see them is because the answer isn’t always easy. We don’t always get to be in a situation where one path feels better than the other; sometimes both paths feel difficult. The ego only wants to find the easy path; however, sometimes that path is the longest in terms of pain – rather than a quick pull of the Band Aid and it’s done. Your inner knowing will always go for the path that doesn’t lead to a repeat of the situation. It always goes for the root of deepest learning. It makes more sense to go that way, rather than being in avoidance of discomfort, when you really know that is what you need.
Often a holding point will come because you don’t want to look at the options for change. Change is scary. In fact, once you have mastered becoming comfortable with change, you have taken away one of the biggest causes of procrastination and repetition of problems. When you can trust your intuition then you can trust your decision-making progress. You may be surprised at how many people just can’t make a decision because the mind is giving them too many options. The inner knowing only gives one option; the one you should take.
When you first get started with trusting your inner knowing, you might like to test what you intuitively know. One way to do this is to pose the situation or question as a curious feeling in your body. Then take a book or magazine, flip to a page at random and run your finger down the page until you want to stop. Often there, under your finger or in a nearby paragraph, is the answer to your question. Even if the answer isn’t fully clear, you will find something that your intuition can use to search for deeper meaning.
We all carry an energy system as I described earlier; however, included in part of that energy system is what Eckhart Tolle eloquently calls the ‘pain-body,’ and is best described in his book A New Earth.
My understanding of the pain-body is that it is an energetic membrane, which comes from energy created by our ego, when we feel any variations of hurt. As all thoughts create a vibration, they all create energy, too. This dense, dark energy sits around you until you deal with it. Often during our lives we have the opportunity to sort it out and heal; it draws toward it similar situations that caused the pain in the first place. We then find negative patterns forming, and the way to clear them is to behave differently in every repeated situation until you find the one that works. A bit like the movie Groundhog Day in which Bill Murray wakes up every day to the same challenges, over and over again.
In this way you can identify when the same patterns are coming up in your life. You find yourself with the feeling that this has happened before, but the absolute worst thing you can do is put this down to being ‘your luck,’ sit back, and look for evidence that the world is being unfair to you personally. You might think it is some kind of karma or because you’re a nice person that other people abuse you repeatedly. But by choosing to buy into the idea that this is just ‘my lot’ in life, you deepen your pain-body and give a right to its existence in your life. It is difficult to be grateful for such a hard message, but it is only a message telling you about the need for change. The problem comes when we don’t know how to change. In my experience, the easiest way to change is to adopt Bill Murray’s approach and make a different decision every time – except, unlike his character, take a different action for the positive.
Also, I have found that the only way to dissolve an aspect of the pain-body, so it doesn’t need to keep repeating the message, is forgiveness and love. How you create those emotions is up to you: You might want to see a therapist, counselor, or psychiatrist; you may have your own ways of healing; you could just decide to choose differently the next time the same issue comes up.
It isn’t always possible to understand where the past event that created your pain-body originated, but I believe the pain-body can come with us from one lifetime to the next, along with any major, unresolved issues from that life.
One of my clients had a skin condition, which meant her skin would become swollen with small blisters appearing. Tuning in with my intuition, I found that in a previous lifetime her family had burned her to death for bringing shame on them. We discovered that the blisters came either when she felt she couldn’t trust someone or in a difficult emotional situation. Her skin condition didn’t flare up again once she had sent forgiveness to those who wronged her in the past life. I’m not saying that it is that easy with everything. We can’t always simply wave a magic wand of forgiveness for pain caused in childhood or past lives; it is a journey to transform our pain into learning. If it can become positive, we can forgive, as we can’t stay angry about something that has benefited us.
Unreasonable behavior is often the result of an active pain-body. If you discover that you have a strong pain-body, avoid alcohol. When we drink alcohol we remove aspects of our conscious mind, allowing the pain-body to emerge.
The pain-body differs in intensity for each person. The more forgiveness that you practice – along with empathy, intuition, and understanding – the less you will add to your pain-body, as it seeks to make itself stronger and bigger. No one else is responsible for adding to it. It is what you make a situation mean to you that will quantify whether you add to a pain-body in any given situation.