Tag: ego

What to do when someone is angry with you.

Q: What should I do when someone is angry at me or treats me unkindly?

A:  The best thing to do is to try and put yourself in their shoes. What are they feeling, what is their perspective?  What are their past experiences in life, and how is this affecting their point of view now?  How are they viewing you?

This practice pulls you out of the duality of victim/victimizer, and puts you into the experience of compassion.  There’s always a reason why someone acts in a certain way, and usually it has very little to do with you.  Usually the person who is experiencing anger is acting reactively from their ego.  Don’t take it personally.

To take it personally puts you at odds with the person, which the person can consciously or unconsciously perceive, and keeps the drama going.  To see the person compassionately usually takes the energy out of the anger, and often times will take the person back, out of their angry state, and make them realize that their anger has very little to do with you.

Of course, to practice this takes time and dedication with identifying more with the watcher than your ego.  Be patient, and practice this consistently.  Often times it will resolve and issue.  If it does not, it will free your energy up to make much better decisions.

Should you confront this person about their anger?  Should you discontinue associating with this person because of their anger?  When you are watching from the witness instead of reacting from your ego, the choice will become clearer and clearer with time.

“Beingness” and “doingness.”

Q: How can we relax more into “beingness” rather than “doingness”?

A: People see beingness and doingness as a duality, and that is the problem.  From the ego’s perspective, it’s either/or. However, doingness is contained within beingness.

To relax more into beingness, you just have to take a step back, get a wider perspective, and become both the witness and the doer of actions.  Both the witness and the doer are contained within beingness.  Beingness is all inclusive, not either/or or exclusive.  But to think of beingness from the point of view of the ego creates a duality.  In reality, there is no duality, and herein lies the error.

Practice this, contemplate this definition.  Have faith that this shift within your consciousness will happen.  You are responsible for the work you put into this, but not the outcome.  Realizing this in and of itself will take the wind out of the sails of the ego and put you more into the state of consciousness of beingness.

Learning this is kind of like any other skill in your life.  It seemed like it took forever for little me to learn to ride a bike, but now that little me knows how, he will probably never forget.  Realizing beingness is kind of like that.

Also, just as one person may learn something very easily, one may learn beingness easily, or it may be very difficult for another person.  It may take a long or short time.  All this is karmically determined.

But if one remembers that they are responsible for the effort put in, not the outcome, and practices humbly (remember, true humility is a sign of non-attachment, just as impatience is a characteristic of ego), it will take the stress out of learning, and the state of beingness will be reached much more quickly.

The nature of true evangelism.

Q: What is true evangelism?

A: True evangelism is being in the world exactly as God intended you to be.  This means “Being in the world, but not of it”; “Wearing the world like a light garment.”

What this means is to be in the world, but not be attached to your ego and its positionalities, to see yourself in others and others in you.  When you see yourself in others and others in you, your natural state of being, which is love, shines through, both to you and to others.

People don’t need to be preached to, they don’t like to be preached to, they respond better to the love that you are.  And people get this.  We often remember the kind words of a stranger, or a loved one, or a teacher.  These times stick with us.  And it’s contagious.  When someone loves you, you tend to be more loving towards others and the world, and vice versa.

To evangelize, we need to reside in our true self, which is love, to spread the word of God’s love through the world. In short, to evangelize, and share God’s love, be more loving to others, see yourself in them, and it will happen naturally.

Additional thoughts on how to get along with others while healing all involved at the same time.

If you could imagine for a moment that all beings are connected (which they are, just bring your awareness to this.) Now imagine that someone or something has offended you, has been mean or rude to you, or just has a different opinion than you that you really don’t like.

Imagine now that this person is a part of you, like your hand or foot.  Your hand or foot is hurting you, from and injury, infection, etc.  What would you do with your hand or foot?  Would you get angry at it, or try to hurt it in some way?  Obviously not, this would in turn hurt you.  

You would try and heal it.  You might bring it to a doctor to look at it or to get some kind of medicine for it.  Why do we treat people differently then, when they are part of us?

In the future, when you are upset with someone, see what it is that is hurting in them, so that you may help or at least be compassionate with them.  People in a negative state of mind are more appropriately labeled diseased.  They are living out of a negative energy field that is hurting them.  They do not deserve your anger or judgment.

Understanding them would help them be released from their negative state, while allowing you to disconnect more fully from you ego and open your heart.  In this way you are both healed when viewing someone as part of yourself.   This is one of the key steps towards enlightenment.

This approach toward people and their problems is contagious.  When you practice this patience and understanding with one person, that person will more likely practice it with another person, and so on.

Do this next time you have a conflict with someone, either outwardly or in your head.  You don’t even need to take any outward action toward this person.  Just follow the instructions as outlined above, and you will be healed.

Lifestyle tendencies of enlightened beings.

Q: Why do most people who reach enlightenment live in isolation?

A: Wouldn’t you live in isolation too if you didn’t live out of fear?  People are drawn together by the similarities in their consciousness; people hang out with like-minded people.

When someone is more identified with the watcher, though, they have less in common with most people, so there is less of a pull.  They may find themselves dwelling more in solitude, or not then.  70% of enlightened people live away from people.  So this does not mean that all enlightened people are isolated, or that just because you’re a hermit you are enlightened!  It’s just a tendency.

Q: How do they pay their bills though?
A: If you step back at it, aren’t bills like a karmic debt, in a way of speaking?  Your mortgage, your student loans, your car loan, your credit card debt, your taxes, etc., all stem from you wanting something, do they not?

Well, what happens if your karma is running out, and you don’t find yourself wanting anything?  You would probably have a lot fewer bills, right?  So in a way, most enlightened people have “downsized.”

How to eliminate stress.

Q: Why do we feel stressed?

A: We feel stressed when we know that we should be doing one thing, while partaking in another, usually out of fear.  So instead of living out of the truth that we are, we are making choices, and therefore living, out of fear.  This is felt as “stress.”

Usually we keep this fear hidden from ourselves and find justifications for our actions rather than looking at how we are reacting out of fear.  If you want to know what you fear, if you are not aware of what you are afraid of, try this exercise.  Imagine yourself living your life completely in a state of no fear.  Picture your day from beginning to end, living in no fear.  What would you do differently?  Why?  Write down what you would do differently if you had no fear, and then write down why you don’t live like this.

This exercise will help you get closer to how you are living in fear and stress.  Be patient, practice this every day, especially when you feel stress.

At first, your ego will run in circles out of fear.  It will justify its fearful actions rather than let you observe them.  This is normal.  Practice watching your ego’s rationalizations.

Eventually you will feel what it is like to live with no fear, so that you can identify how you are living in fear and watch your fear instead of living out of it.  This will bring you peace and eliminate stress.

Making effective decisions

Q: How does one make quick and effective decisions?

A: The best way is to look at a situation, look at what actions may be taken, and weigh the pros and cons of all of the outcomes and actions.  Then be still, request an answer to your question, and it will come.

At first, this process takes time, patience and practice, but it becomes quicker and quicker over time. One also has to realize that questions rarely have yes/no answers, there is also the “it’s unclear right now,” and “now is not the right time to make a decision on this,” and “you really don’t need to make a decision at all,” and so on.

Since the ego deals in dualities, it expects a clear-cut yes or no answer, which is rarely the case.  In most cases, the ego demands a yes or no answer.  This is it acting out of its child persona. That’s also the reason why it seems to get stuck pondering a question; it doesn’t have enough information to make a yes or no decision, which makes it spin in circles.  It is also not typical for an ego to be patient and still, that is a mark of the witness consciousness.

So as you can see, decision making is very hard for the ego. It’s best to observe the question and all of the parameters surrounding it, and then let a decision come. The right decision is usually the most obvious one (even if we don’t want to admit it).

Above all else, when asking a question, one must be patient and wait for an answer, hurrying and impatience is a mark of the ego, which cannot make good decisions.  Good decisions are made for the ego, come to the ego from consciousness.  The ego then tries to take ownership of the decision-making process, inflating itself, which then sets it up for more pain and disappointment in the future, when the next decision has to be made and it can’t make it again.

The value of prayer

Q: What is the value of prayer?

A: Prayer sets intention.  It sets up the m-field to help you recognize, choose, and manifest things that go along harmoniously with that intention.

By the way, if you ask for something in your prayers, what you’re really saying is that you don’t have something, and you’ll manifest more of a want for that thing rather than the getting.  For example, if you say “God, please give me money, I want more money,” you’ll experience the experience of wanting more money, but not necessarily getting it.

On the other hand, if you say “I intend to live my life in abundance,” what you’re really saying is that you want to share your abundance with the world, which then recognizes this condition, and reflects if back on you. Therefore, everyone is enlisted in helping you live your life in abundance, since you are asking and intending to already be a blessing to them.

As an added benefit, in this case, even if you don’t experience a great deal of financial abundance, you will experience the experience of abundance of love, which is, in and of itself, its own reward.

The most powerful prayers are prayers that you use to set up the intention of serving and loving God and others, rather than asking God and others to serve you.  When you ask to serve God and others, you align yourself with God, love, and witness conscious, not the ego.

When you’re asking God for things, you are aligning yourself with your egoic consciousness rather than your higher self.  Everything in egoic consciousness eventually leads to pain, in some way or another.

So ask to give, rather than to get, and you’ll be happy.  The trick is to really mean it, recognize, and let go of your wants of the ego, and live life persistently serving.  Then you’ll be happy.

How do I escape my negative thoughts?

Q: How can we escape the never-ending circuit of repetitive negative thoughts?

A: First off, remember that thoughts are just that, they are thoughts about reality.  They are not reality, they are just thoughts.  You could have the opposite thought about the same thing or situation, depending on other thoughts at that time.  So you must realize the “reality” you see is really just perception, it’s true to a greater or lesser extent, but it’s still not reality.

So after you realize that thoughts are just thoughts, you see that they have no power in and of themselves.  Your belief in them brings them their power.  That’s why trying to change your thinking may help make your thoughts more pleasant, but they are still reinforcing that this or that thought is true, and that you believe it.

The real answer is to watch your thoughts, to let them be there non-judgmentally.  Just let them come and go.  This opens the psychic doorway to witness consciousness.  It takes time, persistence, and faith.  Every time you see yourself believing a thought, any thought, bring yourself back to the consciousness that watches all, all thoughts, all happenings.

Negative thoughts then are just seen for what they are, negative thoughts, the opposite of positive thoughts, but not reality.  These negative loops then lose their power over your psyche, or mind, and they gradually wind down.  Remember, to try and fight them or change them acknowledges them, and their power over you, which reinforces them.

By the way, if you master this art of observing in the course of your lifetime, you are doing pretty well.

After writing all of this, maybe the first thought you should ask is, do I want these thoughts to stop?  What happens then?  What happens if all thoughts stop?  Since the ego is a thought form, and it is characterized by motion, reaction, and action, stopping is equivalent to death.  That is why when one practices witness consciousness, it can be very disturbing and anxiety producing.  Your ego feels its own death approaching.

Basically, it boils down to what you want to grow in the garden of your mind, if you want to grow fearful thoughts, believe your fearful thought, think other thoughts about your fearful thoughts, act on your fearful thoughts.  This will make them grow big, scary, and powerful, but only to you, the prisoner of your own mind.

Conversely, if you want witness conscious to grow, identify with it, watch it watch, watch it not react, see how it lives out of the flow of life, rather than the ego and fear.  The answer is to fully take part in this process.

What is the ‘Big Me’ or ‘Higher Self’, and how do I communicate with it?

Q: What is the difference between the small self and the Self with a big ‘S’?

A: If you take the small self, and take away all of its attachments, its opinions, its points of views, what you’re left with is pure witness consciousness, the highest expression of one’s self, the big Self.

Q: How do I communicate with this?

A: First, you have to acknowledge that there is a big Self, and a small self. Then, you have to admit that communication with the big Self is even possible.  Most people do not know about the big Self, and those who do think they have to enter into some trance state — some meditative state — in order to communicate with it.  Just the opposite is true.  The big Self is always there, it’s just that we’re too busy paying attention to, and are addicted to, our day-to-day drama.  Others think it’s heresy to think that we have a higher Self with which we can readily communicate.  Meanwhile, they put an altar at the feet of their egos — that’s the real heresy.

To communicate with the higher Self, we first must admit that we have a higher Self, then we must put faith in the act of communicating with it. Then, we may ask for permission to speak with it.  Then, we wait patiently with faith that communication will come.  In my case, when I am feeling peaceful, either during the day or at night, I will ask “Are you there, Big Me?”  Oftentimes, a voice will come back and say “Yes, I’m here, I’m always here”.  Then I start up a conversation.  And when Big Me speaks to me, I listen, just listen, the best that I can.