This is the very first post of our new Centre for Living Medicine offering called “That was Then This is Now” written and narrated by John Stoddart. This thread is in service of cultivating wellbeing by discovering what it means to live IN this world but not OF this world.
I used to think the big egos of this world made it a miserable place to live. At the same time I wondered if I might benefit from an upgrade. That’s not the world I live in any more but there are still faint echoes of that confusion. It’s all part of the landscape of my current big inquiry—what does it mean to live in this world but not of it?
Is it really true that one needs a strong healthy ego? This is not a concept one can grasp with the intellect. It’s a question for the heart.
The paradox. It seems there are two contradictory memes in our culture, the need for a strong ego on the one hand, and the parallel spiritual teaching that presents ego as, and I’m paraphrasing here, a bad thing!
What I’ve discovered is that there is no order of magnitude with the ego. Ego is just ego. It’s the thing, big or small, that gets in the way of love. Or spirit. Or god. Or big-s Self. It’s what keeps us in this illusion that we are separate from creation.
To return all non love with love—our most basic of responsibilities—cannot be accomplished through the ego. The ego must stand down. Or rather one must love one’s way to a frequency above and beyond that of the ego such that it loses its potency, its constancy, its dominance.
Life, then, is no longer ITS story. No longer ME. Identity shrinks. Psychology and culture fade into the background. Beauty, grace and kindness arise in the foreground and begin to envelop every aspect of our earthly lives. Miracles appear everywhere. We begin to step back from this world with all its programs and its fears. We’re still here—IN this world—but not so attached, not so much OF this world.
You become aware that there is a choice in every moment, love or non love. Love or ego. This is what is meant by the power of NOW, the power of being present. It is the awareness of the choice. You have to be able to feel it, then the mind and the body can come together in that moment of choice and know the feeling of NOT ego. And gradually we learn to embrace it.
This goes for the ME as well, returning our own non love of ourselves with love. How do we figure this one out? It’s simple but not easy. A helpful hint is that, just as there is no order of magnitude with the ego, there is also no order of magnitude with fear. And fear is the opposite of love. Even the tiniest niggling anxiety, an emotional trigger, a judgemental opinion—these are all the embodiment of fear. And therefore NOT love. So we make the choice to love ourselves in that moment of fear. We return that non love within ourselves with LOVE.
Again and again.
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