I, Ya, Yay

Let's talk about Ego.  Thanks to the teachings of contemporaries like Eckhart Tolle, one of Oprah's wunderkinds, we are becoming more aware of that pesky part of us.  The Beatles sang about it: "I, Me, Me, Mine." Ancient mystics have long known that the part of us that's eternal can't afford to completely identify with the physical experience of the soul because that experience is so temporary and fraught with fuck ups.

Yet, there are many, many people who get stuck in that physical ego identified existence and it can lead to some dismal human choices.  Those who are identified with eternity weigh their choices based on the long term good for all, as well as the short term good for me.  We keep having to live it till we get it right and the currency of the universe is Love.  Love is much bigger than Hallmark, romantic conventions or money.  Love is courage.  In French, "coeur" is heart.  That's why I say that dreams give us the courage to live from our hearts.  They connect us to our eternal soul.

Anytime we choose to love in the face of hate, to contribute as well as receive, we extend our consciousness both forward and back in time, into lifetimes we've lived and lives we'll be living.  What clogs everything up is hate.  Hate and fear, fear and hate. We're here to do something in the name of Love.  We each will die; we each will live on, perhaps to incarnate physically again.  Perhaps we choose. As I appear to be here now, I have to ask myself; what am I here to learn?  What am I here to do?  How can I more precisely align with my authentic self while I'm here?

The good news is that for over a century, Spirit has been sweeping humanity and waking us from the lethargy of false paradigms like patriarchy.  I know that dreams and the dream channels are a huge part of this revolution; that's what I love to share with you on Lita Dreaming.  We are being invited to tune in to the bigger picture.  Yes, we'll each die but we aren't extinguished.  We go on, and on, and on, and on.  So an obvious question to me is what shall I do Now?

It appears to me that I chose, as the Chinese curse goes, an interesting time to incarnate again.  The most colossal ego America has ever seen is running on the presumption that everybody loves a bully and he, in particular, can do no wrong.  He could shoot someone on a posh NYC street and still get elected.  Wow!  So who votes for Mr. All-Ego?  Mini-egos?

As Tolle loves to point out, the ego is insane.  Jung taught that if the ego becomes rigid and the person completely identifies with it, they are in the grip of whatever the unconscious sends their way.  Without the awareness of something bigger than ego/I and without the ability to dialogue with our own larger Self, a person loses the opportunity for spiritual growth that incarnation offers.  They can also make physical life extremely unpleasant for others because they see themselves as an isolated I instead of a spirit Being, whole, eternal, connected to All That Is.  The I sees no need to share, connect, understand or love because it can dominate with all the opposite forces; yet, as Wicca puts it, what goes around comes around.  Jesus stated this universal law as, do unto others as you would have them do to you.

So, what values will fuel our vote?  Are we citizens with civic responsibility or consumers looking for the best deal for ourselves, too bad about anything else?  Are we aware of our own spiritual responsibility to use this life for service as well as for gain?  Do we know that we are free from all but our own inner dictums and that dreams are our way to Skype Home?  Can we get outside of our little thinking ego personalities with its likes and opinions and connect to our hearts?  What is the best possible scenario for our future, our children's future and the future of all the world's peoples?  What will we be able to tell our loved ones on the other side about our lives, why we lived them as we did and how we feel about it all once we cross over?

I cringe every time I hear some minimally informed person proclaim they will vote for this man because he's so good in business, he knows how to "deal."  Wow, that's not even true.  Over and over, reliable sources have reported his bankruptcies, his broken promises and betrayals of honor and trust,  Trump university, beefsteaks, casinos, on and on.  He claims he'll bring jobs back and has outsourced his clothing line to the Mexican people he reviles. But, at this moment in time, he's not the real focus of my concern. It's us, the citizens of this great nation.  What is it we dream? Is it a dream worthy of eternity?  I hope so.

What's My Story?

In a recent interview I say that we're in the midst of a spiritual revolution and that dreaming is at the center of it.  One aspect of the Consciousness/Awareness movement that we're experiencing right Now is the individual practice of "Mindfulness." Mindfulness encourages us to be the watcher as well as the do-er; the Self as well as the Ego, Jung might say.  More and more people are learning to "watch yourself."  Dreams are Magic Mirrors that let you see your "little self" your ego, as your Self, your Observer does.   In his latest book, "The Boy Who Died and Came Back," Part IV: At Home in the Multiverse, "The Double on the Balcony," Robert Moss writes some very fun stuff about this topic.

I've written here about one of my all time favorite dream sequences, In the first, I hear a voice that says, "Can the Ego be dissolved?  What is the role of the Observer?"  Dreams are often koans, mental jigsaw puzzles or parables.

Two months after this dream, I got my answer by way of a lucid dream, perhaps an OBE because of the hyperconsciousness of the experience. I was in what Robert Waggoner calls the Clear Light, though I hadn't read his books, yet.  I always chuckle that I had this transcendent experience as an unexpected dream gift. I came awake from the dream saying, "I'll never be able to explain this, not even to myself."  In my dream my sense of "I" was in that Light, as I came to, the sense of Oneness I experienced began to fade, my separateness became stronger.  As my ego took charge of waking life, I could re-enter my dream and feel the sense of awe over and over again.  Today, these many years later, that dream is my portal to the Light; the feeling is still strong.

What I learned from the dreams and where they took me in my studies is that the Ego needs an Observer to keep it in check and to help it really blossom.  In my two previous posts reviewing Robert's new book, I talk about the power of story.

As human beings, maybe even in some animal clans, we love stories.  "Tell me a story"is frequently the request we hear from young children.  I love to hear stories or to read them, but what this dream koan and the many wonderful teachers of Mindfulness, like Eckhart Tolle, have taught me is that my thoughts are frequently telling me stories that aren't really that groovy.  I might quite unconsciously be telling myself the story of a puny checkbook and a robust bill basket while I'm brushing my teeth.  What I've learned to do is say; "Aha, listen to that story!  Where does that get me?  Is this the story I want to entertain.  Duh; no."

By listening to what I'm really telling myself all the time, I can choose the best story for me.  Okay, "all the time" is perhaps not realistic; the drunken monkey, as Buddhists call the ego/mind, is a tricky and slippery little devil.  Luckily, Monkey isn't hard to please once you get to know it through Observation.  Dreams hold up a mirror that helps us see Monkey working.  Dreams knock on our inner doors and ask us to open to our own Wisdom and connect to the Light.

In a recent extended-family drama, the kind of thing that has the phones ringing and different relatives chiming in, I found myself feeling fearful, protective of the Me and Mine.  I asked for a dream of guidance; "What can I do?"  I dreamed that two of my nieces, (one was purely a dream niece), wouldn't allow me to use their make-up; yet, all I needed was a simple eyebrow pencil. I felt they were shallow, heartless and careless of my feelings.  I woke up feeling the sting of rejection.  Reality check: real niece, but not the relative involved and unlikely to deny me an eyebrow pencil, dream niece not someone in waking.  As I lay there feeling the strong emotion this dream evoked and trying to fit it with my question to the dream source, I saw what my dream was saying.  "What can I do?"  I can focus on my heart; I can marshall my kindness, (when I first typed the question, I found I'd written, What kind I do?:-).

As often happens, these nieces were Shadows my Ego was casting with its fearfulness; their behavior mirrored an unconscious story that could dictate my conscious behavior. I relaxed and focused my awareness on my heart chakra and bathed it in emerald green light. I expanded my heart center with every breath.  My dream gave me the perfect answer.  As I wandered through the emotional land mine (I wrote "land mind") of the crisis, I was predisposed to close down in fear.  I focused on my heart and trusted that step by step, in the moment, things would work out.  And they did.  The outcome opened a door that had been shut in anger and created new possibilities for personal growth on everyone's part.

This is one reason I think dreaming is at the forefront of the Spiritual Revolution.  If Self-Awareness, Mindfulness is at the heart of Enlightenment, really of Being, then dreaming is a vital practice.  In dreams we get to talk to and listen to the Observer, who has a much bigger picture to offer than the blinkered Ego.  What's my Story?  I'm writing it as I live it.  I write as consciously as I can and look to my dream stories for the best suggestions, the best plot ideas for my waking ego to use.  I stay connected to my dreams so that my Big Story, the reason I joined this human experience again, will inform all the little stories, the personal dramas that can take too much time and sap too much energy, unnecessarily.

Each of us has a Story.  Together, we  are the Book of Life - All of Nature included.  No one can tell us what our story, what our purpose is, but we can lose the thread and go off narrative if we're not connected to the Watcher, our own Soul Mate in the Multiverse.  Dreams are an organic, innate avenue to Spirit.  All we have to do is pay attention, listen and learn; then we'll each find our own story and how best to live it.

May it Be So!

Projections

We live in a wonderful age!  I know things seem to be going to hell in a hand -basket, but the amount of revolutionary thinking exploding onto the human screen is exhilarating.   Do we save the planet?  Do we destroy this incomparable biosphere?  I don’t know.  Oh, goddess, I hope not.  But all I can do is evolve.  

For so very long my favorite word has been paradigm.  I heard on some intellectual circuits that paradigm is dead and we should use meme instead.  Sorry, I like paradigm.  The word evokes an image of the boundaries I’ve drawn around my reality.  I believe this and this must not be challenged.  Good luck with that.  Paradigms are meant to be re-drawn ; that’s evolution.

Listening to some of our great contemporary spiritual  teachers , I have to count myself lucky.   We are exhorted daily by the media to worry about the economy and about our survival, but these teachers are reminding us that there is much more to our experience on this planet, or in this dimension of reality, than how much money we can make.  What can you take with you, especially if you know for sure that this “life” experience is but a chapter in our book?

What I can take with me is the evolution of my consciousness.  What does it mean to be conscious?  If you haven’t read Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now” and “A New Earth”,  I very highly recommend these as a solid answer to this question.   But just about every mystical or martial teaching around the world is based on this principle; honing awareness on the present moment, something that is aided by focus on the breath, is crucial.  The mind, the drunken monkey as the Buddhists call it, is a detriment to our well-being, our sense of balance.   The Ego, says Tolle, is insane, driven insane by the constant messaging of negative, anxious or fearful thoughts  in the mind.  Being  is more important than Ego, as I like to put it, there’s more to me than meets the I. 

Jung, that wonderful old witch doctor, as he called himself, developed a powerful, if a bit esoteric, paradigm for the psyche of a person.  Central to his thinking is that each person must develop an open dialogue between the Ego, the center of consciousness, and the Self, the center of the unconscious.   He held a firm conviction that  our psychic affairs are far more important than our wordly ones, in fact, that when we remain unaware of the transpersonal nature of the unconscious, and so ignore it, we project all our blind beliefs into the world and create the mess we find ourselves in.  So, as he put it, “The world hangs by a thread, and that thread is the psyche of man.” (If he were writing today, I'm sure he'd use more inclusive language.)

What  excites me so very much is that by connecting us with the multi-dimensional experiences of the unconscious, dreaming teaches us to be more conscious  in our waking life.  A dream practice is a very royal road to expanded consciousness.

Projection is an unconscious need we fulfill.  I feel unlovely or, a man might feel unmanly, so I fall in “love” with someone other than my husband/wife,  (without deep love and respect, familiarity often breeds contempt)  and have a torrid affair.  Long story short, it all blows up into a frightful relational mess, until I examine my own story, my waking life, and ask, “What part of fulfilling this story did I play?” If we pay attention, our dreams will tell us in no uncertain terms, but in a way that inspires us to move forward, not wallow in shame or guilt.  Collective projections are probably the scariest: mobs, fans, religious fanaticisms of all sorts.  These lead to blood shed that leaves us reeling, but as that old joke says, “In an avalanche, no one snowflake feels responsible.”

Withdrawing projection, individual and collective,  is a huge psychological accomplishment. Taking responsibility for my own life story, how it plays out and accepting its outcome as A-okay, that’s the summit of individuation.  It’s enlightenment.   It’s a step-by-step, day-by-day process; there’s no arriving at enlightenment, there’s only the immediate living of it.  Being, not Ego. must drive the bus.  Or, since the Ego, to feel strong must feel in control, I entertain the metaphor that the Ego is the chauffer of my limo, but the Self, sipping champagne in the back seat, is the one who says where we’re going.

Withdrawing projections isn’t all that complicated.  I like to remind myself of Gandalf’s final words to Bilbo in “The Hobbit”, when puffed up with the success of his adventures, Bilbo gives his opinions on the prophecies.  Gandalf says to him:

  

“Surely you don't disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself? You don't really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit? You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you, but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all.”

To me this means, I’m part of this human story, but I’m not the whole story.  You who are other than me, have your own part to play in this story.  If our paths cross and we partner for our mutual good, let it always be in mutual respect and affection. If we don't see "I to I", then let us give each other the space to evolve as our personal timing dictates.

When people get very angry at each other, especially people who’ve previously “loved” one another, maybe married, they project like gangbusters all their hurt and disappointment on to each other. ET (Eckhart Tolle) explains this as each person projecting their own pain body on to another or others, because this also happens on a collective level in mob insanity, violence and war.  Tolle believes that we are at a watershed moment; however, that humanity is taking great leaps in the expansion of consciousness, self-awareness and withdrawal of projection.  He believes it’s happening because, as Jung predicted, if we don’t evolve into a non-egoic paradigm, we’ll bring the whole house of cards of material form down with us.  So, owning one’s own shadow is a major accomplishment on the road to individuation, and withdrawing the negative projections we have is one task in integrating the shadow and creating a better world. 

To echo ET again, some things are very hard to grasp in words and with our left brains, but we project on to others because it fulfills an unconscious need, one we have never acknowledged to ourselves.  The only way we can catch projection is when we shine the light of consciousness, the Observer, not the Ego, on to our behaviors and life situations. Of course, dreams open the doors to the rooms we must air; they present us with the images and clues we need to trace our way home.

I find this topic fascinating and tracing my own shadow through my thoughts, words, deeds and dreams extremely rewarding.  It’s not “patrolling” for negative behavior.  The shadow is not necessarily bad or dark, certainly not evil.  It’s the repressed, rejected or too painful to deal with bits of our personal history along with all our karmic stuff. Befriending a shadow aspect can bring great rewards.

The Ego projects. The Self observes, recognizes and balances the Ego.  The Ego needs a story, the drama, and often feels life-threatened.  The Self knows its own divinity, its own immortality, something the Ego must fathom in order to be strong. Dreams give us the resources, the counsel and guidance we need to achieve this breakthrough; and once enough of us do, we can dream a new dream collectively with the power to save our planet for future generations of divine little fellows, like each of us is.

If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself.

If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world,

then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself.

Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of

                         your own self-transformation."    ~ Lao Tzu

More to Me Than Meets the I

Should I not be I, but us? 

Talking in an interview about his awakening to the power of the present, Eckhart Tolle explains that what stopped him as a young man from succumbing to his suicidal thoughts one agonizing night was recognizing as he was thinking, “I can’t stand to live with myself anymore,” that there must be two of him. “Who is I who can’t stand to live with Self?” he asked. This epiphany was the catalyst that initiated his journey to become one of the world’s foremost spiritual teachers, to my delight, one who intentionally disaffiliates from formal religions. 

My interest in Tolle’s teachings began in early May when I borrowed the audio book, A New Earth.  At the end of April, before I encountered his teachings, I posted about my little big dream that posed the question, “Can the ego be dissolved, what is the role of the observer?” and shared with you my own power of Now mini epiphany.  http://litadreaming.blogspot.com/2012/04/observer-or-observed.html 

The serendipity of finding his teachings on ego/observer right after writing about the same subject confirms for me the importance of this material, as they say, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. I’m sharing the story with you because it also makes the organic process of dream spirituality pretty obvious.  A dream from 11 years ago (Hey, Trish, I found my eleven!) seeds this profound spiritual koan in my heart and gradually, with the help of one sign post after another, leads me to this great, new to me, teacher who can deepen my understanding of the question.

Dreams are organic spirituality; all it takes is listening, paying attention and braving up to the difficulties they may present, as well as, recognizing the gifts they bring.  Writing them down ensures that you’ll have them eleven years later or when you can really appreciate them.  Dreams are way ahead of us.

I began by asking a question about our use of the personal pronoun, should it be singular or plural? Well “we” is the royal personal pronoun, isn’t it? 

There are many theories of personality proposing that we’re actually multi-selves, whether we talk about  complexes, sub-personalities or lost soul parts.  It can be a little hard wrapping the logical mind around this; I think of it as psychic string theory.  In many psychological models, the ego is seen as the captain of the ship, the center of personality that must be in charge to keep us from going crazy.  The stronger the ego, the better able one is to cope with life’s vicissitudes and become successful.

Tolle shakes things up when he proposes that the ego is crazy and letting the ego control our lives is insane, both on a personal and collective level.  The ego is shortsighted and easily deluded; egoic consciousness focuses on the world of form, gets lost in the past or the future and is thrall to distorting subjective thoughts and projections.  When we switch our awareness, become the Observer, we live in the reality of the present moment and can tune in to a larger consciousness than our puny human egoic thinking can fathom. The observer is the part of us that can see the ego’s self-created dilemmas and detach, releasing the obsession by seeing it for what it is, what William Blake termed, mind forged manacles.

The challenge that Tolle lays out isn’t new and sounds pretty Buddhist to me, but his synthesis of many spiritual teachings into a clear, contemporary understanding is very helpful.

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So, can the ego be dissolved?  What is the role of the observer?

Shall we sleep on it?

Here’s the link to ET TV where he tells his story.

http://www.eckharttolletv.com/adwords1?_s_ref=75E59Cx3S&kw=[eckhart%20tolle]&creative=8377150426&gclid=COqP2Kevt7ACFQlN4Aodm2V76g