Life Beyond the Ego's Dream
06 Dec 2011

IT IS ONLY WHEN YOU WAKE UP from the ego's dream that you realize just how much of your life was in service to who and what you thought you were. I used to think I was an open-hearted spiritual person, but I now realize it was all just an act. Unless you are awake, everything on some level is in service to the illusion of self.

Of course, the people I have been kind to over the years have appreciated those acts of kindness — and to be fair they certainly were acts of kindness. But they were motivated by mind, not heart. They were motivated by a self, and so were not truly self-less. (There is nothing wrong with self-centered acts of kindness — they still make a positive difference to society. If we waited only for selfless acts of kindness, the world would be in a sorry state!)

I believed that I was a very spiritual because of the many strange things have happened around me my whole life, the many mystical and unusual states of consciousness that I have experienced (whether spontaneous, during meditation or after taking a shaman's potion), the myriad of spiritual and self-help books I have read since I was at school, and ego-supportive friends and partners that have colluded in mutual delusions of spiritual labelling.

Part of my act, of course, was also to be humble, so that I didn't actually preach emphasis my spirituality too much — which was obviously because I was so spiritual!

When I started to seriously recognize the dream, I was shocked to see how kind-and-spiritual "me" was a total fraud; that my ego had carefully integrated itself into everything I had done, and even retrospectively inserted itself into events and times when I was completely out of my mind such as sleep, meditation and psychotropic journeys.

Our egos basically sit on top of our primary awareness, like a colored filter over a projector lens, so that all that we are aware of becomes a validation of self — becomes colored with self. But one thing that the ego cannot stain is the awareness itself, only the objects of awareness. And so, the only place we can experience life outside the dream of self is in our basic awareness — the hum of consciousness.

Two problems arise: how to get to that place of awareness of awareness without getting caught up in the meaning of the objects of awareness. You don't systematically get to it — just as you don't systematically see those 3-d images that are hidden in stereograms. After staring for a while, you just suddenly get it, a process some people call grace. To get to it you just have to immerse yourself around teachings

More on this later… I don't have the time right now to finish this train of thought.