GUILT ABOUT EGO

Rev. O.M. Bastet, Ph.D.

Head Minister

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This article represents my own opinions, my stories, my perspectives. I don't claim they are absolute Truth. I do claim they have been useful for me, and I do hope they could be useful for you. That's why I offer them. In my opinion you don't need to be fixed or rescued, but you might be ready for some new perspectives, so here are some possible new perspectives/stories to consider.

Definition of Ego for the purposes of this paper:

Identifying as your thoughts, especially repetitive and judgmental thoughts. This means being totally immersed in your thoughts and not being aware of anything except your thoughts. It means believing that what you think is reality and truth. It means you have no sense of "self" outside of your mental activity, your thoughts. It means you have limited ability to talk ABOUT your thoughts, or think about your thoughts, or mentally stand outside of your thoughts looking AT them. You are constantly inside the house looking out, rarely in the yard or street looking at the house. And never above the house looking at it from above, seeing the Bigger Picture.

When you are identified as your Ego, you would say "I hate you!" When you are less identified as Ego, you might say "I am angry with you" or "I feel hate toward you" or, as your identity moves further away from Ego, you might say "There is anger and hate within me toward you."

The ideas in this paper are based on and aimed at folks studying and practicing from Eckhart Tolle's books The Power of Now and A New Earth (and other similar spiritual teachings.)

Do you recognize any of the following thoughts?

I can't stop my thoughts. There must be something wrong with me. I must be defective. I gotta try harder.

Very often I get sucked into reacting in everyday life, especially by troublesome situations. There must be something wrong with me because I can't stay Present all the time in every situation, no matter how hard I try.

If ego is wrong or a hindrance to my spiritual growth, why do I have it? Why did I develop it? I must be wrong or bad.

I go in and out of full consciousness, and when I come back into full consciousness, I feel bad and guilty about having gone unconscious again

If my ego is something I need to get rid of, make fade away, then why do I have it in the first place? There must be something wrong or defective or bad about me. I must have made a mistake somehow in my life.

Let's take a close look at these thoughts and the feelings they create, and maybe find some new more helpful perspectives.

The first thing to consider is that Full Awareness, or Presence, is not the only thing in consciousness that can be aware OF, or comment on, the Ego. Presence is not the only possible Witness of normal Ego activity.

In fact, when we first discover Tolle's ideas our first lifting above being totally immersed in our normal mental activity is usually NOT directly into what he calls Presence. It is usually into another ability of our Ego, to observe and comment on Ego activities. This is a Witness portion of the Ego itself. Unfortunately, this Witness is still Ego, and it is still sunk into judgments, blame, guilt, and believing itself completely!

The challenge then becomes to spot this Witness, and move yet beyond it. To stand in a different place and observe its activities, but not identify as it, not say This is all of who I am, these thoughts and feelings represent all of truth and reality.

If you experience yourself as being in compassion for what you are observing, you are in true Presence as your identity. If you are in guilt or blame for your own mental activities, you are in the Ego-Witness identity.

Ultimately, the truth is that identity with Presence is your natural always-true and already-true state. You are not practicing a new skill or new achievement. You are relaxing out of the constant effort of restricting your identity to lesser realms or arenas of conscious activity. You are opening, letting go, not getting to a new place via effort. So when you remind yourself to practice, this is Ego under the illusion it is controlling the process. And there's nothing wrong with that, it's part of the process. But ultimately, it fades away, and you have the sense that Presence itself is in charge of the process, and in charge of your mental activity.

It also helps to have a helpful, not harmful, story about how we got Egos in the first place. Are we broken, defective, powerless, in error, or bad-evil? Is that why we have Egos? Did we do something wrong? That pervasive guilt is what Christianity points to, I think, when it talks about "original sin." The idea that there is something bad or wrong in the very nature of our Being, that causes this bad thing to develop in us, inevitably. If we were good, we would never have something about us as harmful, unpleasant, and useless as an Ego, would we?

So shouldn't we feel guilty about developing and having an Ego? Doesn't that guilt even serve a useful function of motivating us to get rid of our Ego? I say No to both questions.

The most help I can offer on this point is something a spiritual teacher said to me once: The purpose of going unconscious is to generate the experience of the inexpressible ecstasy of becoming conscious again. There is no other way for Spirit to have this experience, as it is always conscious. To know something fully, and appreciate it fully, one has to experience some contrast, something that's NOT that something. So God or Spirit (or whatever you want to call the Ultimate,) as a project, generates a portion of itself that is, for a time, in forgetfulness of the Whole, the One, Presence, the All, Full Awareness. That portion functions in ignorance, in illusion, in pretense, under the veils of forgetfulness. Like an actor forgetting he's not the character.

In other words, Ego is not the opposite of Presence, it is an activity of Presence itself! Or, to put this in other words, the Ego is not a mistake God made in creating you or that you made about yourself. The Ego is not outside of the circle of God's compassion. The Ego is not exempt from the Love that God Is.

So rather than condemn what you are moving out of, it's best, I find, to focus on the relief, the freedom, the liberation, the ecstasy, the joy, the appreciation, the gloriousness, of what you are moving (back) into. That fulfills the purpose of the project and allows it to complete and be done with. Bringing along blame and guilt for the time of pretense just indicates the project isn't completely over yet, and that too is part of the project, not a defect in us.

It's also part of the project and not a defect in us, that while we are waking up, we have a judgment about the project. "Seems like a nutty idea to me. Why would God do that? Create all that pain and suffering? Create the Ego? I can't imagine why. Makes no sense. If I were God, I would not have done that. God is nuts." All I can say right now is, I find it best to accept what is, to bring the compassion and full awareness of Presence to these judgments themselves, and let them be, without believing them but also without rejecting them. They are!

Another thing I find helpful with respect to Ego judging Ego is simply to bring Presence to that judgment. Ah, the judgment exists. I accept it. It is. It is not all of Me, and is not the Truth, but it's here, in me, I see it now.

Instead of condemning ourselves or our Egos that we can't stop thinking, we can stand somewhere else than smack dab within the thoughts and the condemnation. I believe it's not what is going on in your mind that's the issue. The point is where are you, your experienced self of "I," your identity, the observer of what you are observing, standing with respect to what is going on? Are you outside looking at it, or are you in it, looking out?

You can have an Ego going a mile a minute, but if you are simply observing it, you are in Presence, you are not trapped in Ego. The alternative we face is not either thoughts or Presence. That's not the choice Tolle presents. Presence always is our natural state, always available to us the moment we choose to stand outside of our mental activity and observe it fully, with compassion.

Presence is not "instead of" anything; it includes everything. That is profound.

So rather than having only Ego or only Presence, one develops a kind of two-track awareness, and stands in the track of Presence. Mental activity never goes away, as long as we are alive. What goes away is our identification as it.

"Don't believe everything you think." Including your guilt about having an Ego, a persistent Ego!

Hope this is helpful to you, dear Reader. Let me know.

Photo is of Breithorn Peak, Switzerland. The mountain is the ego, the mature liberated ego, in harmony with the rest of everything

I am not seeking agreement; I disagree only to offer us all food for thought, alternatives to consider, to expand our awareness of possibilities.

The practices Tolle recommends and the way he words his teachings, lends itself to some conclusions I disagree with. For example, many people conclude he is saying that Presence is "more present" in silence, in the gap between thoughts, than it is in words or thoughts. In my opinion, his teaching does not carefully distinguish that it is only our Awareness of Presence that is "more present" in silence or gaps; Presence itself is equally present in thoughts and silence, in words and gaps. Presence being aware of itself in us can begin as awareness of the gap between thoughts, but Presence itself is no less the thoughts than the gaps.

Any serious attempt to "discuss" Presence soon degenerates into paradox, because presence is vaster and more complex than mind or language can handle. So please regard what I wrote as partly poetry, and read as much with your "right brain" as with your left.

The Nature of Presence is more than our experience of the Nature of Presence. I am pointing to the Nature of Presence itself, which is of course beyond description, beyond experience, beyond the pointing, and cannot be contained by them.

Also please realize I am stating my own truths, my own story about "the way it is." I am open to yours being different, even though I appear to believe I am stating "facts." I am not really believing I am stating facts. I am hoping to stimulate you to know more about your own truths as you respond to mine.

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Presence is not a thought, not a feeling, not an attitude, not a mood. It is not a viewpoint, not a perspective, not an experience, not an emotion, not a belief. It is not a concept, not an idea, not an understanding, not an insight. It is not a knowledge or an intelligence or a fact. It is not a sense, not a sensory impression, not a perception. It is not a space without content. It is not silence without noise, nor is it noise without silence.

Presence is not instead of judgment, not instead of anger, not instead of frustration, not instead of sadness, boredom, grief, depression, hopelessness, concern, or worry.

Presence is not instead of a thought, instead of a feeling, instead of an attitude or mood. It is not instead of a viewpoint, a perspective, an experience, an emotion, a belief. It is not instead of remembering or imagining. It is not instead of labelling or interpreting. It is not instead of conditioning. It is not instead of the Painbody. It is not instead of opposites. (It includes all opposites.)

All those are activities of Presence.

Presence itself is not instead of words, not under or between words. All those are activities of Presence.

Presence is words and beyond words, is language and beyond language, behind and above and around and under and within all that can be named or experienced. Presence exists as the substance of and all activities of, all that can be named or experienced. Presence is Beingness itself, the very nature of our awareness, as well as each and every bit of the content of it.

Presence is around and within and under and above and beside, and exists as the substance of and all activity of, all anger, all sadness, all frustration, all unawareness, all unconsciousness, all moods, all thoughts, all experiences, all perspectives.

Presence can go out of our awareness, yet is never anything but our awareness and our unawareness. Presence is who you are, whether you are aware of it or not. Presence does not come into existence only when we "take a step back" from our thoughts. Our Awareness of Presence does not bring Presence into existence, nor does our unawareness of it make it go out of existence.

Presence is the substance and form and activity of everything that is. Presence is that from which everything that is arises, and it is everything that is not, is not yet, or could be.

Presence is not different from matter. Presence is not different from energy. Presence is not different from Life, from awareness, from what exists, and yet Presence contains all of these. Presence is not in time, but time is nothing but an activity of Presence. Experience and matter are nothing but the substance and form and activity of Presence.

Ego is nothing but one activity of Presence.

Presence is, already. Presence is, always. Only Presence is.

"We seek what already is, here and now." Presence is inescapable. There is nowhere else you can go but Presence, nowhere else you can be except Presence, nothing else you can experience but Presence.

Presence is and expresses itself as and contains your awareness of Presence. Presence is and expresses itself as and contains your unawareness of Presence. Presence is and expresses itself as and contains your forgetfulness of Presence. Presence is not other than your forgetfulness of Presence. Presence is always always present.

Presence itself is not more present in your silence than in your thoughts. It is not more present in your sensory awareness of the world than in your lost-in-thought introspections, your daydreams, your deep sleep. Therefore, Awareness of Presence is not more possible when you are aware of the sounds around you than when you are aware of thinking about your motives for saying x to person y. Might be easier, but not more possible.

Bringing "the light of awareness" to anything at all, a sound or a thought or a feeling, brings Awareness of Presence, but does not bring Presence itself, which is the thought or sound, and the attention, and the process of transfer of attention, and the results of that transfer.

Our only choice is, are we aware of the always-presence of Presence, or not? Is Presence, through and as us, aware of itself or not? Those are the same question. Thus, the choice is not ours as separate from Presence. It's Presence's choice, in us and through us and as us.

There are no "blocks" to Presence, but sometimes Presence creates blocks to its awareness of itself in us.

Since there is never anything except Presence, all we as Presence need to do is relax out of our effort to be unaware ourselves as Presence. There is nothing to achieve, and nowhere else to be but here now, whether Presence as us is choosing forgetfulness of itself or not.

Seeking and searching and striving for Presence are simply activities of Presence. Thus, they are not a "waste of time" and not a reason for self-blame, though those feelings are also activities of Presence.

One might well turn one's attention then, to what Quality of Life for self and others, one prefers.

That is the real issue, question, challenge.

The way I see it, doing the "practices" Tolle teaches will greatly enhance a person's Quality of Life, but they do not affect the nature of Presence. The "practice of Presence" lends itself to the misunderstanding that somehow we are sometimes separate from Presence, that we are not always an activity of Presence. Whatever state of awareness or unawareness you are in, that's Presence.

So that's not the question.

But the questions might be: How aware do you want to be? Do you just want to be Presence, or would you like to be aware of being Presence? How "awake" would you like to be? How many repetitive useless thoughts do you want? How much do you want to be run by conditioning? How big a picture do you want of your life and your place in the scheme of things? How much inner freedom do you desire? How much inner noise are you willing to have?

Dealing with these questions can increase Quality of Life, but none of the practices bring Presence where it was not before. Presence can be pretending to not be Present to itself, but truly there is no either-or to Presence, no alternative to it.

What changes as Presence becomes aware of itself within us is that we are tuning in to what is, rather than something becoming different. Perception shifts, but "what is" does not. Awareness of Presence simply exchanges the activity of Presence in us as "forgetting" to the activity of Presence in us as "remembering." Both are fully activities of Presence itself.

"How do you experience Presence in your life?" As everything I am, do, experience, feel, think - and everything I don't.

"How are you experiencing Presence in this moment?" As all of this moment.