Tag Archives: waking up

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Waking up

In order to get out of ego identification, we have to wake up first. The kind of waking up that happens is very unique to this circumstance.

To initially wake up to my ego identification required a jolt of some kind, at some point. What it reminds me of is the feeling you can have when you take a nap and end up falling so deeply asleep that it is a serious struggle to get yourself to wake up again. You are aware of the fact that you are sleeping, and at the same time have to pull yourself out of sleep. If that has ever happened to you, you know what I am talking about. That’s almost the way it felt when I first really woke up. I had a jolt, which caused me to see my ego, and my full blown identification with it, all at once. Then I realized that I really wanted to wake up from this, but that ended up being incredibly hard at first. It took some baby steps. It reminds me now of learning a martial art, at first you learn very basic moves to teach balance, movement and flow. You repeat this to no end. And it seems as though you are not making progress or learning anything. Then you graduate to more complicated moves until you become a master at it. At this point you realize that the most basic moves are still there in everything you do, they actually make your mastery possible.

When I woke up to my ego identification, I had to start with the basic moves. I had to trust my awareness of the ego in me. I had to quite literally tell my ego thinking ‘I see you,’ and that I was no longer interested in it. Sometimes I did this out loud. Then I had to choose to stay away from all the sticky ego thinking, but without choosing anything else. This created space for something new. This whole process felt very tedious to begin with, it felt as though ego was everywhere and there was no way to get away from it, and it didn’t feel as though I was making much progress. Then something in the balance of what was on my mind shifted. It was the tipping point. The ego sourced identification began to recede, it had less power and when it showed up, I found it truly uninteresting. I didn’t have to do anything with it. From that point forward, everything changed.

Once on that track, the awakening simply continues. The awareness of having an ego rather than being one sinks in, it becomes the new experience of myself. This does not mean that I don’t occasionally fall asleep or take a nap and fall into some ego identification – to say that does not happen is a big fat lie. The most important thing here is that I notice it usually very quickly, and when I do, I automatically use my basic waking up moves I learned way back, to come to. Much like the martial artist, the foundational moves have become part of me and I can use them in my sleep.

I guess what I wanted to share is that the awakening does have an initial jolt to get us to wake up, but after that it’s a lot of practice at first, which eventually leads to a different state of awareness that enables us to stay awake more, and wake up more quickly if we happen to nap out. In all of this, the biggest change for me has been in the quality of my life and relationships, and realizing that being is always here, no matter what I do or believe. I feel as though my life is not about anything in particular anymore, and it doesn’t have to be, it is enough to just be here and do whatever occurs to me out of that feeling. No fear, no expectation, just choice and its expression.

The next time you see yourself operating from your ego, and you don’t like how it feels, consider that this means you are waking up at least a bit at that moment, and then see if you can drag yourself out of your slumber and to the surface. You may just realize that you have been trapped in a nightmare and are about to step into a world of your creation.

Cheers,

Ralf

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Recovering from ego identification

I used to be into ego identification. I am now recovering. Let me explain.

The whole ego thing had always been something of a confusing concept to me. I grew up learning that having one was not only important, but that you needed to make sure to have a strong and good one, and be able to show that to the world so that others may take you seriously. You didn’t want to overdo it though, too big an ego was frowned upon and not seen as an advantage. Thus it was important to find just the right balance with this, not too much and certainly not too little. So I worked on mine and tried hard to find the right balance.

Over the years I ran into all kinds of definitions and theories on ego, but they all had as a common theme that it was real and something to deal with. As I got into the spiritual community and became a ‘spiritual seeker,’ the ego was often talked about as the ‘enemy,’ or at the very least something to ‘transcend.’ I created a version of ego that looked spiritual, sounded spiritual, but wasn’t spiritual. And that, as I found out to my surprise years later, was simply so, because the ego is neither the enemy nor does it have to be transcended, it has to simply be seen for what it is: A keeper of information on an individuated level to enable us to have a functional human experience. Nothing more and nothing less.

Once this realization hit, the ego and the idea that it is me diminished rapidly. There is a choice to be made here. Do I live my life as my ego or with my ego? Huge difference. With this the questions about how to overcome or transcend it become meaningless. Once I see that, I live with my ego, which makes my individuated functional human experience possible. That’s it. Your whole perspective shifts. Suddenly there is this other ‘me’ that sees ego in its rightful place and function, but I am no longer the ego, rather it is simply a useful aspect of me.

This is freedom. We see the ego doing its job most efficiently, and when we have bouts of ego identification (as I call them), they tend to pass rather quickly because they really don’t feel very good. Ego identification is fear. For when I am my ego, I am trapped in the time bound version of me, the one that is born, does some shit, and dies. And that even sounds depressing. The ego is temporary and when I am identified with it, I desperately try to deny and hide from that fact by making it more real and more permanent through personal experiences, and that is one fearful existence. For when the ego dies, I die. That is why the ego identified state is one of constant alert, after all, we know deep down that it is only temporary and try to hide this fact from ourselves. So we make a lot of noise, and the best noise in ego identification is one of competition with other egos, only second to competition with itself. Thus we spend a lot of time of our lives defending and building up our egos only to find out at some point that it is the least real part of us.

Even entertaining the possibility that we are not our egos, but the one seeing it, changes everything. I don’t have to worry about keeping up my ego/me, doing maintenance on it/me, making sure other people see it/me, always making it/me look its best, etc. Life is no longer about me in that smallest way, instead it is about living here and now, while being able to see this at work in others with the compassion and understanding of a recovering ego addict.

So I invite all of us to have some fun with this idea and choose to stop the ego identification when we notice it. Whenever we feel any kind of negative or positive drama, no matter how mild or severe, we are in full ego identification mode. Dramatic emotions are a hallmark of this state, and can serve as great information and wake up calls. They can either put us deeper to sleep or awaken us. Our choice, as it always is.

Cheers,

Ralf

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Choosing the ‘story of my life’

My bride and I were on a walk the other day, and a woman and her a friend walked by, talking. One of them said to the other: “So I guess I am going to have to tell them my life story.” That really struck me for a couple of reasons. One, we say so many things in any given day that really shine a light on how things actually are but we barely notice, and two, how much meaning her statement had.

We say that line as such a throw away, don’t we. ‘You really want to hear my life story?,’ ‘He/She tells everyone her life story,’ or even better, ‘Story of my life.’ Let’s look at this with a little more depth. When we talk about our life story, on a certain level we recognize that our life is just that, a story. But only to a certain degree, where it’s still safe. Safe for the ego/story, safe for it to maintain the illusion that we are, in fact, the story. We never stop to see how much deeper than that safe degree we could go with that simple, but very powerful and accurate statement.

When we entertain the possibility that our life is a story, then immediately we have to wonder about who is doing the telling of it. That’s easy enough, it’s me. And then we feel that we might overwhelm or bother people by telling our life story, so we keep it short and simple, and move on. Too bad. Next time we sigh to ourselves “Story of my life…” (usually when something bad happens), stop and look at that. It is truly the story of our life. It’s a story we not only tell ourselves, but the story we continually craft and create. All the time. Incessantly. And most of all, unconsciously. That is the important piece. And because we do this unconsciously, our story continues on, seemingly without our participation or input.

But what if we woke up to the simple fact that we indeed write, craft and create our stories? What if we realized that this ‘story of our life’ was not happening to us but by us? It’s a game changer, let me tell you. Suddenly we become aware of how much we tell ourselves on any given day. How many ‘mini stories’ we have going all the time. ‘I am a loser, a winner, the best, the worst, the mediocre, will never amount to anything, am the greatest person alive, other people suck, it’s my parents fault, my fault, his fault, no ones fault, God’s fault, why me, why not me?’ and on and on and on… Once we notice this, we can either stay with that growing awareness, or go right back to being a victim to our own story.

If we choose to take the matter of our story into our own creative hands, the jig is up on the illusion. The illusion that things and life happen to us, because all we are is our story. Instead we discover quickly, that life is a creative endeavor of choice. To choose anything. Nothing limits our freedom of choice, short of physics and our own minds. The magnitude of this escapes us at first, but when we begin to understand and own this simple fact of our choosing everything, everything actually changes. If we even consider the above to be true, then some questions come to mind: Why would we choose to create miserable stories? Why would we choose to believe them to be us? Why would we choose to continue on in the same manner? The beautiful point is that we can choose not to. And when we start to notice the incessant ‘story telling’ in our minds and begin to see it for what it is, we begin to get less and less interested in these ramblings until we stop feeding them altogether and become something very wonderful: present.

It’s our choice. Again and again.

Cheers,

Ralf