Most people who study these discourses on the ego will end up feeling somewhat confused. It seems almost impossible to distinguish between what is the dualistic “truth” of the ego and what is the real truth of the Christ mind.
This is simply a necessary phase on the spiritual path that all seekers must pass through before they can rise above the ego. It is indeed possible to pass through this phase, even though it can seem hopeless at times.
The state of honest confusion is a magnificent state of consciousness. You should congratulate yourself for having won an important victory. By being willing to move into a state of confusion, you have taken a very important step on the path of freeing yourself from the ego.
The ego has an insatiable desire to be in control of every situation. It is constantly seeking to set itself up as an authority figure that cannot be questioned or gainsaid.
The ego lives in a constant state of fear that if it is proven wrong, it will lose its control over you and thus it will die. If the Conscious You begins to see the fallacy of the ego’s dualistic, fear-based and control-seeking reasoning, the ego will lose its control over you and it will eventually die.
If a person is completely identified with his or her ego, the person will feel the ego’s fear of losing control. This person will feel compelled to defend the ego’s beliefs in order never to be proven wrong.
The ego attempts to avoid being proven wrong by creating beliefs that are based on either black-and-white thinking or gray thinking.
The ego defines a world view, and as long as the person accepts it, the person can never be proven wrong. The person will always be able to twist any situation or argument so that it seems like he or she is never wrong.
This gives a person a sense of certainty, which can make people feel very sure that they are right. Yet, this is a false security that is in constant danger of being threatened.
When you identify yourself with the ego, you have the ego’s superficial certainty, and thus you can deny any confusion. The very fact that you now feel confused is a clear demonstration that the Conscious You is no longer completely identified with the ego.
Being confused is a major step forward, because you have now become teachable for both your Christ self and your spiritual teachers. “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”
Spiritual seekers need to go beyond the need for outer certainty and security by making conscious contact with the ultimate teacher, namely the inner teacher of their Christ selves and through that with their ascended teachers.
You will always attract to you both the true teacher that can help you take the next step and the false teacher that will make you feel like you shouldn’t take the next step. If you look for certainty, you will be attracted to the false teacher. Only if you are willing to remain confused, will you find the true teacher.
The ego seeks to control you, and the last thing the ego wants is for you to become self-sufficient and spiritually independent. In return for letting it control you, the ego offers you the false sense of certainty.
The true teacher wants you to become self-sufficient and will never seek to control you. The true teacher offers you the inner path—an ongoing process of expanding your consciousness.
If you are open to the possibility of never-ending growth in awareness, it means that there is no belief or viewpoint that can be considered absolute or infallible.
A true teacher will not tell you what to do, as the ego and false teacher will gladly do. The true teacher will give you a greater understanding, so that you have a better foundation for making choices.
On the inner path, there is no outer certainty or security. It is essential that you develop an inner sense of certainty and security.
Instead of seeking a human sense of certainty, you seek for God’s truth. You will not find Christ truth until you are willing to let go of the ego’s certainty and be confused.
Christ truth is entirely beyond the dualistic “truths” of the mind of anti-christ. Yet because you have grown up in a world that is so heavily influenced by the mind of anti-christ, it will take you some time to free your mind from this influence.
You simply must go through a period in which it seems like there is nothing that is certain, nothing you know for sure.
Keep your mind open to the inner direction, which will always seek to take you beyond your current mental box by questioning your “unquestionable” beliefs. There are people who reject the true teacher as threatening their infallible beliefs, and they cling to the ego and false teachers who do not question their most cherished beliefs.
Behind the ego’s desire to set itself up as an infallible authority is the ego’s built-in insecurity. The ego feels that it is inherently unworthy. The ego is trying to create the appearance of its worthiness by using what is available to it in the material world.
The key to overcoming unworthiness is to realize that the core of your lower being is the Conscious You, and it is more than the ego. The Conscious You is more than your entire worldly sense of identity.
The Conscious You is an extension of God’s own Being, and thus it is inherently worthy. You are worthy by the fact that God created you out of his own Being.
The concept of the Conscious You can seem abstract, but seeing is believing. If you recognize that you feel confused, you have already experienced the Conscious You.
Your ego never feels confused, for it will simply replace one failed absolutist belief with another one. The Conscious You has the capacity for self-awareness, and that is why it can recognize that it is confused and wonder about whether it is worthy.
You are already experiencing the Conscious You, because only the Conscious You can step back from your life and even consider that you have an ego and that you are more than the ego.
The ego has no inherent or self-sufficient sense of identity. The ego is its beliefs and viewpoints.
The ego must base its sense of identity and worth on its beliefs. And if one of those beliefs is threatened, the ego feels its very existence is threatened. That is why people who are identified with their egos are willing to kill other people in order to destroy a threat to their belief system.
The Conscious You has an inherent sense of identity and worth that is independent of your outer beliefs, opinions and viewpoints. You can gradually reconnect to that pure sense of being.
You can experience a state of consciousness in which you are aware, but your mind is free of specific thoughts. You experience pure consciousness, and when you have such a transcendental or mystical experience, you know you are more than the contents of your mind.
All spiritual seekers have had at least brief glimpses of this pure consciousness or they would not be longing for something beyond what this world has to offer. Yet not all seekers are consciously aware of what they have experienced.
As you become more aware of the “you” that is behind the contents of your consciousness, you naturally become less attached to those contents.
As you stop holding on to the dualistic beliefs of the ego, you will become gradually more open to the non-dual directions of your Christ self and spiritual teachers. This will eventually give you a conscious connection to the universal Christ mind.
The greatest advantage of this shift in consciousness is that you lose your fear of being wrong.
The obsessive-compulsive desire to be right springs from the ego’s belief that if its viewpoints are proven wrong, then it is proven wrong. And this belief is perfectly true—for the ego. Yet it is not true for the Conscious You because you are more than your viewpoints.
If one of your beliefs is proven wrong, it does not mean that you are wrong. And this means you can let go of the entire weight of having to always be right.
The ego will always resist having a belief proven wrong, but once you connect to who you are, you can actually see it as a great opportunity to have a belief proven wrong. Instead of continuing to live with a limited or incorrect belief, you can now rise to a higher understanding which can only enrich your life.
Losing a limited belief never leaves you in a vacuum, for the limited belief is always replaced by a broader understanding.
Your inner teacher will question your limited beliefs, but will always offer you a higher understanding to replace the limited one.
When you embrace this process, you will never feel a loss. Instead, your life will become a constant process of discovery that leads to a greater and greater understanding of life.
You must become aware of the ego’s fear of loss, and you must consciously choose to dismiss it. Instead, you must embrace the true inner path as an ongoing journey that never stops.
There is no greater certainty than oneness with the Spirit of Truth, yet it is not based on outer beliefs. Stillstand is never a reality but only an illusion created by the ego.
Copyright © 2013 Kim Michaels