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A Christian Flavour
"God is not mocked. For what a man sows, that be will
also There is of course a lot of interesting theology and philosophy on the concept of sin. But let us be simple here. Sin is no more than this: identification with form, which primarily means thought forms, reaction forms, the worldly forms. Evil has this reality — and wether it has an absolute reality or not, we don't know. God talks to the devil in the beginning of the Book of Job, so.... Complete identification with form — physical forms, thought forms, emotional forms, makes us sinful creatures. And we are, all of us. Right? Identification with forms results in unawareness of my connectedness with the whole, which I mean is Christ as He lives us as Spirit now. My connectedness through Christ is the intrinsic oneness with every "other" as well as with the Source. This forgetfulness is original sin, which is not essentially a church dogma or theological conception but simple suffering, delusion. When this delusion of separateness underlies and governs whatever I think, say, and do, what kind of a world do I create? To find the answer to this, observe how humans relate to each other, read a history book, or watch the news on television tonight. It's all there. The word "I" embodies the greatest error and the deepest truth, depending on how it is used. Jesus always points us in the direction of the Father -- the pure not-I and the free state of Love in non-identifying with any form. In the "fallen world" conventional speech, it is not only one of the most frequently used words in the language (together with the correlated words: "me," "my," "mine," and "myself") but also one of the most misleading. In normal everyday usage, "I" embodies the primordial error, the sin of missing the mark, a misperception of who you are, an illusory sense of identity. The good news is: If you can identify with Jesus Christ as your real being, you don't have to do anything more, since in Christ the illusion is seen as illusion, and it dissolves. The recognition of separateness is also its ending in the Christ being and loving. In love you don't have to be anyone separate. Sin survives only if you depend on your mistaking it for reality. In Christ the mistake is washed away in the seeing of Him who really lives as you. Becoming Him in Whom we believe dissolves the sin mistake of identity. The ego-based world is what you are not. The reality of who you are in Christ emerges by itself. This is what grace is. A person unable to look beyond form generally becomes even more deeply entrenched in the ego-error with advancing years. We are now in secular modernity witnessing not only an unprecedented influx of ego consciousness. There is also an entrenchment and intensification of the ego through social media. More than ever we need to turn to Jesus Christ to replace us in God's love. Some churches have historically been open to the new and living faith in Christ as our own consciousness; others have hardened their doctrinal and denominational positions and become part of all those other manmade structures through which the collective ego will defend itself and "fight back." Some churches, sects, cults, or religious movements are basically collective egoic religious wordly institutions with a cultural and historical value. But spiritually they are as rigidly identified with a secular mental position as the followers of any political ideology. When Christ fills your awareness, obvious doubt appears in you as to the absolute validity of the human intellect. We have to realize that thinking is only a tiny aspect of the consciousness that we are in Christ. One of the most basic mind structures through which the ego comes into existence is identification. The "I AM" of Jesus Christ is the highest identification process, in which we become alive when we turn in faith to Him and say His Name. The the ego construction has fallen away. The word "identification" is derived from the Latin word idem, meaning "same" and facere, which means "to make." So when I identify with Christ I "make Him the same as my life" and He becomes the saved me. One of the most basic erroneous levels of identification is with things: My toy later becomes my car, my house, my bank accounts, my clothes, my position in the secular or religious society, and so on. The sin-ego tries to find a self in a blend of all these, but never quite make it and end up losing life. Jesus teaches: "For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it." (Matthew 16:25) So, viewed from another side, we cannot really honor things in life if we use them as a means to self-enhancement, that is to say, if we try to find ourselves through them. This is exactly what the separate ego does. Ego-identification with things creates attachment to things, obsession with things, which in turn creates our hyper-consumer society and economic structures where the only measure of progress is always capital growth and power growth. The unchecked striving for endless growth, is a cultural and spiritual dysfunction and a disease in the human society. It is the same dysfunction the cancerous cell manifests, whose only goal is to multiply itself, unaware that it is bringing about its own destruction by destroying the organism of which it is a part. Some modern economists are so attached to the notion of growth that they can't let go of that word, so they refer to recession as a time of "negative growth", unaware of the obvious obsession they reveal. When we turn to Christ, say His Name whithout ceasing, we can after some practise suddenly feel the true being of Christ, the "I AM-ness" of Him, who is the Way, the Truth and the Life. You have never felt that before and now it is the present conditon. In that moment you know "My peace I give to you" of Jesus. That is not the peace of the world. If I can feel the "I AM" so strongly, then who I am will not be diminished at all by any wordly circumstance. I can still feel it in every presen "now", something peaceful, joyful and very alive. That is the joy of Being. We can only feel this Alive in Christ when you get out of your head. Being and consciousness must be felt. It can't be thought. The ego doesn't know about it because limited thought forms is what it consists of. Whatever the fallen ego seeks and gets attached to are substitutes for the divine Being that it cannot feel. You can value and care for things, but whenever you get attached to them, you will know it's the ego, the erroneous subject. And you are never really attached to a thing but to a thought that has 'I,' 'me,' or 'mine' in it. Whenever you completely accept a loss, you see that. Diminishment through "less than" is neither right nor wrong — it is the just the erroneous ego. The ego isn't wrong; it's just unconscious. When you observe the ego-sin in yourself, you are beginning to go beyond it. Don't take the wordly ego too seriously ! When you detect egoic behavior in yourself, smile. At times you may even laugh. How could humanity have been taken in by this for so long? Above all, know that the ego isn't personal. It isn't who you are. If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, that's just more ego. The fallen world always praise possessions, external or internal. This is why renouncing all possessions has been an ancient spiritual practice in both East and West. The cave, the monastery cell or the primitive hermitage did not have many things. Renunciation of possessions, however, will not automatically free you of the ego. It will attempt to ensure its survival by finding something else to identity with, for example, a mental image of yourself as someone who has transcended all interest in material possessions and is therefore superior, more worthy of praise and honour, more respected. This is the modern guru-syndrome, common both in the West and the East. Indeed there are people who have renounced all possessions but have a bigger ego than some millionaires. You quite oftenf ind them in high ranks of a religious body, in higher ranks of the clergy. Why? If you take away one kind of identification, the ego will quickly find another. It ultimately doesn't mind what it identifies with as long as it has an identity. Think of the two apostles who wanted to secure special positions in the Kingdom of God. They identified as worthy apostles. Jesus corrected them of course. "You don't know what you are asking for." Anti-consumerism or anti-private ownership would be another thought form, another mental position for the sinning ego, missing the mark of the divine, that can replace identification with possessions. Through this anti engagements you could make yourself right and others wrong. Making yourself right and others wrong is one of the principal egoic mind patterns, the basis for sin, one of the main forms of spiritual sleep or unconsciousness. The content of the ego may change; the mind structure that keeps it alive as something separate from divine life, does not. It is the old and well known failure in the Garden: wanting to replace God, suggested by the devil and using the gift of freedom of choice. The ego tends to equate having with Being: I have, therefore I am. And the more I have, the more I am. The ego lives through comparison. How you are seen by others turns into how you see yourself. If everyone lived in a mansion or everyone was wealthy, your mansion or your wealth would no longer serve to enhance your sense of self. You could then move to a simple cabin, give up your wealth, and regain an identity by seeing yourself and being seen as more spiritual than others. How you are seen by others becomes the mirror that tells you what you are like and who you are. The ego's sense of selfworth is in most cases bound up with the worth you have in the eyes of others. You need others to give you a sense of self. You live in a culture that to a large extent equates self-worth with how much and what you have, or how you look and appear. If you cannot look through and renounce in prayer this collective delusion, you will be condemned to chasing after things for the rest of your life in the vain hope of finding your worth and completion of your sense of self there. And it will never be enough. The Kingdom of Life is not of this world, says the Lord. The fallen self identifies with having or "having done that" or "having been there". But its satisfaction is a relatively shallow and short-lived one. Concealed within it remains a deep-seated sense of dissatisfaction, of incompleteness, of “not enough.” “I don’t have enough yet,” by which the ego really means, “I am not enough yet." Even in old age people keep this chase going, hopelessly fooled by the sin illusion of self. And the consumer industries make a lot of riches out of this illusion. Mass tourism is exploding today with many negative effects on nature and life quality for animals and humans. As we have seen, the central notion of "having" — the concept of ownership — is a fiction created by the ego to give itself solidity and permanency and make itself stand out, make itself special. Since you cannot find yourself through having, however, there is another more powerful drive underneath it that pertains to the structure of the ego: the need for more, which we could also call “wanting.” No ego can last for long without the need for more. Therefore, wanting keeps the ego alive much more than having. Indeed the ego wants to want more than it wants to have. And so the shallow satisfaction of having is always replaced by more wanting. This is the psychological need for more, that is to say, more things to identify with. It is an addictive need, the sinful desire in its kernel, not an authentic natural need. Some egos know what they want and pursue their aim with grim and ruthless determination—Caesar, Diocletian, Genghis Khan, Stalin, Hitler, Putin, to give just a few larger-than-life examples. The energy behind their wanting, however, creates an opposing energy of equal intensity that in the end leads to their downfall. In the meantime, they make themselves and many others unhappy, or, in the larger-than-life examples, create hell on earth. Most egos have conflicting wants. They want different things at different times or may not even know what they want next, except that they don’t want what is in the present moment. Unease, restlessness, boredom, anxiety, dissatisfaction, are the result of unfulfilled wanting. The anxious pursuit of travel and experiences keep them vigilant and restless, even up into senior ages. Wanting is a structural sin, so no amount of content can provide lasting fulfillment as long as that mental and delusional structure remains in place. Intense wanting that has no specific object can often be found in the still-developing ego of teenagers, some of whom are in a permanent state of negativity and dissatisfaction, sharing this experience with others on social media many hours a day. What about simple and necessary needs? Basic comforts could be easily met for all humans on the planet, were it not for the imbalance of resources created by the insane and sinful need for more, the greed of the secular ego, wanting to be godlike in satisfying all the needs. It finds collective expression in the economic structures of this world, such as the huge capitalistic corporations, which are egoic entities that compete with each other for more revenue. Their main aim is profit whithout limit. They pursue that aim with absolute ruthlessness, albeit with a skillful advertising. Nature, animals, people, even their own employees, are no more than digits on a balance sheet, lifeless objects to be used, then discarded. This is the old sinful autocracy at most times protected by state governments and huge armies and military strategy. The thought forms of “me” and “mine,” of “more than,” of “I want,” “I need,” “I must have,’ and of “not enough” pertain not to content but to the structure of the ego. The content is interchangeable. As long as you don’t recognize those thought forms within yourself, as long as they remain unconscious, you will believe in what they say; you will be condemned to acting out those unconscious thoughts, condemned to seeking and not finding — because when those thought forms operate, no possession, place, person, or condition will ever satisfy you. No content will satisfy you, as long as the chosen sinful egoic structure remains in place. No matter what you have or get, you won't be happy, your heart will be troubled and at times you are in fear. You will always be looking for something else that promises greater fulfillment, that promises to make your incomplete sense of a separate self. On the other hand and another choice: "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid." (Joh 14:27) Just as Adam and Even suddenly got ashamed of their bodies, after they had chosen to be like gods and know good and evil, most sinful people identify with their bodies, trying to be proud over them but mostly being disappointed. Many old men and women hate their wrinkles and declining bodies, which is the other side of identifying with pride with their bodies. Not to speak of all those who are born with physical defects or acquiring them through illness. So, it is not just people with good or near-perfect bodies who are likely to equate it with who they are. You can just as easily identify with a “problematic” or sick body and make the body’s imperfection, illness, or disability into your identity. You may then tend to think and speak of yourself as a “sufferer” of this or that chronic illness or disability. You receive a great deal of attention from doctors and others who constantly confirm to you your conceptual identity as a sufferer or a patient. You then unconsciously cling to the illness because it has become the most important part of who you perceive yourself to be. The body thus becomes another thought form with which the ego can identify. This is what mythically happened to Adam and Eve in the primordial Garden. Once the fallen ego has found an identity, it does not want to let go. Amazingly but not infrequently, the ego in search of a stronger identity can and in fact does create illnesses in order to strengthen itself through this suffering ! Although body-identification is one of the most basic forms of ego, the good news is that it is also the one that you can most easily go beyond. This is done not by trying to convince yourself that you are not your body, but by shifting your attention from the external form of your body and from thoughts about your body — beautiful, ugly, strong, weak, too fat, too thin — to the feeling of spiritual aliveness inside it, which is the original receiving of Holy Spirit. This Spirit is the way Jesus Christ lives as you after his breathing on the apostles after the resurrection: "He breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit." (Joh 20:22) No matter what your body’s appearance is on the outer level, or the present general physical state of the body, which often might be pain or hunger or fatigue -- if you accept the Holy Spirit of Christ, then beyond the body form being alive, is now an intensely inspiring energy in your heart and mind. What I call the “heart” isn’t really, of course, the anatomical or physical heart muscle, but true spiritual life energy, the bridge between form and formlessness, between God and you. Let union take place. Make it a habit to feel the inner heart as often as you can. Pray the Jesus prayer and receive the Spirit. This transcends the mere physical body sensation. After a while, you won't need to close your eyes anymore to experience the heart. For example, see if you can hear the words of the prayer even whenever you listen to someone. It almost seems like a paradox: When you are in touch with the praying heart, you are not identified with your body anymore, nor are you identified with your mind and thus no ego-construction is going on. The praying heart is filled with the presence of Jesus instead. This is to say, you are no longer identified with limited self-interest form. You are lifted away from form-identification toward divine infinity and love, that dimension which indian philosophy calles Advaita. We may also of course call it Being or the Ground of Being. It is your essence identity in union with God through letting Jesus Christ live as you. This infinite awareness not only anchors you in the present moment, it is a doorway out of the prison of the world of error and sin. It is a treasure, not known by many and not often preached in church. The fallen self is always identification with ego and form, seeking yourself and thereby losing yourself in some form. Forms are not just material objects and physical bodies. More fundamental than the external forms — things and bodies — are the thought forms. They are energy formations, they appear often as forceful demons, what the desert father often warned us against when in prayer day and night. Demonical thought forms are finer and less dense than physical matter, but they are forms nonetheless and therefore always limiting us from the spiritual freedom we originally have. You may be aware of thought-forms as a voice in your head that never stops speaking. It seems to be a stream of incessant and compulsive thinking. The practical term is actually "enemies" or "demons", as the desert fathers called them. These people of prayer dealt very realistically with these negative thoughts. The Jesus prayer was their most efficient weapon. One very good teacher of this is Evagrios (4th century, whose “153 advices on prayer” should be used by all of us. Often thoughts absorb your attention completely, you become so identified with the voices in your head and the emotions accompany them. You simply and sadly lose yourself in thought energies and their attached emotions. You are totally identified and therefore in the grip of the ego world. This is the world that Jesus says is not His Kingdom. The world of your demonic ego forms is a conglomeration of recurring thought forms, forming culture, ideology and politics, business and technology and conditioning the world population to mental-emotional patterns that are intensely invested with a sense of a separate I, a sense of self-power. Ego arises when your sense of Beingness, of “I Am,’ which is formless consciousness, gets mixed up with form. This is the meaning of identification. This is forgetfulness of Being, the primary error, the illusion of absolute separateness that turns reality into the modern world we have today globally. The french philosopher René Descartes noticed that he was always thinking. This was beyond doubt. And so he equated thinking with Being, that is to say, identity—I am—with thinking. "Cogito, ergo sum." Instead of the ultimate truth, he had found the root of the ego, but he didn’t know that. The answer is simple, once you realize what the ego is and how it works. When forms that you had identified with, that gave you your sense of self, collapse or are taken away, it can lead to a collapse of the ego, since ego is identification with form. When there is nothing to identify with in the sinful ego-conception of the cogito, you are set free to accept Christ and enter a new reality, a new world. It is, as Paul says, like a veil lies over their hearts. "But when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom." (2 Cor 15-16) There you willingly submit in prayer to God and experience a joy that the limited cogito never can reach. Not everybody who experiences great loss also experiences this awakening, this disidentification from form. Some immediately create a strong mental image or thought-form in which they see themselves as a victim, whether it be of circumstances, other people, an unjust fate, or God. This victim thought-form and the emotions it creates, such as anger, resentment, self-pity, and so on, they strongly identify with, and it immediately takes the place of all the other identifications that have collapsed through the loss. In other words, the ego quickly finds a new form. The fact that this new form is a deeply unhappy one doesn’t concern the ego too much, as long as it has an identity, good or bad. In fact, this new ego will be even more contracted, more rigid and impenetrable than the old one. In the constant praying of the Jesus prayer, this tendency to repeatedly recreate the false ego is dissolved. It takes time and sometimes feels crushing with tears of sorrow, but eventually all ego goes up in smoke. This is experienced as a tremendous relief that not seldom brings out tears of gratefulness. Resistance is an inner contraction. The Christian truth seems like a huge demand and people contract when they hear about it. C.S. Lewis was "the most reluctant convert" and reluctant indeed are many intellectuals today in the world. There is a hardening of the shell of the wordly ego. You are closed in by sin taking the form of resistance arguments. Whatever action you take in this state of inner resistance (which we could also call the negativity of sin) will create more outer resistance. If the shutters of the needy ego are closed, the sunlight of the Spirit cannot come in. The love of Christ becomes your worst enemy. You become the resistance rebel. When you yield internally, when you surrender, the veil is removed and a new dimension of consciousness opens up. "Behold I make all things new" says the Lord (Rev 21:5) If action is possible or necessary, your action will be in alignment with the Spirit of the Lord and supported by creative human intelligence. God is the unconditioned loving consciousness which in a state of inner openness you become one with. Circumstances and people then may become helpful and cooperative. Coincidences happen. You rest in the peace of Christ and pray always in this inner stillness that comes with surrender. You can say with Paul that divine fullness has taken a dwelling in you and with utter simplicity. Meanwhile most people around you in the world are so completely identified with the voice in the head of the sinful and resisting ego conception — the incessant stream of involuntary and compulsive thinking and the emotions that accompany it — that we may describe them as being possessed by their mind, remembering the older expression “devil-possesed” that is used in the NT. As long as you are completely unaware of this original sin and believe divine peace to be just religious nonsense, you naturally take the thinker-self to be who you are. This is the fallen erroneous egoic mind. We call it the fallen ego-thought-form because there is a false sense of self in every thought and action. That includes, of course, every memory, every interpretation, opinion, viewpoint, reaction, emotion. The hawaiian spirituality focuses on cleaning the memories in order to meditate on the divine. That is a sound reaction because memory supports the false ego construct based on thought forms. The Ho'opopono works effectively on this sinful self and dissolves it through the constant erasing of memories. This ignorance of the false selfhood is unconsciousness, spiritually speaking. Your thinking, the content of your mind, is of course conditioned by the past: your upbringing, culture, family background, and so on. The central core of the false selfhood is the egoic illusion. In most cases, when you say “I,” it is the erroneous construct of the ego speaking. It is not the real spiritual you in Christ. It consists of misled thought and emotion, of a bundle of memories you identify with as “me and my story,” made up of habitual roles you have played without knowing it, of collective identifications such as nationality, religion, race, social class, or political allegiance. It also contains personal identifications, not only with possessions, but also with opinions, external appearance, long-standing resentments, or concepts of yourself as better than or not as good as others, as a success or failure. All this is false content, misleading you from reality. In recieving Christ through prayer and faithful heart presence, you discard all of this and "unload all your burden on to Him, since He is concerned about you." (1 Pet 5:7) We are all the same. It is a great freedom merely to recognize that. We seem different persons and we find that interesting, but in every ego the same structure operates. This is not boring news, it is actually good news. It is a very inspiring thing that egos only differ on the surface. Then we can all share in this surface problem. Deep down we are all the same. And we all share the sam sin-sickness. Persons — all without exception — live on identification and separation. Think of all persons you know or know about. It is the same phenomenon, no exception at all. They all play the deceitful game of identification with a thought of a separate ego. So you already know all about them. When Christ is invited as your life you will also love them all, without exception. The most evil of persons does the same mistake and act it out in troublesome ways. Not long ago I sat in a coffee shop and overheard a nearby couple chatting. After some time the vibrant female voice said to her male company: "You are so different from all other people I know. It is so interesting." I felt inclined to lean over and explain in a friendly way: "Not at all. I have heard you talking for a while here and you are both playing exactly the same game of identifying with ego thought forms. There is no difference at all. Please turn to Jesus Christ for salvation from this small and precarious reality you construct with the false and distorting ego-form !", But of course, had I done so, that would have been an infringement on the right of ego's to play their game and I had been rude to say the least. When you live through the mind-made self comprised of thought and emotion that is the ego, the basis for your identity is precarious because thought and emotion are by their very nature ephemeral, fleeting, distracting you from the real life. That is distortion and provides no peace or heartfelt compassion. Note also that every ego is continuously struggling for survival, trying to protect and enlarge the false form of self. A person living in solitude and prayer of the heart does not do that at all. She or he is patiently spending the day in saying the prayer, enjoying the holiness of the universe. For the person enclosed in the world it is different. To uphold the I-thought, it needs the opposite thought of "the other." The conceptual "I" cannot survive without the conceptual "other." The others are most other when I see them as my enemies. But there is a gliding scale, there are many charaterizations of the "other". At one end of the scale of this unconscious egoic pattern lies the egoic compulsive habit of faultfinding and basically hatred. At the other end there is glorification, jealousy and envy. People of prayer withdraw to forests and mountains to avoid this "vanity fair" of the world. The phenomenology of the distorted ego-self has a wide range of behaviours. The sin of complaining is one of the ego's favorite strategies for strengthening itself. Every complaint is a little story the mind makes up that you completely believe in. You see others do it so you do it too. Why not? Whether you complain aloud or only in thought makes no difference. Or whether you gather with groups complaining about the same thing and it becomes an ideology of the group. Some egos that perhaps don't have much else to identify with easily survive on complaining alone. When you are in the grip of this sinful behaviour of the false self complaining, especially about other people, this becomes habitual and, of course, unconscious, which means you don't know what you are doing. Applying negative mental labels to people, places, circumstances, neighbours, either to their face or more commonly when you speak about them to others or even just think about them, is often part of this sinful destructive pattern. In our vainglory we label this complaints "critical thinking" or "pragmatic politics" or other similar terms. Name-calling is perhaps the crudest form of such labeling and of the ego's need to be right and triumph over others: "jerk, bastard, bitch" — all definitive pronouncements that you can't argue with. On the next level down the scale there are simple vengeful actions. Resentment is the emotion that goes with complaining and the mental labeling of people and adds even more energy to the ego. Resentment means to feel bitter, indignant, aggrieved, or offended. You resent other people's greed, their dishonesty, their lack of integrity, what they are doing, what they did in the past, what they said, what they failed to do, what they should or shouldn't have done. The ego loves it. Instead of overlooking unconsciousness in others, you make it into their identity. Who is doing that? The unconsciousness in you, the ego. Sometimes the "fault" that you perceive in another isn't even there. It is a total misinterpretation, a projection by a sinning mind, not aware of Christ or the Spirit, conditioned to see enemies and to make itself right or superior. At other times, the fault may be there, but by focusing on it, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, you amplify it. And what you react to in another, you strengthen in yourself. The psychology of the false self is of course a rich context of confusion and erroneous assumtions. When you invite the presence of Christ's Spirit when meeting other people in the world, the usual ego-reactions fall away quickly and become obsolete. This spiritual non-reaction to the ego in others is one of the most effective ways not only of going beyond the temptation of ego-construction in yourself but also of dissolving the collective human ego. You now have a spiritual space in which to restore love and confidence with others. As soon a reaction sets in again, this will be destroyed fairly quickly and confusion restarts. Let us hear the pauline recommendations in Phillipians 2:2: “Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.” But you can only be in a state of nonreaction if Christ is living you. Otherwise you appear numb or blank or not at you wits. In the presence the Spirit you can in fact recognize someone's behavior as coming from the ego, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction, the original sin as it were. When you realize this sin is not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were. Instead the compassion from Christ is manifester by you in silence. By not reacting to the ego of the "other", you will often be able to bring out the sanity and compassion in others, which is the unconditional love of God, in the last analysis. At times you may have to take practical steps to protect yourself from deeply unconscious people. With practise of the inner prayer and silent attention you can do without making them into enemies. Your greatest protection, however, is being Christ conscious. Somebody becomes an enemy if you personalize the unconsciousness that is the ego conception that person makes in the moment. Compassionate nonreaction is not weakness but strength. It is actually to help the other. Another word for spiritual nonreaction is forgiveness. You give away the grace you have recieved in prayer. To forgive is to open up space, to look through the situation and upwards. You look through the ego to the sanity that is in Christ as He abides in every human heart and being as His essence becoming our essence. The false ego also loves to complain and feel resentful about situations. What you can do to a person, you can also do to a situation or place: make it into an enemy. The implication is always: This should not be happening; I need another place and another situation; I don't want to be here; I don't want to be doing this; I'm being treated unfairly; I am rotting in this place; I am not comfortable here. And the sinful original ego's greatest enemy of all is, of course, the present moment, which is to say, life itself. Complaining is not, of course, to be confused with informing someone of a mistake or deficiency so that it can be put right. And to refrain from complaining doesn't necessarily mean putting up with bad quality or behavior. There is no false ego in telling the waiter that your soup is cold and needs to be heated up — if you stick to the facts, which are always neutral. "How dare you serve me cold soup. . . ." That's complaining. There is a "me" here that constructs a person being offended by the cold soup and is going to make the most of the situation in blaming and anger. Facts are neutral and compassionate, the false sinful self is not. It is always a false and sick "me" that enjoys making someone wrong or some place something "rotten" or "boring". However the description of Birkenau-Auswichtz in the book "Five Chimneys" by Olga Lengyel is to the point and necessary to understand the horror of the nazi ideology. The complaining we are talking about is in the service of the sinful ego, not of necessary correction and change. Sometimes it becomes obvious that the false self doesn't really want change so that it can go on complaining. See if you can catch, that is to say, notice, the voice in the head, perhaps in the very moment it complains about something, and recognize it for what it is: the voice of the false self-construction, no more than a conditioned mind-pattern, a thought. Whenever you notice the false and fallen self-life in your nature, that deceptive voice of separation, you will also realize that you are not the voice, but the one who is aware of it. This is the true Spirit living in you and as you. In the prayer of the heart this Spirit is your true self, which can make you realize what Paul says: "I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." In fact, you are the awareness that is aware of the voice. In the background, there is the awareness. In the foreground, there is the voice, the thinker. In this way you are becoming free of the ego, free of the unobserved mind. The moment you become aware of the ego in you, it is strictly speaking no longer the ego, but just an old, conditioned mind-pattern. Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist. The old mind-pattern or mental habit may still survive and reoccur for a while because it has the momentum of thousands of years of collective human unconsciousness behind it, but every time it is recognized, it is weakened. A long-standing resentment is called a grievance. To carry a grievance is to be in a permanent state of "against," and that is why grievances constitute a significant part of many people's ego. Collective grievances can survive for centuries in the psyche of a nation or tribe and fuel a never-ending cycle of violence. A grievance is a strong negative emotion connected to an event in the sometimes distant past that is being kept alive by compulsive thinking, by retelling the story in the head or out loud of "what someone did to me" or "what someone did to us." A grievance will also contaminate other areas of your life. For example, while you think about and feel your grievance, its negative emotional energy can distort your perception of an event that is happening in the present or influence the way in which you speak or behave toward someone in the present. One strong grievance is enough to contaminate large areas of your life and keep you in the grip of the ego. Only in constant prayer of the Name of Jesus Christ do we feel how false and sinful this grievance business of the false self really reveals itself to be. When I hear about the african Christians who danced and sang when someone "fell asleep in Christ" it was easy to understand what true Christ presence do to dissolve the sinful self with is prolonged grievances. All form of grief and grievance has its root in the false self-identity. In Christ death on the cross there was once for all total forgiveness and this is the real path for the true self to get rid of grievances and griefs. Forgiveness happens spiritually and naturally when you see through the presence of Jesus that these emotions have no purpose other than to strengthen a false sense of self, to keep the ego in place and nurture this temptation and distraction. The seeing is freeing. Jesus' teaching to "Forgive your enemies" is essentially about the undoing of one of the main egoic structures in the human mind. In the presence of Christ all are forgiven and the new Kingdom is at hand. There is nothing that strengthens the erroneous ego construction more than being right, being in the right. Being right is identification with a mental position — a perspective, a religious dogma, an opinion, a judgment, a story or interpretation of a story. For you to be right, of course, you need someone else to be wrong, and so the ego loves to make wrong in order to be right. In other words: You need to make others wrong in order to get a stronger sense of who you are. It is only a blind and deluded ego that claims spiritual and moral superiority, perhaps according to a religious belief. Masquerading as a superior spiritual being, the false ego see others as condemned and of lower value. The truth is rather, as John 3:8 has it, like a wind that blows, we know not from where nor towards where. And so is the person with faith. He or she is never in the right. Jesus calls it being born in the Spirit. Not only a person, but also a situation can be made wrong through complaining and reactivity, which always implies that "this should not be happening." This applies also to places and environments. To stay at home instead of going on holidays and travel to tourists spots around the world, becomes the bad place and situation. The "I" feels diminished or offended because it is bored at home. The tourist industry of course relies heavily on this negativity. Being in the "right places" gives the false self a position of imagined superiority in relation to the person or situation that is being judged and found wanting. It is that sense of superiority the ego craves and through which it enhances itself. Facts of nature and the universe undoubtedly exist. If you say: "Light travels faster than sound," and someone else says the opposite is the case, you are obviously right, and he is wrong. The simple observation that lightning precedes thunder could confirm this. So not only are you right, but you know you are right. Is there any ego involved in this? Possibly, but not necessarily. If you are simply stating what you know to be factually true, the ego is not involved at all, because there is no identification, no spiritual choice of the egoic version of reality. With the choice of the false mind and its mental position the distortion creeps in. If you find yourself saying, "Believe me, I know" or "Why do you never believe me?" then the sinful self has already crept in. It is hiding in the little word "me." A simple statement: "Light is faster than sound," although true, is now in the service of the fatal illusion, of ego. It has become contaminated with a false sense of "I"; it has become personalized, turned into a mental position. The "I" feels diminished or offended because somebody doesn't believe what "I" said. The fallen worldly self takes everything personally. Emotion arises, defensiveness, perhaps even aggression. Are you defending the truth? No, the truth, in any case, needs no defense. The light or sound does not care about what you or anybody else thinks. You are defending yourself, or rather the illusion of yourself, the mind-made substitute, the sinful choice, once wrecking the true life in the primordial harmonius Garden. It would be even more accurate to say that the illusion is defending itself. If even the simple and straightforward realm of facts can lend itself to false self and egoic distortion and illusion, how much more so the less tangible realm of opinions, viewpoints, and judgments, all of them thought forms that can easily become infused with a sense of "I." Every si ful ego confuses opinions and viewpoints with facts. Furthermore, it cannot tell the difference between an event and its reaction to that event. Every ego is a master of selective perception and distorted interpretation. Only through prayer and acceptance of the holy source of water that Christ provides in silent hearts, can this separation veil be lifted. But if the belief "I am right; you are wrong" is one of the ways in which the ego strengthens itself, if making yourself right and others wrong is a mental dysfunction that perpetuates separation and conflict between human beings, does that mean there is no such thing as right or wrong behavior, action, or belief? And wouldn't that be the moral relativism that some contemporary Christian teachings see as the great evil of our times? The Catholic Church as well as other churches are actually correct when they identify relativism, the belief that there is no absolute truth to guide human behavior, as one of the top secular evils of our times; but you won't find absolute truth if you look for it where it cannot be found: in doctrines, ideologies, sets of rules, or stories. What do all of these have in common? They are made up of thought. Thought can at best point to the truth, but it never is the truth. That's why we say "The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon." All religions are equally false and equally true, depending on how you use them. You can use them in the service of the ego, or you can use them in the service of the Truth and the unveiling of the sinful self. Used in such a way, religion becomes ideology and creates an illusory sense of superiority as well as division and conflict between people. In the service of the Truth, religious teachings represent signposts or maps left behind by awakened humans to assist you in spiritual awakening, that is to say, in becoming free of identification with form. The living water from God flowing within yourself — and being in touch with your natural state in the Spirit, not some miraculous self-achievement — means that all your actions and relationships will reflect the oneness with all life that you sense deep within. This is love and the freedom that comes with the true Spirit. Laws, commandments, rules, and regulations and ideologies are necessar for those many who are cut off from who they are in Christ, the Way and the Truth and the Life within. "Love and do what you will," said St. Augustine. Words cannot get much closer to the Truth than that. Here it becomes obvious that the human egoic separate self in its collective aspect as "us" against "them" is even more insane than the private individual "me," the individual ego, although the mechanism is the same. By far the greater part of violence that humans have inflicted on each other is not the work of criminals or the mentally deranged, but of normal, respectable citizens in the service of the ideological collective ego. One can go so far as to say that on this planet "normal" equals insane. What is it that lies at the root of this insanity? The story of the Garden and the two trees comes to mind. There was a tree of Life and a tre of dominating power through knowledge, making us pretend we could be gods. We chose that. Complete identification with thought and emotion, that is to say, false separate ego. Greed, selfishness, exploitation, cruelty, and violence are still all-pervasive on this planet after this fatal fall in the Garden. When you don't recognize them as individual and collective manifestations of an underlying dysfunction, confusion or mental illness, you fall into the error of personalizing them. You construct a conceptual identity for an individual or group, and you say: "This is who he is. This is who they are." When you confuse the separate ego-self that you perceive in others with their identity, it is the work of your own ego that uses this misperception to strengthen itself through being "right" and therefore superior. This is reacting with condemnation, indignation, and often anger against the perceived enemy. All this is curiously satisfying to the false ego-self. It strengthens the sense of alienation from other fellow beings. The particular egoic patterns that you react to most strongly in others and misperceive as their true identity, tend to be the very same patterns that are also in you, but that you are unable or unwilling to detect within yourself. Jesus taught us about seeing the grain in anothers eye but not the beam in your own. So in that sense, you have much to learn from your enemies. What is it in the people you dislike or even hate that you find most upsetting, most disturbing? Their selfishness? Their greed? Their need for power and control? Their insincerity, pride, dishonesty, propensity to violence, or to smearing others or hateful buffonery or whatever it may be? Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you. See? But it is actually no more than a form of constructed ego-self and as such, it is completely impersonal, actually another attack of the old enemy from the Garden, then appearing as a talkative serpent. It has nothing to do with who that person truly is, nor has it anything to do with who you really are in Christ. Only if you mistake it for who you are yourself, can observing it within you be threatening to your sense of self. Recognize the false ego-construct for what it is: the Anti-Christ drive, active from the beginning of time after the fall in the Garden. It has become a collective dysfunction over time, a form of insanity of the human mind. When you recognize it for what it is, the old counter-force, you no longer misperceive it as somebody's identity. Once you see the ego for what it is, it becomes much easier to remain nonreactive toward it. You can see the tragedy and be compassionate with the victims of it. In Christ everything changes for you. There is no complaining, blaming, accusing, or making wrong fromyour side. Nobody is wrong. It is the "old counter-force os satan, the false ego-self in someone, perhaps within your own family, even in your spouse, that's all. Compassion arises when you recognize that all are suffering from the same fatal sickness of the mind, some more acutely than others. You do not fuel the drama anymore with reactions to it or acting out in fighting the other person, not even with passive aggression. What is the fuel for this false selfhood? Reactivity. The ego-construct thrives on it. When the ego-construct is active and at war, perhaps in someone near and dear, know that it is no more than an old evil illusion that is fighting to survive. Jesus won the eternal victory over this energy and will through His death and resurrection. It is all forgiven, once for all. No need to repeat it as a task for Him to forgive us once more. It is done. That illusion still, though, makes you identify with it, with its energy and urge and drive for acting out. Once we really know this we can be compassionate towards others as well as to ourselves. We don't have to try to be very holy, just empathize with others who get caught by the false ego-energy in whatever way or fashion. But the good news is that next time when the ego-self is in blind survival mode or some emotional pattern from the past has become highly activated, in yourself or in another, you may choose instead to turn to the Christ-Presence power, literally throw all the burden of self-reactivity on Jesus, and the ego will lose its grip on you. For me the Jesus prayer does the work, regardless of circumstance, and for many others through history, this is the most practical path. And so, with this prayer, a power comes into your life that is far greater than the ego, greater than the mind. All that is required to become free of the false ego-self is to be aware of the Name of Jesus, since this awareness and the separateness of the ego are incompatible. Name-in-heart-awareness seems to be the power that is concealed within His constant presence in our lives. He abides in us, habitating our hearts. The ultimate purpose of human existence, which is to say, your purpose, is to bring that original divine and integrating power into this world. And this is also why becoming free of the ego-self, cannot be made into a psychological or therapeutic goal for the ego, however learned or skillful the professionals are. Only the Presence of the divine Saviours Name can free you of the false self-construct. As Miguel de Molinos once said we have to live in admiration for the Name of Jesus, in love for it and and in resignation to it. Only this Presence can undo the past in you and thus transform your state of consciousness. Jesus said, "Deny thyself," and what he meant was: Negate (and thus undo) the illusion of self. If the self — ego — were truly who I am, it would be absurd to "deny" it.
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