The ego is confusing. It’s not your enemy. And you already know that very often it isn’t your friend. It can cause a lot of trouble.

If you have too much of it, you may be blind to it—while it’s obvious to everyone else. If you have too little, you can’t function in this world.

You can’t live without an ego; you have to have one, but it isn’t real. It is created moment to moment by a conversation you have in your head: one moment you’re wonderful, the next moment you shiver in fear.

This ego, the one that’s forever busy chasing what it desires and protecting itself from what it fears, is the ego of suffering.

The ego is baffling and mystifying, and if you don’t understand it, and educate it, it will be your master, instead of the servant it is meant to be. Then it will lead you around by the nose, through a lot of pain and loss to exactly nowhere.

You’ve heard all the stuff about transcending, or even  ‘killing the ego.’ And you’ve also heard that you need ‘ego strengths.’ So what is it? Do we need to get over it, or make it strong?

The answer is: both. You think that’s paradoxical? Definitely!

Okay, lets start with the basics.

At birth you emerge into this world from what has been called “The Ground of Being,” the womb of the universe. And at death, that’s where you go. It is the Self, the alpha and the omega, spirit, THAT which many people call God.

From there you can picture the journey of your existence as a circle that begins and ends in the Ground of Being.[1]

You can then divide this circle into two halves. The first part of life is about building the ego, coming to know who you are in this short time-span of your existence; it’s about going out into the world, about self-assertion, about being some body. The second half is about returning back home to our essence, to your origins, to spirit, to Self-realization, to eternity, oneness, and truth.

The “I” changes throughout this circular journey.

We can also divide the circle into three parts, three pie shapes. In childhood the ego begins as soon as you start to think. At the beginning of thought there is a mechanism that makes you continuously relate everything in your world to this “I.” You make up this thing called “I” as you think. You believe it’s a stable ‘thing,’ but it isn’t; it’s like an optical illusion of the mind that appears real.

This first third of the journey is the pre-personal stage. The roots of your beliefs of “I am………” are laid here, good and bad. You identify with your body, your likes and dislikes, your emotional habits and your personal history. You praise yourself and experience pride, and you condemn yourself and experience guilt. Most of this is subconscious and quite automatic. You struggle to be who you think you are meant to be, and you judge yourself as to how well you think you are doing. This, as I said, is the ego of suffering.

At this stage you are unconsciously still fused with the collective mind, and your thinking is deeply conditioned. You think in the way your family or clan, religion or nation told you to think. You are under the influence of an internalized voice that sounds like a controlling and critical parent. You have not yet developed a fully independent sense of yourself, a free way to make up your own mind.

For that you have to cut the restricting ‘umbilical cords’ that bind you to the ways of your upbringing. Until you do, you do not yet have a fully functioning ego. You’re part of the group mind. You’re also still close to spirit and that gives you comfort. But the danger here is that you may be prone to fundamentalist thinking.

Once you cut the ‘umbilical cord’, you move into the self-conscious stage, become a fully rational person and see the blossoming of your personal identity. You become an independently functioning individual, a “person” in your own right. No longer bound by the fear of being rejected by your group if you were to be fully yourself, you unfold your unique gifts and abilities.

This is the culmination of what Western psychology calls the development of ego-strengths. Rational and relatively independent in your views, you act and operate in your world.

Western culture generally assumes that this is the totality and aim of human development. Once you are a strong individual, you ‘have made it’ in the eyes of our culture; you are done. Therefore, of course, most individuals do not evolve much beyond this point. They are still in the grip of the ego of suffering, and remain far removed from the nurturing reality of the true Self.

This is now changing, as more and more of us realize that the highly developed ego is not the end of the line. And the ego itself feels it, as it matures. Where it has been fascinated with material life at first, now a sense of unease arises, an existential loneliness, disconnection and lack of fulfillment, or perhaps a deep, but indistinct yearning. These can easily turn into despair and trigger addictions and relationship problems.

Such lack of fulfillment is often mistaken for regular anxiety or depression—but that is not what it is, and it should not be treated that way. The ego has to suffer this basic lack of fulfillment, because it knows deep down that it, along with the body and all its worldly achievements, is going to die—although it tries hard to ignore that fact.

But rather than despair, this is the time when the individual needs to evolve further, and only entry into the next stage, the spiritual stage of development can resolve these problems.

This brings us to the third pie shape, the trans-personal stage. This part of the journey has been deeply studied by the world’s mystical traditions. Particularly Indian Vedanta and Tibetan Buddhism have elevated this inquiry to a profound and fascinating science.

As long as you operate exclusively through your rational mind, you will remain unaware of the reality of this higher development, because it goes beyond the ego, beyond the rational mind. But it does not deny rationality; it includes and transcends it. Here the mind can evolve into intuitive intellect and into divine intelligence.

It begins with experiences that lead you into the spiritual realm. At first these moments of peace, or deep joy, or your ability to perceive a deeper truth, are fleeting. To make them more permanent, you must develop an ability for stillness. Meditation is the best known and time-honored way to do that.

The first part of the spiritual journey is the exploration of ‘spiritual wonderland.’ You are fascinated by all kinds of exciting options, collect spiritual paraphernalia, move from teacher to teacher, read many books, and, all-in-all develop a very cool spiritual ego, which is not much different at all from the rational ego. It feels special about itself, either in a good or bad way, and in that it is absolutely commonplace.

But as you explore the spiritual realm, you build another kind of ego, the ego of aspiration. Now you feel drawn to real sadhana, to committed spiritual practice. This is how you can free yourself of the shadow elements, the habits of suffering which you have acquired earlier in life and which are the true source of your pain.

The higher reaches of spiritual realization will remain hidden to you until you do this work. But with the gradual easing of unconscious tensions, and with a greater and stable peace, comes the ability to look inward.

Now a great paradigm shift begins. You realize that who or what you thought you were was in fact a mistaken identity. Yes, the ego was useful enough for a while, just like the countless other identities you have built in past lives that are now gone and forgotten. And so will this one be gone in just a few years.

Now however this is not a source of despair, but of a great aspiration. You begin to intuit that you are in truth not this puny ego with its ongoing drama and self-importance, but the true Self, and your body and mind can serve as the perfect expression of divine presence in form.

You realize that you are not the body, but a ray of divine light that is reflected in you. And, going even further, you realize that this individual ray is one with the sun, the Self, the Source of infinite light.

In the expansion of this inner experience, the ego is transformed into the ego of the sage. Where it has formerly been opaque and confused, it now becomes transparent to the light. Where it has been a dictator, if not a tyrant at times, it now becomes your faithful and reliable servant.

Through the force of continued spiritual practice, sadhana, your being becomes the conduit of divine grace. The thinking mind with its judgments and stress dissolves and gives way to the intuitive intellect, which can run your worldly affairs perfectly.

The heart remains increasingly open and, since you are internally filled by the bliss of the Self, you can love freely. Your life becomes a life of joyful service to all beings around you, in whom you recognize the same presence of God that shines in you.

This is the way to absolute peace and to the fulfillment that does not die when the body is done. It is the realization of your true and immortal identity as the Self.

The ego evolves from being the source of much trouble to being a clear lens through which the presence of God shines into this world. How is it done? What are the mechanisms that are at work in this transformation? And what is the most crucial transformation from the ego of aspiration to the ego of the sage?  That is what we will discuss in Part 2.

We invite you to watch the video: The 3 Aspects of Ego by Ram Giri.
For more information visit our website www.Skillsforawakening.com

With love and gratitude,

Ram Giri 
and the Skills for Awakening Team

When depression is not depression but disillusionment, it still feels like depression. But in reality it is the first step toward the recognition of your inherent freedom and peace. Dis-illusionment is the beginning of waking up from illusion. It is a difficult stage with enormous promise.

What is the illusion that is about to be lifted, and what reality beckons us? Our primary illusion is that we experience ourselves as separated from our Source, as egos subject to a meaningless and uncaring world. Because of this fundamental error in perception we grasp for things we hope will fulfill us and reject what we fear. We live in the tension between hope and fear, perpetually chasing after substitutes for real joy, unfulfilled and blind to the fact that the Source of all we yearn for is within our own hearts.

Human beings lived in this confusion for thousands of years and for many of us it can now come to an end. The process of awakening breaks us open from the inside and this is be highly upsetting to the old ways of our thinking, the view of the old paradigm. And it is good that what is not true should be destroyed so the truth can blossom in us.

To find the bliss of Self in the depth of the heart is the greatest adventure of humankind. As all adventures it brings along dangers and discomfort. To brave these and to triumph over our fears and our weakness is the price of success. That is why I invite you to welcome your dis-illusionment and, instead of trying to reach back to a former state of tranquility, move forward to embrace the astonishing truth of your being.

We embrace this truth and the love it brings through sadhana. Sadhana is the effective practice of waking up from illusion and replace it with the taste of reality. This is done by practicing specific skills, first among them stillness, devotion, self-inquiry, presence, and the support of spiritual community.

Sadhana demands focused self-effort. Through self-effort you are creating your destiny. It is magnificent to be able to change the course of your life by your own power! Your habit of blaming the events of the past, other people, or ourselves enhances the ego and contradicts your efforts to awaken. What appears as your destiny today is the effect of self-effort—or its lack—in the past. What matters therefore is how you conduct yourself now. You are capable to practice easy-to-learn, powerful skills to break free. It is simple. The alternative is to continue to suffer.

The greatest aspiration is to realize our highest goal and manifest it in this world. This is the aspiration to awaken from suffering and realize the radiance of the Self. And the truth is: you are already on the path to this goal. Everything is part of the path to enlightenment, whether you know it or not, even your pain and confusion. Your path looks like this now. Your journey had to go through all your experiences, just as they were. You have not failed, you have not gone wrong; this IS the path to your fulfillment.

What obstruct you from realizing this highest goal of your life is your thoughts. All suffering is experienced not in the outer events we blame, but in the mind. And even the body is exterior to the mind. Therefore your constricting, fear-based mental habits are the true source of your pain. You have inherited them from the society you were born into; they are entirely conditioned and you have not known how to question them to break free of their spell.

How heartless have you treated you and robbed you of the joy of your life! How cruelly have you imprisoned your heart by judging others and yourself constantly! Of course it was all done innocently, out of confusion. And what enormous joy will come to you when you find yourself, when you connect once again with your innermost ability to love yourself as you are and to let this love overflow into the world around you!

That is why I invite you to find your way back to the core of your Being. HeartSourcing is the central practice for that. The essential answer to all you, or anyone, have ever yearned for is the unconditional love and self-acceptance that waits for you in your heart. It may sound too simple and yet it is true. The fundamental nature of your innermost core is that happiness, and once you find it, it can never fail you.

To gain permanent access to that inner Source you can question your basic assumptions with the question, “Who am I?” This is self-inquiry. It frees you of your stressful beliefs and opens you to the realization of a deeper truth that will set you free. Through Open Attention you can shed your patterns of restricting emotions, which you have mistaken for an identity. This will take some effort, yes, but it is not at all difficult to do. The alternative is to suffer more. What will you do?… You are the architect of your destiny!

with love,

Ram Giri

SkillsforAwakening.com

Overcome Physical Problems through Open Attention

We all know of the intimate correlation between mind, emotions and physical illness. Can resolving emotional stress help you overcome physical pain? And if so, how is it done?

Jane’s hip was hurting a great deal. She had gone to the chiropractor with little results and in the middle of the night the pain woke her up. That’s when she tried Open Attention, one of the Skills for Awakening.

Open Attention guides you to do the opposite of what you would normally do. Normally you would do anything to get rid of the pain. When pain arises, the mind is conditioned to jump into fight or flight mode. But what is the effect of that? You contract around the pain and it gets worse. It’s hard to stress yourself healthy.

That is why we need to approach healing with a healthy dose of wisdom and caring. Although the healthcare system is constantly involved in one war or another we need to ask this: when you fight a war against something that is a part of you, who is going to win that war? Not you.

So when war doesn’t work, then what?  Then it helps to realize that the symptom is not an enemy or a threat, but a part of you that needs help. This is a significant paradigm shift that allows for a completely different and very promising approach. You open to that part of you and pay attention. Thus begins a positive way of healing.

So Jane brought her attention to her hip. There was a burning sensation on the left side. Several times her mind tried to escape the feeling, but she persisted. After a while she became aware of a subtle sensation of nausea in her abdomen. What could that be about?

She switched her focus to the nausea. For a while the feeling in her belly continued to evade her attention, and again she persisted. Realizing the nausea, though subtle, was a powerful and important feeling, Jane became very still. She wanted to get to the bottom of this.

Assisted by that stillness and her determination to heal this part of her, she came into a highly focused state of mind. She evoked the power of unconditional love in her heart (through a process called HeartSourcing) and directed it into the nausea. When her mind and heart was concentrated on the sensation she realized that this was the way she had felt at times of great fear.

As soon as she realized it was fear, it began to dissolve. She did not know what had caused the fear, but she clearly experienced it evaporating. After a short while she noticed that both fear and nausea were gone. Her attention went back to the pain in her hip and that too had greatly decreased. After that she went back to sleep.

When Jane woke up the next morning, the discomfort in her hip had almost completely disappeared. She went to exercise as usual, with no side-effects. The improvement was stable.

How did this come about? Open Attention ends the unconscious rejection, the ‘war’ we wage against the symptom. It replaces this unconscious hostile attitude with an attitude of conscious openness and kindness. This can allow us to find hidden emotions that underlie the symptom, which dissolve through the simple application of awareness. This is the power of self-love in action.

Sadhana (spiritual practice) is the way to seek wholeness on all possible levels of our being. In the process of we are ‘plowing’ the unconscious mind to unearth the hidden obstacles that lie hidden there. They are known as the five kleshas: ignorance of the Self, egoism, attachment, aversion, and fear of death.

As these afflictions come to light one by one, we are able to transmute them into their opposites:

• awareness of the Self,
• ego transcendence,
• non-attachment and clarity of mind,
• acceptance of reality and unconditional love,
• and fearlessness.

The deep-seated fear Jane discovered was some manifestation of these kleshas. It was unimportant for her to find out its origin. What matters is that she brought awareness into the unconscious (the pain, nausea and fear). Like light shining into darkness, it dissolved the fear.

Such healing is part of the profound process of spiritual transformation. Once we have entered the path to enlightenment, the inner obstacles rise up in various ways so we can recognize and resolve them. This is the key to freedom.

Whether you are facing physical challenges, relationship problems, or pain related to your mind and emotions, you may be dealing with manifestations of inner obstructions that cannot be resolved permanently by conventional means.

In my experience most medical or psychological treatments are based on the rejection of symptoms without trying to understand their subtle message. This can produce only a temporary improvement. The deeper emotional cause remains untouched and manifests sooner or later in another symptom. To reach a lasting resolution requires that we free the deeper cause, and that demands a spiritually conscious approach.

I invite you to experience the practice of Open Attention and HeartSourcing through a guided meditation with devotional chant by Krishna Das CD “Living with an Open Heart”. Audio samples and downloads available in iTunes!

For more information go to our website: Skills for Awakening

with love,

Ram Giri

Dear friends,

I want to share with you this interview I was invited to attend couple of days ago. I’m very grateful to ‘Wisdom’s Soft Whisper’ radio show team, for your kindness and love.

Please click on: RamGiri09272010.mp3
If the above link does not work, you can paste the following address into your browser:

https://rcpt.yousendit.com/958760073/0bd75d0021a3e4694841c73b9cd35874

Size: 20.54 MB. Time: 51.32min.
Content will be available for download until October 07, 2010 15:50 PDT.

Excerpt:

* HeartSourcing Meditation
* Satsang (spiritual community)
* Conversations about my personal spiritual path
* Conversations about divine love
* The Skills to help you find your own freedom from suffering and your way to the core of your being

with love,
Ram Giri Braun

Skills for Awakening

The Israelites showed us how it’s done. 40 years in the desert with nothing but their faith to support them – my God that was no picnic!

Picture them, the whole tribe walking along. Up ahead the courageous ones, the explorers, ready to conquer the scary unknown. Then the whole mass of the people, the old ones, women and children. And at the end the stragglers, the weak and the sick.

That’s how we move toward enlightenment, all of us. We’re a whole crowd, every one of us, all the different parts moving as fast as we can into the light.

Look, there is your courage and strength moving ahead and there is also your weakness, your pain, your arrogance, blindness and shame, lagging behind. These are the parts of you slowed down by the five poisons (or kleshas), confusion, anger, desire, pride and envy.

So now picture yourself as Moses. You’re in charge to get the whole convoy of yourself moving along. Where do you put your attention? It’s fun to deal with the fearless explorers and with the crowd in the middle that knows to party every night when you make camp.

But as the best of leaders, I bet you’ll pay special attention to the stragglers, won’t you? Because you know that the whole of you can only move as fast as they move.

There is no point in giving them pet talks. They are already moving as fast as they can. Better to relieve them of some of their burdens, purify them of those poisons. They are bogged down by stressful emotions and thoughts that are giving them pain. Have patience; show them compassion. Be kind to yourself and clear and determined in your spiritual work.

Show them, one by one, how they can put down their burdens. Make that your main focus and the whole procession of you will speed up. You will move along in a unified way, everyone will feel better and you’ll get to the promised land right on time!

How does it start? Some day you have an experience and your world shifts. Suddenly – or gradually – you come to realize that Spirit is true, that there is a dimension of grace you can enter. At that moment God steps out of a book and becomes a real presence for you (even though you may not relate to a God, which is fine.)

The result is: You have entered spiritual life.

This experience can be a moment of deep inner peace, of being fully alive in the here and now; it may be an experience of emotional harmony or a great opening of the Heart. These are the kinds of decisive experiences after which your life may never be quite the same.

Then we go on a journey. We lose the experience and want it again. A yearning has been awakened. What can we do?

We learn about spiritual practice. We sit still for hours, turn our bodies into pretzels, make pilgrimages to teachers or shrines and especially read lots of books. It is all good.

And where do we end up when we finally arrive where we are going?

We end up once more in deep inner peace, being fully alive in the here and now; we feel again that emotional harmony or that great opening of the Heart.

We return to where we began, in grace, in the breath-taking presence of Being or God. Inside ourselves. In the core.

We end up where it all began – wiser, much more solid, our mind peaceful, our Heart vibrant, big and alive.

The journey is a cycle from you to you, from now to now. You get lost in the middle, even while trying to find yourself. You want to shorten the time it takes to get back to what you are seeking. You are confusing yourself by your seeking.

There are 10,000 things to do while trying to get back to that place of pure grace. Most go in circles. Which are the few that take you straight back to yourself? Which ones dissolve the internal tensions that keep you in internal exile from grace? Which ones can nurture you so deeply you get the stamina to face your own demons – and not in 10 life times, but now?

This journey is not a walk in the park, you may have noticed. It is the greatest adventure bar none open to human beings.

On this road you will have to face any terror your mind can dream up and overcome every habitual pain and confusion.

And the payoff is eternal life. No cheap goal by anyone’s standards.

So again the question: what can take you there? What can give you the access to the pure essence of this highest goal?

Perhaps not surprisingly it is the pursuit of the experiences that began it all. The experiences you will be established in when you have arrived, when you have crossed the ocean of confusion and pain to the other shore of divine bliss.

The essential practices are to step directly into the Promised Land. To stop the 10,000 distractions – and yes, even those that are labeled ‘spiritual practice’ – and enter the Heart, which in its unlimited richness is always waiting for you to come home.

Always waiting. Still waiting. YOU are in there, still waiting.

And I know, so many will read these words and not understand. So let me say it again:

Your Heart is available to you this moment. It is as far from you as the Now. It is the central core of space, as the Now is the core of time. The core contains everything. Why not return to that core in you now?

Oh no, so many say, “I have to continue my sadhana, my spiritual practice” and they wind their legs around their ears and sit their bottoms flat and read the 20^th book that tells them the same thing they cannot hear: It’s inside you now!

So go there! But you can’t. Your thoughts and emotions get in the way. You follow them rather than your hidden instinct that says “Stop it all. Stop. Listen to what he is saying. Let it come in. Maybe there is something to this…”

There are 3 skills you need: Clear the mind quickly and effectively. Bring your confused emotions to harmony. And drink from your Heart the Essence of love that you are secretly aching to feel.

It is the best kept secret in the world. It is secret because we keep it secret from ourselves. We have become lost in a trance state. Somehow we can say the words and believe them; “It’s all inside.” And still we don’t look. Still we don’t become still enough to feel the ravishing Heart Essence. Still we are lost.

I sit with people and I see myself in them, the way I was: tense, the body shifting, the mind not at rest. There is no space for peace to get in. There is no rest in pure love.

Not yet.

But if you want it, stop. Stop now. Make a huge foolish decision to love yourself absolutely! It makes absolutely no difference what people think of you.