When ‘reading’ our ego’s lives, our souls must be generous readers. To live, in essence, is to doom oneself to pain. But far, far more than that, it opens us up to the many colours of life –to the act of creation itself.
God, or the universe, or the collective consciousness reaches out its many tentacles of being to become our minds and hands, and our egos are our individual fingers; reaching out, touching and changing the universe.
No one knows how our spirit takes up our life. No one knows where that happens, or when, or by whom or what power –the wise have gone far enough on their journey to have surrendered trying to ask a dualistic question about the subject of oneness. It simply doesn’t translate.
Our souls exist beyond the realm of reasons; our souls simply are living our lives. In a world with no limits, the only reason that would happen is because our soul chose it to. Likewise, our ego also exists by choice. This may at first seem confusing, because I also wrote that some identities are forced upon us.
This seeming paradox is often at the heart of illusion. How can both be true?
It is true, no one can make me feel ‘Canadian’ if I genuinely believe I was born in Norway, and stowed away to Canada when I was young. To me I am still a Norwegian, hiding with a fake Canadian identity.
That said, if some officials take another view that I am that fake Canadian, and if they believe my behaviour is illegal, they can still lock me in jail on false pretenses because in the ego’s dualistic world everything exists based on beliefs and we cannot assert our reality over others, as the Norwegian example demonstrates.
Acceptance of this Nature of Duality is the part of reality that our ego accepts when it slips back into being healthier by being nearer to its non-judgmental spiritual self. It still has no desire to be seen as guilty, but our spirit accepts that just as we will win in life, we will lose too. And just as people can believe us when we lie, and just as we have believed lies, others can believe lies about us. This is the landscape of where human lives are lived.
Our spirit simply is. But to live nearer to our spirit, and to spend more time mentally peaceful, it is a worthwhile investment of our attention to study our ego’s choices. Even in situations where we feel forced into them, we still have choices regarding how we react. Truly comprehending that is a powerful insight.
It is only through this combination of the full acceptance of duality (and therefore pain), that we can avoid choosing the life of the tortured ego that perpetually wants its existence to be without suffering. Our spirit is more like a record player. For it, the music is made as much from the drops as from the rises.
peace. s
A serious childhood brain injury lead Scott to spend his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and identity. It made others as strange to him as he was to them. When he realized people were confused by their own over-thinking, Scott began teaching others to understand reality. He is currently CBC Radio Active’s Wellness Columnist, as well as a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB where he still finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
