How to Bust the Ghost that Haunts You
Summary: The ego is the shadow of fear that haunts our lives and creates our suffering, increased by the ego’s addition of the compensatory defenses of anger, envy, hatred, avoidance, and other emotional tendencies that produce unhappiness. Inner work culminates in the recognition that the ego is unreal and obsolete as an operating system. Consciousness is then free to realize its unborn, formless, loving, and infinite nature.
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The illusion of fear arises with the illusion of the ego. The ego is like a tooth, and the nerve within it is fear. That fear is there because the ego arises as the object of an other upon whom the life of the organism depends; and this creates the fear of abandonment, rejection, antagonism, and enmity. So these become the standing waves of thought forms that repeat and aggregate other forms of thought to crystallize around them, along with the desire to mimetically please that other and then all of the others that the ego becomes dependent upon in time—or to manipulate, control, intimidate, placate, or evade those others—whatever is the strategy of the persona that forms as a buffer between the ego and the other.
But all of this artificial mentation then obscures the nature of the Self to itself. The ego forms to obscure its feelings from the other because the ego doesn’t want the other to know of its own fear, anger, hatred, or fury for fear of a backlash. So the ego’s deepest thoughts become repressed into the subconscious, but they are constantly irrupting to destabilize the persona’s attempt to remain in a state of equanimity. The ego cannot remain in equanimity because it is always buffered by the fear that it will be harmed, insulted, rejected, made fun of, or otherwise belittled and shamed. That original shame signifier that came from the neediness in relation to the other that caused the ego to alienate its consciousness from itself in order to please the other (to be like the other, to be the desire of the other) created a sense of self-betrayal. That self-betrayal is then projected as a fear of betrayal by the other.
So the ego is burdened with this complex of a tremendous brew of anger, terror, and confusion as to who it is or what life is about. It can never find its true center because it has fragmented itself into a persona, defenses, a calculating mind that tries to strategize how to cope with things, and a repressed subconscious. It doesn’t know who it is, and it has censored the connection between all of these fragments so that it doesn’t have to know its own unbearable feelings.
So when you begin the process of examining your mind, all of this comes up and you face that unbearable energy. The only way that you can cope with the forbidden and unbearable knowledge that arises when you truly want to know who you are and what is Real, is to recognize that your consciousness is not identical with the self-image that has become the ego’s way of conceiving of itself—an image which has enabled it to negotiate its relationships with the other but which is not authentic. It is usually chameleon-like in order to be able to change in accord with the different projections of different people. So it has no true nature. And when you want to find out what is true, what is real, what is authentic within this consciousness, you have to penetrate so deeply into the self that you reach that place that has no identity—that place that was in the core of your awareness before the ego was formed and is actually the place where the ego resides.
When that is realized, the consciousness understands that it was never born. It is not identified with the body or any of the traits and complexes that were built up upon the belief that you were born—the belief that you’re that body—the belief that you’re the thinking mind that is the operating system created to protect the body; all of that is a fabricated illusion built on the foundation of pure Awareness that is empty and that is boundless. And when you explore that consciousness that was present prior to the ego and the contraction of the mind around a few signifiers (beginning with those of shame and guilt and fury and all the other emotional reactions you have to the other’s failure to love and connect with you), once you reach that, you realize that your consciousness is not particular to the body—that it’s actually cosmic consciousness, it’s without limits, and it’s even beyond cosmic because it’s consciousness that’s prior even to the world, it’s absolute. When you have the courage to leave behind the grounding in the ego that tells you who you are (if you’re willing to not know who you are), you will realize that the ego never was who you are but an illusion, and that the not-knowing is the Being. The Being is the not-knowing and the radical acceptance of not being able to grasp with thought who you are, because who you are is greater than the mind’s thinking intelligence can comprehend…
Audio File How to Bust the Ghost that Haunts You.mp3