We’re going to take a journey, a pilgrimage, to Jivan Mukti; and a pilgrimage, as you know, is always a journey to the highest, the most sacred, the holiest point that can be reached. And here the journey is to the Holy of Holies, the innermost core of our being. A journey of remembrance and recognition. A journey that requires the discipline of overcoming habitual patterns, of remaining superficial, and scattered, and with a consciousness that is diffuse rather than concentrated, and one that is dissociated, and often at odds with itself. So it is a transformation of consciousness via this pilgrimage of meditative focus that stays true to what is Real within us. Therefore, it should be obvious that the only obstacle really is the ego.
So we’re going to take a journey that has seven stops. The first stop is a flea market. And from there we’re going to go to a restaurant—it’s a gourmet restaurant that has a liquor license, so we can all get divinely drunk. And then we’re going to go to a bookstore. And then from there we’re going to go to a diamond market. And then from there we’re going to go to the ultimate treasure house, where all of the riches and wealth of our divine nature are stored. And then we’ll go to the border, the checkpoint, the gate to liberation. And then finally, freedom, the Absolute Supreme Selfhood that is already our nature, but that many have forgotten.
So we start off at a flea market. A flea market is a place where you try to get rid of something that has no value, and hope somebody will buy it from you. And you look at all the things that have no value that other people are trying to sell, and you sometimes fall for thinking that you can use it—but for the most part, most people walk away without making too many purchases, and usually not able to sell very much. So the flea market for us is that place where we go in order to try to get rid of the ego because it isn’t worth very much; in fact, it has a negative value.
So let’s be very candid in our understanding of the ego. The ego is a mental illness. Literally, it’s a disease of the soul. We were not meant to have an ego—we were meant to live in the soul, and the soul’s consciousness of God, the Buddha-Nature, Allah, the Infinite, the Brahman, the totality of nonduality—but the soul itself, through time has lost its vibrational energy, and it has become diseased. Sometimes I think of the ego as barnacles that have been encrusted on the hull of a ship that slow it down, but really that’s not a strong enough metaphor—it’s a cancer in the soul. It’s a tumor that has to be removed, because the ego itself is the cause of our suffering. It’s a false self. It’s an acquired self.
No one was born with an ego, although these days so many traumas happen even during the prenatal period, before actual birth, that often an anxious traumatized, proto-ego is already present at birth. And then the way that births are done, the way the deliveries happen in most of the Western countries in hospitals, are so traumatizing that the ego is burdened from the very beginning with a negative reactivity to the world that it has entered. And very often, for reasons of the situation that brought about the conception, and the pregnancy, and the conditions and the relationship of the parties that were responsible for the conception, and the family situation, and economic situation, and other factors, create a very ripe environment for the need for an ego with many defenses, and many layers of anesthesia, and often fragmentation to deal with the amount of pain that is carried by a consciousness that has not yet even acquired language, and so cannot categorize, cannot think about these things, cannot coherently understand its own need for defending itself against adverse energies, and situations of neglect, or abuse, or other forms of intentional or unintentional trauma—that regardless of the kinds of repair that are made later, there is such a primitive defense system that is developed, that it can prevent and stunt the growth of someone throughout their lives.
And because of the nature of the postmodern collapsing civilization into which people have been born, in which culture itself has lost its higher values, and the capacity to even recognize that we are souls, has been lost, even ridiculed, by the materialism, and atheism, and consumerism, and the dumbed-down educational situation that most people have to go through—all of that has led to a situation where the ego is burdened with a kind of internal self-division, self-hatred, self-images, that are disturbed and often anti-life, anti-growth, anti-curiosity, anti-truth, and unable to accept a great deal of information that could destabilize it. It becomes very fragile. And because of its fragility and its instability, it tends to, then, need to project its own negativity, its own demonic nature onto others. And it tends to need to collude with others who will buy into one’s ego, in which one can then create “good guy” versus “bad guy” scenarios, and dump on some egos at the expense of others, and create all kinds of schisms, and the ego will invest in very unhealthy relationships, codependences, and sadomasochistic relationality because it has no internalized model of a healthy way to be, or to love.
Now, the ego could not even have come into existence, except that if the—you all know the kundalini map, the seven chakras—chakras seven and six were foreclosed. Chakras five and four have been suppressed and inhibited from being felt or activated. We can think of the chakras as turbines that are engines of prana, and of energy that can move the soul into different vibrational frequencies. But the ego is the activation of only the lower three chakras.
And if the third chakra becomes the dominant turbine, then one is filled with anger, and with a sense of wanting vengeance, retaliation, and a sense of superiority, and territoriality, and hatred, and demonizing of the others, and it’s bothered by any impingement on its space.
If it’s in the second chakra, it’s more in a state of need that can become demand, and desperation, and yearning to be contained. And it can’t function independently, can’t think for itself often; or it can think, but it can’t feel. It is a fragment of itself that requires other fragments to support it, and requires psychic waste dumps to take the exhaust that it cannot process and properly work through.
And then if it’s only chakra one that is functioning, and even the second and third have been suppressed, then there is even almost a conscious denial of one’s existence, because one lives in such denial of so much that one has blinders on, and it can lead to becoming a very avoidant personality—it can lead to censoring out tremendous amounts of information, so that one cannot think clearly. It can lead to autism, and it can lead to psychosis.
So we have egos that are in a spectrum, in a range, depending on how early they were impinged on, how much they were traumatized, how chronic it was, and the types of abuse that may have happened, the types of neglect, rejection, insults, attacks, bullying—all of the kinds of phenomena that people have to go through in a typical childhood these days that is so aversive and that does not give one the tools necessary to healthily overcome the circumstances, and turn the pain of the lack of love and the lack of joy, the lack of wisdom in one’s environment, into an ability to grow from it, and to gain strength and empowerment, and a motivation to reach the higher states of consciousness that are free of those kinds of malevolence.
So that’s the situation where most people find themselves, and it’s a long way from Jivan Mukti. So we first have to understand the intensity of the defenses, even against being curious about the possibility of Jivan Mukti, liberation from the ego, and from its traumatic residues and consequences, in order to realize our true nature as blissful beings of Pure Awareness, who have actually never really been born. What was born was only a very tiny ray of the consciousness of your complete true Self. But because that ray of consciousness, that point of light, the jyoti bindu that lights up in the third eye, becomes encrusted with false ideas, beliefs, especially the belief that the consciousness is the body, and the ability to discern one’s nature as pure Awareness, not as matter, not as the vehicle that is carrying your consciousness, that one cannot make that separation accurately—one falls into identification with all of the wounding that has happened psychologically. And it is that people are trying to get rid of in the flea market, but they can’t do it. You have to go to the hospital for that, or you have to go to at least the med school, and learn how the psyche functions, and gain the clear knowledge of how to free yourself from it. So that, in a way, is the purpose of a retreat like this.
The good news is the ego is false—it’s not your Real Self—and you can free yourself from this mental illness if you choose to do it. You have the power of free will. You have the power of divine love and wisdom, if you activate those chakras that are the engines of those powers, and you have the power to liberate yourself completely. But one has to activate the will, and the capacity to understand the path, and then take the action necessary.
They call these Iccha, Gyana, and Kriya. You have to have all three. Iccha is the will. It’s even precognitive. We often refer to it here as the Upper Death Drive. The ego has a Lower Death Drive: it wants to commit suicide, or some proxy of suicide by blacking out, becoming so addicted, alcoholic, or involved in some other way of spacing out—even the internet is used for that—but people want to be in a state of distraction because they can’t bear the pain that they’re carrying, and they somatize the pain. They’d rather turn it into physical illnesses than suffer mentally and emotionally. And so these defenses lead to even further problems.
So we have to use wisdom, willpower to transcend the ego, and then take the action necessary, which is a practice of meditation in which the tendencies of the ego are gradually or quickly released. So that’s our journey.
If you’re in the ego, you probably don’t have a very high opinion of yourself. This is one of the problems—even though the defense against that is a superiority complex, but underneath that, if you do have one, there is an inferiority complex—they come in pairs, and you’re probably aware of both pairs coming out at different times in different situations. But this pair of opposites is one of the main issues in the beginning of the journey, because it will make you feel unworthy to take the journey, or to rise beyond a certain point where you’ll feel like you’re too much of a sinner, or you have too much baggage, or you have too much or too little intelligence, or love, or stick-to-it-iveness that you don’t have what it takes to free yourself. All of that is an illusion. But you will have to deal with the ego, and the superego voices that will tell you, you can’t do it. And those will have to be silenced, and not entertained, and not believed. That’s the first action that will have to be taken.
The ego is not real, but you could say that it’s in the same situation as processed food, which is not real food, OK? But if you eat it, it can actually take away your health, and cause you to lose your taste for real food. And so many people are addicted to junk food, and processed food that’s actually poisonous to their wellbeing, and that’s the problem with the ego. It has learned to prefer poison to nectar, and to, really, a healthy diet of high-level thoughts and feelings and attitudes and actions of service that raise one’s vibrational frequency. So we have to overcome the tendencies of the ego to defeat itself, and to…
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Reine
10 Sep 2022🙏