Sentences

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Sentences - To Shuffle

Let go – don’t let ego.

We don’t ever see the whole situation.

It will always be now.

Nothing real can be lost.

Slowly, slowly, awareness becomes enjoyment.

Asking for help brings help.

Duty is fear in uniform.

Ego is fear in fancy dress - it is helpful to remember this, when someone is acting up.

Likewise, when our own fears are active, it’s helpful to remind ourselves that fear is often just ego in a scary mask.

Joy is intrinsic, is built in – to life, to natural attraction, to who (= how) we truly are.

Trust the trustworthy (events, reality, your own heart) – this is one of the secrets of joy.

Dominant (ego-sponsored, ego-perpetuating) lies:

- that being true to yourself is ‘selfish’.

- that without duty, things fall apart (See CA Oracle, 59)

- that we can only find security in acceptance by ‘our’ group.

In fact, there is no true security for anyone in collective clannishness, for, in a group cemented by fear of not being in the group, nobody is really there, so everyone in such a group is, at heart, on their own.

Only love – natural, generous, reliable, upwelling, unfakeable love - provides security.

Ego would have us outsource our lives to it.

Our fears well up from a deep place within us (after all, we have often thrown them down the well of oblivion) – to affect what goes on in the present, on the surface of our lives – to taint our drinking water.

Clarity comes with detachment
- and not a moment before
Detachment comes with clarity

- and not a moment before

Trust your gut-nav.

Gently is the way. How decides both what, and which way.

Don’t let ego grab the mike. (It will try to.)

If you tower, you will topple.

Nastiness is not true. Power is not real. Violence and conflict are based on lies.

Song: the Valley of Peace

My own journey towards the Heartland has not been along one thin line, but more like a rope of many strands – more unfinished novel than song.

If I go in through my fear, when it's besetting me, I often come out the other side into the smile, the Universe’s sense of humour.

My delusions have been grafted onto my psyche (by me, presumably) - so that it takes some kind of catastrophe to dissolve the bond and set me free of one of them - and then, only if I'm willing/able to let it go.

Song: Letting Go of the Illusions

Where there’s human life, there’s the potential for mischief-making.

Equal. Just this one word – breathed – over and over. All of us, and everything - equal. Equal.

Life’s not about sailing on over the horizon into some glorious future, leaving my past behind - it’s about gradually coming into my own.

There is always more than one thing happening – in ideas, in events, in my mind – in fact, there are usually more than two things happening.

Every moment is newborn, and wide open. When I 'get' this, I am freed from listening to looping mental scripts of guilt or blame.

These scripts have no real life, for they don't arise out of any present moment. They are concocted by ego, for ego purposes - so all they can do is rotate in the mind automatically, repetitively.

I belong – I really do belong, in and to the world. But to feel the truth of this, to know it, I need to be free of ego, of self-deluding notions of my own ‘specialness’.

The lazy, moralistic concept of ‘selfishness’, is based on a confusion or elision of ego and self.

I need to stop slandering life – to learn to spot and stop my own internal, half-unconscious slanders against life (often disguised as self-criticisms or anxieties); and I need to step away from other people’s slanders on life.

When something dies – the flies, the flies! That is, when the heart shuts down, and becomes unable to love (live), its death feeds other things – unlove, unlife, negative dynamics.

The Cosmos is endlessly generous, kind and protective. When I open my heart and trust life, I am helped.

The journey is from there and then to here and now, from the past (what has passed, happened, is over) to present (what is freely given, in each moment).

Fousty* old fear pretends to be all about now – everything's marked urgent! Fear is always presenting an ultimatum, a desperate deadline.

In fact my fear is based on hazy, half-remembered memories of stuff I didn’t understand when it was happening – and maybe there is nothing to understand, because all that fear-arousing behaviour is nonsense and pretence, based on lies.

When I stand firm and call its bluff, there’s nothing there – no follow through.

*fousty - possibly Scots word meaning mouldy or dusty

Less is more, but it is also less. Less interactions, distractions, evasions – more space, room for enjoyment, simplicity, ease. Less stress, less hurry, less worry.

Whatever happens, however difficult my feelings are - if they are real, and about reality, my heart can contain them without being damaged. I can afford to look events in the eye without fear, with acceptance.

If the feeling is untrue, if it arises out of ego, it evaporates in the sunlight of reality – or it will, eventually, if I remain centred.

Life is not just survival, or about trying to look as if I'm having fun. It’s about being fully alive, savouring, tasting, noticing what's going on – however quietly. Whatever kind of life I am living, it is going on right here inside me, without onlookers.

Wrestling with my faults - or with what I see as others’ faults - energises ego. Awareness is enough.

Deep within me flows a river of enjoyment I can trust to carry me where I want to go.

river of life

I need to be aware of (and beware of) impulses in myself that cause me discomfort when I sense them in others – the mirroring of ego.

The more neutral I become (the more inner space I have), the more I can afford to see clearly the twisted half-truths and illusions I previously accepted, without being bounced into fearful reactions, including blame, self-blame or ‘victim’ feelings.

Clarities - momentary insights - unmesh themselves from the chicken wire of cultural fencing and the individual mental grids we live by. They stand clear, and disappear. By their effortless agency, they help us to extricate ourselves in enduring ways.

I oppress myself whenever I accept ego’s insinuations that I am inadequate, and so need its help. This is how ego incites me to adopt a self-image to project and live up to, and to fantasise about imagined comforts to be gained from situations and relationships I strive to create.

Whenever these misguided, ego-sponsored habits get me into trouble, when my self-image is challenged, and/or these situations and relationships break down, this is my chance to shed another self-deception.

song: Letting Go of the Illusions

The river of enjoyment carries me out of trouble, away from neurosis, ‘stuckness’ and untenable situations, into more life – more awareness, more freedom, more capacity for joy. It also carries me through trouble, and helps me stay clear of overhanging branches and eddying currents.

river with overhanging branches

It is very hard to see my own fear-driven behaviour for what it is – though I am often irked by other peoples’! The way to proceed, in both cases, is gently.

Note to self: Don’t look for more from others than they are freely offering. Try and notice when I start looking (hoping) for more than is actually, spontaneously there for me.

Extremes tend to flip over into their opposites (like the moving lines in an I-Ching hexagram).

It’s how people are on the inside that determines how helpful or otherwise they are – as parents, lovers/ spouses, friends, bosses. You can’t tell how people are from appearances, but only by interacting with them.

The journey to the Heartland is my return journey to reality, to how things work. ‘Things’ includes me, for I too belong to reality – 'how it works' is how I myself 'work'.

Most harm is done, I believe, unconsciously. Those who act destructively towards others are usually unaware of the damage they are doing – because they are unable to acknowledge their feelings.

If they could bear to feel their own hurt, they could not behave as they do.

Those who are unconscious in this way can’t apologise, so the imagined, idealised cycle of apology / forgiveness usually remains uncompleted. The real work of forgiveness – of getting clear of past hurt – is more often done within the psyche of the injured, without reference to the ‘oppressor’.

Ego doesn’t know what to do with joy. Ego revels in exhilaration and high spirits, but the ego-bound heart has no room to accommodate the inward spaciousness, and spreading wellbeing of true joy.

Ego (correctly) fears joy - since it has no role, becomes unnecessary, in its presence.

Coming to full self-expression is beauty.

full pink rose

In human history - in economics, ecology, in war and peace – as well as individual experience, the operative word is often inadvertently.

It feels wonderful when we learn to stop ourselves plunging into fresh misadventures.

The Cosmos deals gently with me, as I persevere in dismantling my defences: I can't ever see more than I'm ready to see (i.e. more than I can bear to see).

Ego hi-jacks, twists and falsifies this Cosmic kindness to whisper, “You don’t have to see anything you don’t want to”, or else, “ooh – you don’t want to go there/ admit that – that’s scary stuff / you’ll be shamed and humiliated”.

Rely on love, not on fear. Love is trustworthy – fear will always let you down. (Love includes caution, and mutual respect, and springs unbidden; while fear, lacking trust, often exerts itself to look like love.)

We are born as we are – and then we are made by history. Becoming ourselves means, among other things, dealing with the negative effects of history on and in ourselves.

Time, Life and the Psyche

Time is life’s filing system, and also its compost heap. It is also the natural element of the psyche.

When my psyche is functioning properly, it stores my experience (filing system), then breaks it down (compost heap), transforming it into more life.

(The psyche includes the body.)

Awareness does not need to be made known.

Observe the ways ego, shameless gatecrasher, blags its way into situations, into my mindset. (I need attentive, practised - and non-violent - bouncers on the doors of my mind.)

What I do to others, I do to myself, on the inner plane.

‘It is harder to be an oppressor than to be the oppressed’ – Hugh Masakela, South African jazz musician.

It’s the stuff I still can’t see, in myself and others – unfelt feelings, hidden memories, unnoticed motives - that cause me problems. These neglected presences nudge at me, jogging my elbow, making me spill or spoil my undertakings, until I learn to attend to them, to hear their voices, and listen.

Willingness leads to capacity. The one who wants to understand will learn to understand.

Refusal, or unwillingness, leads to incapacity. The one who refuses to understand (or would rather not) will become and remain unable to.

Our inner attitude determines whether and how we and our lives develop.

Note to Self: Try not to let murky motives (my own, or other people’s) sneak past me, in either direction - in the way, or out the way. Pay attention, notice feelings, alarm bells, my own subtle responses to people and situations.

There’s nothing mystical or supernatural about this – it’s our animal nature, to sense what’s really going on. We are embodied awareness. (See Carol Anthony and Hanna Moog, Oracle)

There is no point in fending off parts of my experience, the bits I’d rather not have to be aware of. For in evading or denying the truth, I only exclude myself from my own heart.

While I live, the river flows on, with me in it. As events move on, I need to keep responding, finding myself, my balance, afresh in the moments – nothing is fixed, stationary in this moving life. But also – I need to remember the ocean – what I am part of, what I am made of and belong to.

breaking wave

Trust the time it takes.

Don’t let ego ride you. (It will try to!)

When I am true to myself, I am helped, and feel accompanied. When I'm not, I find myself on my own, in Egoland.

Self or Ego?

‘Self-seeking’ motives and behaviour are really self-losing, self-estranging, self-sacrificing, self-throwing away. My self is the one thing I must not sacrifice – who I am is my gift from life.

Self-interest is really anything but. Any ‘interest’, in the sense of advantage-seeking, is ego’s, and thus to no-one’s true benefit. The word ‘interest’ itself (from the Latin ‘being between’) suggests something interposed, intruding, intervening in order to wrest profit from a situation. This is not actually how life works: it is how ego works.

The joke’s on me - and when I get the joke, I’m free. The Cosmic sense of humour is accurate. It can be direct, 'ouchy', shying away from nothing, but it’s not cruel or malicious – its function is to wake me up, not to make me suffer.

Quote from Nitan Sawney – Our consciousness has a part to play in the way the universe works.

When things happen in the Heartland, they happen kindly. They may be full of energy, but no-one is hurt, marginalised or undermined. There’s no undertow of doubt, no secret, unconscious agenda. Nothing to block the flow, or get snagged on.

Egoland is the land of leverage, strategy and manipulation – "I do X so that Y has to do Z". This is not how life actually works.

There are many things fundamental to human wellbeing, which 'modern', materialist culture finds hard to acknowledge and respect properly, because they can't be quantified or have their validity demonstrated by controlled experiments.

What is hollow, receptive – deeply asking – will be filled, answered. An open, neutral mind will attract understanding.

Most of what’s going on, even in my own life, I can’t see and don’t know about, however much I may ponder - just as I can’t really see how I myself am, in relation to others.

I find the best way to deal with my feelings, and with other people’s ego-tinged behaviour is by noticing and acknowledging these things for what they are, and letting them go. When I remain neutral, my feelings can do their work – with no intervention from the muscle-bound super-hero, ego.

Most unworthy motives lurk in the shadows, unconscious or only very dimly conscious – troublemakers in the psyche stay well out of sight. Where such unsavoury motives are conscious, they tend to be backed up by burly, leather-clad (or pious, priestly) rationales.

ego Iago

A strangely comforting thought : that no-one has ever been as unkind to me as the mean scripts in my mind can get, if I listen to them.

Life is a long emerging, like a flower opening, into its true colours – the colours of everything it contains – including, embracing, acknowledging, and letting go of, what has been.

Song: This is the Beautiful Slow Opening of the Heart

This is what I think (and I may be wrong): To let the past truly become the past requires letting go of it. To let the past go, it has to let us go – and it can only let us go when its reality has been fully acknowledged and accepted, in our hearts.

Advertising and Self-estrangement

In our materialist society, it has tended to be the case that if something is not a product, and has not been paid for, it is seen as having no value.

Yet advertising understands well that what we all need in life is not products, but fulfilment and a sense of belonging. So products are sold using images of ‘happiness’ – popularity, sexual attraction, ‘good times’, status, family security – to make us associate them with positive feelings.

Alienation, or self-estrangement, is taken to new levels of inwardness, as advertisers set out to expropriate our feelings and sell them back to us.

Life is for enjoying. 'Enjoy' means savour, taste, relish, consume – allow to flow through us with awareness, experience life, be in it. Not hoard, try to fix or pin life down, not measure or compare or assess it.

Our life, truly lived, can be a big, slow emancipation from self-deception and imagined dependence, a joyous release into reality.

Things felt aright arouse compassion. Compassion involves sensing the inner hell people are in when they misbehave, and not being drawn into that hell, not feeling threatened by it. Detachment, therefore, is a precursor of compassion.

People who behave badly cause hurt, and fend off love. They refuse, in their unconscious fear, to take control of themselves.

Thinking in terms of opposites arouses opposition – inner conflict, and conflict with others. Everything real belongs, and co-operates, co-exists and interpenetrates by force of attraction. (See Carol Anthony)

knight on horseback

Opposition is ego’s game, a mental construct and a trap for the psyche.

I can only really know things first hand. What I really understand, I’ve been through.

The distance we’ve had to travel, to get to where we are now, is the measure of our accumulated awareness. In a sense, the worse it’s been at times, the more we have had the chance to learn.

But if we’ve spent our lives evading self-awareness and skating over the surface, it’s as if we’d never been here – except for the hurt we may have handed on, unconsciously.

If you feel uneasy, don’t just bash on. Step away, reflect – notice what’s going on, give yourself time.

Life is made of surprises – life is not what we think.

In the way – to the easy way (the I Ching) – is the trickiest direction to find, from outside the heart, or Heartland.

the way in

Finding the way in involves refraining from aiming, and straining, towards all outward directions – all ‘goals’ (including the goal of ‘spiritual enlightenment’, and other imagined states of mind).

It involves trusting events and our natural responses to them (our feelings), and tuning in to our subtle awareness of what’s happening in the innumerable, ever-flowing moments of our lives.

Ego makes a big deal of everything. Living free of ego – spacious and joyful as it feels – is no big deal.

no big deal rainbow

Solutions are not found by striving, or trying to ‘get it right’. Ego rules effortful living – ‘in order to stay in control'. I may believe I am the one making the effort, trying to stay in control, but when I'm in this state of mind, I have actually surrendered control to ego.

‘Leave them alone, and they’ll come home’ – it’s not up to us to shepherd other people back to themselves, or try to put them right. It is up to us to refrain from involving ourselves in ego-bound interactions.

When we’re in tune with reality, including ourselves, everything works, naturally – life flows on. When we’re out of tune, we clash with life – stub our toe at every turn.

Feelings are not 'just' subjective. Feelings are real, indeed they calibrate reality for us. They are our most reliable access to what is real.

We human beings are a part of reality, we are plugged in – this is how we live. What is harmonious feels right, and works. Discerning what feels harmonious is not 'just' a matter of opinion, or taste.

What is not harmonious doesn’t work – it also feels wrong, creates or perpetuates problems and inner conflict, and necessitates endless arguments and self-justifications.

On shame: There is a distinction between 1) true (truth-bringing) shame – embarrassment, when I sense I have been in error, betrayed myself, done something insensitive; and 2) shame used as an ego-weapon, to blame, undermine or inhibit - either within my own psyche, or against someone else.

The first kind of shame arises out of my feelings, and brings me closer to reality; the second kind introduces a spurious accusation, based not in reality, but in some previously accepted collective falsehood, now being used (by ego) to disable my will, make me override my feelings and conform.

Perhaps things can’t really be seen properly, until they’re completed - 'things' like an event, an era, a movement, or a life – my own, or someone else’s.

Becoming free of fears and doubts = elimination of the false. A process so gradual, with so many backslidings, probably never completed.

True authority comes from within the self.

++

Note to self: When I can’t see clearly, just stay open. Trust the process, and the time it takes. The truth I need to know will show itself at the right time.

Note to self: Trust my inner senses – my inner truth-or-nonsense censors – my inner sense of smell.

Once I can bear to see a situation clearly, as it is, I can remove my rose-tinted specs (or my blinkers).

Inner clarity helps me to name things accurately - in particular, my own ego’s confusing games. Nailing these inner shenanigans stops ego deceiving me and assuming leadership of my psyche under false pretences.

Ego relies on remaining unnoticed, in the shadows where I prefer not to look. Shining the light of my attention on its tricks – articulating them to myself, explicating (unfolding) them, helps to unmask ego's nefarious activities.

Correct naming fillets ego’s tactics.

Ego has no inborn energy source, no life of its own – parasitic and predatory, it siphons energy from the living*. The ego-bound person therefore constantly seeks to unsettle, undermine and engage those around her/him.

* This unsavoury fact about the susceptibility of the psyche may explain the attraction of vampire and zombie myths.

Many of the truest things in life are not for saying out loud. They can only be known – understood - first hand, by the feeling heart.

Many of the most important lessons I have learned can’t be stated as ‘facts’, or pushed on anyone, argued for – for they are not 'facts', but feelings. Understanding them is not an intellectual activity, but an inner capacity, akin to an ear for music or poetry, or an eye for beauty.

When I am attuned to what is, to how things are, I am true and trustworthy. What matters is not what I ‘believe’ to be true, but how I am, moment to moment - i.e. in what relation to reality.

What I love and feel attracted to is also attracted to me: we feel comfortable together - be it understanding, experience, other people, my path through life. It happens. It is what happens.

When what happens feels like an obstacle, a cul-de-sac or a stumbling block, this means something is crying out for attention, needing to be noticed, acknowledged, and let go of.

Being true to myself eliminates self-conflict.

Ego insists on having its say, being seen & heard, interrupting and intervening. It can’t bear to let things be, trusts no-one.

On History

Wherever and whenever we are born into human life, history is dealt out to us – like a blow, or like a hand of cards. It then becomes ours to deal with.

We become implicated in history by believing the lies and half-truths of our ancestors – things they made up, or accepted without question, and handed on to us.

This is how we inherit emotional falsehoods too – grist to ego's misery mills - through the injuries, silences, and unnamed fears of childhood; or through over-indulgence and obliviousness encouraged or condoned.

Being human is no joke - or rather, it is possibly the best joke of all, depending on our point of view, when we consider the extent of the self-destructive foolishness that comes from our being so clever!

We need detachment and humour to see ourselves clearly.

Each generation lives in the fallout of previous generations’ actions – history comes home to roost, on all levels, individual and collective.

Awareness is all. Awareness prompts the correct Yes or No response in me, once my will is reconnected to my feelings.

Healing involves feeling: it means developing more and more feeling for what’s been wrong, and for what feels right. I can let go of more and more negativity as I learn to trust myself to recognise how right feels.

The inner journey is the necessary journey.

It is up to each of us to seek out the causes of suffering in ourselves. Only when we do, can they be removed.

Ego’s always claiming to see ‘both sides of the issue’ – an issue which ego has conjured up. Reality is not constituted of oppositions and arguments which have to be weighed up and balanced – everything in reality fits and flows effortlessly together.

Ego’s ‘even-handedness’ is really sleight of hand.

When I shelve things that are bothering me – push them aside till ‘later’, without having got to the bottom of them, I have to be very careful that they don’t begin to infect my mood or my thinking. The sooner I pay proper attention to troubling feelings, the sooner I am free of them again, through understanding what gave rise to them – from outside, and / or within my own mind.

Egoland is the land of leverage and strategy. X so that Y.

Remaining free of motives, doing things for their own sake, because they feel right, keeps us in the Heartland.

Asking deeply opens the mind and invites new awareness. What is empty and hollow (what doesn’t think it already knows) will be filled.

Being receptive attracts insights into how things work which I could not have imagined. These glimpses, and the understanding they help me to gain, strengthen my sense of belonging in the world.

Western Self-Understanding - a new dawn?

Philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, medicine and all the other disciplines of thought and speculation have evolved out of our natural human curiosity about who we are, and how this life of ours works.

Since Europe, in the 16th Century, started being pulled into the headlong trajectory of industrialising ‘Progress’ and ever-increasing world domination, I believe that Westerners have been prone to delusions of superiority.

It would be good to think that with the waning of Western power and predominance, perhaps we now have a fresh opportunity to reassess our actions over the past 500 years, and reflect on where we might go from here.

Recovering humility and realism about our true place in the world – not as Creation’s pinnacle – would be a step of true progress for our culture.

Egoland is all about appearances, perception - image, and self-image. It’s the land of grandiose gestures and heroic ‘solutions’ (the ‘final solution’) – where everyone is striving to be seen, rated, admired, looked up to.

The Heartland is the land of the ordinary, of detail and down-to-earth practicality; land of kindness and inner reality, of what’s really going on, and where things really get done.

These Rough Guides are not about beliefs: they are attempts to describe inner experience.

When I take control of my mind – when I manage to take responsibility for what is up to me, and to refrain from interfering in what is not – everything real can get on with happening. Life can continue, in its natural way – attraction, joy, harmony, creativity of all kinds.

The hardest part of my inner task is negative – learning to refrain from old bad habits - to withdraw, say an inner No to ego, in myself and in others, practising not being seduced, jostled or bounced into reactive thinking or actions – steadying up.

By practising neutrality, I make myself unappetising for predatory egos.

To succeed, in Heartland terms, doesn’t mean to do anything overtly, or get my own way. It means: ego is routed from the situation. Fear is no longer in control, no longer calling the shots.

The view of the world expressed in the symbolism of Yin/Yang, and in the I Ching, with its broken and unbroken lines, expresses the complementary 'light' and 'dark' aspects of the Cosmos.

This view of life embraces both the dynamic, proactive, engendering quality of nature, and the need to hold back, to give things space and time – the need to not rush ahead, or plough on regardless.

Yin and Yang are mutually compatible – the attraction between them holds everything in the Cosmos together, and carries life onwards. (See CA and HM, the Oracle of the I Ching)

Relationship is crucial to human identity. (Zimbabweans say ‘People are two. One is an animal.’)

We humans find out who (= how) we are through our relationships with others - including non-human others, for example nature, and music.

There is only the real to falsify.

When I am in control of myself, I stop getting in life's way, and the next thing can happen.

The one thing that is up to me, in this life, is to take responsibility for what goes on in my own mind. And this is the one thing which many people never get round to.

How to live doesn’t change, from age to age. Yet human life itself is in constant transformation, coming and going, rolling on.

Human babies are born whole and open-hearted – but often, there is nonsense – unnecessary, fear-arousing, ego-driven nonsense (much of it masquerading as ‘virtue’) going on between humans, individually and collectively, and this nonsense inevitably gets into the psyche of the human child.

Then we need to let life help us find our own way back to ourselves, to reconnect with our joy.

Evil (or ego) unmasked soon finds new hiding places – often in the self-image of the heroic unmasker! Unmasking, can drive dishonesty deeper inside the psyche.

In his strange, baggy novel Beware of Pity, Stefan Zweig writes “There must be no fooling with the feelings of others” - which is true, and clear, and helpful to realise. However, if my own feelings have been fooled with – then I too will have learned to relate incorrectly, by ‘fooling with the feelings of others’, in some way.

Unlearning what I have learned therefore becomes a part of my necessary journey, my 'via negativa' or hollow path.

the via negativa

Reality – what is is true, reliable, trustworthy – feels to the heart or psyche like solid ground, a firm basis for living, while ego-based reasoning, justifications and arguments keep opening up inner sink-holes in our feelings.

Though it may be hard to pin down in words or ideas what exactly any instance of this reality 'is', and even though this reality is in perpetual transformation, moment to moment, as my own body and feelings are, I recognise it effortlessly in my heart, with all my senses combined – because it chimes with my essential nature, with who I am in my cells, in myself.

Ego’s imitations of reality, on the other hand, rely on fictions of different kinds: either slanders against life (including myself), or abstract ‘truths’ asserted as fixed ‘for all time’; or mutually exclusive opposites, forever wrangling and claiming to have the upper hand.

The ego version of reality makes a statement, and feels like planting a flag – staking a claim, asserting ownership of something that can’t be owned.

Attaining calm or stillness, however I label it – meditation, prayer, emptiness, mindfulness – brings me, over and over again, to timeless points of neutrality. Off the wheel – just here, now - feeling my aliveness, and my belonging.

The best cure for unreality (or ego-based thinking and behaviour) is reality - i.e. what actually happens, what works (feels comfortable, endures) and what doesn’t; what we are drawn to, and what we naturally withdraw from.

When anxiety strikes – remain in reality. Remember, it’s a much bigger place than fear.

Standing still in life is not an option. Either I go on - making mistakes and letting life lead me through and out of them again, helping my capacity to gradually broaden out like a river; or else I go off – stagnate, grow ever more defensive, rigid and blinkered, fearfully refusing to flow.

Or maybe I do a bit of both!

The counsels of fear would have us believe that one way leads to success and fulfilment, the other to perdition – that I must be ever goal-oriented and watchful not to make mistakes.

I think it is more accurate to believe that whatever happens is the next thing in my life, and has been given to me. It has what I actually need hidden in it. Our treasure is so often buried deep inside our trouble.

++

When I feel I have to present a particular face to the world, I put pressure on myself. Any mask I adopt, I have chosen as a kind of support, or scaffolding, to disguise my insecurity and keep up a façade of control (what I call Koping) – but wearing a mask, or persona, compromises my psyche, and is under ego’s control – which is bad news all round.

Everything but the truth costs me dear. Everything but my natural self drains me of energy, undermines my health, creates waves and trouble, unnecessary complications.

The fact that I am able to see and say (write) this doesn’t mean I've broken free from all my ego-driven drivel!

It goes on taking time and attention to bring my own buried (i.e. unconscious, and so still active) nonsense to the surface, to be noticed and let go of.

The only thing in life I need to control is myself – or rather, is ego in myself.

On Reality

Reality is an ‘anyway’ thing – it’s what goes on, what’s going on, whether I notice it or not, and regardless of what I superimpose on it, by way of theories or interpretations.

Reality is the world in its natural flow, and the way to get to know it is to let it come to me, in its own time and its own ways. I can't get closer to reality by trying to force myself on it, intellectually, or by setting out to ‘penetrate its mysteries’ in the lab, by dissecting it, or smashing it against itself.

To apprehend reality, I need to attune to it – not try to control it, manipulate or dominate it, ‘improve’ it, civilise or domesticate it.

I am part of reality, made of what is (rather than of what I think), and accepting what is, including myself, is the only way to feel at home in myself and in life.

song - We Are Not Alone

When I let myself 'fall down’ through my fears, I find I 'land' softly, in peace and acceptance, more able to enjoy life.

'Falling down' means not clinging to my fears, and not resisting them either (resisting is another kind of clinging). It also means not trying to suppress my fears by superimposing positive words or images, or attitudes, or behaviours, on them – but also not believing their scary stories, not indulging fear in any form.

Song: Over & Over Again

Life is not cruel or indifferent – though people can be.

'Sturm und Drang' – storm and stress – pushing and shoving – is not how things actually work. Calming down – becoming inwardly still – reflective – at rest . . . no longer relying on stratagems and striving, on forethought and calculation – trusting life, including myself and my feelings, lets me become part of how things do work.

Everything is not up to me – that’s what ego would have me think. There is help, and I can ask for it. When I stop flailing around and ask for help, I am helped.

Truth doesn’t depend on words – falsehood does.

Language, to be used correctly – to avoid becoming an instrument of falsehood or half-truth – must be used with great care, and with reference to the speaker or writer’s inner senses – to what we know in ways not based on words.

Love makes acceptance possible – and so, helps to end resistance, denial and self-deception. Love gives me the security to let go of my false comforts and become true again. Where there is love and acceptance, there is no need for self-estrangement. Though with a big word like love, it is necessary to be very careful.

(Wordplay)

Resistance to life is futile, whereas resisting evil is vital (keeps us live).

The nearness of darkness – inner darkness - sometimes takes me by surprise. By inner darkness, I mean negativity, confusion, conflict, and sudden awareness of inner obstruction, or opacity – what I don’t see, don’t get – yet.

Sensing such inner darkness is often a prelude to something previously unseen coming into view.

There are different kinds of inner darkness.

There is gentle darkness: the Cloud of Unknowing*, empathy, embarrassment, silent asking for help, the upwellings of grief and other psychic pain; and there is darkness of the armoured mind: ego's self-punishing 'protections' against guilt and fear.

When they are 'working', these express themselves in disapproval, righteous indignation, and hostility towards self and others, and when they 'fail' – in a collapse into anything from anxious self-doubt to full-blown panic and dread.

Gentle darkness can be midwife to light. Painful awareness of constriction previously unfelt - because unconscious - may be the birth pangs of new life emerging, as we are freed from one more layer of denial and falsehood.

*The Cloud of Unknowing is a slim volume, written by an anonymous medieval mystic, which is a guide to ego-less prayer.

Red Flag Moments

There is often a turning point, in personal and in public, political life - say in a relationship, or in a family, or on a larger stage, in a historical process – when an ‘evil’ - some abusive behaviour that was previously sanctioned by the collective ego, by rationalisations and justifications - becomes no longer ignorable.

At these points, everything shifts. What has been hidden and colluded with (because of the inability or unwillingness of the powerful to see the situation clearly) begins to ‘out’ itself, in all its ugliness and inhumanity, as a result of its very persistence.

After the turning point has been reached, each subsequent evasion becomes no longer confusing and obfuscating to persons of goodwill (as had been the case up until then): rather, it provides further evidence of the falsehood and mischief at work deep in the heart of the set-up, the system, the family or institution.

I call these ‘subsequent’, giveaway misbehaviours – the ones that increase insight and detachment – ‘red flag moments’. It’s as if the abuser – or the abusive authorities – wave a big red flag in the air that says ‘Keep away! I am dangerous to your health!’

At this point, their protestations of innocence no longer wash – they have been, all along, at best protestations of unconsciousness.

The racism of apartheid, and sexual abuse and its cover-ups within the Catholic Church and other institutions, have taken many generations to be properly ‘outed’ – as have the evils of slavery and colonialism, including genocide, kidnapping and other racist abuses.

We in the West are still learning, and still have much to take on board about our treatment of other peoples, over the past 500 years. We are still far from full disclosure.

Willingness to be led by events leads to ever-increasing inner capacity. Capacity will follow willingness. I will become able to see and do what I am willing to be shown, and shown how.

I have found that when I start doing things differently, refraining from old, fear-based reactions, trusting my feelings more, at first it feels strange, unfamiliar, uncomfortable. What is right - correct - feels a bit wrong, perhaps even difficult, until I grow into my new, expanded comfort zone.

Then, gradually, what is wrong (but used to be second nature to me, from long habit) begins to look as awkward, unnecessary, and self-destructively painful as it actually is – and becomes easier and easier to stay well clear of.

All I have to do, day by day, is take the next step on my path. Each next step involves a transformation – it may be the birth of something or someone new, it may be a loss, a letting go. Each next step is all I have to (and sometimes all I can) do.

What is required is not being ‘good’, ‘nice’, heroic, self-sacrificing, or perfect – but being correct, natural, sincere – true to myself; being unwilling to betray myself, to cater to ego.

It’s not for me to ‘sort the world out’, or cast around for issues to protest about, people to help and problems to solve. Ego feeds on my sense of righteousness (!)

It is for me to get the joke that's here specially for me to get - and this joke is often on me. Getting it lightens my load, every time.

My bubbles (my self-deceptions and rationales) will eventually, with any luck, be burst – not because life is out to get me, but just because they are bubbles, and this is what happens to bubbles, sooner or later.

How I feel and act towards others is how I feel and act, inwardly, towards myself – the two are one.

We humans have become quite deeply misguided and destructive through accepting collective myths, rationales and heroic fantasies – falsehoods – that perpetuate conflict-causing ideas about the world and ourselves.

How things are in the world, among human beings, expresses human attitudes and actions. There is a lot to do, to divest ourselves of our accumulated nonsense.

I can't remove anyone else's 'nonsense' - it's hard enough to remove my own!

Ego fights only righteous wars. The most ruthless violence has often been perpetrated by those who have seen themselves as upholding some code of moral-religious, political or racial superiority, or as victims of conspiracy - or a killer combination of the two.

The best, most enjoyable jokes, in my experience, are the ones on me. I'm not told these jokes, in so many words - I'm 'shown' them. They happen to me, or within me. No-one else knows, unless I tell them.

The way insight slowly, invisibly ripens into tasty, nourishing fruits for ourselves and others is both natural and wonderful.

Dreaming doesn’t involve ego.

Dreaming is the psyche at play/work – doing what it needs to do, experiencing, finding out, trying out scenarios, storylines. As with young children, there is no difference between work and play, to the psyche.

Criticism of the Arts

Many writers and film-makers seem to dream onto paper, or into film – they let their unconscious direct their work, and this is regarded as natural and even 'normal', for artists. But another person’s uncensored psyche is not always the best place to be - which is why psychotherapy is such a skilled profession.

Besides, writers and film-makers sometimes allow ego to spice things up a bit, to intensify the unsettling impact of their work. 'Dark' and 'disturbing' have become terms of critical admiration, over the past thirty years or so.

To unsettle has become a declared aim of the arts in the West, but being unsettled is not always helpful, and can energise ego.

The logic of ego leads to what has been called evil. There is desperation at the back of it.

For evil, read ego.

Ego - collective ego - hides in the notion of the bogeyman/devil that has been used to frighten children and believers down the ages.

It has long seemed to me that Paul’s (St Paul’s) letters in the New Testament give Christian preachers plenty material for ego-style moralistic browbeating, whereas the reported speech and actions of Jesus give no such encouragement to ego. Rather, they are usually designed to undercut righteous self-images and hypocrisy.

This is an surprisingly clear distinction to be tangible across all this time. But perhaps: the closer to the heart, the more enduring and recognisable utterances are to us, regardless of intervening centuries and cultural gulfs.

Shame and blame are both games I do not need to play. They are like boomerangs - and if I remember to duck, they will return to their throwers.

Ego is an unnecessary intervener, constantly inciting us to futile, self-undermining effort.

It’s not what we think – it’s what we are that matters - what we are made of, at heart.

It is hard to name what we are made of – the dancing molecules, free of fantasy, falsehood and ego-strategy, free of fear.

Joy – grace – harmony – ease – life – rightness – reality. There is no need for anything else.

Ego works in the shadows, out of sight of conscious awareness. I need to bring ego and its workings back out into the open – by becoming aware of what it gets up to, within my mind, and through infecting my attitudes and actions, in the world. My reactive feelings, my lazy, unexamined inner habits, the compensatory delusions and other trouble-making nonsense I overlook in myself.

Our human life is an inner dance, a dance of hearts at play. Each relationship I have, with myself or with another, is an inner dance of mutual awareness and response, an intimate feedback system of infinite subtlety.

Ego imitates all this, turning the dance into a game of chess – substituting for real feelings and inner truth: strategy, power relations, negotiations, deals and contracts; extracting concessions, services and attention by demanding, wheedling, charming or threatening.

Ego views life as a game of winners and losers, and depends on mistrust – harmony is its enemy. When relations are harmonious, it has no basis for existence.

The brighter the self-image, the darker the shadow.

There are some things in life that we have to deal with for ourselves, on our own. Attempting to talk about them, and enlist support - unless from a therapist! - falsifies what’s happening, and blocks our way.

Evasion of responsibility is self-betrayal. There is always inner help, but sometimes we have to do without outer help, to find our way back to ourselves.

When we remain neutral, other people’s egos can’t feed on our energy.

Rhetoric, like ego, seeks to raise the pressure, to inflate the importance of what is being said and mark it URGENT! This insistence on specialness is fear-inspired, and fear-inspiring.

Gently – that’s the way. I need to be gently. Remembering, now and again, to check, adjust, correct – not the content, but the attitude of my mind - then going on, flowing on, without dwelling or fixing on problems, without pursuing trails to bitter ends. Alexander lessons for the mind. Pause – relax – let go – move on.

As long as my ego is able to control me, I remain unreliable, to myself and to others.

The brighter the light of righteous certainty, the brighter the self-image, i.e. the reflection we see of ourselves in ego’s mirror of self-approval. And the brighter the light, the darker the shadow - i.e. the murkiness of whatever I am choosing not to know about myself, the obscured underside of my attitudes and actions.

Remember: ego is expert in doing evil in the name of the good.

The true self is neutral, gentle and non-encroaching, even in enjoyment.

Perhaps I should beware the paths of righteousness!

The price exacted by ego for ‘protecting’ me (from unwanted feelings or awareness) is the opposite of self-protection: it is inner exposure to unreasoning fear, to self-attacking or self-undermining aggression.

Ego’s aim, of course, is not to protect me, but to keep me off-centre and off-balance.

Finding my way into my own Heartland, and getting to know how it feels here, has been the most useful thing I have done in my life. Becoming familiar with my Heartland helps me recognise when I have strayed out of it. When this happens (as it does) I need to remember to ask for help in finding my way back ‘home’.

As I move on through life, I find myself continually at the edge (or limit) of my capacity. I imagine this 'edge' as the growing circumference of my awareness, which is always 'edging' into my unknowing – what I can’t yet see, don’t yet get.

When I am on track, each tentative step – or insight – is validated, and I feel strengthened, upheld, and given more inner space.

Ego is ever-eager to put its oar in, to criticise, condemn or undermine whatever’s going on – including its own shenanigans!

To become true to ourselves, we need to let go of all self-images - which is easier said than done.

Not being too sure about whether I am right or not is a helper, and keeps me in my Heartland. This is not the same as gnawing self-doubt, which drives me into Egoland, and is destructive.

Not being too sure helps me to avoid being self-righteous, and also helps me not mind too much when I find out I'm wrong – as of course I often am. It improves my sense of humour.

Fear constricts our inner space, so we feel ‘up against it’ and under pressure. Dismantling fear gives us room to breathe – to look around and see more clearly, to reflect, and feel free and in control of our own lives, of how we act.

Life is always new – there is always more – it is always (and will always be) now. However, my responses to the arising moments are not always new enough – I tend to go round and round in circles, repeating myself.

Turning down the volume of my inner i-player helps me hear the quiet music of reality - the music playing NOW, for the first time.

Evil in the name of good – is what ego does best.

All power games, from the most hidden and intimate (and often unconscious) interpersonal manipulations to all-out war, are manufactured by ego, and benefit no-one. Only ego gains (profits) from them, and fear alone is strengthened.

When ego and fear are the winners, reality (including all of us) is the loser.

It's a good idea to practise refraining. There's always something it’s better not to react to, something it’s better not to say, not to do. Practice at refraining builds character and develops neutrality and detachment.

What I need, and need to do, is to free myself from inner unreality. I can’t get rid of other people’s misbehaviour and bad habits, but I can work on my own.

If I stay calm, fear recedes, and I spot the keys to my inner prison cell, lying on the floor inside the door.

The further I come in self-acceptance, the more I can afford to notice and acknowledge my own feelings, and the less easily I can be taken in by untrustworthy impulses in myself and others. (At least, that's the theory! It still happens.)

When situations arise where I find myself disadvantaged, marginalised or unfairly treated, I need to remember not to struggle to be heard, or to try and increase my leverage – for this will just energise the ego forces already active in the situation.

It’s better, for me and for the whole situation, to make straight for the goal that’s worth getting to - back into my own Heartland.

Step away – detach – let it go. Work and associate with people I can trust and relax around.

Whenever I point the finger, I push myself off-centre. I can no longer see clearly in the direction I am pointing, for my feelings are tainted - tinted all the colours of ego's pain-bow.

No-one is superior, no-one inferior. We human beings are not creation’s centrepiece. We are all equal animals.

Hell has been invented by fear – and it is fuelled (kept nice and hot and threatening) by fear.

There is no punishment in reality, except what ego brings on itself, naturally – when left to its own devices.

Our true source of life lies within each of us, in the feeling of belonging and harmony we have when we are at peace with ourselves.

It is misguided to slander people who do bad things as ‘being evil’, in the sense of having an evil nature. We can all ‘be evil’ at times, in the sense of behaving in ego-driven ways that hurt ourselves and others.

The true self is detached, reticent, relaxed; ego, on the other hand, lurches between self-assertive bravado and cringing self-doubt.

When I stuff a painful or confusing memory, and the feeling associated with it, into my unconscious (so as not to have to feel or deal with it) the thing pushed away is preserved, held onto in my mind/body (which are one) – and continues to affect me.

But, until it returns to my awareness, until I readmit it, I have forfeited both my conscious access to it, and my control of its energy.

Nothing of value is achieved by pressure or leverage.

The rationales of the powerful are unlikely to tally with the truth.

Power (being an ego-construct) waxes and wanes with people’s willingness to believe in it. Reality just is – how things are, what works is how things are and what works, whatever is going on in the culture.

Power has a tendency to believe its own self-justifying rhetoric, and so to lose contact with reality. When, as a result of such delusions, power gets too high-handed - or when it shrivels into paranoia and crazy dogmatism, then what people actually feel, need and sense to be true eventually prevails over power.

These days, we are expected to believe in growth/development/the economy - much as medieval Europeans were expected to believe in the doctrines of Christianity, including the reality of heaven and hell, as our inescapable destinations after death.

When someone lets themselves down, what I see is for my eyes only. Next time, I may be the one letting myself down.

Ego-free seeing just steps away, and that’s all – no gossip or backbiting, no dwelling on negatives.

++

So many events in life come as surprises. This observation may bring to mind shocks, and how we ‘never know what’s round the corner’; yet many more things happen in gentler ways: unexpected openings, timely meetings, offers of support.

Once I tuned in to this characteristic of life, I was able to become more grateful.

Gently is the way. Gently deflates ego, prevents it bouncing me into fear, and so into Egoland.

Gently prevents harshness, rage, hurt, and defensive reaction from infiltrating my mind, and helps to relax and dissolve any rigidity it finds here.

Practice takes us further – practising what we know, and what we’ve learned, takes us on and in, to new capacities, new freedoms.

Denial fuels ego. All the energy I put into not-seeing, not-knowing the things I’d rather not know or see goes straight from my true self to ego. I undermine myself, and increase the mischief in the world, every time I choose a half-truth, or a comforting illusion, over an unwelcome truth.

Like many people, I often seem to be more interested in failure – in the infinite variety of ways I can miss the mark in life – than in fulfilment.

Sometimes, it’s when all is well – when nothing’s wrong – that our remaining fear makes itself known.

Humour acts as a solvent on fear.

Gently, attentively, listeningly is the way.

Children - who just want to play - are closer to reality than adults who’ve forgotten how to play.

We can, and do, hold mutually contradictory ideas and beliefs in our minds at once. It’s called being human, and it is confusing.

Thought experiment: try letting my mind feel like a soft play area, or a bouncy castle - not like a squash court!

Note to self: Don’t cross-examine life. But do look deeper than appearances: look behind events, for their triggers, for causes, for meaning – for their helping function.

Everything ego initiates is a manoeuvre – do X so that Y. Leverage and mechanics, and maximising advantage, is how ego approaches life.

But reality doesn’t depend on manoeuvres or strategies – the way things actually work just is, effortlessly, unforced and immune to coercion – before, throughout and after all the unnecessary exertions of ego-bound action.

How we are is who we are –

and who we are is how we are.

This thought first occurred to me when someone told me about a friend who'd had a head injury, and said, in a revealing phrase, that when she began to recover, at first she 'couldn't remember how I'd learned to be'.

Often, not saying what I sense to be the case is a way of honouring the truth of a situation. Awareness is enough.

What I see may in any case not feel true for someone else, and saying what I see may betray the integrity of the insight, turning it into a move in a game.

I need to keep looking deeper – and consulting my feelings about what’s going on, both within and around me.

There is a world of difference between doing the right thing, and trying to ensure it looks like I'm doing the right thing.

There is no shame in having private fear-scripts and mental rat runs.

I need to remember to steady up and ask for help, when I find myself getting unsettled.

Consider this: the body includes the mind . . . and the mind includes the body. This is not the way we have been taught to think of ourselves.

I need to see things clearly, as they are – whether correct or incorrect – and to accept that things are the way they are, for now.

This doesn’t mean swallowing nonsense, or going along with misbehaviour. It means not panicking about incorrectness – other people’s and/or my own; and taking responsibility for my own fears and ego-sponsored thoughts and impulses.

And it means developing the capacity to step back, return to neutral, and let go of people and situations – to give them space to sort themselves out. When I feel I have to get involved to sort things out, this is ego/fear speaking. Refraining from interfering helps everyone.

Reality – the way the world actually works (not the way ego tells us it works) can’t be improved on.

Every true insight we receive illuminates and upholds – complements and fills out – every other accurate truth we’ve realised, everything that is true. It’s not a dynamic of argument, of ‘this and not that’, of the overturning of one thing by another.

The path of acceptance leads us in the way. As we learn to refrain from resisting and rejecting events, our attention is drawn to our own feelings, our fears and inner arguments – to ego jumping up and down, insisting that we should DO something! (‘Or else’ is implied.)

We learn - gradually, and with much backsliding - not to be bullied by our fears, but to recognise them for what they are, stand up to them, and forgive ourselves for feeling fearful.

Other people may not let us off all hooks, but the Cosmos does.

Nothing in Nature is evil to start with. Everything seen as ‘evil’ is the result of human projections.

Reality, everything and everyone, comes into being and is held together by attraction: the mysterious ‘strong force’, which physicists are still trying to understand.

Given the universal attraction between things, individual entities can only exist thanks to limitation, self-limitation and the observation of correct natural boundaries. In human terms, self-limitation disables ego, which is a notorious disregarder of boundaries.

Ego goes for extremes – wants it all, throws tantrums. Either it's on top of the world, or it's crushed by self-loathing. Ego hungers for excitement, the adrenaline rush, the pounding of the heart. It is harsh, judgemental (including self-judgemental), sets impossibly high standards, and flings reproach around like a grappling hook.

Ego lays false trails in the mind. I need to learn to differentiate between these plausible, mischievous gambits and my actual feelings, true perceptions and insights.

It is my particular gift, to ‘get’ the jokes that I myself, assisted by life, have played on myself. Each of these practical jokes I 'get' releases me from one more self-deception. Each fresh, detached glimpse allows me to see myself a little more clearly.

Whenever ego hisses: ‘You’ve got to DO something about this!’ the thing I actually have to do is resist its pressure, and withstand my own panicky impulse to react. Until I am calm again, no clarity is possible, and anything I do only fuels ego and fear.

Every person has the capacity to behave correctly, to stop jumping when fear claps its hands, and stop blaming others for their own feelings, thoughts and actions.

People are not naturally obstructions, or culprits – they are themselves. When someone acts as an obstruction to others, the one they are obstructing, most of all, is themselves. They are the ones with the main problem.

The way out (of trouble) is the way in (to our hearts).

What is true, what works, our actual feelings are more trustworthy guides than an abstract and generalised ‘morality’, with its religious or philosophical rationales and its imaginary opposites of ‘good’ and ‘evil’.

What works makes us happy, and our contentment spreads naturally, at nobody’s expense, and to everyone’s greater enjoyment.

Desire and grabbing come to grief; acceptance and disengagement come to joy and fulfilment.

Thoughts are mental food. When I allow negative or ego-tinged thoughts to fill my mind, it’s like eating rotting or poisoned food. These thoughts have an effect on my health, as well as on my state of mind - my inner atmosphere - and on the atmosphere around me.

Gently, like snow, here comes reality - overriding all my plans.

The more clearly I am aware of what’s going on within me, the more clearly I can sense what’s going on around me, in my relationships and in the world.

Many people seem to whizz through life, afraid to stop and let what’s ‘behind them’ (pursuing them, driving them) catch up with them. I set out like this myself, into adulthood, and still find myself evading what's 'behind me'.

It’s as if there’s something chasing along calling ‘Wait for me!’ While I am running, I imagine howling hounds, and myself the prey – and, terrified, I will not wait.

But when life brings me to a halt - when I am forced to stop running - I find that what was running after me just wanted to be with me, be noticed, attended to, acknowledged. There is no harm in it - on the contrary, it brings me the healing of a little more self-acceptance.

Perhaps most mental suffering is the result, in one way or another, of neglect. Failure to attend to my own feelings engenders panic in the psyche, and can lead to insensitivity to others’ feelings. The habit of inner evasion allows ego to dominate our minds, and ego grows fat on fear.

Mindfulness, attentiveness, calms my fears and brings me to rest.

Coming to the end of pretence – flushing out ego’s fakery, the compensatory role-plays I've let myself get embroiled in - can feel uncomfortable, awkward – but is like oxygen to the psyche.

What is the child of how. As I go through life, I come to see that the content of my life, and the quality of my relationships, issues from my innermost attitudes – to myself, and to others.

Gently is the way – gently is free of pressure, gives ego nothing to hook into, allows space.

It is a slow business, correcting my inner attitude – learning to spot harshness in my own mind as being the ego ploy it is - designed to draw me into fear. Recognising this gives me the courage not to be browbeaten by inner bullies.

Ego’s shenanigans are transparent to the unbefuddled mind. However, if confusion has become a habit, I am easily fooled, and turned against myself.

When I learn (i.e. develop the capacity) to let go of my fears, I grow into myself.

When I allow myself to be pulled into the egosphere (ego’s fear), I become food for ego: I lose my true identity and it can feel as if I'm being dissolved in acid - in ego's digestive juices!

I have learned that these feelings of dread and self-loss are my true self’s cries for help. I need to attend to them – steady up, become still, and let clarity return.

Using a truth as a club to beat someone with turns it into a lie. This is why it is futile to try to be heard, or to ‘have your say’, when resistance and mistrust are present.

Withdrawal – disengagement - and return to inner neutrality, are the only way to stay true.

My feelings are often way ahead of me – not of me, but of my understanding, my insight – my penetration or grasp of what my feelings already sense, know, and are guiding me to do. This is as it should be.

++

I don’t need to ‘get it', every step of the way – I am not expected to understand everything, as it happens. Life is becoming, ever-becoming, ever in transformation.

Comfort and clarity come hand in hand.

When I see clearly, I know I can let go. The Cosmos has got it, everything’s taken care of.

When I find myself in a tricky situation , my ego comes at me, ever eager, rolling up its sleeves: “Let me get that for you – leave it to me!” It tries to jostle me into accepting its trouble-making, untrustworthy ‘help’, relying on any fearfulness - or laziness - in me that might encourage me not to inspect its (i.e. my own) methods or motivation too closely.

Attention to detail is the key to not being fooled and subverted by ego.

Note to Self: Let life sort me (and others) out – not try to do it myself.

To be effective, stop trying.

When I remember to call out for help, when I'm in trouble - and call - life instantly throws me a love-line (life-line).

Note to Self: Trust the moments, and trust my feelings. Don’t trust others’ opinions, or the apparently (or automatic) next thing to do or say.

Notice (and be guided by) how it feels – this is the true authority.

The snow shows us how to go – step by careful step – careful not to fall.

step by step

(song – Christmas came early)

Life here on earth is subject to seasons, weather, ups and downs – births and deaths. Finding the ‘eternal’ in this – the steady, life-sustaining core - is an art and a journey of self-discovery.

Insider and outsider are both self-images, which perpetuate self-conflict – lurchings from sunlight to shadow, day to night. Ego deals in self-pressuring polarities, which keep us veering from one extreme to the other.

Reality, or the Heartland, persists in perpetual inner radiance – free of obstructions, arguments, justifications. Reality just is.

If I remain conscientious to avoid incorrectness, and remember to step away, when I notice I’ve made a mistake, I am shown the way. I don’t need to know all the answers in advance.

Ego is about making an impact – Taraa! And since it has no life of its own, but exists by preying on the energy it can siphon from people, its strategy is often to disturb harmony, to unsettle, and arouse mistrust, bringing disorder out of order.

Whether ‘positively’, through charm and charisma, or negatively, through meanness and manipulation, the main thing for ego is to leave its mark.

The fullness and adequacy of life in the Heartland, of life without ego, is proven by experience. There is no comparison.

Doing without brownie points and ego rewards has been a big part of coming into my own. I've had to learn to do without the untrustworthy support and false comforts of deal-based relationships - and I'm still learning!

Ego likes to sprinkle magic dust over things - or puff dry ice onto a scene or situation, to introduce an air of specialness, and prevent clarity. Ego the ringmaster knows how to heighten the tension, anticipation or dread - to ‘make something of it’.

Reality, naturalness and detachment are nothing special.

In the Heartland, there are no big deals. Everything and everyone in the world is equal in value and validity to everyone and everything else, and we just go on with our lives, step by step. Far from being boring, this way of living is constantly surprising, and more welcoming, graceful and easy than I could have imagined.

Ego increases the pressure – reality eases it, releases me from pressure. (real-eases me)

Clarity retunes (and returns) us to reality.

Note to Self on becoming aware of an unsavoury element in my thinking: if it’s there, I need to see it distinctly and acknowledge it, not sweep it under the carpet, so as not to give it houseroom, and be feeding it.

I need to attend to whatever murky motives I find in my mind, in order to stand clear of them, to detach from them. This self-extrication from ego through conscious acknowledgement of its presence has to be done over and over again; fortunately, it gets easier with practice.

Proust has come to matter deeply to his readers, because he listened to his own mind honestly, even when it was being dishonest.

Follow the heart – into clearings, and into clarity.

Truth can only be held in an open hand. Reality is accessible and self-revealing to our feelings, to our open hearts, when we are free of agenda and calculation.

karens poet

image by Karen Chivero Porter

Truth can’t be used as a lever.

Whenever ‘truth’ is used to manipulate people - to make them do or believe certain things, or feel in certain ways, or to win arguments or admiration, to feed someone's self-image - the truth has already vanished, leaving only husks, empty forms of words and ego-tinged motives.

Such discarded husks are routinely employed by ego to beautify, disguise, conceal, justify or rationalise anything at all.

Introspection has a bubble aspect to it, it can float us off, away from reality and other people (and from our hearts), if we allow ego to take the lead in our minds. But if we resist ego's promptings and stay steady, there is a clarity-bringing aspect to introspection that is invaluable and transformative.

Note to Self: Don’t compare myself, and don’t compete. These are ego’s games, and ego is the dealer who always wins. Whoever else is playing is losing.

The mind may be particularly susceptible to ego infiltration on waking from sleep in the morning, as we pick up the threads of consciousness again. It is helpful to notice what kind of thoughts we are entertaining, and to check any nonsense or negativity, until we are clear of the mists.

As I write, with the rising sun shining into this unfamiliar room, there is a rippling of light on the paper – maybe from the radiator under the window, the shifting of dust-motes? It seems mysteriously suggestive, that something I can’t see, as I look out at the bare trees on the hill, can cast a moving shadow.

When ego is casting aspersions, and making me doubt myself, it suggests that the truth might lie ‘over there’ - that there's something I need to go and have a closer look at. If I heed this untrustworthy advice and follow ego's pointing (blaming) finger, I move away from my centre, and the shadows get scarier and darker.

There is an art in discerning what needs to be attended to, and what needs to be ignored, in our minds!

Once I start listening to it, ego feeds on my fear and grows bullying – it will tell me anything, however outrageous or self-contradictory, just to keep me off-balance. The only thing to do is practise not listening.

As long as my hurt feels bigger than my heart’s capacity to encompass it, I am understandably scared of my feelings. My fear fuels my ego, giving it a 'rescuer' role to play, and perpetuating a vicious cycle.

Once I get to a place where I know (because I have learned from experience) that my heart is bigger - more spacious - than my hurt and my fear, I can begin to trust that whatever is troubling me will pass – I will survive, it will come right.

Many people accept awards on ego's honours list, and then feel bound to live up to their ego-appointed self-images. These people can be gatekeepers in groups, self-appointed distributors of approval or disapproval.

Words are not the point – though, used with care, they can be helpers, or 'rough guides'. The right words can point the way towards something we don’t yet see, or describe something we know from experience, something that is neither an object nor a concept, but a felt event.

Each one of us needs kindness – gentleness and non-rejection – to flourish, and become ourselves. I need to be gentle towards myself, to be gentle towards others. If I find myself being harsh, it is a sign that I am being inwardly harsh towards myself.

When I realise I’ve made a mistake, ego will often swing into action - either with self-justification and criticism of others, or with self-derision. Whereas what I need, at these times, is compassion and self-acceptance - and a sense of humour.

The messiness of healing is natural, for all the yucky stuff I've not wanted to feel or see - the deferred hurt and anger I’ve been sitting on - emerges into conscious awareness when I stop denying it and fending it off.

The process of loosening our inner bonds is subtle and intricate – but not entangling or strenuous.

Much mental suffering can be said to result from neglect, from failure to attend, to be inwardly truthful. Neglect of our feelings allows ego, powered by fear, to run riot in our psyches.

When I point the finger at someone or something, I push myself off balance, and out of the Heartland.

When I compare myself with others, I let ego shove me aside, so it can stand centre stage, measuring, commentating, passing judgement - and shrinking my heart.

Note to Self: Take my time. Let life come to me – savour it, and let it go.

++

When I'm in trouble, I need to remember to ask for help. (Asking for help, inwardly, brings help.)

When others are troublesome, I also need to remember my own need for help, to guard against writing them off.

When things are going well (or not so well) - just carry on. Don’t dwell. Don’t let ego build a palace (or dig a pit) for me.

Nothing is ‘above’ us, nothing is ‘below’. Everything is around and within us.

Symbolically, 'above' has been used to mean: better than, more holy than, in authority over; 'below' - inferior to, poorer than, ‘under’ us, subject to us.

Symbolically, 'around' means: on a level with us in the world, sharing the earth, and this moment of existence, on an equal basis with us;

And 'within' means: belonging to our awareness, present in our own being.

Song: We are not apart

This writing is about how I keep finding and refinding my way back to wisdom, through the mental forests of fear and falsehood (following, in this case, Beowulf-like, the truth-bearing tread of rhythmic alliteration on the English-speaking mind!)

Falsehood is bad for our health.

We human beings are mostly water: we shouldn’t try to flow uphill.

One of the many good things I find about growing older is no longer having either the energy or the inclination to jump through hoops.

Life is not what we think. Ego is what we think, and nothing more.

I never know where my next blessing is coming from.

The lessons I learn in life often clash with the beliefs I have been holding - so I have to learn them over and over again, till my old beliefs gradually fade.

Life doesn’t argue with me – it leaves me to ‘get’ things in my own time, when I'm ready to.

What I am learning on this slow path into the Heartland is to stop gripping – to loosen my fingers from the bars of my playpen-prison.

When I ‘get it’, when I understand something, something happens in my heart, and viscerally.

Intellectual understanding is helpful, it can help me focus in the right direction - but it doesn’t light me up, it can't conduct the energy of reality through my circuits.

Fear is ego’s plutonium – the enriched element of intense, self-perpetuating feeling, which - unattended to - can turn me into a reactor or a warhead.

My mind can be like a bull with its head down – running at things – scared and scary – particularly when faced with something it doesn’t ‘get’, and feels it needs to.

Another good thing about getting older is sensing that there are many things in life I don’t need to do – places I don’t need to see, languages I don’t need to learn, books I don’t need to read, people I don’t need to know.

I no longer feel I’ll have missed something essential if I die without experiencing them.

There are latch-opening questions – which enable a wider, or deeper perspective to emerge into view; and there are hatch-closing, lid-slamming questions (of which ‘why?’ can be one) – which make the heart recoil, withdraw, wrap itself up again.

Bullies are scared people.

Life is not what we think. Reality is not what we think. The way things work is not the way we think they work.

Effort only intensifies ego.

Clarity comes as a surprise – when I’m thinking of something else, or when I’ve been relaxed, enjoying myself. It comes like a gift of light – a sudden sense of ‘getting it’ (the whole story) afresh – harmonising what I am consciously aware of with what I already know in my blood and bones, from my inner (implicit, inarticulate) experience.

Unconsciousness is not the same as innocence. The ego-bound are deeply unconscious, because they don’t want to know what they are up to.

Understanding – seeing through ego games – is not accusation.

Ego stores (hoards) hurt, and transforms it into fear, which it uses as energy, as fuel (ammunition) in its conflicts. Healing allows us to let go of our stored hurt, and stand up to our fears, trusting our hearts to deal with whatever comes up.

We live – indeed, we grow up – amid other people’s unfinished (and undealt with) business. So it becomes ours to deal with – we inherit one another’s messes, and if we don’t want to hand on a mess to the next generation, we need to address what our forebears failed to address.

When we come into harmony, duality disappears (CA p93). In reality, there is no ‘Us and Them’.

Our path is uniquely ours. There are no collective paths.

Our own path, the way onwards, for each of us, is the way back to ourselves. This path leads back through whatever we have done that was untrue to ourselves. Our path to our own truth lies through our own untruth(s).

There’s only room for one ego rampant in any small group of people.

Failure to relate – insensitivity to others – is due to inability maintained by unwillingness. Willingness leads to capacity.

Carol Anthony writes (Guide, p 29) ‘We should not brandish the light, but allow it to shine through us, as if we were not there’.

There is nowhere else to fall, but into reality (truth) – where we will all eventually fall, when we give up our bad habits of fabrication and resistance to life.

The fruits of cheating, coercion and bullying are fear, disquiet, no rest.

EDITED TO HERE march 6th

It’s worth reminding ourselves that bad behaviour (evil deeds) is (are) usually done in the name of some kind of righteousness.

Whatever we need to do is doable by us.

All flags belong to ego.

Reality is not the problem. Unreality is the problem.

Love and truth are inseparable.

Willingness gives birth to Capacity, after a period of inner growth like a pregnancy. Capacity is really a set of twins, called Able and Ample.

If someone is unable to ‘get’ – empathise – understand something, it suggests they are (possibly at a deeper level) unwilling to open their awareness. Such unwillingness (or shutdown) has its reasons.

Thinking of the destructive trajectory our culture is on, and even though we understand more and more about the damage we are doing, and the need to change our economic behaviour, our apparent inability (unwillingness) to do so – We need to be stopped. We cannot stop ourselves voluntarily. Therefore, we will be stopped.

Help comes, whenever we ask for it – or even admit we need it. Our teeth-clenching determination to fight on single-handed is, ironically, what prevents the ever-available help from getting through to us.

We all have natural access to ‘all Cosmic knowledge’ (CA2). All that is required is openness to our feelings, and willingness to be guided.

The straw that breaks the camel’s back – if it forces us to look with fresh eyes at a game we have been caught up in - is also the lockpick that opens the door of our inner prison cell. A liberty taken one step too far can free us from delusion.

Things are what they are – which is often not what they seem.

Gently does it. Where there’s vehemence, ego slips in.

The bad places to be (workplace, family, nation state) are where the out of control are in control.

Let your heart be heard.

Stop complicating things. Let them be simple, easy, harmonious – as they want to be.

Not catering to fear makes us stronger. Resisting fear, whenever it crops up – learning to recognise it, acknowledge it as what it is – fear, only fear - and stand up to it, not let ourselves be bullied or cowed by its threats, makes us more real, more true and trustworthy, to ourselves and to others.

We are all casualties of history – of other people’s previous failures to deal with their own feelings, and their tolerance of incorrectness in themselves and others. We, and only we ourselves, can deal with what we have inherited from our elders. Nobody can make us do what we need to do to free ourselves of falsehood, nobody can do it for us, and nobody is supervising our progress or lack of it.

The root of fear lies in denial, in the refusal to feel. Just by being aware of our fear, by feeling it, we begin to calm ourselves and come back to reality.

There is no need to contrive results, or to force ourselves on people, or on life. The missionary/capitalist impulse has led us way off track in Western culture.

Our understanding, on our way to the Heartland, evolves through time. Just as our bodies are renewed every seven years or so, so our capacity to comprehend – to ‘get’ how things work - is gradually refreshed, overhauled, and we find ourselves in a new place – with a more open-handed ‘grasp’ of reality, realising a little more, being more in harmony.

Step by trustworthy step, everything can be healed, everything false and fear-mongering can be laid to rest, and we can become true to ourselves again.

Each of us must pass through the narrow door of self-liberation, to let go of the past.

Clarity can only be about what is – what already is, what actually, anyway is the case, and is ready to be seen. This means that we are ready to see, accept, to make room in our awareness for the clarity that comes to us.

Delusions and fantasies – including self-images - offer no clarity. They are based in words, scripts – glosses or versions (rewrites) of reality, and connected to tight-knotted feelings of fear and resistance.

Many people make it their business to get through life with their defensive or flattering self-images intact. Ego (or fear) rules them, and they will do anything to avoid facing up to their own self-deceptions. Life continually offers us opportunities to see through ego’s strategies, if we accept its help and allow events to unmask the ego activity within our psyche. Ego, on the other hand, would have us demonise life – see it as ‘out to get us’, and ‘a bad joke’ – and many people go along with this slander.

So life is indeed ‘out to get us’ – but only in the sense that it wants to haul us out of Egoland, so we can come back to ourselves, come back to life, to reality.

Life is not prewritten – everything we do, and don’t do, is a part of the unfolding present.

We tend to look away from, more than we attend to what needs our attention. Human attention makes all the difference to things. We can deal with anything we’re willing to attend to.

Everyone is living with the consequences of their actions and decisions, or indecisions and sleepwalking, automatic behaviour.

People almost never commit ‘evil’ deeds in the name of evil – but very often, evil is done in the name of ‘the good’ – or out of a twisted sense in the perpetrators of what their own survival requires.

As we move into the Heartland, our old nightmares no longer hold sway in our imaginations, and we have a sense of our life – our inner freedom - being restored to us.

Each step on this path into the Heartland can open us up more. As healing proceeds, and we learn to trust life more, so we can bear to see how deep our hurt has gone – without collapsing into victimhood, or other ego-tinged backlashes. We come to appreciate more and more love’s life-giving capacity to bear pain, and not turn away.

Note to self: Be attentive – particularly to anything that avoids attention, and seeks out the shadows. But don’t dwell – don’t let ego direct my thinking.

And also – attend to the enjoyable, to what flows naturally, without obstruction, without demanding attention.

The smashing of illusions can feel quite brutal. But though it feels like loss – like grief, even – loss in itself is not destructive. More, losing an illusion is an enabling loss.

All effective influence comes from the heart.

It is truth or falsehood which is ‘heard’ by the heart – inwardly heard, or discerned. So ‘getting’ things (as in getting the point, the message, the joke) doesn’t depend on how loudly and pervasively (as with advertising or propaganda - ego’s games), or with what sophisticated technology something is communicated, but rather on the quality/nature of the influence.

Our true self and ‘things’ – i.e. other people, events, reality – are in tune with one another. We can trust the Cosmos to be true to itself.

There is no such thing as ‘dead’ or inert matter. Everything resonates with everything else, everything’s dancing - everything is and has a form of consciousness.

If you can transmute your experience, your feelings into music or literature or art, you are doing/ making something that others will recognise and relate to.

For several centuries in the West, among the young, educated and artistic elite, there has been a recurrent subculture characterised by envy and imitation of misery.

We are not the whole point of the Cosmos, or the culmination of Creation. The earth is not here for our convenience. Whatever gave us these ideas? When did we start to think like this? (This is worth reflecting on.)

Be aware – and beware – of your hotly held opinions (your ranting irons).

To rephrase a familiar saying: there is no rest in Egoland.

In the Heartland, there are no motives. The Heartland is free of agenda, strategy, timetables and deadlines. And yet, things get done here, effortlessly, things which bear fruit and endure. Egoland is full of goals and plans – conscious and unconscious – and restless activity, but its busyness is self- defeating, creating unintended, destructive consequences for everyone who involves themselves.

Things come – events happen – when they’re ready to – when all the necessary conditions for them to occur naturally have been fulfilled. How else could they happen? Things seized before their time, or obtained by cheating or manipulation, contain built-in fates, unhappy consequences.

Life is dynamic, in the moment – and ego is always eager to have a go at getting in on the act. So there are always decisions to be made – tiny invisible inner turnings away or towards. Nothing is pre-decided, it is up to us.

In the Heartland, when we discover an error we have made, we are not shamed – we are shown. There may be a smile of recognition, an amused shrug of owning up – caught (by ourselves) in the act. Arrest (of ego) is release.

More and more reality – truth – means more and more freedom: freedom from fear, and freedom to be ourselves.

To live is to partake of reality – to be a living part of the all.

We are born complete and intact, in our capacity to feel and relate, to respond. Without language, without words, complete.

updated 20/12/11