Forgive Me Lord, the Ego Made Me Do It!

It is utterly fascinating the seemingly infinite ways the ego-self seeks to diminish itself, thereby conversely strengthening its experience of itself as “existing.” And that experience must be purified in order to be made more real.

The ego-self sees itself as a nasty, bad thing and it thrives through an inherent disgust with itself and the things it thinks and does and it projects that disgust on other egos that it perceives must in fact be like it.

Certainly, it can think and do many wonderful and magnanimous things too. Yet, how to jive that with its nastiness is a crucial ego task.

Therefore, to escape this inherent and chronic dissatisfaction with itself, it attempts to cut itself off from itself. Thus, we have the self and then some abstract, conceptualized, non-conceptual, non-self version of itself, that it must then struggle and sacrifice the whole of its apparent existence in order to “realize.”

Now it can continue to adhere to the world's paradigm of “learning” by teaching itself NOT to be itself, but rather, some lofty, wondrous, spiritual non-self self, that is not a self at all.

But from whence does this conceptual, non-conceptual, fantasy-self come? Why its concept of “God,” of course, or Divine Mind, Universal Consciousness, etc, etc. They all essentially mean the same thing, self perfectly purified of itself in a freedom from self. Ha!

The self despises itself for the nasty things it thinks and does, which it often must do simply because it's a 'self.' Therefore, it makes compromises with itself by adopting belief in a “spiritual” non-self that will free it from its self-hatred and help “transcend” itself.

Now self can essentially continue to blame itself for all its errors, but luckily, it's not responsible for any higher good or even moments of unusual experiences of profound peace and tranquility. That requires the self invent an abstract concept it calls “Spirit” (or “Being”) which must be “realized” fully to become fully experienced (“Awakening”).

Now, whenever ego-self performs profoundly spiritual acts, or achieves higher states of consciousness, self can interpret that as Spirit and not self at all, thereby seeking to negate the inherently bad ego-self (notice that not-ego concepts must be capitalized to insure sacredness).

Yet, since it may take a very long time to purify self of itself, and self recognizes that many die before purification (can't be proved, only believed) the ego-self accounts for this by inventing the concept of “reincarnation.” Now self can continue many “cycles of birth and death” until the reward or outcome is fully “realized,” like its concept of “God” is fully realized, even though it's only just a concept.

Hahaa!

This game is so funny that, if it wasn't for all the suffering that originates from it, we could all die laughing.

But then maybe to die laughing is what must happen!
MikeS