Interesting thread. “Ego”. Didn’t we get this label/concept from Siggy Fried? Perhaps a questionable source? Does it even exist? (Was Freud a giant Hasnamuss?) If we are primarily transducers of information and energy then there might not be a point of reference like an ego. So I think self might be more of a field. But even that distinction might not matter much. You is what you is.
I recall the C’s saying self, spirit, and soul were all pretty much one and the same. I guess I am suggesting the ego is a mental construct. Perhaps a nonexistent concept of personhood. Another divide and conquer psychological differentiation.
So what is an inner compass? Does it access different levels of the human brain machine? And all of a sudden we are dissecting what the hell IS a human bean, anyway?
Welcome to the deep end.
Ego is the Latin term for 'I':
ego (n.)
by 1707, in metaphysics, "
the self; that which feels, acts, or thinks," from Latin ego "I" (cognate with Old English ic; see
I); its use is implied in egoity.
{...}
Psychoanalytic (Freudian)
sense is from 1894; sense of "conceit" is 1891. Ego-trip first recorded 1969, from
trip (n.). Related: egoical.
Another of the common 'ways of talking about our customary or worldly self' is the word person or persona. I find it much easier to understand because of the associated imagery:
A
persona (plural
personae or
personas), depending on the context, is the public image of one's personality, the social role that one adopts, or simply a fictional
character.
[1] The word derives from Latin,
where it originally referred to a theatrical mask.
[2] On the
social web, users develop virtual personas as
online identities.
Who we are as a person - or who we think we are - is the 'fictional character' or we have chosen to embody here on the BBM in order to participate in the school of life, and ideally learn certain kinds of lessons. Who we are is a fiction - not in the sense that we are all fake, but in the sense that we are embodied fictional stories, or living myth, and there is much more to us than we can shake a stick at. This is another way of talking about the point made above - we are composed of information.
This opens up one of those fascinating mutually-constitutive dualities - without the darkness, one cannot know the light. In the same way, without a mask, one cannot know one's true face. Without becoming horribly lost, one wouldn't have a burning question about creating, locating, or understanding the internal compass. Without knowing the Flesh, we cannot know the Soul. Without negative, no positive. Inhale, exhale. You get the drift.
The mask of our persona, to put it in terms laid out by the C's is our physicality. They have said that 'aural profile and karmic reference merges with physical structure'. In that sense, this world is a masquerade ball, constantly whirling out of control, and constantly being brought into balance. One of the joys of my life has been to see (in myself and in others) the 'godspark', or golden inner light - in Pauline terms, to see the world of the Flesh, but to also deepen into seeing the life of the Soul that is glowing just below the surface of things.
The kicker is that I made a choice at some level. The C's quote above doesn't really get at this sense of personal agency and choice involved in incarnation, adopting a certain mask, a certain role, a certain character, and a certain life-plot in the current grand drama. I think they've said enough in other contexts for us to surmise that it wasn't just a random event.
Reincarnation is generally thought to be an Eastern thing. But it's an idea that runs through Plato (in the Myth of Er, for instance) all the way to Bill Baldwin (in his book Spirit Releasement Therapy), to the C's.
One aspect of the discussion in this thread touched on a sort of workplace anthropology that posits certain class positions in society as lending themselves to more of a tendency towards truth, ie., 'working class/ high pain tolerance/fooled less easily [vs.] intellectuals/lazy/stooges for the regime. Lobaczewski suggested this, too, writing that the workers had more of a natural immunity to ponerological infections. But what I find fascinating about the following quote from Baldwin is it provides one possibility of how the 'persons' (working class or intellectual) finds themselves in certain 'theatrical roles' in the first place - as the result of Soul choice.
Probably not the whole banana (this only touches on one of the three aspects mentioned by the C's, that of karmic reference) but perhaps enough to chew on. I'd seen 'simple and karmic understandings' mentioned on the forum for a long while, but I didn't really grasp what it could mean until I read Baldwin:
When an individual spark of God-consciousness, the spirit being, chooses to come into the earth plane from unmanifest or non-physical consciousness, some preparation is required. There is a level of the spirit realm, described as the Light, which seems to be near the earth but in a higher frequency or vibrational rate and invisible to most people. In esoteric literature it has been called the Astral Plane. It is made up of Lower, Middle, and Upper levels, each level being further divided into sublevels. There is a portal, or entry station, through which a spirit being initially must pass in order to arrive at the specialized area of preparation in the Middle Astral (Monroe,1985,p.128).
In the Middle Astral there are great Halls of Learning where a being can prepare for earthly life. There is a Planning Stage where the being develops the Life Plan, the schedule of events and opportunities in the life to come. This place is often perceived as resembling a corporate board room with a large table, around which sit all the beings who will participate in the coming earth sojourn. In this Planning Stage all possible interactions with the others will be negotiated, agreed to, and arranged (Wambach,1979;Whitton and Fisher,1986). In the Planning Stage, counselors (usually three to seven in number) assist the being in recalling and reexamining the unfinished business and unresolved emotional conflicts from other times, other places and other earth lifetimes.
The being makes choices regarding elements of the coming life-for example, gender; race; health; parents; life circumstances, such as geographical location, affluence or poverty; marriage partners; and children. The entire range of learning opportunities for the coming life is developed in this stage. Events and opportunities are arranged which will give everyone involved the opportunity to resolve conflicts and balance the remaining karmic debts. This is the foundation for the concept of Karma, the law of cause and effect: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. In the Christian tradition it is represented by the phrase, "As you sow, so shall you reap."
So we're talking about spiritual economics - we show up here with debt, and we gotta pay, and pay with ourselves, a la Mme. Salzmann, who writes about the 'two-ness' of us, our false personality that vibrates on a Flesh frequency, and our essence, that vibrates on a Soul frequency.
The Ancient Wisdom holds that there are three aspects of Divine Essence which shine forth to create, qualify, condition and govern all forms in the physical universe. The first, Will or willpower, is the propellant of existence. Love is the second aspect. It modifies the impact of Will and blends with Active Intelligence to produce wisdom. Active intelligence is the third aspect, the Mind of God which overshadows all substance. Spiritual maturity of the human race will see these three qualities fully evolved and manifesting. The final focus of our spiritual learning is love. The bottom line of healing is love. Love without object, unconditional love, love which neither demands nor expects anything in return (Fisichella, 1985, pp. 29-36).
All there is is love, the expression of love as one person loves another, the experience of love as one person is loved by another, and the barriers to the expression and experience of love. The barriers to love between people are the mental and emotional residues which are carried from lifetime to lifetime. This is a basic tenet of past-life regression therapy and spirit releasement therapy. As the designed events unfold in the lifetime, each involved being has the right of free will to choose any possible course of action, including the one which will lead to forgiveness, resolution and balancing past karmic debts. If the being makes an alternative choice, there is no punishment, recrimination, or judgment, just a different outcome. There will be another opportunity to balance the ledgers of the past. Within the framework of eternity, every injustice, every indiscretion, every sin of omission and commission, every jot and tittle will be balanced; nothing will be left undone or unresolved. When that total balancing is accomplished, all beings will rejoin Source. All will return Home. No being will be left behind, none will be left out.
An important aspect of the Planning Stage is the design of the lifeline, extending from conception to the maximum age attainable, which includes all possible choice points for choosing death and checking out of the lifetime. The checkout points might include terminated pregnancy, childhood illness, teenage suicide, battlefield death for a man, death in childbirth for a woman, auto accident, drug overdose, surgery, heart attack, murder, or death by natural causes at the maximum possible age on the lifeline. A spirit being plans all possible points of departure or death. No one is ever responsible for someone else's death. There is always something to be learned by the death of a person at any one of the checkout points, both for the person who chooses to depart from the physical body and for those who are left behind.
Then he dives into the development of the mask, or the identification with the Predator Mind:
From this Planning Stage the spirit comes into the manifest or physical universe and the earth plane. The being will find its place, wherever that might be. A portion of the consciousness engages with the physical level at the moment of conception and remains with the developing fetus, recording all surrounding stimuli as though directed at itself. This portion of consciousness seems to be related to the subconscious, which records without discrimination, judgment or discerning filter of any sort everything which transpires nearby. This function of mind does not sleep and is apparently similar to, if not identical with, the hidden observer, the mechanism which records the experience of a person while under anesthesia or hypnosis.
The remembered information includes most prominently the emotions and communication of the mother, the father, and, to a lesser degree, others in the vicinity. This certainly includes the conversations and emotions surrounding the birth experience (Netherton, 1978; Verney, 1982, 1987; Grof, 1985; Chamberlain, 1988).
An essential accessory for the physical life experience is the conscious judging mind. The mind constantly assesses the environment for real or imagined threats to survival, and it finds many. The original design function of the mind was survival of the being, or of whatever the being considers itself to be. The pure being, or spirit, is passive in its embodied manifestation here on the physical plane. The aspect that becomes involved with other personalities in emotional interactions is the personality.
Soon after conception, the being seems to forget who it is and whence it came, in time coming to presume that it is the physical body. Thus, survival of the body becomes the goal of the mind. As the personality develops, the being identifies with the personality and the mind itself. Since the function of the mind is survival of whatever the being considers itself to be-and since the being has come to consider that it is the mind-the function of the mind perpetuates its own concern with survival.
The result is ego. This error of mind, this refocusing of its own function, leads to the unnecessary mental and emotional residues in the individual, and to much of the seemingly endless human suffering on the planet. The ego seeks to survive by competing, by validating its own viewpoint and invalidating the viewpoint of other people, by making itself right and others wrong, (often at the expense of denying truth) and by justifying its own actions and behavior while judging the behavior of others; in short, by self-aggrandizing. The judgments, assumptions, conclusions and decisions are the mental residue on which the ego acts in successive lifetimes or incarnations.
[...]
However, these self-deceiving mechanisms have a major personal cost: they deny one's self-responsibility, especially responsibility for one's own motives, intentions, emotions, desires, behavior and actions. This avoidance of responsibility leads to the further self-deception of falsely blaming others for one's own misfortunes and assuming false guilt for the suffering of others. The ego is proficient at denying its own failings and inferiorities, suppressing these rejected aspects in the unconscious mind and thus denying them expression. However, this darker side, termed "the shadow," does find an avenue of expression, particularly in projections (Singer, 1973, pp. 209-228). Projection of the shadow onto another person or group of people often leads to prejudice, conflict and violence. This is one function of the ego which distorts the purpose of the reincarnation cycle as a process of spiritual evolution.
Although I'd disagree with him here, and say that without ego, there would be no process of spiritual evolution - there would be no weight against which we can learn to strengthen ourselves.
Responsibility begins with the willingness to acknowledge oneself as cause in any situation. This precludes blame, shame, guilt, resentment and remorse. It is always false, in a larger sense, to blame another person for one's own troubles or to feel guilt over perceived self-blame. Misperceptions and misinterpretations of human interactions lead to false decisions, assumptions, conclusions and judgments. The emotional and mental residues thus engendered, and the deep spiritual need to achieve balance, can lead to unnecessary re-embodiment in the reincarnation cycle. Discovering the truth of any situation and clarifying the distortions of mind will bring freedom from these destructive emotions and mental programming.
Reading through this, I found some freedom from the mental programming that tells us all we're just meat robots who are 'here for a good time, but not a long time'. The idea that we choose our ignorance and that we choose our own death, is freeing in thinking about the coming changes. All of the people who will be swallowed up by effects of The Wave do so by their own Free Will, based on their own chosen lesson plan. They also have their own role to play in the great balancing that is going to occur. Who am I to interfere in their choice? Maybe it's an interference in the great balancing itself, by preventing in the learning-through-suffering and 'payment' of someone else.
That brings up the difference between pain and suffering. I've heard it said that pain is the sensation, whereas suffering is the story of the sensation, or the possible meaning inherent in it. Pain tolerance was mentioned here as a necessary precondition for truth. I understand what's meant by that, and I think it's partially correct - but it is a much different beast to simply be able to take some pain vs. going out and seeking it intentionally on the basis of growth in Knowledge and Being.
People passively endure all kinds of pain and don't learn anything from it. Whatever 'it' is, they're just relieved its over, and then go back to whatever caused it in the first place - usually diving headlong into pleasure, foregoing any search for what happened, why, how. Maybe they accidentally 'pay' a little bit, but then go straight back into karmic debt. The mask goes back on just as quickly as it begins to slip. As they cycle through highs and lows, peaks and troughs, through many lifetimes, it generates a waveform of the torture-nurture cycle, which I think is what the 4D STS feeds on. It leads to an extended period of constant disintegration, by which energy is extracted.
Someone who seeks out pain, however, could be said to be actively engaged in life, taking up responsibility for themselves, their character, and their pain is no longer just a sensation to be endured, but a story to be lived, the primary hiding place of meaning. Eventually the mask slips, and they catch a glimpse of the expanse of their golden true nature in the mirror. The strange thought shows up, a mix of "That was horrible" and "Thank you!" A change of state becomes possible - a positive disintegration whereby energy is multiplied because some of the internal pleasure-loving parasites were cooked out in the fever. And perhaps this cycle of growth and growing up creates a much different frequency that is also 'food', a type of affirming information for 'ourselves in the future', creating a circuit that's outside of Time. Rather than breakdown, it is a breakthrough.
So I don't know if pain tolerance is adequate as a precondition. I'd replace that with good ol' intentional suffering, because insofar as is it is a Work concept, pain tolerance is already implied. One item that might be added to hlat's list is connection with 'ourselves in the future', or some tendency towards remembering one's Life Plan (which would be signed, sealed, and delivered in 5D, ostensibly, which is outside Time, thus making our Life Plan a key facet of connecting with 'ourselves in the future'). Kinda bizarre to think about - there we 'are' in the no-Time of 5D, writing a contract to forget and then re-connect with ourselves.
I don't know what changes for some Soul when they sit in the Halls of Learning and finally say to the Elders or whatever, "You know what, guys, I'd like to try Truth this time around." "That's going to hurt, Jimmy. You sure you're up for it? You have a lot of debt to pay." What are the conditions of possibility for someone to choose a positive 'breakthrough' cycle? I don't know for sure, but maybe the 'rareness' of it follows natural principles. On an apple tree, not every branch will bud - not every bud will flower - not every flower will be pollinated - not every fruit will mature - not every mature fruit will fall on fertile soil - and not every mature fruit that falls on fertile soil will germinate and becomes another tree. The same probabilities may be at play in the development of Souls.
