Inflated Ego

I’ve noticed that when things are ‘bad’, meaning, I’m participating in negative emotions and I’m really struggling to push through, I manage to get through it because it’s easy to identify what exactly it is that I need to work on and write about. Recently I’ve noticed this starts the pattern.

When I push through and write myself out and complete my self-forgiveness to the point of actually changing my experience within myself, I have the tendency to go into over-drive where I try to ‘do it all’ and I want to change over night without walking through the process step by step. So this time, for example, I went to Montreal to sort out my next school year. My academic advisor gave me serious accolades and painted a world of academic opportunity if I kept things going the way they were. I managed to keep myself focused, that is, until I got home, because that’s when my parents asked me how it went. I went into the old pattern of wanting to impress my parents, or wanting to show them that I’m doing well etc... and when I told them about what the professor said I went into a positive emotional energetic experience. This was my polarity experience to having previously been worrying about the trip and my academic future. On top of this, I also did well in an interview and got a job and I used that to feed the positive experience.

The polarity experience consisted of feeling ‘good’ about myself, going into thoughts about how I’m doing well at school and “good for me!”- type thoughts. I start getting positive feedback from other family members which re-confirms my ego-inflating thoughts, and I’ll start to feel special, to feel like I’m winning at some fantasy competition in my mind and I participate in energy. This is not equality, but rather a “me-against-the-rest” mentality in a survival system. This is where I become unclear, because my whole life I thought winning (the ‘winning’ experience) was the ‘goal of life’.

 I’ve mostly felt uncomfortable in my own skin, and I’ve felt like a failure and an outsider, and so throughout that experience in my mind, my mind sought the polarity opposite, thinking that was ‘right’ and the way things were ‘supposed’ to be.

I’m sure I’ve been bouncing back and forth between the two poles my whole life without any awareness of the pattern, but the experience that stands out for me is the negative one. I’d been thinking all along that I’d been doing something wrong, or somehow ‘living wrong’ because my experience within myself was generally negative.

But now, after I use the Deseni tools to get through something and push myself to actually get things done or be effective, the positive feedback has been leading to ego. I can see a ‘me first’ mentality brewing within me which does not consider all equally, but is actually a back door where self-interest slips in. I know how deceptive the mind can be, so I know how important it is to write out the experience of ego and see it for what it really is before it gets to be a possession.

I can see this is a pattern which is reinforced by the system within which we live, wherein as a student we must impress our teachers and gain their approval to get good grades. Good grades lead to better jobs, which equals financial security and survival. We also need to impress our bosses, and validate ourselves to them as ‘good employees’ so that when the axe falls our asses are safe. Again, our survival is on the line here, especially for those that live pay-check to pay-check.

So before Desteni, one of my survival techniques was to aim to impress my teachers, my bosses or any other authority figure, because of my fear of survival which made me see them as holding my security in the palm of their hand. I would validate or gauge myself based on the positive feedback from them. I would use my sexuality, my charisma, I’d try to do everything right and perfect, I’d hope that I was better than the others and I would feel more secure if the others weren’t doing as well as I was. I would use the positive feedback from the figures of authority to confirm my survival, to validate myself and to ‘win’ at the game of life.

After studying at Desteni for a while I finally understood that this competition with my peers is fear-based and that competition for survival is actually what’s going on in the world that’s creating a huge gap between the rich and poor. The rich live in a heaven on earth compared to the suffering of the starving. I do not want to perpetuate this within myself as I no longer accept this as a part of human nature that we feed with our fear every day. I’ve changed my perspective with my peers now to one where I want to support them, I ask them for help, and I understand the equality of all being able to succeed and support each other.

But herein I see revealed to me the fact that I have not lived this as my absolute truth. My slipping on to participation within the ‘winning’ experience shows me that I still look for the validation of authorities to feed my ego and the feeling of ‘winning’, I still compete within ego. The ego is so easily bruised, it’s so unstable. “Pride cometh before a fall” as they say, because when you get up on the pedestal you realize that a positive charge is never constant, the pedestal is just a mirage, and the only way to go is down. I’m sick of bouncing back and forth between the positive and negative charges, so I’m stopping this experience within myself now, before it becomes my reality again.

I had to stop writing for the day, but when I woke up this morning and was doing my watching/rating for the day, I somehow accidentally ended up on the wrong page of the thread. I watched all these old videos and one of Lindsay’s came up that really assisted and supported me within this point I’m trying to clarify here. This is the video:

From Battle to Self-Expansion - Man Know Thyself http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IpChcCO4o4&feature=player_embedded

I was having trouble figuring out what my corrective application was going to be within this point. I asked myself the question: how will I handle the situation of succeeding without going in to ego?

Because of the fact that I participated in the positive energetic feeling, I know that I’m in for the fall, the polarity, and I’m suppressing and avoiding facing myself within this, and I’m instead going blank and numb because my mind as ego wants to stay ‘up’ and ‘high’ like I’m on my high horse. But I know that I can direct myself back down to reality and humility in a way that is supportive to myself.

The negatively charged emotional polarity experience usually consists of thoughts such as “I can’t do this” “I can’t keep up with the rest,”  I get this feeling of everything around me moving so fast while I remain burdened by the incredible amount of things I must do to succeed and win and stay “up.”

So in this moment I allow myself to slow down and open up within myself. I allow myself to return to the absolute humility of equality with everyone and everything that’s Here. I allow myself to be one with everything that’s here, instead of wanting to feel special and above the rest, thus separating myself from ‘them’ perpetuating a system of competition with winners and losers. I remind myself of the dark depths of my mind, my secret mind that I still need to face in its entirety. I allow myself to walk into the uncertainty of myself, and I direct myself through the darkness of my mind as I stand stable, equal and one to all that is here, within the ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ ‘highs’ and ‘lows’  ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ of the mind, I remain. I am not my mind and nothing of the mind is real, nothing of the mind is who I am as life.