How Do We Move Beyond Our ‘Ego Software’?
Much of the practice is to continually remember to extricate yourself from the identification of your awareness with your desires, fears, hopes, and thoughts.
The goal is not to stay out in La-La Land, but to get established in other planes of consciousness, and then connect fully back into life. So that you are, as Christ said, ’In the world, but not of the world,’ so that you are simultaneously dancing in life as a human being and at the same moment you are absolutely spacious and empty. It’s a very interesting thing, because generally we don’t stretch our consciousness that much.
We tend to move in and out of planes sequentially, not simultaneously, because it takes a certain discipline to open to the fact that we are like strudel; that we are multi-layered; that we are not a single-layered entity.
We underplay who we are so much, even with our language, because we tend to polarize the getting high, and the coming down. What we’re really doing is, with the practices, taking our conceptual mind, and using it in order to take us beyond itself… so that we are then using our conceptual mind in a delightful way.
The ego—you can’t function without an ego here.
It’s your control room for your space suit that you’re wearing as an incarnation. You need it. It’s your software. But you aren’t software. Your ego is basically your software for functioning on this plane, and appreciating that. In order to appreciate it, you have to extricate yourself from an identification with the software, with the ego. Not because the ego is bad, but because it’s a beautifully articulated functional technique for playing.
