Metaphysical Principles: Outgrow the Ego

By Times of India

Metaphysical Principles: Outgrow the Ego

We don't really live until we understand that truth is the missing piece from humanity, says Patrick Drysdale

We have to realise that we have our original centre in God and that without Him, we couldn't exist. Somewhere along the way, though, we made a terrible mistake and displaced this divine centre with a sense of a separate me and acted from that standpoint instead of our original one, thereby obscuring God as our natural centre.

The purpose of our life is to undermine this unnatural centre and re-establish contact with the divine. We don't really live until we understand that truth is the missing piece from our humanity and everyone on earth is seeking it but doesn't know it. Spirituality has been so suppressed that its negative side has surfaced as the most outrageous addictions and preoccupations: making money, love affairs, drugs, alcoholism, gambling, racing, anything that produces an intense sensation is accepted as a substitute but they'll never satisfy. The spirit wants union with truth, not shallow amusements.

It's important to remember that recovering this natural centre doesn't obliterate our humanity. It completes it. Development in humans is entirely spiritual and achieving our full potential means returning to our original unity with God, our natural centre. This should be our first goal in life.

Living with a sense of a separate self is the adolescent stage in the spiritual life but the majority of human beings don't get any further than this level of development because neither organised religion nor society provides the environment for going beyond it. Most people get stuck here and never have the opportunity to break out of themselves.

Nobody seems to consider that not being able to outgrow the sense of a separate self is just as pathetic as not being able to outgrow children's clothes. A forty year old who still wears juvenile clothes is deplorable but exactly corresponds to an adult living with an egotistical self. A person who fails to trade in his adolescent clothes for spiritually mature ones has made a decision to stand apart from the call to inwardly develop and will mechanically repeat his egotistical lifestyle to the very last.

It's as if something in us wishes to stay a child, resist the call to spiritual maturity, and remain unconscious of our natural centre but I've found that being at an immature level isn't the real problem. The major obstacle is that everyone at this level believes that he's already reached his highest level of development.

Conventional psychology can't come to the rescue because it hasn't evolved to the point where it considers the psychology of the whole person and can see the ego as the juvenile phase of the total human experience.

It's my experience that, at a certain point, the personal self stops expanding and an inexorable inner process enforces its contraction. This is God calling us home and His way of inviting us to devote serious attention to the inner life. I've observed that people who should have let their sense of a separate self die long ago but insisted on keeping them alive become hypochondriacs, rigid dogmatists, and either applauders of the past or eternal juveniles.

In my opinion, these traits are all pathetic substitutes for the spiritually mature personality but inevitable consequences of resisting God's urge to become whole and inwardly develop. If someone tries to tell us of a life without a personal me in it, they're labelled as escapists and considered psychologically unsound.

I'm firmly convinced, however, that the really dangerous people aren't the non-believers in the ego less life but the swarm of petty thinkers who have already decided that union with the divine is just an emotional fantasy.

Knowing the validity of spiritual truths can only be accomplished by living them, not just reading or talking about them. Real spirituality consists of experiencing these truths instead of just believing in them. Living without oneself is not only possible in this life but it is the normal state in which truth intended us to live.

The loss of ego results in a blissful state. Breaking your identification from thoughts and false images is like learning a new behaviour, a new way of living without a sense of separateness. There's an inner emptiness that's both a quietness and conscious awareness of your existence, a stillness that's truth itself. This is your natural centre.

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More from same author see: Times of India

See also: Metaphysical Principles, Definition of Metaphysics, Metaphysical Techniques, Miracles, Creating Miracles Faith and Belief, Spiritual Guidance, Peace of Mind, Life and Beyond, Body Mind and Soul)