Why are you your most important discovery?
So who are you? Who are you really?
Most of us are driven by our emotional victories and defeats unconsciously following the cravings of our egos. Living on the surface of our consciousness – always looking to feed and heal our egos and so needing to perpetuate its cravings. The problem is, we are not always aware of this; and even if we are aware, we usually don’t know how to get out of this cycle, to dive under our egos and find our true self.
It is not a coincidence that prominent spiritual masters and sages agree that unless you are aware of who you are at the deepest level – beyond what you own, what you experience on the surface of life, undertake or achieve in life – then life will ultimately have little meaning. Self-improvement projects will be ego improvement projects and so pointless, and you won’t gain final contentment.
Why is this? Because without a deeper awareness, your life is based around a false sense of self. You are not living your life with a sense of wholeness, context or full vision. The decisions you make and the actions you take are being guided by your ego. For survival and evolution purposes the ego is important, it is how we relate to others and our environment, but when it dominates, you lose your real self in the resulting lack of balance.
Guided by your ego you are living life as an actor in an elaborate play; you improvise in real time believing all your decisions autonomous, real. You inhabit a role for which you have been conditioned and schooled your entire life. You believe this works for you; it gets you what you need from life and you’ve probably grown accustomed and even comfortable with living life in this way. But none of this is based on a knowledge of your deeper, real self. Based in ego the distortion feeds into your decision making. All your decisions become an emotional reaction to external stimulus rather than springing from your real self.
You experience your own ego programmed version of reality with little connection to who you really are, or who others really are. That disconnection is evident in your feeling of something missing, that there must be more, so your search for more, guided by your ego and the cycle continues.
This internal focus is a kind of head trip, where you spend time with yourself, feeling and thinking – either about the past or future – or in judgement of yourself or other people. This is a painful, tiring and unfulfilling way of living and it often drives you into words and actions that aim to appease the constant yearning or to numb the constant ache. Your fearful, largely emotion driven and habitual thoughts have become unconscious beliefs and automatic reaction patterns – thwarting your progress.
However, with all the yearning, with all the pain, with all the confusion and with all the lack of contentment, your life so far, even acted out in this way, has worked hasn’t it? Inside you are a unique combination of gifts, talents, strengths and weaknesses.
Directed by your ego you may argue for your limitations restricting opportunities and ‘free will’, imprisoned inside a gilded cage of subjective reality none of this is the real you. It never was.
Yet you have ‘chosen’ this haven’t you? It is the discord affecting your natural state of harmony, wholeness and connection with life, and the cause of all your issues, problems, suffering, fear, anxiety, stress, resentment, anger, shame, guilt and self-pity. That’s why you may find yourself feeling like something is missing, or asking – is this all there is?