By Frank M. Wanderer, Ph.D
Guest Writer for Wake Up World
During your spiritual growth, you may discover what’s important to you. You can reach your inner tranquillity, peace and happiness, that none can take away from you. You can find your inner strength, which you can experience as an effortless Presence. In this state, you are aware, only the present moment exists to you, and your being is pervaded by the silence of consciousness and the joy of existence.
During your spiritual journey you would like to bring this effortless presence into your daily routine, so you try to spend as much time in the state of presence as possible.
That is a noble effort, but alas, it is soon experienced that it fails day by day. The question arises, “What is the reason for the failure? Why can I not spend a longer period in the state of effortless presence, when I want to? It is surely because I am not good enough, and I am unable to make the required effort. I am unsuited for such a noble task!”
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Such thoughts inevitably generate guilt and remorse. The guilt may, after a time, become so overwhelming that the individual gives up the desire to live in the presence in order to avoid the negative emotions that come with the guilt.
This is an extremely dangerous mind game! Why?
It is to be recognized that the negative emotions and the guilt are not a part of the Consciousness. They only belong to the mind!
The Ego – and so guilt as well – is a social product, created by the expectations of the parents and teachers as a part of the mind. How? A small child’s adaptation to the external world is supported and sustained by the parental expectations. Whenever a child meets the parental (and so the social) expectations, the child is accepted, rewarded and loved. Otherwise some sort of a punishment or rejection follows. In order to avoid retaliation, the child will unconsciously meet the expectations.
As long as the child is small, the expectations appear as external stimuli for the child. The child behaves well, because mum (or dad) should not be angry, should love him/her. As the child grows up, these external expectations undergo a complicated psychological process and become internal ones, and create the foundations of Ego. At that time children learn to behave the way it is expected by the society, not because the direct environment so desires but because it generates an inner good feeling in them. When they do not behave in accordance with these social expectations, they experience guilt. That is how external social effects become parts of the Ego. This mechanism follows us all through our lives.
At one point of our spiritual Journey we meet the teachings of an awakened teacher, and internally we feel that this is what we have long been looking for, we want it to be a part of our daily routine. We are thus able to create some internal expectations regarding how we are able to do it, what the fastest way to incorporating Presence into our life may be. We are, however, unable to meet the expectations, so guilt appears automatically. Be aware that this is the work of the Ego, a game of the mind!
What Can We Do With That Guilt?
Several things are to be taken into consideration. One is that we have been living identified with the Ego (on the edge) so long that we have drifted too far from the center (Consciousness, Self, Presence). It is therefore not possible to get back to the center overnight (the possibility is there, naturally, as the center is within us, but we do have to make the effort to reach it). The progress on our Journey towards the effortless Presence initially requires efforts from us.
There is an important maxim that applies to that effort: every step in the right direction takes us closer to our own center. It means that moments add up and reinforce each other.
There are inevitable occasions when one temporarily drops back into the Ego-dominated state, and these cases are also followed by a sense of guilt. Once we have understood the mechanism of the emergence of guilt, and bear in mind what has been discussed above, we need to realize that in such instances guilt is not justified!
On our spiritual Journey, we should not dwell on the guilt emerging because of dropping back to Ego-dominated state; instead, we should celebrate that we are in the state of the Presence!
When one is able to rejoice about these moments, instead of worrying about the next possible dropback, then the positive periods will be more and more frequent in our lives. We therefore need to be patient with ourselves, and look upon our sense of guilt as Witnesses!
The Revolution of Consciousness — Deconditioning the Programmed Mind
A book by author Frank M. Wanderer Ph.D:
The revolution of the Consciousness is taking place Now, in the present moment. There are no strategies, no great leaders in this revolution, only heroes who understand the evolutionary progress of the Consciousness and are open to allow the processes to take place in themselves.
Frank M. Wanderer’s book The Revolution of Consciousness — Deconditioning the Programmed Mind offers tools and insights to help you overcome obstacles to enlightenment, and bring higher levels of consciousness into your daily Life.
The Revolution of Consciousness is available here on Amazon, or you can check out all of Frank’s published works here.
Previous articles by Frank M. Wanderer:
- Visitors from the Unknown
- Suffering – A Wake Up Call
- Waking Up From The Biggest Illusion In The World
- The Secret Of Silence
- Learn How To Live In The Flow Of Life
- The Effortless Presence – Active Meditation vs. True Meditation
- The Unconscious Conditionings of the Mind
- Identity and The Online Personality
- Are You Awake? The Dimensions Of Alertness
- De-Conditioning the Conditioned Mind
About the author:
Frank M. Wanderer Ph.D is a professor of psychology, a consciousness researcher and writer, and publisher of several books on consciousness. With a lifelong interest in the mystery of human existence and the work of the human mind, Frank’s work is to help others wake up from identification with our personal history and the illusory world of the forms and shapes, and to find our identity in what he calls “the Miracle”, the mystery of the Consciousness.
You can also follow his blog at powerofconsciousness.blogspot.hu
Center image: “Guilt” by Mare-Of-Night.deviantart.com
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I find it amazing that someone with a PhD in psychology can be so fundamentally confused about the ego. The ego is most definitely not an artificial construct that is the result of how we interact with our parents’ role modeling. It is a fundamental part of our psychological structure. It is the source of our sense of self, our personal boundaries, our self-awareness, our feeling personal confidence. It is the reason we are conscious. One of our important tasks is to bring our ego to maturity along with the rest of our self. To become a whole self. This can only be done through the self-examination that is fundamentally necessary to bring ourselves to deeper and deeper self-understanding, and through this process let go of our attachments to the “down” side of ourselves. Any effort to “eradicate” the ego will lead to the problems such action is trying to eliminate. It is completely and utterly self-defeating.
I largely agree, Greg. There is entitled and defensive ego and then the functional ego. I don’t think it’s needed to be conscious though, if we define consciousness awareness.
And, to live in the world and find wholeness, we always have to integrate our personality and individualized self into the experience of “presence,” not just try to ditch the part of our psyche we don’t like in an effort to be undifferentiated consciousness…doesn’t quite work like that! (I tried for many years long ago)
Thanks for your reply, I appreciate the distinction you are making and the fact that you acknowledge that you tried to eliminate (ditch –good word) that part of your self and found it didn’t work. What you describe as “entitled, defensive ego” is really our emotional immaturity showing itself. The ego isn’t segmented. It is part of, an aspect of, our whole self. All of us need to do the work necessary to bring it to maturity. Unfortunately, our cultural values get in the way because self-examination, self-understanding, is not supported or rewarded. This kind of effort is almost entirely a very personal, internal journey and its rewards are the same.