Transcending the ego/ascension
(Higher self and Lower Self)
We all have such a close and personal relationship with our own egos. We blindly follow it with out questioning its true motives. It’s the voice in us that is judgmental, negative, pessimistic, but is cunning and sly as well. It will build you up and tear you down. It will talk you out of following through on heart felt ideas that once had you soaring on wings of love. It tells you you’re not good enough, that its too dangerous, that you will be rejected, that you’re better than others, or don’t need to change anything at all. We are slaves to our egos, and our egos are imposters. We can transcend our egos by expanding our awareness, or our consciousness. We do this by asking questions and getting the knowledge to answer those questions, and by becoming the observer of our own lives. Our egos are tape recorders that play over and over again the same painful experiences that we are trying to escape. The only way to stop the same recording from playing yet again is to become aware of the common thread that ties them all together.
Esoteric Art For as long as I can remember in my own life, I’ve had a hard time connecting to people. I’ve never let myself get too attached, but when I do I am very loyal and loving. It just takes me a long time to get to that point. I recently started noticing that I panic a lot in my close relationships. Whether it’s about being worried that I made them mad at me, or that they don’t want to talk to me anymore because I they haven’t responded back to me as quick as they usually do which always leaves me asking myself, “what’s wrong with me?.”. Seeing this pattern has been the beginning of me finding the common thread that ties together one of my reoccurring themes. By really asking what I felt when I was in these situations, I discovered that I felt abandoned and rejected. The thing is, I realized that most of the time these feelings were fears, and that they never turned out to be true. When ever I felt like I did something wrong, and was being rejected, it actually never had anything to do with me. So where was this fear of abandonment and rejection coming from? Why did I keep recreating my self? Well I had to follow my memories as far back as I could, and what I discovered was that I did experience these things when I was younger and my fear of feeling like that again, actually made me create it, because our egos thrive on our fears, and they tell us the same negative story over and over until, you find the common thread that allows you to follow it all the way back to the beginning.
The beginning for me was the memory of my dad leaving. Even though I understand as an adult why my mom and dad separated, as a 5 year old, I don’t think I ever got it. I never knew how much that day affected me, until I realized how I kept recreating that pain through the rest of my child hood and into my adult life. I had visited that memory many times, and never really felt anything. However, now that I could follow the common thread that tied so many of my painful experiences together back to this memory, I was then able to console the little girl in me who had looked in her daddy’s sad heavy eyes, and watched him drive away. For a moment, I was that little girl again, and I felt angry, and scared, and abandoned. I screamed at my dad this time though, to come back, to not leave me. I allowed myself to feel everything that came from reliving this little girl’s memory. The little girl in me that day felt abandoned and blamed herself which made her think something was wrong with her. See what happens is, when we have painful experiences, mostly in childhood, a piece of us gets left in that moment. The part of me that felt secure, and worthy of acceptance, got left there that day. Our egos are negative as in they keep us stuck in old patterns that don’t serve our highest good, but our egos will also lead us back to the parts of ourselves that wait for us wanting to be healed so they can help us become whole again in our “now” moment.
This process is how we begin to transcend our egos. By actively participating in becoming aware of, and healing your own negative patterns, thoughts, and beliefs; you are in turn raising your consciousness. And while this is the process of transcending the ego, this is also part of the process of ascension! I hope you’re thinking, “I’ve already been doing this, but I didn’t know it was ascension, and let alone what ascension was!” The truth is we are all in the process of ascension whether we are aware of it or not, we have been trying to raise our awareness and transcend our egos since the beginning of our existence as humans. What’s special about the times we are living in now is that it is easier than it has ever been before for us to raise our awareness and transcend our ego/humanness, which is based in duality, fear, and separateness. The reason this is important to know is because our ego/humanness prevents us from seeing our own true limitlessness, and oneness with all and everything.
We can’t have the human experience (which is why we are here in the first place) with out being human. So, transcending doesn’t mean we are trying to physically leave our human bodies so that we can remember our truth. That would defeat the point. We are, and in fact have been trying since the beginning of our human existence, to remember our true limitlessness and divine nature; so that we can create the lives that we truly want during our human experience. It is my belief that some of the great spiritual masters before us, such as Jesus, or Buddha, were here to show us the path of transcendence. They both walked different paths, but transcending our humanness was the important message they brought, not how they got there necessarily. If anything, the fact that they got there taking different paths is showing us that there are many paths to enlightenment, not one right way like most of us are raised believing.
A better way then, to describe what transcending your ego/humanness is, is obtaining the perspective of the overview. By raising your awareness, you allow yourself to gain new perspectives. It’s in these new perspectives that we are finally able to step back and observe our behaviors, instead of just going through the motions of the same emotional responses to triggers from old wounds that haven’t been healed from our past. The mission isn’t at all to get rid of the ego, but to embrace it for its healing messages. Its only from gaining a higher perspective (higher self), that we can achieve this ability. While we are seeing from the perspective of the ego (lower self), we aren’t seeing the whole truth, or the whole perspective. This is why we have been stuck in the same exhausting patterns, because we haven’t been able to achieve the perspective of the overview. The contrasting perspectives can also be referred to as our higher selves (the higher perspective) and our lower selves (the lower perspective.)
How do we help ourselves become more aware? A good start is by meditating, because this allows you to quiet the mind, which is usually full of the negative thoughts, beliefs, and fears that create our patterns of response or our state of being. Another tip is to practice becoming present in every moment. We don’t usually realize how much time we spend thinking about the past, or worrying about the future, which generally leads to negative thinking. Becoming aware of your breath if you find yourself in the past or future is a good tool to use. Focusing on the sensations of the body as the breath comes in, and goes out. For a while your mind will probably continue to venture off, with meditation as well. It takes time to master our thoughts and control them. So don’t give up just because you don’t do it perfect in the time frame you think is suitable. There is no time frame, and there is no doing it wrong. Another thing I suggest is actively seeking knowledge. Knowledge is power! So go and explore, and discover what’s out there. There is a whole world out there waiting to be found.
Danae Smith
Sept 2012
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