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Soul is not the ego. Not initially anyway. Soul is the Self that remains the same no matter what you go through in life. It is the 'I' if you will. Ego is the false self that goes through many different phases only to merge to the original Self. It is the 'Me'. For example, when a child is born, it has no ego but just the Self. That's why it is so adorable and innocent because it has not developed a false self yet. But as it grows up it continues to acquire the false self. The journey is to find the Self and eventually make the tradition to it. The ego is important because through this journey you learn and come to realize who you truly are.
I will explain more as to what I know and see if you can relate to it. It's really best to look at things from a point where you can disassociate yourself from any pre-existing belief systems. That's the best way to learn. You can use all others such as religion, science, you personal life experiences etc. as a reference point.
I'll have to re-read everything that you've said and process it slowly to come to a better understanding of what you mean. At this point I think we are using different terms to describe the same thing, and I did leave the heart out, but I will compose my thoughts better in order to explain what I mean.
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No worries, TT. We have rest of our life to sort it out.
Ego tends to rationalize things; that's why we cannot always listen to it. Even a murderer will try to rationalize things as to why he murdered somebody. We do it all the time to excuse some of our own behaviours. Being quiet means being in touch with the Self. But the idea is to be nobody. Self is nobody. Ego is somebody. Ego has to be somebody otherwise it can't survive. Anyway, I will go into details as to what I know later.
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Have you heard of Eckhart Tolle by any chance? He went into great detail to describe the nature of the Ego in one of his books - A New Earth. It is a very complex read and requires a lot of thought process but it is one of the books you want to have. I own his two of his books, this one and The Power of Now.
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Have you heard of Eckhart Tolle by any chance? He went into great detail to describe the nature of the Ego in one of his books - A New Earth. It is a very complex read and requires a lot of thought process but it is one of the books you want to have. I own his two of his books, this one and The Power of Now.
No, I haven't. I am new to this subject and am absorbing this newness of information. -
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Here's what I know. I hope you enjoy reading it if not relate to it.
The ego is our self-image, not our true self. It is characterized by labels, masks, images, and judgments. The true self is the field of possibilities, creativity, intentions, and power. We can go beyond the ego through self-awareness. We can see ourselves from the point of a third person, as in, become the observer that is now being observed. And that allows us to become aware of our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and speech. That’s when we slowly begin to move beyond the ego to the true self. The human journey as a soul is to go beyond your own small self, your ego, to discover your true self.
The soul is your core consciousness, and since consciousness is the ground of all being, it is the ground of your being. It has two components. One is the personalized soul that recycles through time on a cosmic journey and it is Karma, memory and desire.
The conditioned soul is part of an unconditioned soul which is part of the universal soul. The purpose of the conditioned soul is to create the evolutionary journey to unity consciousness. We do this through being, love, and creative expressions and through service. The soul is also the co influence in the meaning--context relationship and archetypal stories. The soul is the source of all our lives. It projects as the mind, as the body and the universe of our experiences.
Throughout the history, it has been said that the self we know -- the separate individual self -- is a limited form of what we truly are. Unaware of our true self, we identify with our thoughts and feelings, our memories and our personality.
Such experiences are always changing, but the self that knows them remains the same. We may be very different people than we were twenty years ago, but the "I" that is aware of the difference is the same "I" as twenty years ago. It is omnipresent and eternal. It is the "I" that knows that it knows. The very essence of being aware. It is always present, whatever we may be experiencing, sacred or profane. There's a great documentary called I Am. It's really worth watching if you are into it.
Anyway, separateness is the great illusion.
The essence of spirituality is the search to know our real self, to discover the true nature of consciousness. -
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Since I believe both Quantum Physics and Spirituality are heading in the same direction and will eventually merge, I don't mind posting this here. This is from one of Deepak Chopra's very famous books, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success.
The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success
Object -referral we are constantly seeking the approval of others. Our thinking and our behavior are always in anticipation of a response. It is therefore fear-based. In object-referral we also feel an intense need to control things.
When we experience the power of the self, there is an absence of fear; there is no compulsion to control, and no struggle for approval or external power.
Through silence, through meditation, and through non-judgment, you will access the first law, the Law of Pure Potentiality. Once you start doing that, you can add a fourth component to this practice, and that is regularly spending time in direct communion with nature. You can start with; I won't judge anything, for the next hour, I will experience non-judgment. Then you can extend it gradually.
The true essence is beyond the ego. It is fearless: it is free: it is immune to criticism; it does not fear any challenge. It is beneath no one, superior to no one.
When you are grounded in the knowledge of your true Self; when you really understand your true nature; you will never feel guilty, fearful or insecure about money, or affluence, or fulfilling your desires, because you will realize that the essence of all material wealth is life energy, it is pure potentiality.
The more you give, the more you will receive. If, through the act of giving, you feel you have lost something, then the gift is not truly given and will not cause increase. If you give grudgingly, there is no energy behind that giving.
It is the intention behind your giving and receiving that is the most important thing. The intention should always be to create happiness for the giver and receiver, because happiness is life-sustaining and therefore generates increase. The return is directly proportional to the giving when it is unconditional and from the heart.
Practicing the Law of Giving is actually very simple: if you want joy, give joy to others; if you want love, learn to give love; if you want attention. Learn to give attention etc....
The heart is intuitive; it's holistic, it's contextual, it's relational. It doesn't have a win-lose orientation. It taps into the cosmic computer; the field of pure potentiality, pure knowledge, and infinite organizing power; and takes everything into account. At times it may not even seem rational, but the heart has a computing ability that is far more accurate and far more precise than anything within the limits of rational thought.
You must first become consciously aware that your future is generated by the choices you are making in every moment of your life.
When you feel frustrated or upset by a person or a situation, remember that you are not reacting to the person or the situation, but to your feelings about the person or the situation. These are your feelings, and your feelings are not someone else's fault.
All problems contain the seeds of opportunity and this awareness allows you to take the moment and transform it to a better situation or thing.
Any time you encounter resistance, recognize that if you force the situation, the resistance will once increase. You don't want to stand rigid like a tall oak that cracks and collapses in the storm. Instead you want to be flexible, like a reed that bends with the storm and survives.
Attention energizes, and intention transforms. Whatever you put your attention on will grow stronger in your life. Whatever you take your attention away from will wither, disintegrate, and disappear. Intention, on the other hand, triggers transformation of energy and information. Intention organizes its own fulfillment.
Intention is the real power behind desire. Intent alone is very powerful, because intent is desire without attachment to the outcome. Desire alone is weak, because desire in most people is attention with attachment.
The past, present, and future are all properties of consciousness. The past is recollection, memory; the future is anticipation; the present is awareness. Therefore time is the movement of thought. Both past and future are born in the imagination; only the present, which is awareness, is real eternal.
If you have life-centered, present-moment awareness, then the imaginary obstacles; which are more than ninety percent of perceived obstacles; disintegrate and disappear. The remaining five to ten percent of perceived obstacles can be transmuted into opportunities through one-pointed intention.
One-pointed intention means holding your attention to the intended outcome with such unbending purpose that you absolutely refuse to allow obstacles to consume and dissipate the focused quality of your attention.
Learn to harness the power of intention, and you can create anything you desire.
Everyone has a purpose in life... a unique gift or special talent to give to others. And when we blend this unique talent with service to others, we experience the ecstasy and exultation of our own spirit, which is the ultimate goal of all goals.
While meditation is the most useful way of entering the domain of spirit, simply shifting your internal dialogue to "How can I help?" will also access the spirit, that domain of your awareness where you experience your universality.
Ask yourself, if money was no concern and you had all the time and money in the world, what would you do? If you would still do what you currently do, then you are in dharma, because you have passion for what you do; you are expressing your unique talents. -
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Free Yourself from Your Ego Armor
Eckhart Tolle, author of A New Earth, explains how to break through the shell that separates you from your true self.
Read more: http://www.oprah.com/oprahs-lifeclass/Eckhart-Tolle-on-How-to-Free-Yourself-from-Your-Ego-Armor#ixzz2o7mmv77G
Vanity and pride are what most of us tend to think of when we think of ego, but ego is much more than an overinflated sense of self. It can also turn up in feelings of inferiority or self-hatred because ego is any image you have of yourself that gives you a sense of identity—and that identity derives from the things you tell yourself and the things other people have been saying about you that you've decided to accept as truth.
One way to think about ego is as a protective heavy shell, such as the kind some animals have, like a big beetle. This protective shell works like armor to cut you off from other people and the outside world. What I mean by shell is a sense of separation: Here's me and there's the rest of the universe and other people. The ego likes to emphasize the "otherness" of others.
This sense of separation is an intrinsic part of the ego. The ego loves to strengthen itself by complaining—either in thoughts or words—about other people, the situation you find yourself in, something that is happening right now but "shouldn't be," and even about yourself. For example, when you're in a long line at the supermarket, your mind might start complaining how slow the checkout person is, how he should be doing this or doing that, or he failed to do anything at all—including packing the bag of the person ahead of you correctly.
When this happens, the ego has you in its grip. You don't have thoughts; the thoughts have you—and if you want to be free, you have to understand that the voice in your head has created them and irritation and upset you feel is the emotional response to that voice Only in this way can you be present to the truer world around you and see the golden shade in a pound of pears on the scanner, or the delight of a child in line who begs to eat them.The trick, of course, is to work to free ourselves from this armor and from this voice that is dictating reality.
Observe Your Mind
The first foundational step is to become aware of what kind of thoughts you habitually think, especially negative thoughts: irritation, anger, impatience and perhaps even some kind of sadness. You might, for example, complain about yourself, how useless you are. If you start to hear these repetitive thoughts, then you will suddenly realize, "I've been thinking these same thoughts again and again almost every day without really knowing it."
Distinguish Between the Voice of Ego and the Actual Situation
Awareness is the beginning of becoming free of the ego because then you realize that your thoughts—and the negative emotions they produce—are dysfunctional and unnecessary. For example, let's go back to the supermarket line. As you stand waiting, you aren't actually irritated because it's taking a long time to get through to the checkout, which is the situation. You are irritated by what your mind is telling you about the situation—which is that all this waiting is bad and a waste of your time. But you could actually be enjoying that moment if you say, "This is simply what is. There's nothing I can do about it, so why not breathe in deeply and look around and enjoy the world around me?"
Let Go of Limiting Stories
Sometimes the danger is not even pessimistic thought. If, for instance, you have been let go from your job, you might so resist being negative that you say, "It's a great thing that I lost my job!" That kind of willful optimism is not necessary. We hold on to the fairy tale of supposed happiness—that we should be happy. But this keeps you stuck where you are. Instead, try to describe only what is happening, without judgment: I do not have a job. I must look for one.
Bring In Your Awareness
When you see the difference between your voice and the reality of the situation, that's the beginning of awakening. This is often a moment—a flash that sizzles and disappears. Initially you still lose yourself again, and the old thoughts arise, but gradually, you gain awareness, and the dysfunctional thoughts subside. It's a gradual transition, this bringing in of your awareness, because the ego doesn't want to change. It doesn't want to disappear, so it will give you plenty of reasons why you cannot be present.
Lay Down Your Weapons
Your challenge will be to become more aligned internally with the present moment. Fighting with your ego by will just makes it stronger. By declaring war on it, you make an enemy. A simple example: You wake up in the morning, and it's raining and gray, and the mind says, "What a miserable day," and this is not a pleasant thought. You likely feel some emotion: dread, disappointment, unhappiness. You suddenly realize that your judgment of what kind of day it will be is based on a mental habit, an unconscious default. That simple awareness creates space for a new thought to emerge. You can look again out the window without that preconception and just see the sky. It's gray. There's some sunlight filtering through the sky. There are, perhaps, raindrops falling. It's not actually miserable at all. It has a certain beauty. Then suddenly, you're free. You're no longer imposing something on reality, and you're free to enjoy what, previously, you had rejected.
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The IQ test that measures intelligence, according to Eckhart Tolle, is an extremely narrow view of true intelligence. Tolle himself wasn't able to solve the little puzzles let alone take the whole test. He was too slow for that.
According to him, intelligence is a much vaster thing than just to accumulate knowledge or information to solve problems or little puzzles.
Real intelligence resides in alert stillness - in between thoughts - that's where the original intelligence lies. Anybody who is creative and there are not too many out there - has some access to it. Albert Einstein, for example, had it - who btw was considered slow and not intelligent at school. His teachers told his parents that he was not suitable for mathematics and physics (imagine that).
In other words, his thinking was very slow. Now what does that mean? It means, there were lots of spaces in between the thoughts. He wasn't one of the so called intelligent students at school whose hands would go immediately up saying, "I know! I know" when asked questions by the teachers. That's superficial intelligence and Einstein wasn't one of them.
Einstein was in fact one of those children, who are not recognized by our superficial society, who was very deeply intelligent. -
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Have you heard of the 'strange loop'? In Quantum Physics, it's called tangled hierarchy.
Douglas Hofstadter was the first person to describe it in his famous book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid when he was researching on the sense of "I" consciousness. He then went one step further in his next book, I Am a Strange Loop to elaborate more.
Dr. Amit Goswami describes him as one of the brilliant physicists of today's time. Hofstadter was in fact one of Dr. Goswami's students.
This strange loop is a system that moves upwards or downwards only and finds itself back to where it started.
Our brain has this tangled hierarchical system (a system of the consciousness) where this strange loop tends to appear. Our perception and memory is the very system where one cannot function without the other. Perception needs memory at the same time memory needs perception. They basically co-create each other and are depended on each other. Both arrive at the same time and both find themselves back to where they started. -
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My biggest problem with the 'belief system' is that the concept is so extremely narrow. It literally does not allow one to explore anything else and true knowledge comes from exploring the world and all cultures, religions, traditions etc. How can I say 'I know' when I haven't experienced of what I think I know? We wouldn't have had science if we were only to subscribe to only one belief system - no matter what belief system that is. Even when some people call or see themselves as 'atheists', they are essentially subscribing to a belief system.
For example, Mellen Thomas Benedict was told that he had terminal brain cancer and had about a few months to live. He was in his early 30s and was an artist who was barely making ends meet. He had a lot of trouble accepting this truth however his condition was to the point that it wasn't even operable. The tumors had taken all over his brain and the cancer spread even further. He left town to die alone. And then he died. It's worth mentioning at this point that he didn't have any belief system in him; he wasn't even an atheist because in his own word, 'I didn't even care for that'.
After he died and remained dead for an hour and half, he had an amazing experience and after that experience he was told that his time wasn't up yet and that he was to go back to life to finish his mission on earth. He then returned to his body with a complete remission of the disease – and what may be the most inspirational near-death experience story known to date.
I have the youtube link on the Dream thread of this remarkable story if anyone is interested to check it out. In short, however, his experience is a positive one despite not having a belief system and he literally came back from being dead. He was told the reason why he had cancer in the first place was because he brought that upon himself, as his outlook on life was quite a negative one (you can read further in his biography or in his book). He was told, even though he had an extremely rough childhood, he could have redirected all his anger and negativity into something positive. He had the choices and the power within him to do that. So how we live our life in this lifetime is far more crucial than to subscribe to a narrow belief system and live on that. Because the belief system doesn't really set you free if that's all you are doing. -
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A lot of people, I don't think, understands the true meaning of spirituality and tend to think it's perhaps another branch of religion. Well it's not. Being spiritual means being aware. So the more spiritual you are the more aware you are. It's identified as going beyond the boundaries of the 5 physical senses. Highly spiritual beings are highly evolved beings like the Buddha (the awakened or the enlightened one) or Jesus or Mohammed, Moses etc. To a lesser extent are perhaps Gandhi, Mother Teresa, some of the ancient Greek philosophers, Shakespeare, some of the Indian gurus, the zen masters and a few more people who tend to remain anonymous. Even in the current world we have some truly enlightened people.
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"Everything in this empirical world is lawful. Nothing happens without a cause. But at the Quantum level, that is not so. A single quantum jump is unpredictable. It's not caused by anything we know. A particle may jump into another state or it may not. If it needs a photon, it can interact with a photon or not. Those are the only examples of not lawful processes. They only occur at the boundary of the non empirical world and empirical world." Dr. Lothar Schafer
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The probability of an empirical object existing is either 0% or 100% according Quantum Physics. For example, if anyone asks where's Emma - you can't say 'oh she's 5% here, 15% there and 10% over there" etc. I am an empirical object therefore I must exist at one place 100%.
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However, the probabilities of Andy defending his Wimbledon title this year lies in between 0% to 100%. It only becomes either 0% or 100% once he enters the tournament. You can't anymore say that it still lies between 0% to 100% because he'll either win (100%) or lose (0%). He'll never stay in between.
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The Observer and the Observed must arrive at the same time for it to exist. Is the moon there if you don't look at it? You may want to say 'yes' but what if no one was there to observe it? Would it exist then? The answer is no. It would dissolve into waves. Only when you look at it it will come to the state, in this case, of the moon. So the observer and the observed must arrive at the same time to come to an existence or to be an empirical object - the quantum tangled hierarchy system. What are waves? They are packages of information in quantum terms. They arrive from the non empirical world.
But the question is, what makes this Universe so lawful and orderly when the quantum level is so unpredictable and unlawful? Clearly order comes from chaos but who gets to decide to make certain orders and laws and why? -