Dissociating From Your Egocentric Embodied Experience

Every egocentric experience merely serves to accentuate your inadequacy and the need to attain greater CONTROL of a “world” that exists to prove exactly how inadequate “you” are. The egos reliance on a-body-in-a-world to demonstrate its own existence ONLY proves its own weakness, simply because the world is perishable and this makes you victim to that experience.

In HELL, any escape the world provides, no matter how brief, is perceived as salvation. This is why your suffering continues to verify a HELL of your making, because the world is an experience of egocentric invention. To believe the body can save you is to believe in HELL and to suffer accordingly.

Everything you look to as a means of salvation through the body, asserts a HELL of your making and everything offered by the world is offered only to bodies. What bodily experiences you worship, or what in your world you rely on as proof of HELL, is inconsequential when the consequences are always the same within a consciousness fixated on embodied experiences. The ego relies on the body to self-actualize itself as ‘existing,’ but must prove itself master by what it demands the body do in its name. The ego-self hates its embodiment, but must rely on that which it hates to sustain it, hence, it is a match made in HELL.

Yet, the ego-self finds this corrupted love affair completely natural (as do “you,” based on your suffering) and it will look to its experiences of a world to accentuate its existence separate from and superior to the body. It could choose drugs, alcohol, sex, food, money, or any number of bodily experiences through which to reinforce its superiority over the body. While the body indulges at the egos request, the ego transfers responsibility to the body, which it experiences as outside and separate from itself. Thus, the body can manifest any number of diseases or disorders at the egos request, while the ego-self indicts the body as guilty and demanding of punishment. 

While the ego demands that “you” exist through a body, the body is blamed for the appetites and cravings the ego seeks out. But here’s the catch: In order to overcome the body’s desires, you must rely on the ego’s advice since, as the ego-self claims, only IT can save you from your ‘self,’ even though it was the ego-self that brought you to this point by using the body as scapegoat. Thus, the ego-self remains superior and only IT offers salvation, which it informs you will be found through the ego’s manufactured experiences of a “world.” This maintains your weakness and inadequacy, since you must remain victim to your egocentric experiences as the means of actualizing your ‘self’ as REAL.

The ego needs the body to prove that it exists, but this also proves the ego exists as weak and inadequate because of its reliance on the body to self-actualize. Yet, when you suffer through the body’s appetites, you must turn to egocentric experience for salvation, even though it’s the ego’s reliance on the body that demands “you” suffer in the first place.

In psychiatry, the term “dissociation” defines the “splitting off of a group of mental processes from the main body of consciousness, as in amnesia or certain forms of hysteria” (Dic.com). However, this psychiatric term signifies a negative process that distorts ones orientation to “reality.” Yet, essentially, dissociation from ego-self fixations is necessary to communicate with the part of consciousness that is not fixed on any egocentric experiences. The body is an ego fixation that must be dissociated from the “main body of consciousness.” But keep in mind that what you are fixated on is not the body, but an egocentric embodied experience and all experience is malleable and plastic, easily shaped to conform to belief. If the belief system rests upon a foundation of inadequacy and weakness, the body will stake claim to the mind through an ego-self of your own invention.

 Artwork by Ben Howe - "Ribboned Bust"

Dead Man Walkin’

The ego requires you pay little heed to your thoughts, but attend primarily to your actions. This is why you often act unconsciously, because the unconscious is nothing more than your failure to be aware of thought. Conditioned thought tends to run on auto-pilot, with little need for awareness.

Being unaware of thoughts helps you to remain ignorant of the rules you follow in conducting your life. The ego insists that thoughts are unimportant and what you DO, should be the chief focus of your thinking. What you DO is entirely contingent on the body and therefore, the body, more than the mind, defines “you.” This aids the ego in maintaining denial of the mind, thereby remaining transfixed on your body and other bodies.

When you really get down to it, you are an absurd belief system in which the chief priority is never looking too closely at just how unbelievable “you” really are. 

Nonetheless, you believe in “you” and are vigilant in reinforcing that belief as often as possible and through every means at your disposal. The ego-self demands that every interior experience conform to the belief in an exterior world, through which to contrast your finite, self-containing exterior body.

From the moment you were born, you were taught to be a victim and, from moment to moment, your entire hopeless existence demonstrates this as you come that much closer to death. Death is a finite game everyone plays and the rules cannot be violated. You were born to lose, since the game was fixed from birth and your entire “life” is contingent on the rule that death can come at any moment.

Death is really the only absolute truth that escapes no one, but we spend a “lifetime” desperately seeking to escape IT.

If your spiritual path does not directly deal with death, then it directly denies the only absolute truth we know with universal certainty. The only truth we all agree as certain is that you MUST die. Yet, you spend each and every day ignoring, avoiding and denying its inevitability. The only FACT of existence and the ego will move heaven and earth to delete it from consciousness (because the ego controls consciousness).

The most expedient way of diminishing the controlling ego-self is to force it to confront the fact that it has NO control of death. Authentically engage your death, look fully and deeply at it and all your grand plans of wealth, fame, spiritual enlightenment, may just turn to fumes of utter nothingness. All your plans of attaining "spiritual enlightenment" can be instantly dashed to the wayside by one erratic drunk driver.

You may feel this morbid proclamation is a recipe for clinical depression, yet the only way to play infinitely is to engage your finality head on. Finite games may never seem the same again.

Every religious ideology, every spiritual belief system exists simply to aid in denying the only certainty you know without doubt. Best to give all that up, because it’s all ridiculous bullshit, while your death is the unadulterated perfect truth.

Embrace it…

Artwork by Lauri Lipton - "Death and the Maiden" 

The Two Gods We All Worship

There are two “Gods” on your mind. The God of Crucifixion indicts you as guilty, while the God of Resurrection immediately acquits you of all guilt, forever.

The God of Crucifixion demands you suffer for your redemption. This God requires sacrifice and the only acceptable sacrifice… is you.

The God of Crucifixion requires that you sacrifice your life for “The Truth” and that you endure many years of suffering so you may finally ‘awaken’… before you 'die.'

However, the God of Resurrection demands no sacrifice in God’s name and teaches that there is NO “death” and thus, no suffering. This conflicts with the God of Crucifixion, because crucifixion claims that 'death' is a fact of 'life' that only a fool would deny.

The God of Crucifixion is the God of guilt and only the guilty feel called upon to sacrifice in order to meet God’s standards. This is why they must endlessly atone for their guilt. Yet, they can never be certain as to exactly what they are guilty of. Nevertheless, the God of Crucifixion assures them that they are all guilty and so they struggle mightily under this burden their entire 'life' (although, many do sometimes wonder if it is truly worth "living" this way).

The God of Resurrection pleads for your innocence in a meaningless world, because what you are guilty of cannot be ‘true.’ That’s because you made the world true, NOT God. All you need do is surrender your "truth" and claim innocence. Only those who know they are innocent are truly free.

The God of Crucifixion demands you be victim to time and so, you must struggle to make each moment count, before it’s too late. This makes ‘time’ an extremely valuable commodity that must be preserved at all costs. Otherwise, you merely waste your time.

The God of Resurrection is infinite and thus, a million years can be experienced in a moment and a moment in a million years. No sacrifice is necessary to what cannot suffer, because what does not suffer must have given up the belief in “death.” Life is lived infinitely by those unaware of time, but for all others, death makes time desperately meaningful.

The God of Crucifixion demands your guilt because you were born wrong (sin) and there’s little you can do to make that right (redemption) and so you must be guilty. In a world of right and wrong, some are punished so that others may be redeemed. A world of crucifixion is nothing more than a 'place' to separate the righteous from the damned.

Which are you?

The God of Resurrection makes no such distinctions, because a world of right and wrong could not possibly have been created by God. What was NOT created could NOT possibly exist, unless you invent it. Your world is full of inventors, but no creators.

The innocent cannot worship the God of Crucifixion. Therefore, to realize your guilt, you must see guilt in everyone else. The God of Crucifixion demands you seek vengeance for all the potential that was taken from you by those who sacrifice to the God of Crucifixion.

The God of Resurrection is aware only of innocence. To know the God of Resurrection you must realize your own innocence. The only way for you to realize your own innocence, is to be aware of the innocence in others. There is no other way.

The God of Crucifixion is only experienced through the body, because physical form is your highest, and only, calling (until death do you part). The God of Crucifixion demands that you learn what the body teaches, so that you too, can experience the pain and suffering sacrifice demands.

For the God of Resurrection, the body certainly ‘exists.’ That is, until you change what it means, which changes how it exists for you. Resurrection teaches that only the mind can create and the only purpose of the body is to facilitate that learning and nothing else.

The God of Crucifixion is above and beyond you and demands the ancient rights of sacrifice so that you may finally transcend your inadequacy and ignorance and 'know' God. The priests of crucifixion teach that you must sacrifice in order to obtain your just reward, because, "how can you have any pudding, if you don't eat your meat."

The God of Resurrection is unified with and indivisible from you. God is always right before your eyes (when you no longer seek sacrifice). You need do nothing to resurrect, because everything that could be ‘done’ only attests to the God of Crucifixion, who requires many sacred and profound acts be performed first.

Look around at your world, because what you 'see' determines the God you worship.

What do you see?

EGO DYNAMICS: The Delusion of Perception

The ego-self is a context of consciousness which constructs its own context we refer to as "perception" through which to experience objects of consciousness. Since the ego-self is itself an object of consciousness it creates a separate experience it calls "perception" for which to have an experience of 'world.'

Perception is a way of experiencing your ‘world’ by keeping you in a frame of reference divided off and separated from other concepts or 'world.' Therefore, you must perceive your world to 'know' it, yet you claim to undeniably ‘know,’ or conceive of, your 'self.' You can conceive of mind and thought, but you believe that you can only ‘perceive’ a world. Yet, the paradox is that everything is conceptually conceived IN consciousness because there is NO "outside" through which perception is required.

Perception relies on judging differences from a ‘value-scale.’ Value creates inequality of perception and this is what fuels perception. This is because without inequality, no differences could be perceived and if no differences were perceived the ego would be done for.

Without ‘value’ nothing could be perceived at all, since your experience of others and the world is completely predicated on a value hierarchy that has many facets, both deep and surface. Value determines what is perceived and the ego demands this judgment be provided by the senses of a 'gross' concept we refer to as body. Therefore, the body is an object of perception along with other objects of consciousness, but it is ego ordained to perceive a 'world' through which to experience itself. It is a delusional tool that can no longer serve a purpose once the origin of experience is realized.

The body is a ruse, since the ego constructed the experience of ‘mind’ through which to experience itself. Ego-self simply demands the body ‘perceive’ because if the mind were conceptualized as the origin of perception (thus conceiving a 'world' as nothing more than a construct of consciousness) this would have grave implications for the ego’s need to separate, or project itself away, from the objects of consciousness. It would, in fact, make the ego face itself as that which constructs experience instead of the body 'perceiving' an external world which is then experienced in 'mind,' (only after it is perceived). If that were true than the ego would simply be another object of consciousness completely equal with all other objects ("objects" meaning anything awareness can grasp). Actually, It would BE all objects and not a separate construct. This is because consciousness does not differentiate and has no need of judgment abilities, because 'abilities' are a product of an ego-self context.

All “awakening" processes create brief experiences of complete equality. No matter how brief these experiences are, they can be quite exhilarating. However, it is still the ego-self experiencing itself momentarily engaged in an equalized playing field.

There is a tendency for these experiences to alter perception of the world. These experiences have a way of kindling a strange sense of 'close' engagement with one's experience of 'world,' as boundaries are suddenly loosened and become less concise and rigid. However, boundaries between objects of consciousness must remain for an ego to 'exist.'

It seems that authentic "enlightenment" is always experienced with and through another and solitary experiences are inadequate, since they merely reinforce boundaries rather than diminish them. This is because, out of all experiences the ego-self could construct, it is the experience of ‘others’ that is most profound and most valued and, interestingly enough, this seems to give us the most problems.

These equalizing moments, or experiences of perfect equality, can be life altering and world changing. Nevertheless, equalizing experience is frightening to an ego-self that will resist such an experience as detrimental to its continued experience of 'existing.'

If you closely examine the the obstacles of your life you will recognize that this resistance was cause. On the other hand, recall your defining moments and you will see that they were times of least resistance. This explains our intermittent attraction and revulsion to one another, since we both fear and desire such a grand unifying experience. This attract-resist ego dynamic is most profound in your 'intimate' relationships and you can easily watch the dynamic played out from moment to moment, day to day, year after year.

So, Good Luck With That!