The Great Escape

AKA
How to Fool your Ego and Get the Hell Out of Here

Never mind the third Reich, The ego is the biggest fascist dictator of all time! No matter how ‘advanced’ on the spiritual path you might think you are, unless you have had some form of direct realisation of emptiness; your ego is most likely pulling your strings on some subtle level.

The ego is a master of manipulation and all things that enhance ‘how clever I am; how spiritual I am, how successful I am, how beautiful I am and how much better I am than you’. It enjoys inflating itself and berating others, it enjoys accumulation, revenge and making itself the centre of attention at all times. It can also do 'poor me, they did it to me, I'm not good enough and everyone else is better than me'. It is the force that makes the ‘world’ go round (although has nothing to do with the earth spinning!) and perpetuates our karma so that we return again and again into a life of mind numbing suffering.

If you are already partially conscious of its force, you may think you can spot it; ironically it is often demonstrated by those who think they are involved in a so called ‘spiritual’ lifestyle. After all, most of the chronic wars on our planet have come about because ‘my beliefs/religion/ideas about God and what I think is spiritually correct, are better than yours and therefore, you should be eliminated so that I alone can rule over the domain of what I think is right’.

And that, in a nut shell is the fascist dictator of MY Ego! It is everywhere we are; its best friend is ignorance of the truth. It demands your allegiance and don’t you dare introduce it to anything as threatening as THIS moment here and now because it is terrified of anihilation. It will do anything to stop you from being in the present moment including: dazzle you with promises of heightened states and freedom; tantalise with hopes of reaching a better state than the one you are in NOW; give guarantees that life will be better just around the next corner and so on, until, by the time you realise it ain’t never gonna happen, you’ve croaked it and are on your way six feet down!

It has many weapons such as pain, sickness, undesirable encounters, loss and of course its biggest ally of all; DEATH! No, we don’t like that one at all…’please don’t let me die, I don’t want to die, nor do I want to experience the death of my loved ones’ Although we try so hard to avoid it, we are silently obsessed with this friend of the ego to the point where most of our films are about pain and death, the news is about murderers, war and suicide bombers and we have plenty of schemes that try to assure us that we can ‘insure our life’ and possibly make our meeting with the grim reaper a little more bearable…

What a load of tosh! However, it is a very effective means for keeping us trapped in the cycle of samsara.

But how can we escape from this cycle of suffering? There is really only one way, and that is to free our minds from the clutches of conditioned thought. In other words, we have become hard wired to accept that death is all there is at the end of a life span. And even though there are many, many clues left here on our earthly plane that might point us in other directions, it is our fear that keeps our minds embedded in this one debilitating belief.

Death has many forms but all of them are concerned with the finite and the limited. Every time you limit yourself with a fixed belief or idea about something, you deny your boundless heritage and are playing games with death and all his friends. Whenever you experience a devitalising emotion such as fear, anger or greed, you are affirming your allegiance to creepy Reapey. When you refuse to acknowledge the divine within you and all around, you become the equivalent of a zombie or the living dead; merely going through motions of existence rather than honouring the life force that moves through and animates your apparent form.

Jesus said, ‘Yea though I walk through the shadow of the valley of death I shall fear no evil’. To me this is Jesus expressing his realisation about the emptiness of death: Yes, we may pass out of the body but our essence remains intact. That part of our existence which is the original awareness of union with One instead of two; i.e., undivided; unconquered, remains intact or everlasting because death is merely a scary face behind which there is no substance.

To dismantle this belief one might question ‘who or what am I? What is death? What is life? And so forth until the mind becomes stirred out of its slumber of habitual acceptance.

However, the ego likes to make large of this idea and scare us into submission so that we are always striving to escape from death’s ineluctable clutches. We do this in as many ways as you can imagine the most common of which is to sleep-walk our way through life until our life-force is exhausted and then we obediently drop into death’s gaping jaws.

Yes, I know it sounds grim (ha, ha!) but it needn’t be because there is always a way OUT or IN to be more precise. Although certain religious texts may lead you to believe that karma – or the fruits of your actions, are inevitable, there are always exceptions to the rules and in actual fact, escape is imminent in every moment. Buddhists may have you believe that you have to accumulate merit like grains of sand in a pair of scales until one final grain causes a critical mass; Christians on the other hand believe that through practising the teachings of Jesus; love God above all and love your neighbour as yourself, grace will fall upon you and you will be renewed but no matter how hard we may try to claim this evasive heightened state that promises everlasting peace, we cannot do it through our will. Even if we SURRENDER our will, results are not guaranteed in this life. Still, you can’t blame a girl for trying.

All of these obstacles to liberation come from our trusty ego. In other words, you can trust the ego to behave exactly as it does. It wants to keep you here forever, in the prison of your desires: To have; to be; to claim it for its own. It is like a clingy possessive person wanting to keep you near them at all costs; pretending to be your friend when their only interest is ME! If you want to fool the ego long enough to escape, you have to understand and be honest about its nature in you. It has other weapons, such as making you feel ashamed or guilty for not being ‘spiritual’ if you experience anger or competitiveness or jealousy, for example. Many who believe themselves to be ‘spiritually advanced’ have a great problem in accepting these mind sets within themselves – which is a big obstacle for those who believe they are on the ‘spiritual path’ as it only brings more reactivity into the picture and keeps them locked into suffering – constantly striving for a ‘better’ state of consciousness – but like everything else in the strife department, this too is an ILLUSION.

A good way to fool the ego is to keep things simple. Think of your fascist dictator as you would a bratty child. If this child throws a hissy fit because it’s not getting it’s way, you can distract it with some other entertainment – constructive ones are better than putting it in front of the TV although mind numbing activities do have their moments. Many spiritual teachers call this karma yoga because it provides something relatively pure for the ego to do, whilst benefiting others at the same time. And then…while your ego is busy with the details of washing someone else’s dishes for example, you can slip away.
And hey presto, you’re gone
Just like that!

Laugh in the face of death...and be FEARLESS