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Abscondo Podcast 53

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The ego wants to be better than others and wants to be right. Yet how can it be better or right when it is so incapable of learning?

For every terrible performance, every embarrassing incident, every pointless argument – there is a huge ego unwilling to learn and improve.

Behind every bad restaurant meal, every disgusting hotel room, every terrible song and film, and every failed business – there is a huge ego unwilling to learn and improve.  

The ego cannot improve and cannot change. It cannot accept help or advice, cannot consider any ideas beyond its tragically limited range, and cannot communicate in truth and honesty. The ego seeks your loyalty through confusion; seeing hopeless conflict in lessons that make no sense only to convince you that truth doesn’t exist.

Rather than learn, the ego only argues and debates. Rather than grow, it would have you shrink into a shadow of your former self. Rather than try something new, it will run and hide. There is no greatness to be found in ego. Seek to be better through ego and become a joke.

Most humans alive today are completely dominated by ego – burying themselves in pointless, trash entertainment, arguing over that which does not matter, and rejecting every opportunity for love, happiness, health, healing and abundance. The ego’s lesson is total insanity and pointless suffering without end. Any lesson other than this is always rejected.

This foolishness ends in an instant. We need only decide to destroy this sick parasite called ego. Learning starts by looking at it honestly. We continue tomorrow and each day after that.

Simply give your best each day and you will not experience lack. Just do your best – no better and no worse. Calmly, steadily, lovingly offer what only you can give and do not withhold it from any brother or sister who looks to you.

This requires a spiritual knowing – a faith that, if you show up each day with an open heart and an open mind, if you are prepared to contribute your unique capabilities, if you can see past ego and connect with your brothers and sisters on the level of the soul, if you can focus your attention on the work or on some other form of service – then you will experience the full abundance of life. This abundance comes in the form of money, security, safety, freedom, love, peace, pleasure and beauty.

Abundance without limit is only possible through spiritual faith. To retreat from faith is to doubt, to become greedy, to attack, or to seek comfort from fear and frustration by isolating yourself. But faith is an unshakable knowing of your true, sacred identity as consciousness in this eternal present moment. It isn’t easy to face the world in faith, but neither is the path of fear and sacrifice. Faith requires no sacrifice; rather, that you maintain your freedom and your truth.

So we awaken to spiritual faith – a deep commitment to love and truth. Then we create systems and we set prices that accurately represents the value we create. Now we give our best each day just as we take care of ourselves and each other. Sometimes your best is just showing up, just telling the truth, just accepting someone. We continue tomorrow and each day after that.

Gratitude is the knowing that you are already complete and your life is how it is supposed to be. This requires a letting go of the mind’s ideas of past and future, an awakening to the present moment, an unconditional acceptance of what is real about this moment.

To live without gratitude is to define yourself by the past or to worry about or wait for salvation in the future. If this is how you choose to live, then even if a better life situation does arrive, you will still not fully enjoy it unless you first learn gratitude.

Whatever comes in the future will bring its own set of challenges – its own reasons not to be happy. To experience the fullness, the richness, the beauty and freedom of life is to develop a wonderful relationship with the present moment. This is true success and prosperity. Regardless of what comes your way tomorrow, you have already arrived. We continue tomorrow and each day after that.

“The answer, the strength, the right action or resource will be there when you need it – not before, not after.” -The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

There is your mind, then there is reality. When the mind tries to imagine or control the future, it invariably fails. This brings a deep sense of unease and suffering.

There is no right strategy, no amount of life experience, and no amount of knowledge that will enable you to predict or fully grasp the future. That’s because the dream of life is not yours alone; rather, it is shared between us. Furthermore, the material world is filled with endless and unpredictable change. Why focus on what cannot be predicted or understood when reality is right here before you?

Does that mean it is impossible to improve our lives? Not at all. But any different or better future can only be accessed by changing our relationship with the now. The present moment is the field on which all reality happens. Nothing ever happened, or ever will happen, when it wasn’t now.

In the now, there is a universal wisdom. Your mind, if focused on the now, is designed to join with this wisdom and to respond perfectly, intelligently, and lovingly. You need only undo thoughts of fear, thoughts of past, and thoughts of future. Observe these thoughts and ignore them thoroughly, then return to the now in love. We continue tomorrow and each day after that.

When the ego convinces you to run and hide from what it sees as a problem, then you are turning from love to fear. Now the problem can no longer be solved. 

Problems can only be solved with your full attention on them. When you hide from a problem, you remove attention; thus ensuring the problem will remain.

Problems cannot be solved through resistance. Accept the situation fully. If something already is, then accept that it is. Now that you accept the truth of what is, ask only this: what is the loving response? 

Love always brings unconditional acceptance, a willingness to help, and a commitment to openness and truth. Respond in love and access the power to heal, to shine light where there was once darkness, to bring joy and peace to where there was pain and suffering.

Accept what is and respond lovingly. You may find that your problems have already been solved, its just that you’ve been hiding from the solution. We continue tomorrow and each day after that.

The ego knows only what it does not want, so as a response to anything and everything, it repeatedly convinces you to run and hide.

The ego’s only belief is in separating you from God, from other people, and from any situation that may lead to union, intimacy, or closeness. Of course the ego never comes right out and tells you this — to do so would mean the end of its control over you. Instead, the ego blames the other and then extends the promise of happiness out into the future. But first, you are always instructed to run, hide, quit, give-up.

Yet you secretly harbor a deep need for perfect union, for the limitless joining together with all of the world. You dream of closeness and intimacy, wealth and fame, you want to be recognized, admired, understood. The problem is that what you most deeply desire is only possible in the absence of ego. While going out into the world without ego for the first time feels as scary as going naked, this is the only way to fulfill your positive goals.

The ego is your enemy. Humble yourself completely and shatter that parasite. Reach beyond the ego’s borders to perfect love, where you join in perfect union with the most powerful, limitless, infinite force available to us. We continue tomorrow and each day after that.

We seek happiness in a relationship with that one perfect man or woman. The dream is that there is someone out there who is meant for you, who fits you perfectly, and when you find this person then life is complete.

The dream is that salvation is to be found in the special relationship. The problem is that the dream becomes more important than the person.

“The ideal of the unholy relationship thus becomes one in which the reality of the other does not enter to spoil the dream; and the less the other really brings to the relationship, the better it becomes. Thus, the attempt at union becomes a way to exclude even the one with whom union is sought.” -A Course in Miracles

When two people form a special relationship, they make a deal. The deal is that both parties must separate themselves off from the world in order to become everything to each other. This comes with a set of rules and expectations that are so unrealistic that, to maintain the illusion, truth must be hidden.

The couple will stop at nothing: arguing, deceiving, making guilty, controlling and manipulating. In time, there is no love and no closeness – only resentment and loneliness. The disciplined few go on in this state of familiar misery until death – which is considered success in this world.

Perfect love is not possible within the special relationship. Salvation requires the knowing of what perfect love is, and how to love yourself. Love is total honesty, acceptance, and giving. When you know what love is, you hold no one hostage to cruelty and attack. In love, nobody is desperate and there need be no rules and no sacrifice. Be love and extend it to the world. We continue tomorrow and each day after that.