Do You Need To Lose Your Ego/Personality?

Do You Need To Lose Your Ego/Personality? ©2018 Joan M. Newcomb, CPC

I know of three people who had profound spiritual awakenings, and lost their personality when they did. I personally believe they might have had mini-strokes or breakdowns. Regardless of the reason, they each went from being depressed, even suicidal, to an expanded knowingness, overnight.

Collage of Eye In The Sky by C. Löser

In some spiritual practices, it's almost a requirement to destroy your ego in order to attain spiritual transcendence. 

However, I believe that kind of requirement is a distortion of whatever the original teachings were. Like the idea that you need to deprive yourself, of food or sex or money, in order to be more holy.

You don't need to have a stroke, you don't need to suffer, nor do you need to become a blank slate, in order to shift from a lower awareness to Consciousness.

(One person who had a profound Consciousness Shift after stroke reported that her personality actually came back after a couple of years, but she just laughed at it).

You don't need to destroy your ego, you just need to discern the difference between it, and the greater aspect of You, the essence of you, which I like to call Consciousness. 

If you look around, most everyone in the world is operating as their personality. Decisions are being made and actions are being taken, not as an Infinite or expanded Consciousness but as the little being in a body that has survival needs, that has limitations, that's only going to be here for a number of years. 

I've found that the more disconnected you are from yourself as Consciousness, the more you will be running off of compulsive behaviors, and the more out of balance your life will be.

When you shift your perspective to that of Consciousness, you operate differently in the world. You're aware of your personality and your body's needs. You don't deny them, you care for yourself with adequate food, shelter and companionship.

It's not an overnight process (unless you want to have a mini-stroke or breakdown of some sort). But it's a process of learning to navigate differently, of discovering the difference between running the show as the "little" will versus the "greater" Will.

Your world does transform, and can transform rapidly, when you start operating as Consciousness. Yet it transforms in ways your personality may expect and beyond what your ego can imagine. 

There's a greater result beyond whatever it is you think you want to be, do, or have right now. And it can be had easily and effortlessly, simply by shifting your perception to the greater viewpoint of yourself as Consciousness.

Everyday Time Traveling

Everyday Time Traveling ©2017 Joan M. Newcomb, CPC

I'm writing this from a hotel room next to the Yakima River. It's a scorching day in August, yet the river it running full and strong. I'm not used to rivers, I live in the Puget Sound, which has tides that flow and ebb along the shore.

The river reminds me of our experience of time in this physical reality. Time flows, from past to future. When I meditated on this, while looking at the river, I saw myself standing still, wanting to walk upstream, wanting to let the river take whatever I wanted to release.

It illustrates my resistance to going with the flow. It shows that I'm facing the past (upstream). The current of time is continually moving us forward, down the river. As Consciousness focused into form, we cannot cling to the river bank.

It also illustrates how, in this new reality, everything is the opposite of what is was before. My old focus would have been to stay anchored in one spot, and to release energy that way. When I see myself as Consciousness flowing down the river, I see that past energy is released in every moment. It's not even an issue. It is gone, and the continuous flow is the present moment.

My body feels unnerved with the prospect of releasing its grip on the bank. It doesn't feel exhilarated by the flowing water (as it may have when I was younger). It anticipates drowning, which is not fun.

But when I gently cradle it in my loving energy as Consciousness, it allows the flow to happen. I feel the shift in energy. I relax into the continuous change that is always available.

Nothing is truly lost, nothing is really left behind, it is put into it's proper placement in the storyline, it is stored in the Cosmic Cloud. No one is really gone, nor abandoned, we are all still connected as Consciousness.

Consciousness exists outside of time and space. The flow of time is just one of the elements that construct this reality. It keeps the story moving along, it's the background music that helps propel our personal game of life.

We are bigger than our story, we are bigger than the river, we are Consciousness that encompasses it all. When you identify as Consciousness within form, this all becomes an enjoyable activity, even if we've hit a patch of white water and are rolling over rocks.

When you hold a bigger space in your life, as you effortlessly do as Consciousness, it is easy to cast off the bowlines and go into the current, towards everything you've dreamed and desired.