The Ego as a Strategy

The ego can be like a monster in a dream: the more you try to fight it or escape it, the stronger and faster it gets. Your very focus on it heightens its power. Instead, look at it like an insecure child, screaming for validation and promises of safety and longevity. Care for it as you would any small child, becoming neither attached to it and spoiling it nor so locking it away in a dark room till it screams it terror, scaring the neighbors.

When sages say there is no ego, I think they mean that it doesn't exist inherently. I think of it as a survival strategy nearing its obsolescence. Just because it's built into our genes and strengthened by tradition does not mean it's any more absolute than our propensity to eat greasy hamburgers to satisfy a primal hunger for fat and carbs. Calmly see your ego as a strategy that has served its role and now needs to step aside to allow a new energy to run through you.

Charles Tart on Altered States

"Because we approach spiritual questions--for example, the question of our destiny after death--only from the perspective of ordinary states of consciousness, it is not surprising that the answers we get are only distorted, pale reflections of reality. We have become so blinded by abstract verbal statements about spiritual truths that we miss the chance to verify those truths for ourselves by direct expercience. Hence the prevalent spiriual dissatisfaction of our times."
-Charles T. Tart, Ph.D.

That's from a book called What Survives? edited by Gary Doore. More stuff on altered states of consciousness can be found on TASTE - The Archives of Scientists' Transcendent Experiences.

Inspiration Is Short Lived

Inspiration is necessarily short lived because if it weren't, there would be no need for perspiration, and without perspiration, no sense of aliveness. I need a sense of earning. Maybe it's just our work ethic, but without earning our happiness, I feel like a passive recipient of life, not truly alive.

I seek constant inspiration when what I really need is to practice maintaining the movement. I seek a guide or dogma forever telling me where to go and what to do, but would I be really living if I was just offered a script? Self-creation is the joy of the universe, but I long for direction in cowardice.

Discomfort Teaches

I wanted to know my spirit guides but couldn't find them. Then, through a burning bush, the message came to me. Discomfort is my spirit guide. It tells me everything I need to manifest at the moment!

It's not the bad guy as I have always assumed. It is the teacher. No pain no gain. Seek the pain if you want the gain. Seek comfort if you want to Rest In Peace. Do you hear that? Seek comfort if you want to DIE. Be yourself so flamboyantly that you love yourself enough that you don't care what they all think. Bring yourself to the party with your own style, your own quirks. Keep it clean though. You know you like cool & clean; it's not all that hard to be cool & clean, damn it! Everyone does it. It's not a bad thing just because everyone does it! Cleanliness is decorating the body. Even hunter gatherers decorated their bodies in their culturally accepted ways. Conform at least to the minimal standards of the mainstream. Since you're not expending so much energy financing the rebellion, you can use that energy to finance YOUR Self.

Your war on cool is as delusional as the White House's war on drugs. You want to fight coolness so hard because you've placed your bets on rejectness. The white house fights drugs so hard because they also don't want to admit they've lost the bet. The others nominate your coolness, but you don't want to take the title because you might lose it, and that would really hurt. If it's so fake, then why are you so afraid of having it and subsequently losing it?

You look at the olympic athletes' tears of joy and pain as too passionate. They've invested way too much of their soul in a silly 3rd dimensional game. What good is that for them in the higher dimensions? That's the thing, you precocious prick! This is your time in 3D, not 4D. The reason you can't ascend to 4D yet is because you haven't mastered 3D. You hate materialism so much that you're too imbalanced in Tao to move up to the next level.

Go ahead, make my 3rd dimensional day.