Dave Brisbin 6.27.21
A priest says that some of the most egotistical people he knows are clergy. A friend asks why people who believe in a loving, abundant God are not living happy, healthy, abundant lives. Digging down, the reasons are related. True transformation is the merging of enlightenment and maturity, our state of consciousness and our stage of consciousness. The two are connected, but not the same. We can gain insight, understand deep, spiritual principles long before we have the maturity to live out the life of service that is the effect of those principles. We can have a peak or conversion experience at any stage, but our insights are always received at the current stage of development, will have to funnel through the ego, processed and filtered by its vision of reality at that stage.
Stages take time and repeated action to develop, and at lower levels, we are all egotistical: stuffed in the shell of our own personal needs, using the tools of fight and flight to minimize risk and maximize advantage. In the holy name of avoiding pain, we believe we need control, but pain hurts largely to the extent we try to control it. And ironically, suffering (in its original meaning of allowing or enduring) our pain is to crack our ego open to new stages of consciousness that will show us the truth of ourselves as part of a larger organism to which we are in service. Everything Jesus shows and teaches is designed to crack open our egos, let go of the obsessive need for control that keeps us within egotistical shells. Yet if we’re not careful, even these deep insights, funneled through shallower ego stages, become mere religious attempts at control of ultimate outcomes, and the religious among us can remain the most egotistical. And bound egotistically, whatever insights we receive won’t crack the shell that keeps us from the truth of the abundant love and life God offers—that it can only be seen when we’re finally out of control.
