Shadow Work: The Illusion Of 'I'
I was spiraling into ego hell.
The feelings of neediness and lack were overwhelming. I kept compulsively thinking, ‘there has to be something ‘out there’ to make me feel better.’
After burning up all day in this egoic hell, I realized I am not deciding any of this. I have never been deciding any of this. And the ‘I’ that I am referring to is the ego, personality structure or personhood. This realization led me to ask, ‘who is ultimately deciding this?’ After feeling into this question I knew with more certainty then ever that Spirit governs all.
Once I internalized this discovery, I realized I don’t even want to decide any of this. It’s so much better if I can just let go of my illusory control and just go for the ride; whether I’m high on Spirit or in ego hell.
I am learning to stop taking everything so personally during this awakening. As if meditating, doing more yoga and saying affirmations every day could have prevented me from going into ego hell. The truth is, I wasn’t going to be able to avoid feeling any of this, even if I was the perfect ‘meditator’ or spiritual being.
I deeply realized that whatever my state of being is in the moment is my destiny, regardless of whether I’m existing in quantum 5d and higher, or if I’m in an egoic state of suffering.
The only thing I really get to decide is whether I accept or resist my current state of being. The Soulful Toz said something beautiful about this, I’m paraphrasing but it went like this,
“it is the resistance to the lower emotions that melts away through the healing, not the lower emotions themselves.”
Ultimately, the illusion of ‘I’ is so fleeting and temporal, so why fight with the ‘I’ illusion?
We want to ask, why does suffering happen? The answer, I have learned, is so your higher self can achieve its objective as efficiently as possible. The objective of your higher self is self-realization through knowing and alchemizing darkness. And it does this through experiencing darkness.
Every time I am drug into the darkness, I always resurface with something deeper to share and give.
Truthfully, this can get very annoying for the ‘I’ self down on the ground. The twists and turns, the rampant unpredictability, no two days are the same. It can get to be very exhausting.
This is why we are growing out of the I’s attachment to outcomes and circumstances. All outcomes and circumstances have already been decided.
If the I isn’t in control then what is? Divine Will, through your higher self. Spirit governs ALL. The illusion of a personal will is just a tool that Spirit employs as a catalyst to create pain and suffering and unsatisfactoriness as a means to wake you up.
The illusion of a personal will serves you by demonstrating how impotent your personal choices are for bringing you lasting satisfaction and contentment. The contentment and satisfaction derived from your personal will is always temporary and fleeting. Not lasting.
This is why the Bhagavad Gita issues decrees about not being attached to the results of your work.
The ‘I’ lives in thoughts. If not for thoughts, where would the ‘I’ be? The ‘I’ would hold no existence without thoughts. We construct our sense of self through our thinking patterns and often times our thinking patterns are just programming and conditioning playing on a loop. It is through programming and conditioning that the I keeps its illusions of deciding and control alive.
It is important to know that the ‘I’ or ego is no enemy. It is an evolutionary building block. The ‘I’ brought humans the awareness of their own mortality.
Through the dissolution of identification with the ‘I’ we become aware of our immortality.
My ‘I’ (ego) asks, “well, what can I teach?” The answer: nothing. My ego can teach nothing. However, my ego is often asked to facilitate the teachings from my higher self through receiving and giving transmissions.
Just ride the waves, even when they get rough. It was never the ego’s choice to come here. The ‘I’ (ego) exists within the field of consciousness of your ‘Higher Self.’ It is a temporary tool or structure is all. It falls away in relatively short order.
Your eternal Self constructed the ideal ‘I’ vessel to experience what ever it decided it wanted to experience in this lifetime. Just let it be. Don’t get involved in outcomes (that’s called karma). If you do get involved, just know it couldn’t have happened any other way and keep going forward.
At some point you just say, “okay higher self, just take the wheel, I’m not very good at driving this vessel.”
You can feel the energy move more freely in your being when you are not rooted in the ‘I’ experience. Everything just flows.
Every time the ‘I’ takes the wheel it just leads to a dead end of dissatisfaction and suffering. I don’t even care what this life looks like anymore. I don’t care where ‘I’ go anymore; I refuse to struggle against my own fate. Laying in bed, about to go to sleep, I finally surrendered.
I was so fed up with ego game of chasing my tail that I called on Adyashanti to show me the Truth, the ultimate Truth, in the form of an unspoken prayer. I remember asking Adya to come through and help me to realize that which I truly am.
I was in that state where you aren’t asleep but you aren’t fully conscious either, you are just supremely relaxed. Suddenly this powerful vision of Adyashanti came into my consciousness. I could see him and hear him and he said something like, “If there isn’t a shred of ego.” I really wish I could remember exactly what he said because it was so succinct and powerful.
Right after he uttered the words, I felt this cosmic blast of energy right above me. It was piercingly loud and overwhelmingly all-encompassing. I was mesmerized and terrified by the power of the energy. It was this energy of extreme bliss and destruction. It felt like an omnipotent lightning bolt that contained all of creation inside of it. And that was just from a distance. I never actually surrendered into the energy.
I instantly closed down and shuddered. I was disappointed I hadn’t had the openness to receive whatever the blast of energy contained. But this new part of me also had the knowing that I don’t decide when I am open enough to be completely taken by this force.
