What am I missing ?

[Yobenm]

Hi everyone,

I've been meditating for a few years now, after a spiritual awakening experience that totally changed my view of existence (yet it seems like it was just the begining of reminding something I knew before even my first true memories). Right know it really feels like I should exchange directly with people that are further on their spiritual path than I am to avoid spiritual ego traps.

About two years ago, while recovering from a brief psychotic disorder followed by a mental breakdown I had a progressive breakthrough and found a definitive inner sense of stability and security. It seems very obvious to me that consciousness is eternal (which I have always intuited) and that nothing can really hurt me because there's actually nothing to hurt. I am mostly in a state where bad things can happen to me, my ego will still react but I don't really suffer because I manage to effortlessly keep an inner peace deep down. 

But that's exactly the point of my post. The more I go, the more I encounter situations where I notice my ego clings to certain ideas or habits. This is especially true in my relationship with my partner. It doesn't bother me in the sense that I still sense that inner peace stays anyway. But it seems the more I notice things, the more will pop up. In fact it actually gives me a pretty clear image of my ego, that I perceive like a kind of veil surrounding my consciousness. 

The thing is, this veil seems like it's always been here and I really have trouble perceiving through it or imagining things differently. I can mediate rather deeply, contemplating it and I definitely feel progress when I do, but the process seems to be endless. Along with the stable inner peace I feel I also sense a strong push to go deeper, I would even call it an urge.

I have many thoughts and interrogations about this and I thought it was time to try and share them and see if someone can relate and maybe share insights :

- I try to avoid ego traps but this urge begins to feel like my ego wanting to get rid of itself which looks like the biggest ego trap.

- I really feel like consciousness or reality is formless and I view it like a kind of infinite fractal that I could possibly navigate. I have a strong feeling I have before (that's how I imagine bardos between lives) and that's actually a lot of what my spiritual awakening was about when I had it. I'm convinced that's what this urge inside me is about too but again, I'm worried that my ego wanting to relive an experience like that is the problem. Maybe the mere fact of seeking enlightenment and nonduality is.

- All this leads to an other thought : when meditating I often go through a phase where nihilistic like thoughts pop. If I keep meditating on them they fade away and it becomes very clear that the point of all this infinitude is just to enjoy the ride. However that fucking ego is still here, trying to explain things, remembering some kind of history, conceptualizing(like you can see), and last but not least, wondering what it really should do with life for it to flow naturally and not feel separated.

Actually I often feel like I could only attain complete enlightenment when I die but this again looks like ego.

I'm eager to read your thoughts about this !

Edited January 23, 2021 by Yobenm

[Moksha]

Hello @Yobenm, and welcome to the forum

A few insights I've had during my own journey, that I hope will help:

• Ego death is an illusion. As long as you are a human being, the ego will always be there. It slithers away and hides, but it does not, and cannot die. At best, it can be temporarily diminished and guarded against.
• Your strongest defense is vigilance. Learn to recognize the ego immediately, before it can attack. It has a distinctive spiritual stench; instead of relying on your regular senses, develop a keen awareness for the ego's presence.
• Sure signs of the ego: Anxiety, depression, obsessive thinking, compulsive habits, doubt, pride, and worst of all, the misguided belief that you are  already enlightened, and could never possibly fall for the ego's lies again.
• Engaging the ego in battle requires integrity, courage, and serious commitment. It is nothing less than the sum total of your human conditioning, which started with your biology, and has been perpetuated by the messages society has hammered into you, for your entire life. It is a lifelong battle to defeat it.
• Realize that the ego relies on your soul energy in order to thrive. The less energy you feed it, the weaker it becomes. It is a lie, after all. It is only as threatening as you allow it to be.
• Trust in the holiness of your own presence. You are already sufficient. You are abundant. You are love. You need nothing beyond the essence of who you already are.
• The greatest lie of the ego is that everything is separate. It requires judgment, and a sense of superiority, in order to exist. Counter this lie with the directly realized truth of who you are, which is the same, undivided, Consciousness, that all of us is.

?

[Yobenm]

12 hours ago, Moksha said:

Hello @Yobenm, and welcome to the forum

A few insights I've had during my own journey, that I hope will help:

• Ego death is an illusion. As long as you are a human being, the ego will always be there. It slithers away and hides, but it does not, and cannot die. At best, it can be temporarily diminished and guarded against.
• Your strongest defense is vigilance. Learn to recognize the ego immediately, before it can attack. It has a distinctive spiritual stench; instead of relying on your regular senses, develop a keen awareness for the ego's presence.
• Sure signs of the ego: Anxiety, depression, obsessive thinking, compulsive habits, doubt, pride, and worst of all, the misguided belief that you are  already enlightened, and could never possibly fall for the ego's lies again.
• Engaging the ego in battle requires integrity, courage, and serious commitment. It is nothing less than the sum total of your human conditioning, which started with your biology, and has been perpetuated by the messages society has hammered into you, for your entire life. It is a lifelong battle to defeat it.
• Realize that the ego relies on your soul energy in order to thrive. The less energy you feed it, the weaker it becomes. It is a lie, after all. It is only as threatening as you allow it to be.
• Trust in the holiness of your own presence. You are already sufficient. You are abundant. You are love. You need nothing beyond the essence of who you already are.
• The greatest lie of the ego is that everything is separate. It requires judgment, and a sense of superiority, in order to exist. Counter this lie with the directly realized truth of who you are, which is the same, undivided, Consciousness, that all of us is.

?

Thank you, this is a great reminder !
I get what you mean about the ego's stench, it's exactly that veil I was talking about. Maybe what keeps feeding it is, though identifying it most of the time, I often can't help but act on it. There is a great negative energy building that makes me feel like I would be lying  if I don't say or do what I have in mind to differenciate myself from things that bother me. Every time the only thing I can do is deal with the consequences without giving more energy to it, which I manage a lot better. But on the long run it's starting to feel like a big joke .

An other thing keeping the ego going I think is my push to meditate comes from a desire to get and stabilize that strange-loopy feeling of being a story telling itself to itself that I got during my spiritual awakening. Constantly being in that state while going about your day is what I see as enligntenment and I definitely have that desire inside me.

12 hours ago, neutralempty said:

“ About two years ago, while recovering from a brief psychotic disorder followed by a mental breakdown I had a progressive breakthrough and found a definitive inner sense of stability and security. “

What was going on there?

How to make it short ? At the time I was very insecure about myself. I had no real self confidence, felt very akward socially and foud myself in a new work environment that I didn't feel adapted to. Add to that that I was clinging to the idea of a long and not so healthy relationship that had ended like two years before and mix it with a first take of MDMA (Which actually felt quite good and didn't seem to have a bad effect at the time) and about one week later ingested canabis (I had only done canabis three times before and it always had a very strong psycoactive effect on me. The  first time it actually triggered my spiritual awakening. From outside though it definitely had a bad trip component to it, but I still view it as a good experience. Each time it kinds of stops time for me, I loose almost all sense of my body and find myself fantasizing about metaphysical concepts like nesting dolls realities, Inception style).
Well I don't know if my body is highly sensitive to the drugs itself and I'm not on the materialistic side, so I would say my subconscious took over and I kinda let myself go in such a metaphysical fantasy. It was not really coherent but I was kind of imagining myself being inside a life large role playing game with a whodunit story. Clinically they identified that as a "bouffée délirente aigue", it's french for acute delirious surge, I don't know if there is a official translation. Anyways I kinda let myself go in it, I guess there was the tempation to escape the reality I was in.
They gave me an antipsychotic and I rapidly stabilized back but it had an horrible deminishing effect on me, I felt mentally slow, which totally anihillated the little self confidence I had. I suddenly felt high anxiety about doing even the simplest daily tasks, thinking I was not up to it and I got into total idleness.

tI took me some months to go out of depression, and I only started to feel normal again when I stopped the antipsychotic. I tackled my self confidence problem with a psychologist, which didn't help at all, then tried a few sessions of hypnosis. Though being totally open to it, it looks like I'm not suggestible at all since I didn't get into hypnotic trance once. I think I have to much trouble visualizing things. However these sessions created a positive mental state that pushed me to start mediation again and I finally came to the breakthrough where the "my focus determines my experience" thing became very true. Ruppert Spira videos, Alan Watts and Leo helped a lot too.

Sorry for the long story, but that's about it

Edited January 24, 2021 by Yobenm

[Vibroverse]

You are missing a lot of things and you forever will, because reality is infinite.

[Moksha]

5 hours ago, Yobenm said:

Maybe what keeps feeding it is, though identifying it most of the time, I often can't help but act on it. There is a great negative energy building that makes me feel like I would be lying  if I don't say or do what I have in mind to differenciate myself from things that bother me.

Isn't it funny how we can awaken to the reality that we are not our thoughts, and still get so easily caught into their undercurrent? Before you realize it, you are already back asleep, being pulled downriver by your conditioning.

The mind has tremendous momentum. The Buddha compared the path of enlightenment to swimming upstream. No realization, however profound, is likely to be enough, unless it is reinforced by regular meditation and spiritual practice.

[Valwyndir]

22 hours ago, Yobenm said:

- I try to avoid ego traps but this urge begins to feel like my ego wanting to get rid of itself which looks like the biggest ego trap.

This point is key. Don't try to avoid ego traps. The ego will never completely dissolve. It's an asymptote that can only approach zero, but it can never actually get there. 

The key is to simply recognize these ego traps like you are doing. The only difference is that you shouldn't resist these ego traps or project negativity onto them.

The ego shouldn't be looked upon as a bad thing. It's part of the perfection that is reality. Without the false self there could be no true self.  

You'll find that the closer you examine these ego traps without resistance, the more you'll realize their illusory nature, and the less traps you'll fall into in the future.