The Battle to Surrender
It recent readings, it occurs to me there is 2 opposite approaches to the spiritual journey here. The Bhagavad Gita presents the spiritual journey as a battle to overcome ego, mind and sense control. In …
Category: Ego
Heaps of Identification
In a completely unrelated browse, I ran into the Buddhist concept of Skandhas. This is similar to what I was just reviewing around Yogananda’s discussion of the levels of ego identification – physical, astral, causal …
Deeper I-Ness
Another process Yogananda reviewed was the evolution of the ego self. What we might call the concept of self or the level of identification. First thing to note is that he describes our person as …
Habits of Ignorance
The mind is a habit machine. That’s how we learn to ride a bike, drive a car, and read. But it’s also how we respond automatically and inappropriately to some circumstances. Like learning to spell …
Complete Forgiveness
Today, a series of articles on several blogs were posted on Forgiveness. This is a response to some of the feedback I’ve received. In no particular order. NOTE – if you land here first, you …
Deep Forgiveness
Takuin and Albert (Urban Monk) decided to post on the subject of Forgiveness on the same day. They invited me and others to do the same. It’s an important subject and a good time of …
Pain Redux
The subject of pain has arisen again, so it would be useful to review the points. All pain, including physical and emotional, is a signal that something is wrong. All we have to do is …
What Leads to Awakening?
In a recent post, I spoke of how our gifts come, not from our suffering, but from the movement of life through us. This arose from the underlying idea that suffering is necessary and will …
Our Gifts come from Our Suffering?
During a meeting with a friend of mine who’s a medium, we had a rather instructive conversation. She said that our pain and lessons bring us what we have to offer. Our gifts to others …
Perspectives on the Past
Over on The End of Evil, LiberatedSelf asked about past lives. The feedback that emerged is worth sharing, edited for this scenario. “I’m kind of interested (why wouldn’t the ego be?) in getting to know …
Seeing without Believing
There is a famous saying – “seeing is believing“. When it’s our experience, we know it’s true. And this is true on one level. But it is the mechanism of illusion on another – the …
On Death
It’s curious how life tends to bring certain kinds of events in batches. I suppose this is because when a certain kind of energy arises, related sorts of actions transpire. This can be due to …