The ego… this veil of defenses hanging at the periphery of awareness, poised to react, like a venus fly trap waiting for the right agitation.
How to overcome this reaction? This retreat back to familiarity, to reinforcing this false image of self? How to gain an appreciable self-awareness, that doesn’t shirk, but grows beyond the walls, pushes past the veil, and allows fresh light to excite our eyes and expose our ignorance?
How to grow beyond this? Well, I kinda just do what scares me or feels uncomfortable. This is the best indication for novelty or new experience. Use your gut. Let yourself feel the tension as you begin approaching uncomfortable realms, and embrace it. Go there. Step forward, not back. Be confident. Stride deliberately, step firmly. If you leap, be sure to land with both feet planted squarely beneath you, so you feel this new earth of experience.
However, there is the occasion where curiosity or intrigue inspires me to implore deeper and examine more exactly.
But on the whole, I cultivate a self awareness that allows me to sense fear or resistance, and I use this sense as an impetus to be risky or impulsive in order to propel myself towards unknowns.
Whenever I sense fear well up inside me, or resistance perturb my being, rather than deny and suppress these uncomfortable states, I will plunge into them head long. They are indications I need to grow, that there is dissonance that must be rectified and overcome.
Desensitization always occurs, however. You become used to the fear, the resistance, the dissonance. Even a highly developed sense of fear loses its edge once you are accustomed to being equipped to deal with novelty and danger and the unknown
I believe this happens. A hubris maybe takes its place. And with that, a blindness develops once again.
Which is why self discovery is a never ending fucking journey.
Self-awareness is ever receding.
You chase the horizon in front of you, while the horizon behind you melts away, along with your memory of it.
I was contemplating this earlier this week: the inescapable crystallization of consciousness.
In short: the failure of fluidity in old age
In death
Ego death
Cause there is no “I”
No “me”
No “project”
We just are. And we are ever present, and that is the ultimate form of adaptability
Engaging with the here and now
Ego is a reaction formation
It’s this invisible fabricated self loaded with feelings we create to justify predetermined responses in lieu of the vulnerability of embracing the present moment
It’s hard not giving a fuck.
It’s hard to lose the ego
The ego is not self aware
The ego is self deceived
The ego is blind to itself
The ego is false security
Humility is key for self awareness
Humility is the key for growth
The key for acquiring new understanding and discarding the ineffective old, which our ego is attached to
We’re afraid of being vulnerable
Because our truest expression is in the now
Is fully present
Absent of fears
Absent of restraint
Absent of anxiety and uncertainty
But fully present means feeling fully, with no guarding, fully exposed emotionally
Denial of death
Is what motivates us, what impels the ego
Denial of annihilation
Deny the pain, the discomfort, the unfamiliar
We protect the self like it is a thing
Like it is to be protected and coddled
We stick it away, hiding it from exposure
Being our “self” =/= being
Not fully living
The bigger the ego, the more painful existence
The more encumbered we move
The more mass we carry
We are not the center of the universe
When the ego dies, or undergoes annihilation, we become fully present, and apart of the collective consciousness
We cease to be separate and isolated, and become one
We can only embrace life through ego death
Hence, we are born again
Hence washing away sins/ suffering and becoming pure
Buddhism is all about ridding itself of the ego by being present
The idea is that the mind is eternal and the physical word is temporal
When we affix mental ideas to the physical world, and they change, we suffer
Impermanence is the source of suffering
But when we are fully present, we embrace the impermanence of life, and annihilate the mentally constructed ego
We are fully present, senses engaged. No internal mental friction holding ideas together in the face of changing circumstance
Flow…
William Dare 