Your Conscious, Friendly Mind – Day 11
In our forgetfulness, we lose access to our spiritual being, to our spiritual Self. Instead, we become attached to and identified with body, mind, emotions, and intellect. Our mind becomes clouded. Whenever we are unaware, whenever we are unconscious, we enter the state of ignorance. In that state of mind, we cannot penetrate below the skin of perception or understanding. We cannot separate Self from experience.
The second affliction of the mind that Patajanli defined is the ego. Ego is born out of, and has its foundation in, ignorance. It is a limited construct of the mind. The ego is the particular individual self the mind considers itself to be. The ego identifies and defines, interpreting life experience through those identifications and definitions. It falsely defines the very nature of life, who we are, and what we are capable of, all based on the distorted perceptions of ignorance.
Ego is the conditioned state of mind and emotions with which we identify a false existence. It is the shadow of real existence, the shadow of the real Self. Through the ego, we process your life experience, we judge others and ourselves with the yardstick of shallow perception, with the distorted and narrow, false identifications of the conditioned mind.
Through the spectacles of the false ego, we see everything as it appears. To see through the eyes of the Spirit we need to change our spectacles!
1. Compassionately observe the ways in which you identify with your limitations, the ways in which you feel defined by your failures, the ways in which you feel condemned to live out the patterns of the past. Notice what you say to yourself inwardly about such things. Counter every false statement with a true one. For example: in response to, “I have tried so many times to change this habit unsuccessfully – I am hopeless,” tell yourself something like, “This may be an old and stubborn pattern, but it is nothing in comparison to the power of God to transform it. This problem is not my enemy. It is an occasion for grace, a friend of my soul that offers me the chance to draw closer than ever to God, to my Spirit within.”
