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April 23, 2009
We've been talking on occasion about "completing our unfinished business" as the best way to prepare ourselves for Ascension and for playing a leading role in the upcoming New Age.
I could raise as a hypothesis that the ego itself is composed of our unfinished business.
So completing unfinished business may be the same as reducing the ego.
For years – in fact perhaps throughout my fifties – I felt I needed to make my mark in the world, to make a difference, before I left the world scene.
I was driven to do something that showed that I had been alive on the Earth.
There were two things that I did. On the one hand, I wrote a handful of books, which sit gathering dust on the Internet.
But on the other I also attended a cartload of finely-targeted retreats [Enlightenment Intensives] letting go of large chunks of unfinished business.
The first accomplishment was designed to be my memorial.
But in the second activity, the "I" that cared about creating a memorial receded into the distance.
The "I" that wanted to make a difference disappeared. Now there was not much "I" left to make a difference or to care about it.
The books may or may not have an impact. I don't really care any more.
What has arisen in its place is an immense desire to serve. It is not as if what has taken its place is that "I" want to serve. No, there is only the desire.
I believe that that desire to serve is innate, just as the desire to know God is innate.
I did not "drop my ego." I did not "put it aside." I experienced through some of the unfinished business that formed the very substance of the ego and the ego, to a certain extent only, disappeared. It is not as pressing a matter anymore.
My desire to be someone turned out to be social conditioning mostly coming from my father and teachers, etc. Everyone wants everyone to get ahead, to be somebody, to make a difference. So it is a very innocent piece of conditioning.
But the real difference I made is not the books, but the completion of the unfinished business which caused some of my ego to evaporate, to loosen its grip on me.
It is no longer about me. I can listen to others without jamming advice down their throat and saying "Look how I made a difference."
I can join a team and look for the way to support the leader rather than showing that I am the upcoming bright light in the firmament.
I can write a dynamite article to some luminary, get no response, and toss the article in the wastebasket.
It is no longer about me and that means I get to simmer in the bliss that arises in the space created by the evaporation of ego. Ego = No bliss. No ego = bliss.
Finally, it is not the "I" that matters. There is for sure difference-making and the more the merrier. But the object of making a difference is no longer to prove what a difference I make.
It is to make the difference itself, let it go, and then turn around and make another difference, and let it go, hopefully without mentioning any of it or even thinking of it again as somehow related to me.
The ego got us through our caveman days, when my hormones ruled and I had to be tougher than the men of the other tribes or smarter than the lions and tigers.
But now, when we are rising above our animal ways, where the ego got us what we wanted, the ego's impulses are no longer what are needed.
Time to deconstruct the ego. Time to stand in the face of the impulse that wants to have us be recognized for our contributions and see what the driving childhood trigger was and then experience that trigger through till we see the truth of it and it loosens its hold on us. That is completing it.
I tell you I don't matter.
What happens to me does not make a differerence unless I totally lose myself to find myself, unless I die before I die.
I have only made a difference in the sense that the one who was there making a difference has subsided. I have not made a difference if a strong "me" is left shouting from the rooftops that it was me who made the difference.
Strange game. Hard to understand. But the way I think God designed it. Omce he gave us an ego and now we are to give it back to Her. In return, we enter a new era of freedom and bliss and an expanded ability to truly make a difference.
Namaste,
Steve
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The Essays of Brother Anonymous
Spiritual Essays
