People speak about the ego as being one of the main things to conquer in this world. They talk of it as some kind of internal enemy that does not allow one to attain higher moral grounds. Many self-help books talk about “killing the ego” in order to attain a higher level of spirituality. A lot of these books give tips about how to kill your ego, some of them giving tips such as self-chastising in order to reduce the imprint of the ego on oneself and become less a “slave to it”. While I see the wisdom in some of them, albeit in a less marginalizing way, I tend to have a different approach to the ego.
It seems to me that having an ego is necessary in order to stay within this plane, concentrated as it is on allowing us to go through physical experiments. Indeed, if we had no ego, remaining on this plane would prove to be very difficult as we would be too spiritual to maintain a link with this densely material world. It’s anyone’s guess on how we would be able to survive in this world if we had no ego left. My experimentation with my ego has led me to believe that it is something that one has to tame rather than constrain and rather than trying to live in a state of self-repression, I think we ought to give the ego some leeway so that it allows us to progress in our search for spirituality rather than opposing all our efforts.
There was a time when I tried the constraining technique and found that rather than allowing me to fully attain higher levels of spirituality, I just felt out of sync with myself and unable to retain my grasp on the world. While it was true that I did progress somewhat on the spiritual level, it was also true that my material needs were not met as I tended to lose my job and had a hard time finding another quickly. This then led to an abrupt stop of the spiritual progress as I tried to grapple with the situation and reach a new level of material comfort. Perhaps if I had pursued my research of spirituality and not given in to the fear of material loss, I could have attained higher levels of spirituality but I felt that it was not yet time to give this up.
At a later stage in life, as I sought to tame my ego by providing it with what it needed but not letting it take over my sense of moral values and search of spirituality, I found that this yielded better results and I was able to access, slowly, higher levels of spirituality. The impression I had was that I was pursuing a helicoidal path of spirituality, all the while nourishing my ego just enough to keep it cooperative with my spiritual aim. It was as if the ego was a constant at the center, fed and feeling well, while I twirled around this centerpiece, always aiming for higher levels of understanding and evolution.
The more I kept the ego central and happy, the less resistance it opposed to my spiritual evolution. It became like a wary friend, watching me from behind as I progressed, not realizing that I was going higher than it as it watched me spin but thinking that I was just in front of it. As I move on with this experimentation with my ego, I’d like to believe that at some point there would be a sort of osmosis where my ego would not be something that I observe from outside in order to tame it but rather something that automatically adjusts to only give me a lifeline to the material world while never getting in the way of my spiritual evolution. It would then become a truly trusted friend and not a frenemy.
The old souls chronicles 4 : pulsing grief 29 April 2024
Courtesy freepik.com
Tony wonders whether Aron is aware that he has now fully become a different being from the other youngsters and young adults. Aron sees in his searching eyes the unspoken interrogation.
- I always was different and even wondered if I was a freak because I had these stronger feelings that were considered as undesirable within my community.
- You are not a freak, Aron. You feel more than others although nothing as near to what we old timers felt, the feelings that all of the world had before strong negative emotions were frowned upon. We never imagined that things would go as far as to stop us even from grieving the death of our loved ones. Now we are just relegated to the role of donors of “funny feels”, “happy feels”, “quirky feels”. In brief anything that is more on the happiness scale and nothing that can touch the extreme sadness scale
- I know what you mean. I have been studying you and your wife for some time now before you went rogue and disappeared. It was a godsend when I learnt of your presence in that restaurant. What an opportunity to finally meet you and make the request for the deeper emotions.
- Why did you want to access this range of emotions?
- Ever since my wife died, I have been having this strange bubbling of emotions that felt like nothing I ever experienced before. Sometimes it’s like a rock was laid on my chest while I was sleeping. I could barely breathe and felt like a pit in my stomach but nothing near what I felt when you gave me the pulse.
- We normally don’t give that range of emotions to youngsters like you because they have a very strong effect on your psyche. With the seclusion of the deeper range of sad emotions, there aren’t many psychologists left so it is difficult to get regular appointments with one.
- I don’t need a psychologist. I can handle my emotions
- Very well. Here is the pulse tube which I have filled with the energetic imprint of the grief I pulsed through to you. Make sure nobody else puts their hands on it and call me if you are in too much pain. I will come as quickly as I can to grant you the solace.
Aron takes the tube containing the precious pulse and bids Tony farewell before leaving the library. As he is on his way back to his home, he thinks about his wife that he might see again in her preternatural form. He decides that he will let himself feel the full extent of the grief as experienced with the help of Tony. This time, he would be using the pulser and would not have Tony’s rapid intervention with soothing solace but he knows he needs to do this for his own sanity. No more half-lived emotions dragging him into a recurring downward spiral. It is now the time to experience it fully within his own house, while looking upon the ethereal form of his wife and put this behind him forever.
This weekend I attended my reiki level one course. Those who know me are aware that I do pranic healing after having taken successfully the 5 levels of pranic healing courses at the Grand Master Choa Kok Sui centre in Dubai. I have been doing pranic healing since 2017 after having initially started doing energy healing in 2013. I wasn’t sure what to expect with reiki but had heard a lot of good things about it. The course surpassed anything I could expect and was given by a young enthusiastic and knowledgeable lady, Justine Nolan, who was very communicative and empathetic. She did the first level attunement in four stages and this worked really well rather than having just one attunement for level one. Already after the first attunement, I was able to connect to reiki and feel it flow through my body.
The process with reiki was very different from what I had experienced with pranic healing. In pranic healing for example, every practice starts with prayers to a number of entities that included God, our angelic guides, our Masters, including those ascended, our teachers, etc. With reiki healing, all that was required was to go through a process called dry brush before the gassho meditative pose, enabling us to request reiki to flow through us. One other salient feature that I found interesting is that the practitioner in reiki is a recipient through which reiki flows for the benefit of the patient and does not alter the outcome of where reiki flows and how it does so while in pranic healing the practitioner can flow prana to one region instead of the other. Given this difference in control, the practitioner in reiki healing cannot harm the patient inadvertently while in pranic healing, if the practitioner charges too much a certain chakra or too little, the outcome of the session changes considerably. I also liked the fact that unlike with pranic healing where we use a device to get rid of the diseased energy (bowl of water with salt or burning with thought), reiki does not contain the notion of contamination and therefore there is no “diseased energy” to get rid of. There is only the sharing of reiki and no fear related reactions are attached to this sharing of energy.
There are other differences in dealing with the chakras, but I will keep them for later, after I have attended reiki level 2 in July and finally the master level course some months after that. In the meantime, if any of you want to share reiki, feel free to drop me an email and I will see if it is possible to accommodate your request.
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