When you’re experiencing discomfort, anger, impatience or anything unpleasant as you engage in conversation with someone or with yourself, remind yourself that your Ego has taken control of your mind.
For the Ego, drama is the adrenaline boost it needs to remind itself that it is ‘alive’ and ‘relevant’ and ‘still in charge’. When there is drama, you shift from a lower intensity of activity to a higher intensity of activity – mental, emotional and physical. When you’re engaged in drama, equanimity is impossible.
From the Ego’s perspective, drama creates another opportunity to assure you that you are not sleep-walking. How could you be sleep-walking, it argues, when you’re able to react so strongly to an event? When you can show such concern, such empathy, such revulsion, such horror, such shock, such indignation toward an event?
Now you’re feeling relevant, purposeful. Now you feel that there’s something about which you can express your purpose for being alive. Now you can show that you care about others even if, on a daily basis, you can keep out the other tragedies that occur in other parts of the world and the tragedy that is happening within the world of your own thoughts – the tragedy of being asleep to the truth of who you are and who every being, without exception, is. As long as you’re in Ego consciousness, in separation consciousness, you ARE sleep-walking.
Periodically, the collective Ego creates drama in order to reinforce the falsehood of its nature and thus to keep you in its grip of fear. Actors in a movie can convince you that what is happening in the movie is very real because you are so strongly affected by it. Yes, you know what it is like to feel fear and as you watch the movie, you do feel fear. You know what it is like to lose a loved one and as you watch the movie, you feel like you have lost a loved one. You know what it is like to be angry and as you watch the movie, you feel anger. You know what it is like to feel betrayed and as you watch the movie, you feel betrayal.
From the perspective of Love, there is no drama.
But that’s outrageous, you say. Haven’t people been killed? Aren’t people even more terrified than they already were? Don’t people feel so deeply betrayed and vulnerable? Is Love denying all of this? If so, I want nothing to do with Love.
Drama and suffering only occur in the consciousness of the Ego, the conditioned mind. To respond to drama and suffering effectively, to get out of drama and suffering, you have to step out of the conditioned mind. If you don’t, you only add to the drama and suffering. Sadly, too many of us are addicted to drama and suffering as we sleep-walk our way through life.
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them – Einstein
Did I create this problem?! Did I???!!! How dare you suggest that I created this problem! This is something that has happened to my fellow human beings. I didn’t create it.
This problem didn’t arise in a vacuum. We are eager to accept that this is ‘a crime against humanity’ because we find consolation in such sentiments. And we find such consolation because we are able to hold the absurd thought that humanity can only exist as a victim and not as a perpetrator also. (After all, the crime wasn’t committed against you or me personally.) And so while we are willing to selectively share collective victimhood/effect (for after all, we are not equally sympathetic toward, and outraged by, all crimes and all injustices) , we are certainly not willing to share collective cause.
You and I may not have been personally and directly involved in the specific thinking and actions that resulted in this crime but are we somehow completely detached from such thinking and action? Have we been involved in NOT thinking and NOT acting when we have seen or heard of other injustices that are happening in the world? Have we indirectly and unconsciously supported injustices that have been carried out on our behalf by our governments? Is each injustice discrete from and unconnected to other injustices? Does an action or thought ever occur in isolation? That is what the Ego would have us believe but we are in denial if we accept such a belief.
The Ego survives as long as it maintains its state of separation, as long as it keeps you thinking you’re an individual separated from all else or only connected to a select few. But when the mind chooses and allows itself to return to the consciousness of Love, it sees no separation.
If, in a consciousness of separation, we have created and experienced a problem, can we expect to solve the problem by maintaining that consciousness of separation? Or, must we, as Einstein observed, shift into a different level, one which did not create the problem in the first place? That level would certainly not be the level of separation but the level of unity, the consciousness of LOVE.
Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children – Jesus
What is the purpose of pity or outrage or sympathy or empathy if it only serves to feed our egoic need to protect and reinforce the separated self, the self that causes its own suffering? Such weeping, while comforting at the time for both victim and onlooker, doesn’t really shift either into the consciousness of Love. Hence Jesus’ words, Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me… In other words, lament the fact that you’re not in Love consciousness but in separated, Ego consciousness and don’t just lament it but do something about it.
You see, such weeping, such moral outrage is preoccupied with concerns about the separated self – I care, I stand with you, You’re not alone, I am as outraged as you are (well, at least I would like to be), I am as determined as you are (at least I would like to be) to seek justice for this outrage, to punish severely these cruel, inhuman criminals. I am just as unwilling as you are to forgive them. I am convinced, just as you are, of your innocence (and mine).
I am bewildered, as you are, as to why this has happened, as to why anyone would want to do this to you (to me). I am taking this as personally as you are. I mean, if I don’t stand with you now, there is only one other position I could occupy – against you. And if I am against you, well then, I must be with the criminals. They are a vile species unto themselves. Evil and insane. I, like you, have nothing to do with them. In such thinking and feeling, in such UNLOVING, we seek our unity with some and separation from others.
And so, we reposition ourselves, as the Ego would have us do, closer to the victims and further away from the criminals. In other words, we reinforce our sense of separation, that which is the underlying cause of all crime, all suffering, all hatred, all violence, all distress, all dis-ease.
The thought of standing close to the criminal is unbearable. It would be the ultimate outrage and insult. But the criminal ‘out there’ is no different to the wounded self within you. The wounded self that has been scarred by anger, unworthiness, guilt, abandonment, lack, humiliation, hatred…What do we do with that wounded self? Punish it further by distancing ourselves from it? By refusing to understand it? By trying to kill it, suppress or subdue it? By denying its existence? By publicly condemning it? (I am a bastard, I am a selfish bitch, I am a moron, I am an idiot, I do not deserve your love and forgiveness…). In an ironic way, all this global drama ultimately is about you. Take yourself out of the picture and there is no drama. But the Ego is enterprising enough to persuade you that this is both not about you and about you.
On the one hand, this is about the people over there who are victims of some other people’s hatred and insanity. And, on the other hand, by preoccupying you with this story, the Ego cleverly makes you forget that this story is happening in your mind, engaging your emotions and drawing on your sense of injustice, your outrage, your anger, your unforgiving, your wounds, your fears, your need to protect yourself (if you don’t do something, this could happen to you and those you love).
The ‘solution’ will never be found by the separated self nor in the consciousness of separation. The ‘solution’, and there is only ever one ‘solution’ because there is only ever one ‘problem’ is in fact the return to truth, to Love, to the unified self.
There is a part of you that KNOWS without ever having been taught it, that true, enduring peace isn’t possible for one if it is not possible for all. The few people in this world who do experience enduring peace, no matter what happens around them, are those who live from the consciousness of ONENESS or LOVE rather than the consciousness of separation, of Ego.
Today, in the light of incidents in Paris, we are hearing once again the call for spiritual action. External, physical action without internal, spiritual action is hollow and often counterproductive. Let us become spiritually active and alive. Let us take the time to speak to the Truth, the Love, the Infinite Intelligence, the Divine that is within us and in which there is nothing but good. In which, all the perturbations, insecurities, distortions of perception and demands of the separated self, the Ego, are returned to nothingness. In which, only Love and all its goodness prevails, not just for some but for all. If you are ready and willing to do this, please close your eyes and give your complete attention to this Intention, this prayer, feeling its truth in every part of your being.
REFLECTION
What are the dramas that you find yourself either starting or participating in? What do you feel you would lose without such dramas? Gain? Who would you be without these dramas?
CALL TO ACTION
Replay in your mind a recent drama you’ve been involved in. Do this only after you have entered into a state of stillness. Now, imagine a different response you could make, one that leaves you feeling truly peaceful regardless of the words, actions and behaviours of the other person/s.
HEALING STATEMENT
I forgive myself for all the dramas I’ve engaged in knowing that they always arose from a place of fear and its offspring – unworthiness, insecurity, distrust, anger, powerlessness, guilt…
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