Liberation Comes After Freedom From Ego
Don’t misunderstand — freeing yourself from all of your tensions, stories, and projections is just the prerequisite for freeing yourself from the experience of separation. Freeing yourself of those only frees you from your ego. Surrendering from that place frees us from our misunderstanding of being separate from God.
Every discussion about sādhana can be boiled down to this question: Are you open or are you closed? We are either living in freedom or in the bondage and contraction that is ego — the part of us that fights to maintain an individual identity separate from God. Both freedom and bondage exist with us, and the aspect we feed with our attention is what will grow.
The purpose of sādhana is to free ourselves from egoic tension and contracted awareness so that we may gain the freedom and clarity of knowing who we really are. This perpetual tension is reinforced by the stories and projections we live in, because that is where we put our energy. It’s extraordinary how much of our life force we spend being tense, projecting that tension onto others, and then defending our own tension. All of that is ego, and when we function from that level of awareness we live in profound pain.
The True Cause of Suffering
We are continually trying to force life to conform to a vision of what we think would be perfect, when the conditions we face are not the true source of our pain. All suffering is the fallout from the experience of separation from God. If we’re perpetually fighting, struggling, and demanding — the indications that we are functioning from a limited place of need in ourselves — then we are reinforcing ego instead of transcending it. Ignoring the real source of our suffering, we create tension in ourselves and pain for others.
In the illustration above, there is a lingam, Śiva’s stone, with a serpent spiraling around it three times. This serpent (kuṇḍalinī) is rising up toward the light of pure Consciousness in the center circle, and the two other sides of the trident have eyes in them, which might represent our capacity for self-reflection.
As kuṇḍalinī moves up within us, it dislodges all the rubble we have allowed ourselves to be buried under. Whenever we see this rubble rising to the surface, we must recognize that it is only long-buried tension coming into view. Instead of projecting that tension out into our relationships — with complaints about what someone else is saying or doing — we use the gift of self-reflective capacity. If we see that we are about to move into a state of contraction and express tension, we can pause, take a breath, and not feed that limited part of ourselves.
If we don’t do that, instead of strengthening the muscles of surrender, we reinforce the strength and power of ego. The need to attack and project reflects a misguided attempt to prove ourselves, which is self-reinforcing. God needs no proof, and His joy and freedom is inherent in us.
If you find yourself in the middle of a cat-fight, stop and ask, What am I really doing here? You might be shocked, because if you ask the question with sincerity, the answer will be that you are creating one more level of tension to bury yourself under. The conscious spiritual person chooses the opposite: when we come up against whatever it is that causes tension in us, we listen to the other person and open, even if it’s to some difficult-to-hear feedback. How are we going to see that we’re functioning from tension, if we’re simply caught up in functioning from tension and engaged in a knock-down fight?
Rising Above Ego
Freeing yourself from all tensions, projections and stories is the prerequisite for freeing yourself from separation. Buddhi is the level of consciousness that has the discriminating power to really see the ego and then choose to not engage it. From that self-reflection, we can start to untie our bindings and free ourselves from the grip of the ego because we realize that we are not our ego, and not our needs.
We change our experience not by taking a sledgehammer to life, but by changing our consciousness. In the experience of our true Self, which is a state called puruṣa, the awakened kuṇḍalinī knows, I am an individuated expression of the Divine. Gaining that realization is the purpose of sādhana.
The God-given capacity we develop in our sādhana is one of making conscious choices that feed and establish us in a higher level of consciousness. We can recognise the level of consciousness in which our tensions, projections, and needs exist, but we also experience that there is a higher consciousness within us that is accessible if we put our attention on that, instead of reinforcing the demands of the ego. All of our fight and tension, and all of our stories, are not going to bring us to the realization that God dwells within us.
We must think very carefully about the daily, moment-by-moment choices we make: Where we are investing our lifeforce and whether we are freeing ourselves from ego. It is amazing how easily we lose sight of the extraordinary possibility we have to be free and to live in God’s love. It’s only once we cut the barbs of egoic binding that our individuated consciousness can ascend to return back to its source. It is only when we are living in openness that we can surrender from the place that frees us from being separate from God.