Along the journey of healing and transformation, we reach a point where we become aware that our ego personality has been, and continues to be, an ever-present lens of our experience in the world. While we may have intellectually understood the fear-based ego or felt its restriction for some time, we now see through and feel the totality of its illusion.
Because we have identified with the false illusion of lack, the ego consciousness becomes a reality of experience in the physical dimension. Even though we came into this world open to our true being of the consciousness of the heart, we became conditioned by the current fear-based consciousness and culture. All of the fear, control, conflict, and separation that is experienced from the family and our cultural environment is downloaded into our consciousness.
Because our early childhood consciousness cannot disindentify with the outside conditioning, we forget who we are–a multidimensional being of wholeness. Within our true self of the heart-based consciousness there is no lack. Our experience is love, intention, and creativity. We live from the abundance of the inside in unity, peace, partnership, participation, and cooperation. We are fully connected to everything because there is nothing missing that must be filled up by controlling the outside world.
When we are ready to see the totality of the false consciousness of the ego, we have reached a point where we accept that the ego consciousness does not work in our life. This is a stage where our consciousness begins to come home to the heart. The true self in unity with Divine energy is embraced within the heart through the Spirit. The ego’s attachment to control by seeking approval, acceptance, and validation from others no longer satisfies.
During our life in the ego consciousness, many of the strategies of the ego have remained unconscious. Part of the false fear-based consciousness conditions us to be unaware of the ego’s misguided attempts to fill a perceived lack. At the core of the fear-based consciousness is a darkness of separation and isolation. It is the absence of unity, love, and creativity. The ego forms its most intense strategies to avoid the experience of this dark emptiness. Here, we find our greatest fears and addictive behaviors. If these defenses become fully uncontrolled, the experience of life can be debilitating. Therefore, another part of the ego is a defensive adaptation to the core fear-based wound. Here, the ego takes the underlying true desires of the heart and filters them through its need to fill its identity from the outside acceptance of others. Because we feel that we are expressing the true intentions of our heart, the ego’s ways of subtle attachment to approval are some of our deepest blindspots. The ego controls from all directions–on one side it controls through self-centered narcissism in pursuing one’s objectives, or on the other side it can control by being compliant to the ego needs of others.
When we can see that our ego consciousness is always in operation, even when it recedes to the background during moments of authentic love, we are ready to begin relinquishing its need. We now strongly desire to live from the heart-based consciousness all the time, not from just sporadic moments when our heart opens. The ego’s defenses no longer work for us. We understand them for what they are–a misguided attempt for love and acceptance. We recognize that the ways of the ego consciousness will not bring what we are looking for. Our true being of love, acceptance, and support has always been within our heart in unity with the Divine. From this awareness our heart is expressed through our mind and body, and through our intention and creativity into our experience of the world.
Once we understand the ego’s all encompassing ways of being in the world, we can let it go with compassion and love. If we are still fighting it and judging it for its negativity, we are still using it. When we see through the fullness of the fear and false self of the ego, our heart-based consciousness can now view its misguided attempts with compassion. As our conciousness transforms to love the whole self, the role of the ego will fade. The ego’s fear-based conflict of control and judgment is no longer necessary. It ways of struggling for love, acceptance, approval, and achievement are not needed–and most of all our use of the ego to struggle against itself dissolves. It is healed by the awakening of the heart-based consciousness of love, intention, and creativity. From the unity of the heart-based consciousness, we are free to intend and create in the love of our true being of infinite potential and connection.
