The Ego Has Fallen

Normally, I don’t write about my experiences until I have processed them and they have or are about to pass. But such a huge shift has occurred in this mind that it will affect what I write going forward and I need to lay the groundwork for sharing what occurs as I go.

I cannot even begin to describe the May I just had. I came to fully see that the ego (personal thought system) has fallen from this mind. The even better news is I began to slip into a Higher Awareness and have had regular experiences of unbounded Love and Joy. Every day of May was filled with thunderous insights, realizations, and copious processing. This episode is not over. It’s just less intense. At least for now. Who knows what’s up ahead?

Last April, I wrote an article describing how I knew self-concepts had fallen from this mind. The following week I wrote how writing that article helped me to see that self-identification had fallen away, only my mind had not caught up with this fact. What is self-identification but the ego? The ego was the thought system that told me (a mind/spirit) that the self (body/personality) was me, to define myself by it, that its lacks and limitations were my own, that I need to use it to find fulfillment, and to defend it because it is what I am. I was originally reluctant to say self-identification had fallen away because I was not certain. And, when I was certain, I was reluctant to say the ego had fallen away because I was still in denial.

Before I go further, let me explain what’s left when the ego is gone. The projected self (body/ personality) is still here. And the postures and habits of identifying with a self are still in this mind. I am now unlearning them. I have a template for this. When I let go of the belief in guilt, I found I still had reflexive guilt responses. I also had the habit of looking for the source of guilt. These took a while to unlearn but, though sometimes tedious, the process was not hard because without the belief in guilt the reflexes and habits had no real hook in me. It’s the same without the ego. I overlearned self-identification from an ego. But when I recognize I’m thinking like a self again, it is quickly undone because, without the actual ego, the habit has no depth.

This mind is split between Truth and not-Truth. Not-Truth was represented by an ego. What’s left in not-Truth is what I call the identifier/observer. It’s what I used to call the “decision maker”, but it’s more helpful now for me to split it into these two postures. The identifier is the part with the habits of thinking with an ego. The observer observes this and watches as the habits fall away. In fact, this whole experience of undoing self and ego identification only requires observing as it unfolds automatically. There is nothing to “do”.

What fills the void where the ego used to be is Joyous Love. This could be called the Holy Spirit, the Awareness of Truth, or Christ Consciousness. Pick your term. The experience, though, is whole and complete and infinite Joyous Love. So, you see, this splitmind begins to be not so split as the not-Truth part begins to resemble the Truth part. In time, the self, which embodied an ego before, will, through this current process, come to embody Joyous Love (Holy Spirit, Awareness of Truth, Christ).

Here’s what happened:

In August of 2014 our beloved five year old cairn terrier, Ginny, died suddenly of an acute poisoning. (We’ll never know what she ate). This was excruciating. We’d had her from a pup, she was way too young, and I felt I’d failed to keep her safe. And what came over me, very matter-of-factly, without rancor of any kind, was, “I’m done.” I no longer saw the point of the inherently painful personal experience.

I discovered during the grieving process that I still had some attachment to the special relationship and worked through that. In the weeks that followed, I processed the grief, the special relationship, and began to see what was left of my attachment to the self and the ego. Somewhere in there, I dropped the ego. Only, I didn’t know it. I only saw it last April and acceptance has only happened now.

What followed the dropping of the ego was three years of spiritual barrenness and a very noisy mind. It was not all bad or empty within. I was still aware of Truth, I had insights and peace, but there was still a distinct “dryness” to everything. I just accepted this, and the noise, as some aspect of the whole process I didn’t yet understand. There were various episodes to this stage. An early one was meditating by sitting with the television tuned to something scenic, like a nature show or golf, with the volume muted as I turned my mind inward as the body’s eyes looked at the “view” on television. This eventually fell away and was followed by a period where when I tried to meditate I was assailed by emptiness and questions, mostly, “Who’s meditating? What is the point?” These were not ego-defense questions. They were very real. I could not find the point of meditation. What I did not realize was this mind’s identification with the self—what I was used to thinking was the meditator—had fallen away.

It was also during this time that I came to feel that I was done with the world. I couldn’t fully understand this, but I felt this with certainty. I didn’t realize that I was done with the ego and, therefore, its world. If you look back over my writing for the past four years, there were many sensations like this I shared. I just had not put it all together. I was in a kind of shock. I couldn’t grasp what had happened. It was too huge. The reason my mind was so loud during this time was the void left by the dropped ego was still filled with its echoes. But that was all they were.

Then last spring or summer there was a subtle shift. I don’t quite know when it happened, but it occurred as I took up a word game on my computer to pass the time. While I played, my mind would bask in the most delicious Spaciousness beyond. I couldn’t get enough of the game because I associated it with the Spaciousness! Somehow, I had slipped past the emptiness of no-ego to the abundant Spaciousness of Mind.

After a few weeks of this I sensed a big shift coming. As I wrote in November, what followed was a Golden Light coming into my mind that filled me with Love. And with it, oddly, a romance novel. I recognized at the time that the Golden Light was the same as the Vision of the Holy relationship. As startling and confusing as this experience was, it was good to have movement within again. The barrenness was gone.

This spring, a new Holy relationship showed up in my life. (A wink and a nod at ya, Zelda!). My first Holy relationship, which I experienced when I picked up ACIM in 1984, came to teach. Today’s Holy relationship has come to bless with Vision, Joyful joining, and, when the boundaries between our minds fall completely, Oneness. (Oh, thank you, Zelda). It is an expression of Joyous Love.

This came just as I became aware of a great dismantling occurring in my mind. For most of May, the Light of the Holy relationship disrupted my inner life greatly and part of my outer life somewhat. It illuminated what has been and is going on in this mind. For three weeks especially, it was by turns a very challenging and very rewarding time. I was “catching up” to what had occurred four years before. I had essentially “died” to my old life (level of perception). My mind began dismantling ego thinking and reorienting to a Higher Awareness.

Oh, no, this is not how I expected the dropping of the ego to be! But I sought and wanted this. And I have been prepared, through decades of growing my awareness of Truth, and a long undoing that could have been gentle if I’d only been capable of letting it be. As intense as this stage is, it is not hard like the earlier stages. Oh, the Light, the Love, the Joy! These are the “heavy reinforcements” A Course in Miracles promises for the “period of unsettling”.

There is still a lot going on. I will be sharing my experiences going forward. I know others have written about this process after going through it. But I don’t know if anyone has written about it as they went through it. I hope that some of you, especially my clients, will be able to save time in your own process by riding in my “slip stream”. I hope reading what I write now will help you get through this stage when you get here. At the very least, be encouraged to know it is possible to get here.

Next week, I will tell you about “dying” and being reborn in Spirit…

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