How do you coexist with the Ego while not being identified

[rachMiel]

There is no now.

[smiileyjen101]

+ it's always now
Hi guys & gals

[rachMiel]

Now now ...

[dijmart]

Even "now" is mithya, apparently real! Awareness is out of time all together.

[Mystic]

The ego is a judgement machine that lives by making comparisons ...but of itself it has no life. Everyone is ultimately divine creations of Source. Forgiveness is to see past or overlook this dense ego covering or shrouding of the pure light that exists in everything and in others. Thus to see it in yourself too. We need to make comparisons and decisions to navigate the perceptual world though. The ego is a servant but it thinks that it is strong and thinks it is in charge. Many scriptures recommend to bind the strong man(ego) with mindful awareness.

[jtightlips21]

The ego is a judgement machine that lives by making comparisons ...but of itself it has no life. Everyone is ultimately divine creations of Source. Forgiveness is to see past or overlook this dense ego covering or shrouding of the pure light that exists in everything and in others. Thus to see it in yourself too. We need to make comparisons and decisions to navigate the perceptual world though. The ego is a servant but it thinks that it is strong and thinks it is in charge. Many scriptures recommend to bind the strong man(ego) with mindful awareness.

I wonder sometimes about the whole matter of enlightenment is a kind of knowing and not knowing at the same time. Since I have heard of enlightenment is not something that cant be understood with the mind. I find for myself the natural tendency to see enlightenment as A) Infinite Intellectualization, where one can understand all of reality in the head, but their mind is too infinitely big to be able to communicate with the common folk, and ordinary language is too imprecise for such omnicience. B) Something resembling nihilism, where higher conscious is etheral, and a kind of nothingness. It seems like these are just egoic labels, but I cannot help seeing enlightenment in either of these ways, which both seem pretty awful.

[rachMiel]

I wonder sometimes about the whole matter of enlightenment is a kind of knowing and not knowing at the same time.

Ka-ching! In Advaita, enlightenment is essentially knowing that you (atman) are the unknowable (brahman).

[jtightlips21]

I think it may have been Meister Eckhart who stated much of Spirituality is about unlearning. Frankly I could not agree more. It seems like we can too easily get stuck in needing to label, explain, or analyze everything to death. This reminded me of an episode of the Twilight Zone known as "Little Girl Lost", where they depicted a supposed fourth dimension, and it was all abstract and confusing. I think that maybe a good indication of what reality looks like if we try to understand it all with the head.

[EnterZenFromThere]

I like that JTL. I was watching Eckhart Tolle yesterday and he quoted Socrates - "the wise man knows he knows nothing". What we believe we know is not Reality - it's just a thought. In the absence of the belief of knowing comes the clarity of actual Reality. Lovely stuff

[Azathoth]

The problem is, that it is all in your head. You think that you have an ego, and you think that you are identified with your ego, and you think that you must desidentify from you ego, because you think that it will allow you to get past the ego and obtain something you want. You have not really gone into the question, what the ego is and if it is different from yourself. You say "I have an ego and I must get rid of it". But the ego and you are the same thing. So how could you get rid of the ego? Do you think that you can lift yourself by your own shoelaces? Because that is exactly what you are trying to do.

It is the same with trying to be in the now. You think that you are unhappy, you think that you can reach happiness by getting rid of the ego, and you think that you can do so by trying to be in the now. So you make an effort to be in the now. By every effort is an escape from yourself, from actuality. And in yourself alone is all the treasure that you seek. Just stop escaping and enter your natural state of effortless being. Your own subjectivity is enlightenment.

[jtightlips21]

I think it can be hard for me to disidentify with thoughts and ideas about Spacetime. In the Ego consciousness, it seems like it is ultimately the reality. It seems like it is impossible to imagine anything not bound by spacetime. For me, its easy to imagine other alternatives, like different laws of physics, biology or chemistry, or alternative events or circumstances. It is even possible to imagine a world without any of these things. Yet it seems impossible to imagine a world without spacetime. However, I think Eckhart Tolle stated that time and ego are closely related.

[EnterZenFromThere]

You don't have to imagine it JTL. You can't imagine it. But you are living it. You literally are it. It's the ground of everything you've experienced through the filter of space/time/matter. Your very nature is beyond time. Gently pay attention to your present moment experience in the body and this perspective will clarify. You don't need to try and imagine it or to force yourself not to have thoughts or experience within space / time. Just being present to your momentary experience is enough. Being aware that the awareness of thought is not the thought. That is enough.

[Azathoth]

However, I think Eckhart Tolle stated that time and ego are closely related.

I never really studied Tolle indepth. However, I studied Krishnamurti indepth and I suspect that Tolle got his ideas about time from Krishnamurti. Both of them are talking about psychological time and not physical time, i.e. time that exists within your own mind, time as a means to achieve something, time as a means to get rid of something, the whole idea of future as projected by the mind
http://www.awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=302

The ego survives withing this psychological time, because it identifies with "what was" (memories, experiences of the past), and projects into the future to "what should be" and all the time escapes from "what is" (the now). In fact, the ego survives by identifying with the past and with the future, in the present moment, it has no continuity.

[jtightlips21]

You don't have to imagine it JTL. You can't imagine it. But you are living it. You literally are it. It's the ground of everything you've experienced through the filter of space/time/matter. Your very nature is beyond time. Gently pay attention to your present moment experience in the body and this perspective will clarify. You don't need to try and imagine it or to force yourself not to have thoughts or experience within space / time. Just being present to your momentary experience is enough. Being aware that the awareness of thought is not the thought. That is enough.

I think I get too many paradoxes stuck in my head. Yet it seems like its nothing more than mental content, and the mind attempting to understand the big picture.

[dijmart]

I think I get too many paradoxes stuck in my head. Yet it seems like its nothing more than mental content, and the mind attempting to understand the big picture.

The mind won't rest until you do understand the big picture...or at least mine didnt. You need to understand what the person you appear to be is, the creator of this universe and original awareness itself and how they interact with each other. They are different orders of reality. There is the manifest and the unmanifest, so there will always be paradoxes, you have to except that at some point.