Be Careful…

One of the toughest challenges of any spiritual journey is staying aware of ego, such that it does not find a new home in your spiritual identity.  Yep, that can happen…

An easy litmus test to determine if ego has found a home in your spiritual journey is to monitor yourself for any feelings of superiority, in regards to your new way of thinking.  Feeling superior is a dead giveaway that ego is in the driver’s seat!

I recently witnessed an example of this while I was sharing booth-space at a local fair with a friend of mine.  I had recently made a series of videos where I was clarifying certain spiritual terms and phrases that I frequently use in my blogs and book and my friend commented that he liked how I’d share the various terms that I use to refer to God.

A customer overheard us and expressed that she no longer liked to use the term God because it coincided with personifying Him…something that she thought significantly limited her spiritual experience.

She continued on a diatribe about the limited nature of organized religion, which, of course, led to an attack on those who still choose to participate in it.  She even proudly stated that her sister had made others cry because she’d ripped up their religion and their beliefs around it.

It was obvious that she felt superior in her spirituality.  (I’ve had to work through my own beliefs that resulted in superior thinking, so I share this as an observation to grow from, not a judgment).

To truly move forward in a spiritual journey, compassion must also increase.   If it doesn’t, you’re not growing at all…you’ve just allowed ego to build a new home in your spirituality.

Compassion comes through understanding.  We judge when we fail to try and understand another’s choice.

In searching to understand others, compassion allows you to let go of a fixed mental position for how someone should be.  If you think that everyone else should think, believe, and behave as you choose to do, you only see how you’re different from them.  Your focus stays centered on what separates you from others versus what unites you with them.

The ultimate goal of a spiritual journey is to move beyond the dream of separateness in order to know oneness….to experience this life through our soul or spirit, instead of only the body.

Anytime ego finds a home in your experience, you’re identified more with your body (or form in general) than your soul.  When the woman’s ego found a home in her spirituality, it created a deeper experience of separation, which is why she felt a desire to attack those who did not see as she did.

Maybe she had an experience of God that shattered the mental imagery around its common usage.  This new experience does little to no good in the overall divine plan, if it isn’t applied to the world with compassion.  Instead of bringing her into deeper unity with humanity, it created conflict through further fragmentation of her experience of the world.

Fragmentation is created through any belief that is held outside of peace, love, and joy.  When you begin to really examine the nature of beliefs, you’ll notice that they’re set-up to divide, not unite…the more rigid and exclusive your thoughts and beliefs are, the more you perceive the world through a lens of separateness.

If you really examine your beliefs with the goal of aligning with love, you’ll naturally drop the ones that divide instead of unite.

Any mental position outside of love creates separateness in your experience of the world.  When you hold beliefs that separate and divide you from others, your fragmented perception of the world reflects back that same fragmentation as truth.  Without understanding that your perception of the world is an effect of your own belief system, you respond to it as if it were outside of you.

Since all conflict is housed and bred through the fragmentation that has been caused by our own thinking, we each hold the keys to creating peace in our experience.  We can choose our ego’s projection as truth and remain caught in conflict or we can choose our spirits and come to know peace.

I choose spirit.  How about you?

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It’s our will-to-do-good that leaves a lasting impression of love in the wake of our presence.  Together, we can help heal the world by simply being loving.

Peace, Love, & Joy,

Shanna