My Big TOE
AWAKENING – DISCOVERY — INNER WORKINGS
A TRILOGY UNIFYING PHILOSOPHY, PHYSICS, AND METAPHYSICS
Thomas Campbell
Book 2 Discovery – Abridged Version – Part 3
What Does Love Have to Do With Consciousness?
The key to a logical assessment of personality and feelings is an understanding of the concept of ego.
Now that we are talking about feelings, personality, and ways of being, a discussion of the role and function of ego and its relationship to fear will be helpful. To understand ego you must first understand fear. At the deepest level, fear is generated by ignorance within a consciousness of low quality. Fear and high entropy are mutually supportive — one creates and encourages the other.
Earlier, we mentioned that evolutionary pressure was at the root of the four major motivators of humankind: 1) survival and material success, 2) male-female relationship and sex, 3) influence, control, and power, and 4) self-improvement, love, and fear. The first three are a direct result of physical evolution whereas the last is a product of consciousness evolution. All four are uniquely blended together within each individual. It is this motivational mixture that drives the bulk of our choices. Whenever an individual perceives that he or she is seriously lacking any of the first three, fear is generated, especially if the consciousness quality is low. Additionally, fear arises from incomplete knowledge or understanding — it leaps up in dread of unknown possibilities. Worry, anxiety, and feelings of inadequacy breed insecurity and fear. Ignorance fanning the flames of fear can quickly whip itself into a blaze of insecurities building one upon the other. Many of us have experienced this unhealthy degenerative process when a loved one becomes unexpectedly ill, hurt, or is unaccounted for, and we do not know how the situation is going to turn out.
Fear resides in the intent or motivation, not in the action. For example, purposely avoiding trouble may be an act of good judgment and not necessarily an act motivated by fear. Fear, as a product of intent, represents a state or condition of consciousness. Fear is like mind- cancer; it is a disease of consciousness, a dysfunctional condition of ignorance trapped within a little picture. Fear is expressed by a high entropy intent driving action that reflects neither understanding nor vision. Like a biological cancer, fear is debilitating and destructive of the system in which it grows.
Ego is the direct result of fear. Needs, wants, expectations, and desires are generated by the ego as part of its shortsighted strategy to reduce the anxiety produced by fear. Desire is generated by wants and needs but not all desire is fear-based or counterproductive. Basic (lower level) desires such as sex and hunger are not necessarily fear based, and the desire to improve yourself (if the motivation is correct) can be a strong positive incentive. In general, when I speak of desire, I am referring to the desire that arises in response to the needs of ego.
The ego and intellect are expressions of the individual being; they reflect the quality of the consciousness of that being. Fear is the reaction of that being to the perception of a vulnerability, problem, or difficulty. The ego lives and works between the fears and desires on one side, and the intellect on the other — it is a trusted advisor to the intellect with the special job of neutralizing the dysfunctional effects of the fear, as well as defining and focusing on things desired (wants, needs, and expectations).
A simple example of a fear-desire pair is the fear of being inadequate coupled to a need of appearing to be adequate. The ego-need is usually satisfied by any contrivance that appears to deny the existence of, or compensate for, the fear — regardless of how superficial or transparent this strategy is to others. The ego is hard pressed to create a viewpoint that decreases the anxiety produced by the fear — any viewpoint that works and works quickly is satisfactory. Holes and discrepancies in the rationality of the ego’s viewpoint are quickly filled by convenient beliefs. It is the ego’s job to reduce anxiety and discomfort by sweeping disconcerting fears under the rug. The ruling principle is out of sight, out of mind; or equivalently, out of awareness, out of personal reality.
An individual’s ego and intellect work together to develop and justify those wants, needs, desires, expectations, and beliefs that are required to prevent fear from adversely affecting the functional (operative) awareness of the individual — their mission is to make sure the individual always feels good about him or her self. No ploy, or deceit, as long as it can be suitably justified, is off limits. This dynamic duo’s most useful strategy is to maintain a fantasy of power, significance, importance, adequacy, correctness, competency, invulnerability, superiority, righteousness, or whatever it takes to allay the anxiety produced by the fear.
Fantasy or delusion is integrated into the perceived reality of the individual by that individual’s interpretation of its experience. Of the three (fear, ego, and intellect), the fear is the only one that is fundamentally powerful. The others, like the wizard of Oz, derive most of their apparent power from illusion and trickery.
But what about the power of the intellect? The intellect of mankind is the evolutionary accomplishment of which we are most proud. Our intellect, like Samson’s hair, is the source of our power both individually and as a species. It provides the evolutionary advantage that allows us to dominate other creatures and exploit the earth.
The intellect has at least some access to, and control of, memory and processing power. It can perform deductive and inductive analysis and make logical assessments by employing approximately the same approach that a digital computer would use to accomplish the same tasks — except the human intellect is not nearly as good at logical process as a computer. Human thinking excels at data collection, interpretation, and synthesis as well as creative self-expression, but is notoriously weak at employing logical process. We have learned to use mathematics as a tool to extend our naturally diminutive logical abilities. Without mathematics to brace our lack of natural logical ability, our ascent to power would have stalled in the nineteenth century if not before. Being logical to any significant depth does not come naturally to mankind (much less to womankind) because it is not particularly important to our purpose.
We need only enough acumen for logical processing to provide the feedback required to evolve our consciousness efficiently. We excel at data collection, interpretation, and synthesis because those are the abilities we need to evolve our consciousness. More often than not, what we let pass for logical thinking in personal matters simply makes our progress more difficult. Justifying our ego’s wants, needs, and desires as apparently logical requirements of our continued happiness demonstrates how our intellect can become a detriment to successful consciousness evolution. By justifying our beliefs (making them appear rational), our intellect becomes part of the belief trap’s trapping mechanism. Most of us believe ourselves to be much more logical than we are.
When it comes to those activities that are most profitable to the evolution of our consciousness (personal interaction and relationship, for example), most of us are barely rational, much less logical. We have much to learn before we are ready to take effective charge of the more important aspects of our life and our existence — that is why we are enrolled in a PMR kindergarten for young low quality consciousness. And why the psi uncertainty principle, to be discussed in Chapters 13 and 14 of this book, is a requirement within PMR.
Did the words ‘low quality’ in the previous paragraph prick your ego just a little? Did you feel an emotional downer or dislike the personal implication? If it did and you did, I rest my case.
Art, intuition, and creativity do not typically flow from the intellect — though the intellect aids them all with definition and process. Pattern recognition and creative synthesis, two of our more complex cerebral functions, primarily lie outside the intellect’s operational capability.
As the champion tool users in PMR, our intellect is undeniably the source of our technical prowess. Our ability to use and design more powerful tools, accumulate resources, and outsmart Mother Nature, each other, and ourselves is a tribute to the inventiveness of our intellect, the power of our mathematics, and our irrepressible drive to control and dominate. However, in terms of consciousness, personal power refers to the power to make right choices that lead to right action. In the Big Picture of mind-space, your power is derived from your quality of consciousness, not from your ability to force issues to resolve to your satisfaction.
In matters of importance, the intellect seldom has but a tiny fraction of the truth-data required for useful logical analysis. Nevertheless, the intellect offers an illusion of being logical as it creates a smokescreen of self-serving belief, need, and fear based rationale to serve the ego’s needs. It is in the service of the ego that the average intellect spends most of its time and energy. There are exceptions, but they are exceedingly rarer than a poll of intellectuals would indicate. Most of the exceptions belong to a relatively small and impersonal set of crank turning tasks that require some serious intellectual effort (mostly day jobs requiring a high level of analytical skills).
The ego, being closer to the fear, has the job of building and maintaining a feel good fantasy barrier between the fear and the intellect. The ego, in collusion with the intellect, builds a complex delusional structure held together by convenient beliefs that justify an intricate web of interactive needs, wants, and desires. The ego is reactive and has no power of its own, though it has great influence by virtue of its job of counterbalancing the fear.
The intellect has the job of justifying, approving, or blessing the construction materials (beliefs, attitudes, pseudo-knowledge, and strategies) of the ego. This information processing function develops whatever analysis (reasoning) that is required to support the ego’s needs. Developing adequate justification for the beliefs and attitudes of ego, along with developing and executing strategies and plans to support fantasy creation and management are the intellect’s primary duties. The intellect has another job: It also processes and stores the information in memory that is required to drive a car, hold a job, earn a degree, be an engineer, find your missing car keys, get out of the rain, and so on.
The intellect cannot, by itself, either love or lower entropy; nor does the intellect direct intent or will as you might imagine. Intent is a reflection of consciousness quality: will is applied intent — neither can be directed by analyzing data. Intent and will operate at a deeper level than the intellect, which represents only the functions of information storage and data analysis.
In summary, the intellect justifies and rationalizes what the ego requires to fabricate the appropriate fantasy structure that must counterbalance each fear. Your fantasy structure is a system of finely tuned personal beliefs that are specifically designed to meet your needs, wants, and desires, and to mollify your fears. The intellect’s justification defines and legitimizes the fantasy as a rational reality.
The common ego-attributes of arrogance, self-importance, and self- righteousness are merely a few of the construction devices such as arches, vertical walls, and pitched roofs that the ego uses to build and maintain its delusion. If others evaluate an individual as egotistical, it means the fantasy built by that individual’s intellect-ego reality construction team is obvious to the vision and understanding of others. The degree to which you are capable of understanding the fantasy structures of others is dependent on your own personal fantasy structures.
The devices you use to maintain your fantasies or delusions are largely not understood for what they are — whether they are employed by yourself or by others. To see with clear vision, you must first become detached and fearless in the face of ignorance. Without fear, there is no need for ego; no use for needs, wants, or beliefs. What basic desires remain are natural, healthy and in consonance with right being and spiritual growth — they create no conflict.
To complete the picture of ego, as defined above, you must be aware of its opposites: humility and compassion. Humility allows for confidence, certainty, self-assuredness, purpose, and passion while carrying an underlying implication of an awareness and recognition of limitations. The limitations of which humility is aware can originate inside or outside the individual (a wholly artificial distinction, but one that will aid the clarity of the explanation).
An awareness of inside limitations recognizes the limits of individual knowledge and understanding (it acknowledges its own ignorance and is accepting of the ignorance of others). An individual who fully appreciates the value, significance, and importance of others, as well as understands his or her own responsibility to be of service, reflects genuine humility. Humility breeds compassion and vice-versa. Outside limitations spring from an understanding of the laws, properties, and requirements of reality. Humility and compassion require an individual to understand their limited role within the Big Picture. As arrogance waxes, humility wanes.
In effect, humility and compassion are the antitheses of ego — they are what is left over when the ego is gone. As humility and compassion emerge, ego disappears and vice-versa. It is exceedingly difficult to consciously and purposely develop humility, increase the quality of your consciousness, drop ego, or grow spiritually without some knowledge or understanding of the Big Picture. Thus, humility and compassion are the correcting mechanism for ego, while knowledge and courage (open minded skepticism in the relentless pursuit of truth) are the correcting mechanism for fear. Love is the result of the success of both corrections.
Your capacity to love (a measure of the entropy of your system) is inversely related to the ego and fear your being contains. Because the ego is generated in response to fear, you can see that to love, to increase your capacity or ability to love, you must primarily let go of fear. Without fear there is no need for ego, but without fear and with humility there is no ego. Both fearlessness and humility are required, and are the byproducts, of a successfully evolving consciousness.
A consciousness becomes the embodiment of love, humility and compassion as it engages its free will to reduce its entropy toward the positive side of being. Thus, increasing your quality of consciousness increases your capacity to love and allows your intents and actions to be animated by love. Love is the natural result of low entropy, high quality consciousness.
‘Love’ is the word we use to describe how a low entropy, high quality consciousness interacts with other individuated consciousness and other sentient or non-sentient entities. Love is the result of successful consciousness evolution. The capacity, ability, and willingness of an individual to love is a function of how much entropy their individuated consciousness contains. Love capacity is a direct measure of entropy within consciousness. I bet you never thought that you would ever see a technical definition of love.
While we are being both technical and surprising, let’s give the concept of spirituality a technical definition as well. Spirituality, as it is used in this book, is equivalent to consciousness quality. You become more spiritual, demonstrate a higher spiritual quality, and make progress on a spiritual growth path by lowering the entropy of your consciousness. A consciousness with lower entropy produces a consciousness of higher quality. In other words, the level of spirituality (or degree of consciousness quality) of an individual is inversely related to the entropy the individuated consciousness contains. It is obvious that an individual’s spiritual quality is directly related to his or her capacity and willingness to love.
Is it clear that a person of high spiritual quality also has an enlarged capacity to love? Do you understand why spirituality and love always travel together? Is it clear that dogma, self-righteousness, ritual, and ego driven intolerance and superiority, which are generally exhibited by both organized religion and science, have nothing to do with spirituality, love, or the pursuit of Big Truth?
It is a matter of record that the violence, hate, and general meanness that human history lays at the feet of organized religious fervor dwarfs any other evil known to man. Spirituality and love must be personal achievements of personal consciousness — they cannot be organizational achievements. Likewise, any displays of love, compassion, and humility must necessarily reflect individual quality, not organizational quality.
The idea that religious organizations help their members to substantially decrease the entropy of their consciousness is, for the most part, wishful thinking — a belief that makes everyone feel better. It is this unsubstantiated notion that organized religion somehow imbues spiritual quality that justifies religious organizations, fills their coffers with gold, and swells their ranks with both believers and fanatics. History tells a different story. Present experience, as well as an accurate account of the world’s past events, demonstrate that the potential of religious belief to stimulate genuine spiritual growth remains largely theoretical and non-actualized while its potential to ferment hatred and intolerance is unmatched by any other human institution. Power politics and cultural beliefs, no doubt, take second and third place in history’s Hall of Shame.
Most of the world’s worst conduct has been committed by a combination of all three working together — religious and cultural belief in the service of power politics. The manipulation of religious and cultural beliefs (exploiting ignorance and ego — common fears, beliefs, and desires) to gain economic, personal, professional, and political advantage is an all too familiar story to any student of history or current events.
The unholy triumvirate of religious belief, cultural belief, and ego driven power politics clearly display the nature and results of high- entropy consciousness — ego, belief, need, fear, power, and desire. These three, in various combinations, seem to be at the source of most of the evil let loose in the world as far back as history can see — and as far into the future as anyone dare guess.
Do you agree or disagree? Don’t simply jump to a conclusion that feels good, supports your beliefs, and reduces your discomfort. Use open-minded skepticism to look around the world; then look at yourself, your community, neighborhood, and office. Pull out your old world history textbook and take another look. Gather your comparative data — then taste the pudding. Accept no one else’s opinion; come to your own well-studied conclusion.
Before you are finished with your analysis, you will probably realize that the process of coming to a conclusion is vastly more important than the conclusion itself. Learning should not stop because a conclusion is reached. If the process continues, the conclusions can always change. To be effective, seeking Big Truth should be an iterative process that lasts a lifetime. Conclusions should, for the most part, remain tentative. Such is the nature of open mindedness.
Now you not only know that evolving your consciousness is the purpose of your existence, but also how to fulfill that purpose by becoming fearless, humble and compassionate. It cannot be more simple or straightforward than that. Now that you know and understand everything important, life should be a breeze — right?
Whether you admit or deny having fear, or any particular fear, is not significant to the results — the outcome is the same. Admission (recognizing the fear) may or may not bode well for the potential of removing the fear, but it does not change the results of having the fear. For people who live out of, or direct their existence from their intellect (many pretend to, yet few actually do), there is an apparent power in recognizing and naming things. For these people, becoming aware of a particular fear may be the first step in overcoming that fear or it may be the first step in redesigning their fantasy to patch a perceived hole in their present delusion.
The fantasy generated by the intellect and ego team is designed to reduce the anxiety and discomfort caused by the fear. The symptom is treated while the cause is ignored and left to fester. The bigger and potentially more frightening the fear is to the individual, the bigger and more important the fantasy must be to counterbalance that fear effectively. Fantasies are dysfunctional in the same way that sweeping garbage under a rug is dysfunctional because it only appears to make the garbage go away. The garbage is still there, and it stinks increasingly with age. As more and more garbage is stuffed under that rug, the accumulation becomes more obvious and difficult to hide. It also becomes more unlikely that it will ever be cleaned up.
The fantasies that are driving choices in our life are as invisible to us, and to those around us who share them, as they are blatantly obvious to others who have a different perspective. For example, arrogance, self-righteousness, and self-centeredness only appear to be dysfunctional when they are larger, and dominate an individual more than is normal or typical. On the other hand, if you are not arrogant, self-righteous, and self-centered enough within a culture or subculture that demands a certain amount of these attributes; you may be seen as defective, weak, passive, or a loser.
Delusion and dysfunctionality that is normal or typical for a given culture is not seen as dysfunctional or deluded from inside the culture that supports it. In fact, most cultures or sub-cultures require that certain types of garbage be swept under the rug — and everybody in that culture is unaware of (or ignores) the stench. The clash of cultures is not only a clash of values; it is also a clash of egos, delusions, and needs.
Delusions come in all sizes, types and degrees — it is a continuum between very little (like you and me) and a lot (like some people we know). Some fantasies are more annoying than others. It is the relative compatibility, interactive nature, degree of unusualness, and extent of the fantasy that you are interacting with that largely determines the degree of annoyance or attraction you feel toward another’s delusional constructs.
What about the deluded, arrogant, and egotistical beings who seem to be happy as pigs in mud? Do not believe it. That smooth exterior is purposely deceiving. It hides an inescapable emptiness, unhappiness, fear, and dissatisfaction that gets worse and more difficult to cover up with age. A poor quality of life is the inevitable result at a poor quality of consciousness.
Evidence to the contrary is short lived or turns sour or flat over time because any fantasy world is always in constant conflict with the real one. Consider the deluded, self-righteous, arrogant, and egotistical people you know (by definition, those who are much deeper into those particular fantasies than yourself). You will notice that the degree of their delusion, self-righteousness, arrogance, and egotism is directly proportional to the degree of their unhappiness and dissatisfaction, particularly if they are old enough for the inevitable consequences to have caught up with them.
I hear someone asking: “Isn’t ego about power trips and pushing others around?” Internal control of your fears is the driver of ego, but a concerted effort to gain and maintain external control (fantasy management) is the function of ego. Control of yourself, as well as other people, is an important part of implementing and maintaining the fantasy. Control is a tool used by the ego and the intellect to convince the individual that the delusion is real and that the being is strong, good, worthy, lovable, rational, adequate, deserving, and all those things the being fears it is not.
The use of external power (bullying, dominating, manipulating, bribing, and threatening) is used to get what you want, need, and desire. Your wants, needs, and desires exist, for the most part, to cover over the emptiness, pain, discomfort, or difficulty caused by fear. Thus, the ego uses fantasy devices that directly and individually contradict each fear. For example, a bully on the outside is a typical ego response to feeling inadequate, powerless, and weak on the inside. In ego-space, what you see is often not what you get — image is everything. The privacy, secrecy, delusion, and denial required to maintain that image is second in importance only to the image itself.
So very easy to see in others, so very difficult to see in yourself! I am sure that is because others have many fears and personal problems that you do not share — well, at least theirs are worse than yours are. Did I get that right? Am I psychic or what? You’re smiling. Is that because you imagine that I caught some people with their egos hanging out? Hey, I know, many things are like that … true for others but not for you. I understand; you are a unique individual — not like all the rest. Relax; it’s others we are referring to here — the ones who still have the capacity and ability to improve themselves significantly.
The goal of ego in using external force, power, control, or manipulation is to display behavior that denies the fear — to pretend that what is feared is not actually true or that it is irrelevant or powerless. Using external power this way is like forcing someone to be nice to you, and then feeling satisfied or superior about how likeable you are based on the actions of this individual. This is self- delusion at its most obvious. The inevitable result of using power to pretend to be likable makes you less likeable. Using power to pretend that you are anything drives you further away from actually being what is pretended. That is how an abstract fear manifests itself into reality.
Our fantasies are not only private affairs, they are social and cultural constructs as well. We share and intermingle our fantasies with others within a mutual support system. There are many fantasy support systems (family, friends, work, school, church, clubs, sports) with one of the largest and most pervasive being our information and entertainment media. Traditions, devices, or institutions that support or reinforce our cultural beliefs often serve as fantasy support systems for individuals within that culture.
In interacting with others, particularly those we are unfamiliar with, we tend to lead or open with our image, tailor it slightly to custom fit the situation, and then wear that image like a costume. In that way, we lead others to participate in our fantasy as we participate in theirs. Eventually, we become lost in our fantasy and do not know who or what lies at the core of our being. We cannot tell the costume from our skin.
A common dream is one in which you are at work or school or church and suddenly realize that you are naked or otherwise inappropriately dressed or undressed, or totally unprepared and unfit for whatever it is you are about to do. Ever wonder why you have those dreams repeatedly? They dramatize a core fear. Not only is our ego-fantasy faux-being-construct itself a reaction to fear, but as a bonus, we get to fear the transparency (we are exposed or the real us is found out) of the fantasy itself, as well as fear the adequacy of the fantasy to continue to fool ourselves and others. Fear of exposure and inadequacy are companion fears born of a deeper knowledge of our self-delusion and manifested according to the individual personality. That is why hiding behind a costume makes us feel more secure.
Psychologists would have you believe that a healthy ego is a good thing — a necessity for success within our culture. When an individual is driven by the types and intensities of fear, desire, wants, needs, expectations, and beliefs that are average for his culture, he is pronounced normal — a healthy (by definition) member of his group. Many erroneously believe that a certain amount of a “don’t tread on me” attitude is necessary to avoid being pushed around by others. The idea that no ego is synonymous with weak, powerless, and effete demonstrates a lack of understanding of the nature and dynamics of consciousness. Low personal entropy, high personal power, fearlessness, love, and no ego are all on the same team.
Beings with low or no ego have the highest quality consciousness and the greatest personal power. The truth of this statement does not rely on some odd definition of personal power. The personal power I am speaking of subsumes the standard definition. The power to take charge of your life, to defend yourself in the face of determined hostility, to find satisfaction and fulfillment, to lead and inspire others, and to accomplish great and lasting things in both the physical and the nonphysical realities in which we exist, flows most naturally from the same process that dissolves ego.
The capacity and ability to master consciousness evolution accrues to the warrior, not the wimp. Maintaining a healthy ego so that you can be normally dysfunctional in your culture is how mediocrity finds comfort in the security of the herd.
Insecurity is a hallmark of many cultures, including ours. We begin our integration into the larger shared fantasy, with its concomitant smaller reality, soon after birth. As that process continues, we eventually lose our ability to appreciate and understand the Big Picture. A small twisted (cultural biases or beliefs) PMR picture appears to be all there is, and seems to contain all the certain knowledge and truth. Knowledge beyond PMR knowledge appears to be necessarily based on imagination or belief. Such are the confines of the shared fantasy, belief, and fear that form and bound our little picture of reality.
A house of cards to camouflage the ricketiness of a house of cards that was built to camouflage yet another shaky house of cards may seem futile, but it works like magic every time. Here’s how. Fear always leads away from peace and balance, and therefore, always breeds more fear in an interconnected cascade of worry and fret. Thus, many layers upon connected layers of fantasy and delusion are generated from a single fear. Eventually, as fear stacks upon fear, the entire fantasy structure becomes immensely complex and Byzantine — a wad of tangled threads so large it becomes a Gordian knot.
The transformation from a rickety house of cards to a strong defensive castle is dependent upon enough complexity and confusion to obfuscate the simple truth to the point that the owner’s intellect will never confront any fear directly. A lesser intellect requires a less complex fantasy. Now the structure appears to be stable, solid and sound because the intellect cannot follow any single motivational strand to any fear in particular. No intent, no action can be laid squarely at the feet of (directly connected to) any particular fear. Presto! Change-o! The fear has disappeared! With some rationalization-putty and justification-Bondo to smooth over the rough edges and glue it all together, we get a beautiful custom made castle (with mote and drawbridge) for the ego to live within.
Beneath that clever cloud of obfuscation, the foundation remains a house of cards and fear remains the fundamental motivator. The garbage is still under the rug. We do not change reality, or modify absolute truths; we merely create a fantasy-bubble to live in with our friends and family. Our fantasy-bubble floats within the larger reality interacting positively with compatible fantasy-bubbles. Each bubble defines a local reality for those who are self-imprisoned within it. What a game! What a shame!
But hey, if it looks like a castle, works like a castle, and is treated like a castle by others, it must be a castle! The castle is the apparent you, it is the personal reality you create. It represents what you want to believe you are. It is the result of a lifetime of steady progress, interacting with others, and existing successfully within your culture. In it, you are as safe and secure as you believe you can be. The castle is where your ego (a relatively small and well-behaved one, I am sure) and your intellect live and work, protected and secure.
From this headquarters, life’s strategies are formed and executed; evaluations are made. This castle is the foundation of your existence, the core of your being. It represents you, your life, how you define yourself as an individual, how you relate to others. You cannot imagine anything more frightening, or more fear provoking, than letting go of or tearing down your protective belief-fantasy castle.
This is how you feel: “Anyone who does not recognize the fundamental correctness and solid reality of my very fine castle must be deluded, or hopelessly lost in a fantasy.”
The door is shut, the drawbridge is up, and no information exposing the delusion is ever considered, tolerated or let inside. You feel protected inside the castle, but from a Big Picture view you are simply trapped inside, ensnared in the web of your own fearful deceit. Caught like a rat in a belief trap! There is no easy or painless way out.
After you are finished thinking about the previous few paragraphs, let’s change gears and talk about what it means to be centered and balanced. A discussion of fear and ego would not be complete without an understanding of balance. You experience right being when you are balanced — when you are living, growing, and being with optimal spiritual productivity and minimal consciousness entropy. You lose balance when the ego is the source of your motivation or intent. When you are animated (making choices) by wants, fears, desires and needs, you become driven by an inward-pointing forcing-function and are not balanced.
When you are animated by love, you are not driven by fear, ego, desire, or need. There is no forcing function driving your choices. Love is directed outward. With love, you are at peace, solid, still, fearless, and centered. This is not a control issue; control does not create balance, but only the appearance of balance. A balanced individual is a conscious part of the unified larger reality, a productive citizen of the larger consciousness ecosystem, and is aware of being interconnected to everything. External balance (being in balance with everything external to the individual) is an immediate and automatic consequence of internal balance. Internal balance precedes and enables external balance — it does not work the other way around. Trying hard to appear as if you are balanced does little to produce real balance — truth does not flow from fantasy. The Big Picture cannot be derived from the little picture.
When right being and right action are natural, easy and obvious, you are in balance. For large systems as well as individual entities, balance defines the minimum entropy state at any given time, under any given circumstance. Balance is not a digital on-off function; it represents a continuum from the highest entropy consciousness (wild, angry, insane, frantic, self-centered, random, confused, hurt, threatened, fearful, demanding, vengeful, jealous, self-important, and inadequate — all artifacts of fear and ego) to the lowest entropy consciousness (balanced, fearless. egoless. compassionate, humble, and expressive of unconditional love).
Balance is sometimes described as the state of being detached. This is a valuable metaphor but we should be careful about what the word “detached” means within this context. Being detached does not imply that you are either intellectually or emotionally withdrawn or distant. Detachment does not mean not interactive, not involved, or does not care. Detachment does not imply being aloof, or above it all. The pursuit of consciousness quality (spiritual growth) never requires or encourages one to become detached from life, caring involvement with others, or from responsibility. Detachment simply means that one is no longer influenced by needs, wants, desires, expectations, and beliefs. Balance and a low entropy consciousness are enabled through detachment from one’s ego.
Note: What I have been describing is the balance of entities growing toward the positive side (rats). Anti-rats, or those evolving through negative intention, also seek lower entropy states of being through internal balance by total control of self (controlling their personal energy) and approximate external balance by control of what is external to themselves that can be controlled. Those poor anti-rats: their potential is dreadfully constrained. Control, driven by desire and need, is a desperate and self-limiting attempt by the disenfranchised effete to appear powerful. Control is, and always has been, a poor substitute for love.
This brings us to a simple fact that everyone needs to understand about having ego and not being in balance: The unfettered ego, aided by the intellect, will always act in a way that inadvertently manifest the fear into the reality of the being. The ego-intellect fantasy constructs always encourage the being to make choices that actualize the fear! If the problem or fear the ego is whitewashing is initially only an imagined difficulty (which is the normal condition), the ego will eventually transform whatever is feared from an in-your-mind thought-form to an in-your-face physical reality. The speed and certainty of this transformation is dependent on the energy invested, which is proportional to the intensity of the ego’s reaction to the fear.
Simply put, your ego makes your fears come true. By manifesting your fears — bringing them from the realm of consciousness into your local physical reality and forcing you to deal with them directly — your ego becomes a powerful teacher by hitting you over the head with the painful consequences of your fear, and imbalance. A dumb rat gets zapped! This is a great educational feedback reality, not an existentialist’s, or nihilist’s uncaring “life sucks” reality. To be confused on that point is disastrous. A “life sucks” attitude dooms you to an unhappy, no-growth existence of self-inflicted pain. Self- pity, “woe is me,” “what’s the use,” “life is unfair,” “so what,” “leave me alone,” “I do not want to learn anymore painful lessons,” “who cares,” and “I just can’t do it,” are deadly to your evolutionary progress and personal growth. Going through life with these attitudes is like trying to swim in deep water with a cement block strapped to your back.
There is one more thing that you should know about ego. The ego is such that many other people, unlike you, will read this entire aside on ego thinking that I am talking about someone else. They will be nodding their heads up and down as they read, pleased to enhance or at least confirm their considerable understanding about what makes other people act as they do.
Hey, amigo, you can help me out here. If you happen to know somebody in this pitiful situation, please try to wake them up — gently of course. Please be empathetic and kind. They are doing the best they can. They have obviously been mesmerized by their extremely capable and clever intellect and have probably missed almost everything important within this trilogy since the end of Section 1, and much of what is important within their life since the age of sixteen. Sad, yes — but entirely redeemable!
If you cannot wake them up … Yes, I know you are very good at this, even so, breaking a belief centered ego entrancement is extremely difficult … if you cannot wake them up … please, try to make them comfortable and simply go on your way. Never attempt to shatter someone’s worldview by dramatically collapsing their house of cards with logic. That approach rarely works and usually creates a bigger problem. If you shove Big Truth into the intellect of an entranced ego, there is a high probability that this victim of self-trickery will contract the hideous-truth-trauma (HTT) syndrome, which invariably creates an emotional disturbance leading to an angry and fearful retreat deeper into the fantasy jungle. Never intentionally corner a critter unless you are prepared to deal with panicked desperation that can occasionally turn vicious.
Nevertheless, all is not lost — the future is always uncertain. Shaaazaaam! Satori may strike the walking oblivious at any time like a brilliant bolt of rogue lightning! Oh yes, it is possible, stranger things have happened at least once since time began.
Take a deep breath and relax — contemplate how this discussion of ego relates to you personally. Imagine a few of your most cherished delusions and the fear that creates and feeds them — and go on.
That ego digression was fun and I hope you had a good time, but now we need to return to achieving a better understanding of feelings and personality. Combine self-awareness with an ego — self-awareness hallucinating (believing in) its own relative self-importance — and you get the possibility (high likelihood) of emotional and intellectual pain. Delusional self-awareness is self-awareness with an attitude (with an ego) and can thus feel both joy and pain. We are not referring to physical pain here. Pain is the awareness of not getting what you want, of not having it your way, of failing to possess or to retain possession of something your ego is attached to — something you believe you want, need, desire or deserve.
Thus, an ego creates pain (for its owner) out of its attachment to unfulfilled requirements, out of its beliefs, and out of the requirements and conditions it places upon the achievement of contentment and satisfaction. Pain is caused by dissatisfied, discontented, needy self- awareness. Self-induced pain is the electric shock you get in the PMR learning lab’s amazing maze. It is the primary negative feedback stimulus applied in the intent-behavior modification trainer provided by your local virtual space-time reality. Joy, love, and happiness are the flip side of that coin, the positive feedback stimuli.
Fear can also be a phobic reaction to real or imagined pain, discomfort, or disadvantage. Fear produces an awareness of potential pain and creates additional related fears. The generated pain and additional fears likewise instigate more fear — a snowballing feedback process that quickly saturates to maximize anxiety and discomfort.
Now we can understand why any answer, including a wrong (delusional) one, often appears better than no answer at all. Using belief to ease the fear that ignorance produces is more immediately important than expelling the ignorance. Open minded skepticism loses out to belief-based immediate gratification because open minded skepticism is a long-term solution that must deal fearlessly with ignorance. It would appear that humankind generally finds it is quicker, easier and more immediately satisfying to pop a feel-good belief-based pain pill to cover up an unpleasant symptom, than to struggle mightily to triumph over the root cause.
Words that describe emotional content have many facets and shades. Different people often interpret them differently. Using terms that express feeling inevitably produces a semantic minefield; consequently, don’t get blown away over the details — particularly if I use words in ways that are not in consonance with your definitions and notions. Following the general sense of the intended meaning, while letting the quibbles go, will produce a more accurate, complete, and productive communication.)
Joy and peace are the opposites of pain and fear. They are generated by self-awareness without ego — without attachments, needs, desires, wants, or requirements. Joy is self-awareness unconditionally enjoying its existence and the existence of whatever it has created, and whatever else there is for it to be aware of.
Peace is self-awareness being unconditionally content with itself and satisfied with the state of its being — knowing that it has done whatever it has done for the right motivation. A being in perfect balance is a joyful being at peace. Balance generates peace and vice- versa.
Sadness is self-awareness knowing that it, its parts, its implementations of the Fundamental Process, its creations, and loved- ones could be better (more optimized, more profitable). Sadness, peace and joy all coexist with each other — each generating and supporting the others.
What I am calling sadness here might better be called gentle, mild, or accepting sadness, or perhaps somber, serious, contemplative or reflective would be better, more descriptive adjectives — but not boohoo or woe-is-me sadness. This is sadness born of compassion, humility and caring. It is the result of a realistic and empathetic understanding of the unnecessary self-inflicted pain that heaps misery on the world and its people. This is the sadness of watching your friends and loved ones (as well as all people) making themselves and each other miserable and unhappy because of their ignorance and knowing there is nothing you can do to help them grow up. Another form of sadness (sad because you are not getting what you want) falls under the heading of ego induced pain and has nothing to do with the sadness derived from compassionate love, joy, peace and sadness, as defined above, compose love. Love is a state of being incorporating compassion and humility with no fear, no ego, and no delusion. Because love is the natural result of a low entropy consciousness, joy, peace, sadness and the elimination of ego are likewise the direct result of a consciousness sufficiently lowering its entropy.
Within a large digital consciousness system, the most profitable internal arrangement is achieved when the various groupings of bits (subsystems and inner structure) interact cooperatively for long-term mutual profitability. Recall that large complex systems, by definition, always have large numbers of complex structures of subsystems that interrelate, communicate, and share information (look at your body for a PMR-constrained example). Cooperative interaction, at its lowest entropy best, within a digital consciousness system is defined as love. In other words, it is this attribute of internal cooperative interaction (that must take place if a consciousness system is to evolve successfully toward lower entropy states) that is the wellspring, genesis, or source of primordial love.
Love is what one ends up with after the ego’s wants, needs, desires, and expectations are removed from an individuated consciousness. Love is the natural and most basic expression of low entropy consciousness. Love is what grows within consciousness in the absence of fear. Love is a technical term defined by an absence of entropy in consciousness; it exists within individuated consciousness as a continuum of quality that may range from very, very little to very, very much. Love is a property of a highly spiritual consciousness. Love represents the uncorrupted natural state of aware sentient existence and harbors no delusion. Love is the goal of evolving consciousness working within the consciousness cycle. All effectively growing personal Big TOES must converge to love as they progress along their unique path toward Big Truth. Love is your purpose; it defines the positive direction of your growth.