Have you ever wondered about your ego? What is the makeup of your ego? It is can sometimes be difficult to transform the mind of humanity when the ego functions to hinder humanity from attaining the Christ-consciousness. Ego functions on the construct of beliefs whereas faith functions on the construct of the Christ-consciousness. Steve McSwain states, “Lately, I’ve been thinking a great deal about faith. It seems to me that many religious people mistakenly confuse faith as trust with faith as belief. The latter is all about what you believe — the content around which the ego-mind constructs an illusory fortress of “truth” and so the illusion of certainty. It’s all about your specific beliefs, the “rightness” of your beliefs and how your beliefs are more right than the beliefs of others. It’s the stuff over which religious people debate almost continually and eventually divide. It is also the explanation for why there are hundreds of denominations among Christians and that many or more among practitioners of Hinduism. The former, on the other hand, is all about how you live — the conduct of your life; your trust in and reliance upon your capacity to enjoy “the wisdom of uncertainty,” as easterners call it; your freedom from the need for certainty and absoluteness, both of which are mere illusions. The fact is, you can be certain of nothing, except I suppose the reality of death. Yet, when your religion is all about what you believe, know that the ego in you has taken over already. The ego is obsessed with beliefs, attaches itself to them, and so fashions an identity around them. This gives it a sense of self and feeds its desire for certainty, security. Beliefs are then more than a way of explaining or making sense of your religious experience. Instead, they take on a kind of absoluteness, and when that occurs (and it almost always does), it isn’t long before you are driven to defend those beliefs against anyone who would question them or subscribe to a different set of beliefs. The ego in you will defend, debate and disagree almost incessantly. It is the cause of most conflicts between religions and between religious people within the same religion. The word “religion” itself is synonymous with exclusivity, divisiveness, even violence and bloodshed. One could almost say that the study of history is the study of religious madness….When you know, however, it is only ever the ego that attaches itself to a belief (as one of its many attachments Eckhart Tolle has rightly characterized as “ego-enhancers”) to strengthen its sense of self — and so the illusion of “rightness,” security and certainty — then you’re free to see from where this inner compulsion to cling comes. This awareness alone creates a space of acceptance in you where you are free of ego-attachments and so more capable of tolerating the viewpoints, perspectives and faith beliefs of another without the feeling you are compromising your own….
This witnessing presence or “the deeper self,” about which I’ve written extensively in “The Enoch Factor,” needs no crutch upon which to lean for a sense of self or worth or distinction. It is that part of you in oneness with Life itself. Because it is, there is no feeling of separateness from others and certainly no “us” and “them” mentality — a common characteristic of a collective ego attached to a set of beliefs. As a matter of fact, this part of you knows only union with others, indeed all things. Gone is the need for permanency, rightness, security or absolutes. This part of you dances on a stage of paradox. Unlike the crippled ego-self, it is healthy — solid, yet soft; strong, yet weak; on a cross today, beyond a tomb tomorrow. And it is always at peace with differing perspectives. Why? Because it thrives in an environment of detached awareness. It has beliefs or, as I prefer, perspectives, but it isn’t attached to them. As a consequence, there is an evolution of the self, what Christians would call “growth in Christ.” There is an expansion of human consciousness, not a narrowing of it, which is what you often see with Christians. Instead of being in the world but not of it (John 17:16), as their forerunner advised, they are neither of the world nor in it, opting instead to remain in church 24/7, as if to hide from the world. An environment of ego-detachment is the fertile soil for the growth of faith–a faith that is transformational; a faith that naturally springs from a fountain of spontaneity, knowing not when it’s giving another a cup of cold water or feeding a hungry soul (Matthew 25). It is beneath and beyond ego attachments and so has no enemies. It is a faith that flourishes in a garden of contradiction, with an appreciation for the variety in perspectives and tastes.”
Re-discover your sacred-self by knowing God!