Zen Farmer

It’s so spiritual to let things go. It is so pathetic to give up. Giving up implies defeat. Letting go implies acceptance. Letting go is good.  Giving up is bad. Letting go is giving up.  Giving up is letting go.

Although giving up and letting go are essentially the same thing, there is a world of difference between them.  Letting things go is hard physically but easy mentally. It is difficult to let things go, but when we do it, we feel instantly better. Giving up is hard mentally but physically simple. It is reaching the limit of our ability and making a choice to become passive and stop striving. This choice may cause us mental anguish. Giving up is letting go of a goal or an approach to a goal. Letting go is giving up a mindset.

The difference between giving up and letting go is the difference between your True Self and your regular self. Your regular self views your experience through your ego and feels separate from and competitive with your environment. Your True Self is still you functioning as an integral piece of the universe whether you realize it or not.

If you are trying to discover your True Self, you will actively work to let things go and, as you do that, your True Self will be working on backing your ego into a corner until it gives up. Until that happens, when you are faced with a situation where you feel like you should give up, let it go. If you are struggling with letting something go, give it up.

You are the universe. If you want to explore the universe look inside your mind. If you are happy, the universe is happy.  If you are angry, you are living in an angry world. When you find peace, the universe is at peace.  So what if you’re the universe? How does that help you deal with being you?  The universe is huge and appears unmanageable, but you are tiny and you have some control over you. When you manage to control you, you control the universe.

As the puppet master of the universe, the strings you hold are your thoughts, emotions and feelings. Your hands are your awareness.  Just like your awareness manipulates your hands in your body, making your fingers type the letters on your keyboard, your awareness can manipulate your emotional reactions.  Emotions are made up of thoughts.  When you pay attention to your emotions and get comfortable existing in any emotional state, you will have a better view of the thoughts feeding your emotions.

Every emotion has a string of thought leading to it. That thought string leads directly back to the source, which is you, which is the universe. Very close to the source and your Self, is your ego. The ego likes to hold the reins. The ego, though doesn’t see the strings going back to the self and often doesn’t see the strings leading from the thoughts to the emotions. When the ego is in charge,  the strings get tangled.

When you become aware of your ego, aware your thoughts, aware of emotions and aware of your actions you can bring peace to yourself. When you are at peace, you bring peace to the universe.

Zen Masters can behave abusively toward their disciples. They will hit them with sticks. They will give them impossible questions and tell them that they will get hit if they answer one way and hit if they answer the other.  They will belittle them.  They will assign their disciples humiliating tasks.  They will kick them out of the monastery. The Zen Masters, who are masters of the mind, will use every mind trick available to assault the egos of their followers.  They perform these horrific acts as acts of compassion.

The disciples submit to this abuse because they know that their egos cause them more pain than the abuse of the Zen Master. They are working with the Master to try to rid themselves of ego. As long as ego exists, the treatment feels like abuse. When ego disappears, the treatment is seen as skillful means and compassion.  There is no greater compassion than to deliver somebody from their state of delusion.

You should not use these ideas to keep you stuck in an abusive relationship. The Zen way to deal with actual abuse is to get out, however possible. You should also not use these ideas to excuse your own abusive behavior toward others. To learn from the Zen Master-disciple relationship, you can use the problems you encounter in the course of your daily life to practice isolating your ego.  A problem is only a problem because of your reaction to it. If you don’t worry about how things impact on you, they are only events.  Your reaction reframes events as problems.

Learning to see your problems in relation to your ego, and learning to be mindful of your reactions to life’s events, will help you develop great compassion for yourself and others.

Winning and losing is pure ego. As we watch reality TV and see situations were people compete and are voted out, or in, week after week, we see how much we love winning and losing. Sports, of all sorts, are part of our culture. We love it when our team wins and we hate it when our team loses.  It gets even more personal if we are playing ourselves.  How wonderful it is to win. How terrible it is to lose. We take winning and losing so seriously, we even divide ourselves, arbitrarily, into winners and losers. It is amazing how our emotions will soar and sink based on which category we associate ourselves with, win or lose. Pure ego.

If you think of yourself as a winner, you have to be careful about acting like a jerk and believing that there are actually losers.  If you think of yourself as a loser, you have to be careful about believing what you think. Winning and losing is only in games.  Yet in games such as Russian Roulette, winning and losing has life and death consequences. That is how seriously we take games. It is exhilarating putting our egos through the paces. Our egos get so involved in these games, we accidentally confuse ourselves with losers or winners.

A winner needs a loser. Without losers there are no winners. The greatest thing about winning is not losing. This is why we are so confused. Any game that sets one person above another is destructive to anybody with an ego, which is all of us. The most destructive part of it is how basic it is to our world view. Playing games is wonderful and  winning and losing is part of life.  Winning and losing can be helpful to figuring out how we differ from our egos, but if we believe in winners and losers, we are lost in ego.

As if our egos didn’t cause us enough problems, it turns out, it is the ego that makes love hurt. If it weren’t for our egos, we could love without grasping. If we loved somebody, we could, with confidence, expect them to love us too. Without our egos, we wouldn’t see any reason a person shouldn’t love us. Without our egos, we would likely love everybody.  We would not have to choose who deserves our limited love, because our love would be unlimited.  People’s quirks would not threaten our egos and so we would love quirky people just as much as people like us. That kind of love would be free of pain. What we usually get though, is painful, ego love.

Since we all have egos, we feel like our love is limited and we pick carefully who we will share our love with.  We maintain a tightly guarded inner circle, which we want to invite a certain, specific somebody to join. Once we have chosen somebody to love, the pain begins. It is often pleasurable pain, but deep pain nonetheless. Pain comes in confirming the love.  Unfortunately, when we first fall in love, we are functionally insane, so our powers of objective confirmation are weak. For example, we may confirm our love by waiting for a phone call or a text. We will time how long it takes for a text response. Anything more than a few seconds, we start second guessing the love. That is painful. That is a game of the ego. It has nothing to do with love.

The final blow of the ego is the heartache when love “ends”. During the relationship, the ego begins to define itself in terms of the other person and love. When the relationship is over, the ego sees that it was defined by a false promise and it goes through the painful process of reinventing itself.

These are a few ways that the ego turns love into pain.  Love itself is not painful. Grasping and making demands of love is what hurts.  Most love between people is a meeting of egos. We can expect pain.

Love without ego is comfortable, and eternal in any given moment.

We all know that we are all equals.  Not one of us has more intrinsic value than another. Sometimes we don’t feel that way.

The social game consists of enjoying each other’s company and delighting in our individuality and our common experience.

There is a subtext of enjoyment that is pure ego.  If ever you feel that somebody is better than you are, that is your ego having a go at you. It is equally as destructive if you think that you are somehow better that another person. Smarter, faster, stronger, maybe, any of these may be true. Better is not true.  That is ego.

To excel at the social game, you can watch your own mind and be alert to your habit of comparing yourself to others. You are no better or worse than anybody, try to notice when you pretend this is not true. If you keep score, you will notice  that you are either harsh on yourself or others. This is how your ego interferes with harmony.

People think about Ego as a greedy, hungry force, that compels us to outdo each other, causing pain and misery.  Ego wasn’t always so sinister. Freud talked about the ego as a middle man of the mind, who was trying to make peace, between our base urges (id) and our conscience, or the internalized voice of our parents (superego).  In that model, Ego was a peace maker. Our ego was a part of our psyche, like our thumb is part of our hand.

Now, Ego has taken on a lot of the blame for our baser instincts. It’s taken over the role of the id and superego.  The unconscious, which used to contain id, is now the promised land.  It is the source of wonder and inspiration, interconnectedness.  Somewhere in our subconscious, we can expect to encounter our true nature. It has moved from a fearful seat of bubbling urges to the seat of wisdom. A major upgrade.  Ego has taken over the responsibility for our psychological problems and delusions.

Good for Ego. We need a scapegoat.  We wouldn’t want to have to admit that we are  ignorant. We are wise, Ego is ignorant. This perspective gives us a handle on ourselves.  By imagining Ego, we can imagine Self as separate from Ego.  Ego becomes the clouds obscuring the sun.  It is helpful for us to learn to see clouds and to know that something is obscured.

Although Ego causes us to feel pain and misery, we actually love Ego. It is us. It is what we have known as us for most of our lives. We fear losing Ego. What we want is enlightenment and Ego.  We want to be free from our desires, by getting everything we want.  Unfortunately we cannot get everything we want until we want nothing. Ego, that which we are now, will fade away when we become enlightened. We will miss Ego. Fortunately, when we lose Ego, we have lost nothing. Ego never really existed.

With love, you can evolve your ego.

In order to actually use love’s force to help your ego evolve, it would it would be helpful to know what all this nonsense means.  To understand this, and to put it into practice, you have to look for your ego.  Upon recognizing your ego, you have to decide if it needs to evolve, or if it is just fine as it is. If you decide that it needs to evolve, then you can use the power of love to transform it.

The first step in this process is to locate your ego.  This should be easy. Your ego is that voice in your head that thinks it is in charge. It is not easy. Locating your ego is hard because it seems so much like you. Imagine that you spent your whole life surrounded my mirrors.  In that situation, it would be impossible to tell which person was you, and which were reflections.  The ego is kind of like one of those reflections, easy to see, but hard to differentiate.

Having located your ego, you have to decide if it needs to evolve. Unfortunately, you don’t get to make this decision. By recognizing that you need to look for your ego, you have changed your ego. The evolution is in progress. The ego, having been spotted, is thrilled and alarmed and goes back into hiding. The ego’s favorite game is hide and seek. It will continue to play this with you for your whole life.  Fortunately, you can influence the course of the evolution when you become aware of the ego’s game.

Your ego likes to hide in your emotions. Hate, jealousy, anger, sadness, fear, happiness, excitement and love are all hiding places. As you cycle through these feelings and the infinite emotional nuances in between, you can be alert for your ego.  The difficulty is remaining alert to the game. As you seek your ego in your emotions, the emotions tend to take over your being and you forget to play. That is your ego’s best hiding tactic. In love, however, the ego is easier to see.  If your love is a bright light, your ego is dark shadow and it can’t hide. By love, I do not mean being in love with somebody. That is so absorbing that your ego can sit on the tip of your nose and you can wear it like sunglasses without noticing it. By love, I mean the love at the root of your being, the connection between you and all people, plants and planets. That is the shining love where your ego can’t hide.

So now that you’ve imagined that beautiful bright love, you may wonder why you should even look for your ego in the first place. Why not just look for the love? You need to look for your ego, because it will show you the way to the love. Evolve.

The separation of self and other is our fundamental illusion.  This is the domain of the ego. If we understand that we are all part of the same entity, then there is no room for ego.  The ego roots for the self over the other.  The ego feels that the bad things that befall us are tragic and the bad things that happen to others are merely unfortunate (or perhaps, even deserved). The ego may turn on the self and feel that the tragedies that we experience are due to a personal deficit, character flaw, or curse. These are destructive feelings and lead us to pain and suffering.

If we think of ourselves as something other than our mortal bodies, we can use that sense of separation to see through the ego.  We will see our experiences as though they are happening to others. We won’t take things so personally.

Conversely, if we think of others as ourselves, then we root for them, take pride in their accomplishments, and we suffer their losses.  There is no room for jealousy. In this approach our ego becomes communal and does not inspire us to spread pain.

Using our inclination to divide the world into self and other, we can separate our Self from our ego, making Ego the other, whom we can blame for our suffering.  As we sit in meditation, we can watch all of these ideas of separation dissolve. We can own our ego and love ourselves.

As a new blogger, I enjoy the experience.  When I enter into new territory, I get to experience the joys of beginners mind. My initial expectations were immediately discarded as I entered the flow of the dashboard. I found interesting people to follow, who send lots of positive and inspiring messages. I’m sure these messages keep me focused on what is important in life. It was all so lovely. Then my ego arrived.

I would write things, people would like them, perhaps reblog them and maybe even follow me, and how I liked that. Suddenly, I have a whole new set of criteria by which to measure myself. Crafty little ego.

The beauty of beginners mind is that I can clearly see my clumsy ego out looking for strokes where none were to be found before.  I’m on to you, you little corn worm. I love you too. You’re a lot like me.