Ego Goals vs Deep Spirit

Why would you think that you can know your ‘self,’ or even parts of the self, simply by self-observation or the use of introspective or meditative techniques? The observer is biased and will tend to completely miss, or even deny, aspects that cause discomfort.

However, others see what you cannot because it is through others that you have defined your ‘self.’ We do not define and give meaning to our 'self' alone or in isolation, but through engagement with a world of others and 'they' are your world.

In fact, the deeper our engagement with that 'world,' the more 'defined' we become.

The ego-self is entirely other-referencing and is always in the process of defining itself, or 'becoming,' through others and the world. This is particularly true of the relationships that we choose for which to deeply engage with another, because it is through these 'intimate partnerships' that we define our deepest layers of the 'self.' We engage with others to intimately share our 'self' so that the 'self' can evolve.

Yet, why is it that we so frequently fail to create and maintain intimacy in our most significant relationships? Why is it that so many relationships fail to engage the depth between them and either remain hopelessly stuck on the surface or disengage entirely?

Individualized ego goals often impede Deep Spirit intimacy, since they reinforce separation and division resulting in chronic conflict from frequent interpersonal competition. The ego idealizes the love of another, not for how it can reinforce the others self-development (your partner's), but for what it expects others will do to reinforce its own self-construct (you). The ego is a self-absorbed belief 'package' whose sole function is self-preservation through pressing itself into and against a world of conflicting opposites. It perceives others as naturally opposing its projects and goals. Nevertheless, the ego believes that completion of its goals and projects will eventually provide fulfillment by firmly asserting it into its experience of a 'world.' Therefore, it picks and chooses significant 'others’ to join with in carrying out its plans of self-actualization. These are the 'loving' relationships we attribute the most significance and expect will add to our individual self-fulfillment.

Yet, these significant relationships may be stifled and paralyzed by chronic conflict, simply because the embodied egos we choose to join with (in 'love') have self-actualizing goals of their own to give meaning and define their own individual self-defining. They expect you will comply with their plans, while you expect compliance with your own.

Chronic conflict with 'loved ones' is often the most severe, because your ego-self expects to negotiate a world of other egos it has NOT chosen to "love", all perceived as strangers, yet each applying meaning to their lives and often in opposition to you. However, in contrast, you expect that those you have chosen to join with 'in-love' will support your individual egoic self-actualization and when that is not forthcoming the ego experiences betrayal.

Although the ego expects opposition from the world, it will not easily tolerate opposition from those it chooses to collude with in building and actualizing itself.

The ego-self wants to experience the fullness of its existence based on what the world teaches you must have in order to be "happy." Conforming to the world is how the ego-self realizes its existence as significant and not merely a made up fantasy of the mind's imagination. It must build and develop itself for fear of being swallowed up and nullified by the world it experiences as outside and separate from it. Therefore, the ego adopts projects and goals that the world teaches will result in an actualized 'self' and, as the world teaches, an actualized self is a "happy" self.

Intimate relationships are considered important, but subsidiary and subordinate to individual egoic actualization.

The problem is that most of the projects we engage in to achieve this ever allusive "happiness" are projects that promote egoic self-absorption and reduce the importance of relationships as primary means to self-actualization. Intimate relationships are downsized and minimized as the means of self-realization.

We can collude with another in achieving ego goals, however, they too seek egoic self-actualization in agreement with the world's definition of a self-actualized 'individual.' These egoic pursuits, although not detrimental from an individual standpoint, are the antithesis of Deep Spirit intimacy in the creation and discovery of the love that joins individuals. When ego goals of self actualization dominate the mind, relationships must suffer and often may expire simply for lack of attention.

Egoic self-actualization that supersedes or takes priority over Deep Spirit intimacy, creates tension and conflict between loved ones who feel betrayed by one another. The 'chosen one' was not supposed to become a stranger in opposition but, instead, an ally in your self actualization and egoic search for "happiness." But the allegiance was lost and now, instead of sharing your 'self' in the desire to self-actualize through love, you withhold your 'self' and gradually begin to hold your partner in contempt as they also withhold from you.

Eventually the ego will experience increased anxiety in relation to the chronic stress of this constant withholding, or blunted extension, since our deepest inclination is to naturally extend to others. Anxiety will rise, particularly if the ego's demand for control in asserting itself against the other is consistently thwarted by the significant others own self-assertion. No matter how hard you try to control external circumstances, another ego is thwarting your efforts in their attempt at control. These are the daily "control dramas" that are played out in millions of "loving" relationships, so much so, that it is often 'normalized' as typical of all intimate relationships.

When separation-anxiety increases to a boiling point, the ego then avoids conflict altogether by slowly disengaging from the relationship. Now there are only bodies in proximity, providing only surface communication in the performance of routine, superficial domestic tasks, while the self is locked away in avoidance of depth. Adverse alienation sets in and we find we can no longer collaborate on even the smallest things. Eventually, the pattern becomes rigidly predictable, with no 'surprise' in the interactions, as engagement gradually becomes monotonous and mundane. Yet, we will not disengage from our individual self-actualizing pursuits and in fact, the ego intensifies its efforts in the direction of individualized self-actualization, since the relationship no longer holds out the promise of "happiness."

Eventually, the ego may cut itself off completely from what it sees as the source of its betrayal, resulting in physical separation and eventually the severing of all ties.The ego then seeks out another for which to collude in its individual plans of self-actualization. It has no desire to realize its role in the circular nature of the conflict and denies the fact that it's as guilty as the one it blames. Therefore, it will reconstruct the same patterns of conflict in every 'love' relationship it engages with in the future.

Yet, if it can come to realize its role in the pattern of betrayal, it can then gradually begin to alter its perspective enough to engage the other toward resolution. Resolution is always assured through increased understanding, because seeking to deeply understand another is to automatically correspond with Deep Spirit. When you correspond with Deep Spirit, the ego recedes in silence, thereby ending its incessant chatter originating from its need to control reality (others). Now both can listen deeply to one another, easily redirecting patterns to allow an intimate center through which communication can naturally occur.

It only takes one to extend from this Deep Spirit, because such extension has the miraculous tendency to evoke the same extension from others and this is because it is as natural as breathing. Yet, we have lost touch with this deep inner nature, because we have become hypnotized by what society teaches will lead to fulfillment and self-actualization, rather than the intimacy with another we know will energize and bring joy into our lives. Joy is only available when shared.

To extend from Deep Spirit is the path to dissolving alienation. This is because you are no longer strangers to one another and embark in the infinite process of intimate awakening together.

To remain strangers is to give up all hope of understanding and thus, all hope of love. To correspond from Deep Spirit 'within' is to find yourself through engaging to deeply understand another. It is the spiritual ground of all relationships and, although few ever reach that level, the path is available to everyone.

Deep Spirit (part 2)

Continued from Deep Spirit (part 1)

Deep Spirit is an awakened intimacy experienced by two or more.

Bodies are not necessary to experience Deep Spirit, although upon encounter, bodies do tend to engage in close proximity, since a desire to be together becomes irresistible.

Sex does not result in, or lead to, the experience, but can be used in expressing Deep Spirit (as can most anything else). Unfortunately, sex that masquerades as "loving" impedes what can be experienced. In fact, Deep Spirit does not require bodies be joined together in any particular 'form.' Nevertheless, bodies that have already come together, conforming to the world’s definition of 'joining,' may have an advantage in experiencing Deep Spirit, simply because they are already engaged on some level. Of course, there are many ‘bodies’ that live together as alienated strangers (and many even claim to be deeply "spiritual"). Therefore, a Deep Spirit experience may not be available until there is the conscious choice to discover it together by identifying and dissolving delusions.

What is discovered will be from what is mutually created. There is no proprietary truth available through linear transmission. Only the truth that waits to be created through a circular engagement loop. This occurs only in relationship.

If you think you’ve experienced Deep Spirit, but no one else is joined in that experience with you, then most likely you are mistaken and merely conform to the world's conditions of "love."

Relationship is the conduit for all experience and you will experience what you expect and “expect what you invite.”

There are many ‘forms’ available for relating to one another in the world. Yet, Deep Spirit is NOT concerned with objectified or manifest 'forms,' as dictated through the world’s rituals and expectations. It is not a socially channeled intimacy and comes from a well much deeper than anything an external world has ever considered as available. There is no need for the forms of marriage, friendship, lovers, familial or any other relationship parameters, as dictated by the world. Nevertheless, since most of us conform to varying relationship types, these would certainly be an obvious starting point.

We cannot conceptually define Deep Spirit, however, communication can aid in removing the obstacles that impede the experience. In fact, mutual identification of obstacles is a necessary first step in the process. Until words are no longer necessary, healing is actualized through words.

There is no finite outcome from engaging in Deep Spirit together, only recognition of the process. This is simply because Deep Spirit is infinite and has no boundaries but those created to obstruct it. When it becomes miraculously available, there is no telling how far, or how deep, two or more can go “within” together. But you can only engage in the process with another and, to use an old cliché, “the more, the merrier.”

Fully engaging to correspond with Deep Spirit is our collective enlightenment.

Consciously joining with another to dissolve barriers for the purpose of encountering Deep Spirit, is highly useful. However, you cannot define what that experience will be or predict when it will be attained and doing so merely constructs more barriers and conditions. Your role is merely to stay in the process and give up all ideas and concepts you have determined as defining Deep Spirit. Once you attempt to define the experience, you inadvertently obstruct it.

Initially, there will be a general resistance to engaging with Deep Spirit since it cannot be encountered in solitude or from solitary actions or psychological practices. However, actions and practices enlisted to aid in corresponding with Deep Spirit can be employed, but only with the aim of more deeply engaging "others."

The "I" is eventually annulled for the "we." However, this does not terminate individual identities, but enhances the self.

We have become very selfish and arrogant in our sharing with others. This has resulted in the discarding of relationships, when the ego self-construct judges that they no longer meet our conceptualized needs. This makes extension, or the sharing of intimacy, utterly impossible due to the conditions we impose. Make no mistake Deep Spirit is intimacy, but deeper than any form of relating defined by the world. In that sense, it can be experienced in the world, but not of it.

Relationship is the ground of awakening, but also cause of the world.

A world in turmoil is a world caused by shallow, surface engagements and thus, loses the ground of awakening entirely. You will only know your ‘self’ through ‘others,’ as both have been mutually constructed, resulting in a subsequent “world” construct which is experienced collectively as separate.

A Deep Spirit experience is not disengaged but wholly and completely immersed in the experience of self and other and, through that experience, the quantum nature of the world changes. Through that immersion, the experience collapses the paradox of the one and the many in realization of the one with, and through, the many.

The World Is An Illusion When Your Purpose Is Unknown

If your mind is at war, how can you be at peace in your relationship? Minds at war with one another inadvertently create an illusory world, since this is not the purpose of the mind, nor is it the purpose of your world.

Make no mistake, the peace in your relationships will be experienced in direct proportion to the peace within your mind and the peace in relating will magnify the mind's state of peace in a reinforcing loop.

Are you in the loop?

Do anxieties and fears consume your mental energy? Are you easily engaged by the outcomes and goals that the world prescribes as crucial to living? Does work and career demand most of your time and energy? Do you find yourself frequently moody and snapping at loved ones? Do you often feel bored and exhausted by the mundane chores of existence? Do you plod through the week in anticipation of the weekend? Do you find yourself feeling disillusioned when expected rewards, that the world provides, fail to satisfy? Do you often find yourself wondering if this is all there is?

Peace of mind is easily transferable to those around you, but so is a conflicted mind. A mind in conflict is like a spinning vortex that sucks in those close to you. The conflicted seek the cause of conflict outside the mind and attempt to control others. The peaceful deeply engage with others in discovering the love “within” by recognizing that this is their purpose.

A conflicted mind seeks the cause of disturbance in others and swings blame like a sword of vengeance. You have chosen them to provide happiness, therefore, if happiness is absent, who else but they are to blame? If your mind is at war, you will bring that to your reality and find enemies were none existed before.War is waged by strangers and there is no love in battle.

Your only purpose in this world is to fully engage with others in the deep understanding that discovers love. Until it is discovered with another, it does not exist and this makes the world illusory, since the world then serves a purpose other than intended. You will see that unintended purpose instead of the truth and you will suffer accordingly.

Love does not exist until it is created by two or more and transposed upon the mutual experience of a ‘world.’ Until then, your world is nothing more than an illusion because it serves a purpose other than intended. If you conduct your life in ways that do not allow for love to be discovered then you have refused your function and choose your goals from what the world determines is your purpose, thus maintaining the illusion. Look outward and see your world absent of love and clearly you have mistaken its purpose, thereby making an illusion of it.

However, there are pockets in the world where enlightened minds have learned their purpose and have attempted to teach it by learning to engage deeply. What other purpose could the world serve? What other purpose could your existence serve? What else is the reason for your Being?

Self-development? Yes, but only to disengage from self-absorbed egoic needs, thereby, dissolving the obstructions to self-discovery through others. Acquisition of wealth? Only if used as a conduit to deeply relating and not idolized as a means to an end. Improved health? Of course, since we can engage deeply when not thwarted by sickness and disease. Every goal the world teaches as useful and necessary can be used to learn your purpose and that purpose is to discover love by extending it and seeing it in the world..

Discover love and discover the real world.

Discovering love is the “enlightenment” that the ancient masters spoke of and it requires an unconflicted and quiet mind to be realized. A conflicted mind cannot possibly discover its purpose and will blame others for that failure.

The ego learns what the world teaches it and if you rely on that learning you will fail to learn your purpose and your experience will conform to the same patterns of war that the world believes is truth.

Make your experience of the world a pocket of peace and sink beyond the ego’s demands in realizing your purpose comes from a well much deeper than conditioned thoughts of finite outcomes and goals. Outcomes and goals may give fleeting pleasures, but not the deep and abiding joy generated by engaging with others in discovering love. Your purpose is with them, as theirs is with you. Enlightenment comes to the relationship that chooses a different path. Otherwise, it does not come at all.

Yet, you both have no idea what love is.

This is why it must be sought beyond appearances and it will be discovered through mutually realizing the obstructions, or walls, you constructed to protect the 'self.' Intimate Awakening demands you accept your vulnerability in surrendering your need for self-defense.

This is your purpose, which the ego self-construct (your belief in a 'self') has impeded by adopting goals that distract from that purpose. Now you remain victim to the past, since all goals and outcomes not established to actualize your purpose, come from the past and merely delay your truth, making the world an illusory place where, no matter how hard you try, you will never feel at home together. The past has no involvement in discovering truth, since love is experienced in the present and does not relate to a past or future.

Love is the "now" spoken of by the ancient enlightened master's and mystics.

A world that does not serve its purpose must be an illusion, until that purpose is discovered. Your experience of a world cannot be real if it serves the purpose of war. However, you can see it differently if love becomes the purpose that you share with others. Make this the purpose of everything you perceive in choosing to mutually discover love in your small microcosm of the world.

Change the world by changing your mind about your purpose. Realize why you are here. Until this occurs you will continue to perpetuate the same patterns of war that the world exhibits and those patterns have become very weary to your tired mind.

Deep Spirit, part 1

There is something deeper than what you see on the surface of your relationships. The ones you have joined with in love are more than their behavior and even more than their thoughts and feelings.


You know this simply because you have always sensed there is something more within you and you are correct. But since you chose to experience this fact alone, you have yet to experience it.

If only we could see this ‘something more,’ this deeper aspect of the ‘self’ that has nothing to do with the body or even an outside world. The problem is that the world we live in has exiled this interior Deep Spirit experience, while appearances and forms have become much more important. "What you see is what you get" is the chief paradigm of modern engagement.

Our actions and behaviors take priority based on the world's (society's) teaching as to how we should act and what must be done. This is called social conditioning. However, it goes much deeper than mere socialization and this conditioned, scripted response to others has stifled our need to authentically relate to others from Deep Spirit. As time rolls on, we feel the distance growing and our interactions take on a displaced and scripted surface quality that leaves us feeling that life is devoid of meaning. This is because, make no mistake, your meaning comes from engagement with others. Meaning is available only in the space between two individuals, and this is why they came together in the first place. Yet, they must consciously choose to seek Deep Spirit together, since alone, it cannot be found.

If we engaged the world directly from this Deep Spirit experience, everything we say and do would be correct, because Deep Spirit informs from the level of Being and in that sense it is primordial and underlying all appearances. Unfortunately, the world is absent this Deep Spirit and, therefore, cannot teach it. There may have been a time when it could be learned from the world, but those days have long since passed and we now move farther and farther from this natural impulse to joyfully relate to the world in direct engagement with others. In the modern world, our lives become increasingly more bereft of meaning and we feel more lost and alone in an absurd world that makes no sense.

Deep Spirit makes sense and, upon mutual encounter, wipes away all confusion as to our purpose and function and causes us to see others and the world in a new light. In fact, it is this deeper aspect that indelibly connects us and unifies us. From Deep Spirit, you will know me and I, you, though we had been strangers before.

Unfortunately, you cannot encounter Deep Spirit alone or in solitude (although solitude can provide a preparation) nor can anyone else “seek within” and find this essence by him or herself. This is because it requires two or more through which to create the foundation, or 'grounding,' from which it can be directly experienced. It will start with two, because two is a condition that the world has not yet negated, although it has been reduced to mere appearance. We still seek to join with another, although even this natural predisposition is beginning to wane and dissolve.

Some have called it the “Tao,” “Awakening, “Enlightenment” or the “One.” Yet, if they experienced it alone then they were mistaken and merely relied on concepts instead of direct experience. There is nothing conceptual about Deep Spirit. It does not conform to words and need not be expressed. But it does require another through which to realize the experience. Together they will simply know, since the experience is unmistakable.

We could call it “love” and many have briefly touched this experience when bonding with another. Yet, the problem with this concept is that it is defined differently by every individual mind that considers it. In addition, experiencing love with another eventually conforms to the world’s rituals and expectations, thereby, losing contact with this deeper, more primordial, essence. This is why we call it "Deep Spirit" because it must be defined by two minds for it to be experienced by either one. It is not available to an individual apart from others and the world.

However, it is absolute and unconditional by nature and this makes it available to all of us.