In the beginning I looked into myself and I found only myself, and it was only me that guided me. The answer to the questions, “what should I do now?”, “should I offer to hold the door?”, “is it time to eat?” etc. reflected off an inner mirror that I see as me, and only me. Jung called this the ego.
So even in my generosity I am always selfish. Not that this is a problem, and not that being generous was a problem or that the gifts I offered weren’t useful to the people who received them. It is just that when I looked inside myself I could see was myself. My world is my world, and your world is your world, and everything I see is filtered through my own individual filter.
As Uchiyama Roshi says, “two human beings cannot share even a fart with one another.”
Each of us, you and me and everyone, live in our own universe which is only the universe: the universe that we each perceive through our individual senses, experience, etc. There is no other universe. When we are born it comes into being. When we die it disappears.
Bernadette Robers writes that through practice and contemplation that at some point the inner mirror that our consciousness reflects off of may eventually be replaced by the divine. This doesn’t mean that we are not who we are, that our personality goes away, or that our own individual universes are suddenly snuffed out of existance. It means that are actions are informed by the divine. In Jung’s terms, our ego is replaced by the divine.
When the ego is permanently replaced by the divine, when we realize our own connection with the divine, we look back into ourselves and find only divine there. This means that we no longer are doing our own bidding, we are doing the divine’s bidding.
This doesn’t mean that we automatically become saints. We are who we are. Our essential fucked up personalities remain, and being human, these things can never be perfected. We still have our eccentricities, our tendencies. What has changed is that these things all serve all life, and not just the narrow band we originally define as ourselves. When we bend in and look into ourselves for guidance, we see God there, not just our egos which we erroneously identify as our self.
This is a natural process of maturation. We experience glimpses of this when we put off for a few moments what it is we think we want for ourselves and do something for others. Maturation is the slow realization that what we want is not what we are. At some point it is not so important what we want. It’s just another factor that is taken into account when a decision needs to be made.
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