| Book excerpt: Part Two Chapter 6 |
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Attachment to Outcomes:The egoic mind becomes attached to an outcome because it is always protecting itself from painful experiences, so it always wants to make sure that what it is doing will end in pleasure and success. The moment you are inspired by your inner voice to do something new or take action, you immediately want to know the end result. If you cannot see the end result, then your mind begins to analyse and assess all the possible problems that you are going to meet with, and it starts to solve these problems before you have even taken the first step. The egoic mind is terrified of the unknown because it may bring an experience of pain. Look across your life and you will see that you have an end goal for everything, from how a relationship should be, to how your home, your car, your job, or the success of your children, should be, etc. If you don’t achieve these goals, then you just change the goal posts and keep striving for another satisfactory result. You may even have lists of how you are going to obtain these goals because you think if you achieve them, then bingo, your life will finally be happy. This is the real battle between the inner voice and the egoic mind, because if you follow the inner voice it is going to take you into unknown areas and you cannot protect yourself where everything is unfamiliar, so you feel out of control and lost. The egoic mind is safety, as it has projected an end result and figured out steps of how to get there. What you desire may not be beneficial for your real self, but it does not matter because you are safe. This conflict that your ego has with the inner voice makes you feel uncomfortable. Some mornings you may wake up questioning what you are doing with your life, but the ego takes control of your thoughts again and before you know it, bam, you forget about that gnawing ache inside and once more you are off on your safe path. This is why we are in pain, because the majority of us are living ninety-five per cent of our daily life from the point of the egoic mind. There are some people who can listen and take action on a large percentage of their inner voice, but there are very few who listen and act upon ninety-five per cent or more. This illusionary-self does not know or even have a relationship with the true self; instead it keeps it covered over with fear. We are truly frightened of the unknown and we grasp at what we believe will bring us security and a place to be safe from feeling any abuse or pain. There is no external safe place, because the material is always changing and moving. The only place to reside safely is with the inner voice because it knows how to chart these waters of impermanence. Many people say that we have free will or choice, but do we really? The egoic mind has opposites within it, so when listening to it you do have a choice between pleasure and pain. The inner voice however has no separation in it, so when listening to that you see the truth as it is. The action you take upon that truth is not formed out of choice, but comes from love. This stunning and amazing energy has its own path to follow. You can ride with it or not. The journey of a life which listens to the inner voice is a journey with the true self, which is love. A life spent listening to the egoic mind is a movement into non-love, based on fear, conditioning and desire. This path will lead the individual into a battle of trying to become a ‘somebody’ rather than a ‘nobody’, resulting in a huge sense of loneliness and separation. When all that is not love has been removed, what is left is love. We are in pain because we are living a life without this love. We have allowed the mind and fear to rule our being. |
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