Positive thinking

Some people don’t know that they have a negative outlook on life. They think that they are positive and cheerful. They have played the ‘car salesman with a big smile’ roll for so many years that they have forgotten that they don’t believe in love and friendship. They don’t believe in equality. They don’t believe that it is important to try to make this world a better place. They don’t want to share. They don’t want to stop exploitation of nature, animals and other people. They believe that life is about to eat or be eaten, nothing else. They have no other desires in life, but more money. They say, “You have to be positive. You have to believe in yourself. You can also become rich and successful, like me, if you put your back to it.”

Learned blindness

Many people in Germany said, after the second world war, that they never knew what was going on in the concentration camps. They never knew what was going on in eastern Europe. They never knew of any horrors.

Today many people don’t know that we are ruining our planet. (How is this possible?) They don’t know about the man made climate change and what deforestation leads to. They don’t know where the nuclear waste, toxic waste and insecticides end up. They say. “There are so many negative losers out there. Don't worry. Try to be more positive. Science and private enterprise will solve the problems.”

Well, many people know that our way of living is unsustainable but they don’t want to live in an environmentally friendly way. They prefer to use a private car instead of public transportation, and they prefer to travel by air instead of trains. They prefer to eat cheap pork from factory farms. They are like nicotine addicts who know very well that smoking is harmful and causes cancer but they keep on smoking anyway.

 

Ego

Ego is like a dog that refuses to let go of his bone.

Ego is like a bored upper class bitch. "I want this. I want that.
I’m desperate for some fun." Nothing is good enough.

Ego is like an inner taskmaster, or perhaps, an inner dance teacher.
She is so hard to please.

Ego is like a very, very prominent scholar, a pompous piece of shit.

Ego has so many different guises.

Ego wants to have the best seat. Ego wants to win and to be right.
Ego wants to have the last laugh. Ego wants to be a moral roll model.

Many people don’t know that they can observe their own ego in action.
In fact, they don’t even know that they have an ego.
They believe that their ego is their true self.

Anyway, you can observe your ego. You can, at least sometimes, see clearly how stupid and selfish you are. This part of you, which is observing your selfishness, is this part, also a part of ego, or is this a separate entity? If so, should this part also have a name? Is this observing self the true self? What do you think?

Ego is pulling the strings. Ego makes you say and do things you’ll later regret. What do you do when your ego is just too much, when he is about to ruin your life?

You can’t lock him up in the basement. You can’t send him to a mental hospital and forget about him. You can’t speak to him, with a soft voice, like a social worker
to make him change his ways. It doesn’t work. He won’t listen.

Here is a piece of good advice. Let him be. Don’t try to change him. Accept him for what he is. He will calm down and go back to bed soon, sulking. If he is very stupid, you can use another strategy: try to make him even a more stupid. I’m not kidding. Make him into the most selfish jerk you can imagine, like Donald Duck, Oliver Hardy.

I have this idea from Russ Harris book the Happiness Trap. And it works, sometimes.

Ego will, of course, continue to be as stupid as always, but he will loose some of his power when you are able to laugh at yourself, goodheartedly, or if you are able to observe your self, when you are able to see for yourself that you are not your ego.

Sometimes, though, it is very important to listen to your ego. The ego cannot always be dismissed. Sometimes he is right. If you don’t listen to your ego when he is right, you will also create problems for yourself. The important point is that your ego is your servant, not your master.

The sky is blue

The Youtube gurus have a lot to say. However, I think it’s more interesting what they don't say.

They never talk about exploitation of nature, people and animals. They never talk about injustice, hypocrisy and greed. They never talk about how the capitalist system is ruining our planet. They never mention that the super rich ought to share their obscene wealth with all those who are starving. They never mention that also rich people can end up in hell because of their selfishness and greed.

They talk about the now. They can talk about the now for hours.

Imagine that I had discovered that the sky is blue and begun to give talks about it. Imagine that I arranged workshops to teach people how to discover the blueness of the sky. Imagine that I had even written a book about it. Wouldn’t that be somewhat silly?

Selfishness

Most biologists today believe that all life forms here on earth are descendants from one original cell that was formed about three and a half billion years ago.

Multicellular organisms were formed a billion years ago.

Animals and plants were formed five, six hundred million years ago.

The first flowering plants were formed one hundred fifty million years ago.

The dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago.

The first human beings appeared about two hundred thousand years ago.

Single-cell organisms are in a sense immortal because they propagate themselves with cell division. If you kill a single-cell organism, billions of identical individuals live on as if nothing had happened. Death came with the multicellular organisms and their sexual propagation.

A human being consists of about ten thousand billion cells.

Your memories, your ideas and opinions, your fantasies and dreams, your delusions and your sense of I, are created in these ten thousand billion cells.

When you ask yourself, “Who am I, really.” the answer is, the ten thousand billion cells that you consist of.

However, every day fifty billion cells in your body die and are replaced. This means 500 000 cells every second. Every two weeks all the molecules you are made of are replaced. If all the parts of your car were replaced, would you call it the same car?
Moreover, without your parents and your ancestors you wouldn’t have been the one you are. Without other animals and plants, you wouldn’t have had any ancestors. Thousands and thousands of chicken, pigs, lambs and cows have been slaughtered in order to create you.

In addition, without the sun there wouldn't have been any life at all here on earth. In fact, without the sun, there wouldn't have been any planet earth and without the Big Bang, there wouldn't have been any sun. All of us are connected to everybody and everything else.

Some people are extremely selfish. They have to have everything their way. They are ambitious and hungry for power and self-realization. Nothing can stop them. This extreme selfishness looks ugly so they are hiding it. They live under a cover, like spies. They are often outstanding actors, smiling and wonderful.

Some people are extremely unselfish. They always wait until all the others have had their share. They are usually not very successful.

Most people are something in between, sometimes selfish, sometimes unselfish, and sometimes extremely selfish. No one is completely without selfishness, I think. Some people believe that spiritually awakened people have no ego. I believe that this is an illusion.

I believe that egotism, or selfishness, is simply a biologically evolved mechanism, which strives to make sure that the individual survive and are able to reproduce. Ego is nothing you can drop or something that will drop away. It is like a nose or a toe. What is important to understand, though, is that your ego is only a part of you. The fact that you can observe your own ego and your own egotism proves that you are not only your ego.

Life is not only about finding a costume, a role and a few lines to say. There is so much more in life than the ego.

Satsang

Satsang is Sanskrit and means to sit in company with the highest truth or to sit in company with a Guru. The Guru lectures and his devotees are listening in awe, then he answerers questions.

Human beings are pack animals. We are like chimpanzees. We are lost without a leader. We have lived in groups with leaders for maybe two hundred thousand years. This way of living has proved to be an efficient evolutionary strategy. Together with leaders, we were strong. Loners didn’t make it and they didn’t get any offspring.

However, the coin has also a backside. Because the majority is following the leader blindly, a mad and power-hungry leader can lead them to hell if he wants to. Hitler is of course the best example, but also many religious leaders, cult leaders, CEOs and politicians have created tons and tons of miseries because of their mad craving for more power and our inborn tendency to follow anyone who takes the lead.

Nothing is more important today, as I see things, in this stage of the evolution, than to stop following leaders. When we lived in small groups of hunters and gatherers, a mad leader wasn’t able to create too much damage. Today, with all kind of weapons of mass destruction the leaders are our greatest danger. Today we have to learn how to think our own thoughts. It’s not easy and it’s not always pleasant but it’s important.

Therefore, today, if we meet together to discuss the highest truth, the Guru should be dethroned. We urgently need to learn how to be together without following a leader. This is very important. To build a bridge or an airplane we need leaders who know how to do it but in spiritual matters, we are all equal. Priests, mullahs and preachers belong to the past. We are all on the same level now, at the beginners’ level.

There are also many female Gurus on the market but this makes no difference. No one should follow what any spiritual teacher say, male or female. And no one should sit on a throne and lecture others from above. If you can’t accept that we are all equal, if you insist to sit at the feet of a Guru, you are still living in the old world. You are then not yet awakened.