COURAGE MONTH: DAY 15: “Don’t try to understand life. Live it! Don’t try to understand love. Move into love. Then you will know – and all that knowing will come out of your experiencing. The more you know, the more you know that much remains to be known.” ― Osho
Any of us who has been alive for more than 10 or 12 years understands this about life. You have to LIVE it to get it. We have all, no matter how young, experienced the Ego screaming Fear into us, and going on to walk through that fear and realizing that there is nothing to fear.
Remember a scary dental procedure, or a surgical procedure, or a big test in school? All of us have had the experience of fearing that and then finding out it was okay. Or it may not have been okay.
Either way, worrying and fretting did nothing to alleviate the experience or make it easier to participate in. We lose sleep or stop eating around fear, and it avails us NOTHING.
NOTHING. We can become completely immersed in fear, and even allow it to rule to the point where we run away from the thing we are afraid of. Or, we can just get through it and find out being afraid will do us no good in preparing for the thing. It just consumes us.
Ego is a powerful master to serve. We cannot serve Spirit and Ego at the same time. We get to choose, over and over again, who is going to rule.
Life is amazing and wonderful; Ego is none of those things. It brings us no benefits, but we continue to live, very unhappily, at its beck and call. Often in denial that we are serving this demanding and unsatisfying master.
I cannot recover at all with ego being the master of my life. I will live in terrible fear and unhappiness forever. That is the saddest part of all. So many of us are doing only the bare necessities to maintain a semblance of life, a semblance of recovery. The steps ask us to go more deeply into Spirit to do the most crucial thing we need to do to fully recover, and that is to SMASH the Ego…or it will kill us. Wow!