Forever Expanding Awareness In Liberation

In many spiritual teachings and also through the words of people I know and meet, I discern what I would best describe as  form of multiple personality disorder in relationship to the ego. What I observe is a split between the apparent “self” and the so-called “ego”. Yet what is this ego that is talked about as some kind of entity separate to the self that is identifying it and talking about it? Often I hear the ego being talked about in third person — this is me and that is my ego.

In my experience this is a slightly distorted way of relating to the ego and I question the long term benefits of such an approach. The ego is simply our sense of “I”; our sense of self; our sense of I-dentity or what I sometimes call the I-entity. The word entity comes from entitas, which relates to character/nature of being also a relation establishing that a thing exists. The I-entity (our identity) is that character of self that we use to establish that “I” exists. On planet Earth the existence of the “I” is, as far as I know, unique to human beings.

Is there something wrong with people having a sense of self existence? Is there something life-taking about a person having a sense of the “I” within their awareness? In my experience, many religions and spiritual paths and New Age teachings suggest there is, yet I disagree.

I think that where we get into problems is not so much that we have ego (a sense of self) but rather that at our present level of evolution in consciousness we (the vast majority of human beings) have a relatively limited and oftentimes distorted awareness of what the “I” actually incorporates. I don’t see this as some sort of error or fault in the human psyche but rather a natural consequence of the present state of development within humanity. Would we condemn the caterpillar for identifying with the particular form it takes in that stage of its development, ignorant of the butterfly that is yet to come? Of course not.

What I would like to suggest to you is this. The ego is not something to be suppressed, denied, controlled, condemned, or destroyed. This is as mad as trying to destroy the caterpillar in order to bring about the butterfly. I’ve seen much reference to the notion of transcending the ego, and again it is so often suggest that this is done through some form of separating from the ego (in some way), possibly squashing it (in some way), and voila, we go beyond it. Yet how effective is this? Really?

Would it not be more sensible to heal the ego in its present state–to heal our sense of self in out present state–so that this sense of sense may evolve into an even higher, fuller, and more spiritually integrated Being? The problems the ego appears to create in this world are the natural result of where it is presently at within its evolution. Just as the monarch caterpillar completely ravages the Swan plant before it establishes its chrysalis and eventually emerges as a butterfly, the ego is also ravaging its world. I’ve seen caterpillars ravage a Swan plant to the degree that the chrysalis’ already formed are chewed off, so they drop to the ground and die. Just this past summer I had a Swan plant which started out with about 15 caterpillars. Eventually only one chrysalis remained hanging, to eventually produce a butterfly. Many other rotted on the ground. Each of these caterpillars was behaving selfishly (moving toward the self) yet at their present state of evolution (in terms of consciousness) their appreciation of what that self is is rather limited. Human beings have the inbuilt capacity to operate at a level well beyond that of the caterpillar.

As I was saying, the key is to heal the ego–to heal our limited, dysfunctional, and disfunctional sense of self. Our ego in its present state is setting us–individually and collectively–up with the exact challenges we require in order to evolve to the next natural state of the Human being. The question is, will a few consume the Swan plant at the expense of everyone else or will we do it some other way that incorporates the life, development, and evolution of all beings?

I think that separating from what we call the ego is a mis-take, just as much as it is a mis-take to think that our limited egoic self is the sum total of what it means (or could mean) to be human. I think one only has to look at India and America to see an example of each of these extremes playing out and the pain and suffering each approach to reality brings about. In a place like India one can find the height of development of spiritual tradition and exploration along with the denial or at least the devaluation of the ego-self. The result is a country that is on the one hand immensely “spiritual” and spiritually enriched and yet on the other hand in deeply impoverished with people suffering and dying through starvation, poverty, abuse, caste segregation, and exploitation.

In a country like America we find a very different and yet paradoxically a very similar situation. The ego rules. The ego is it, the be-all and end-all of what life is about. The resent popularity of the movie The Secret is just one tribute to this, where spiritual principles are being promoted (at great financial profit) as a means to the ultimate satisfaction of the ego’s many delude desires and addictions. I think the capitalization and commercialization of materialism in America is the commercialization of the ego in its present state of evolution–that of being identified with a purely physical (even machine-like) body and the emotions, thoughts, and desires experienced within the framework of that body. Yet here in a country of ego-maniacs and ego-gratification we again find the same situation. People dying not of starvation but of greed and obesity and health degeneration that results from such greed. Oddly, death by starvation and death by chronic gluttony are both caused by malnutrition! In the USA we find a nation of people living in relative luxury yet at the same time impoverished with debt, the relatively absence of heart, and a level of consciousness devoid of true spirituality.

Of course, in both situation there are exceptions. If you’re reading this it’s probable you are one of those exceptions. I don’t wish to nullify the reality of those are an exception to the norm in either of these nations. I fully acknowledge I am using two generalizations to make a point. Generalizations that I think have a great deal of basis in reality.

So, in my experience I observe that neither of these approaches is in itself the answer. Denial of ego and worship of the ego both represent a limited approach to the reality of the Self and the evolution of awareness. Each is a stepping stone along the path we are all on–”we” being humanity. Each brings important lessons in the form of challenges that move the human collective toward something that is evolving toward a greater embodiment of awareness, and a fuller expression of Divinity.

The key is to expand our sense of self–our I-entity–so that it incorporates more of what is real and less of what is unreal. What I am referring to is not about the inflation of the ego the results in egomania, but rather in each human being expand their awareness of “That which I AM” beyond the limitations it is presently faced with. Just like the caterpillar must answer the call to let go of its present sense of identity so that it might arise from that chrysalis as a butterfly.

Let us explore the nature of money.
Oh yes, this stuff of stuff,
That some say “makes the world go round”.
For many it’s as delicious as honey,
Whilst others hold perceptions,
I can only describe as funny.
How to you feel about this stuff
That we collectively perceive as “money”?

Money, money makes the world go round…

Money is an extremely important topic for any person wishing to even remotely get along in this world. Money impacts on most of us in one way or another. Yet it is perhaps one of the most misunderstood “things” in this world. Money, sex, love, and power… are perhaps all as misunderstood as each other. Oddly enough, all of these things are intricately connected within the human story.

In this article we will first briefly explore the nature of money, and then move on to healthy and unhealthy relationship to money. Let’s start with the most obvious question…

What is money?

We live in a world that uses a manifest thought-form/concept called “money” as a tangible metaphor for life-force, energy, value, and worth. Money is actually just a concept that is used as a form of external exchange. What is actually being exchanged?

Value. Perceived value.
More exactly, is is the perceived value that a collective of people place on particular configurations of energy or “Life-force”.

Energy in the form of a 1/2 kilogram of bacon might have $100 of perceived value in my society.
Energy in the form of a 1987 Mazda 626 might have a perceived value of $2000 in my society.

What form does this “value” take at the most basic level? Or put another way, how do people determine the “value” they perceive in a particular thing they are willing (or not willing) to exchange money for?

It all boils down to an e-motional experience.

Let us say you like the way you feel when I give you a massage, and you are happy to pay me $80 for that massage.
If the guy down the road, however, gives you an even greater emotional experience than I do then you will be willing to pay him more money than you pay me. Perhaps he always puts a nice bunch of flowers in his massage room and you happen to really enjoy flowers. He might also use nice rose essential oil in his massage oil, and you just love rose oil., pays you compliments on how great you look, gives you purified water to drink as opposed to my tap water, etc. If you value these things and derive greater emotional satisfaction from them, then you will be happy to part with more money in exchange for this experience.

Emotion is literally an internal experience of energy-in-motion (e-motion).
The exchange of money between two people is the external experience of energy-in-motion.
Therefore we have a very close link between money and emotion.

Is money “good” or “bad”?

There are religions—and followers of such religions—that state “money is the root of all evil”. It is odd, I think, that these religious organizations have amassed trillions of dollars of wealth over their many years here on Earth. What do you think about that contradiction?
Most would call it hypocrisy.
One religious organization in particular is considered to be the largest holder of real estate in the world. Interesting that. Using their own logic of what money is, the various Orthodox Christian religions have amassed “the root of all evil” in vast quantities.

Actually, money is a completely neutral thing. Just as water is neutral. Yet water has the capacity to keep my body alive by my drinking it when thirsty, and it also has the capacity to kill my body if I get over my head in water and don’t know how to swim. Is water evil because of that? Is it “good” because it happens to help my body live when consumed?

So why does this world have such an odd relationship to money? Why is the distribution of money on this planet so imbalanced? Like the fact that the richest 257 people have more money than 3 billion (257 compared to 3,000,000,000) of the poorest people.
Money and sex must be two of the things that the people in my society have greatest amount of major issues and struggles with. The sex issue is a topic for another article, so for now we’ll stick with money.

Power and Money

The reason money has such a central place in the world of human affairs is that it is directly linked with external power… with power as perceived and (mis)understood by the ego-mind. The ego sees power as the ability to control people and things in the external world. By external I am referring to the world “out there” as opposed to your inner world… the one in felt through your heart and constructed within your Mind (greater non-ego Mind). The best way to control people is to have control over their emotional experience. Actually it is perhaps the only way to control people. For this reason a great deal of research and development goes into ways to control peoples emotional experience. That’s the foundation of advertising and a consuming society. “Eating our brand of potato chips/crisps is going to make you feel better than eating that other brand. Our brand has less fat… which means you stay skinnier… which means you will feel better about yourself in a society that has mind washed you into thinking that anorexia is somehow healthy and normal.”

So what have we got here?
1. External/worldly power is basically relative to ones capacity to affect/control other people emotionally.
2. Money is the external form of exchanging of emotional energy or “perceived value”. E-motional = energy-in-motion = life-in-motion.

Power and Money, therefore, go hand-in-hand within the human world as it presently stands.
The ego, in its belief that “I am separate from God, from all other people, and from all things” exists in a place/state where it is separated from the one and only source of True or Authentic Power. The result is that the ego is constantly trying to derive emotional experience (or emotional satisfaction) from the outside world. Therefore, one way or another, the ego is infatuated with external power, because it is this power that determines its capacity to get the emotional experience it wants. Money and power go hand-in-hand, remember, so the ego is also infatuated with money.

That doesn’t mean that everyone is infatuated with power and money in an obvious way and overtly seeking it. Some people have an ego that undermines them in such a way that they fear power (and therefore money). Actually it is more likely that such a person fears the responsibility that power affords them. This person doubts her capacity to remain in a place of integrity when more than a certain amount of power/money is in their hands and use. At the apparent level such a person will quite likely shy away from power and also away from money. The truth is that underneath that story they (their ego) is as hungry for money and power as any other ego in this world. Such a person will generally experience a level on conflict internally as a result of this—unless they genuinely transcend their ego-mind.

Dysfunctional relationships to money

I know and have met a lot of people that are actively pursuing their spiritual development. I know and have met quite a few people that are working in the field of healing in some way. As far as I can tell there is an archetypal pattern related to poverty that within the human collective mind has been attached to the archetypes of “healer”, “spiritual teacher”, and many other roles in the world that are to do with service to the greater good of humanity. I have found it’s more common to meet people in a service type role who believe it’s not “right” for them to receive much in the way of payment (monetary remuneration) for their work than it is to find people in these roles that are happy to be fairly paid for their work.

Why is that?

Before answering this, I will also point out that I’ve met a lot of people on the receiving end of such services who also believe that they should not have to part with much in the way of money for these things. There are many people that will feel better about paying their car mechanic than they feel about paying a healer, naturopath, or spiritual teacher. It’s fine, they say, for the mechanic to charge $60 an hour… but not a healer.” There is often some sort of implication that “a healer shouldn’t be charging for their work”, or at least not charging much more than they need for basic survival.

Why is this?

My sense is that one of the issues playing out here is that the healer or spiritual teacher (etc.) is bringing something forth into this world from beyond the material plane of reality. Money is an tool created from and used by the 2nd chakra of humanity. It is on this level (and perhaps the 1st and 3rd also) that money is empowered and valued. People are happy to pay money for something tangible like food, car repairs, shoes, a haircut, etc. because these things also all exist primarily in the realm of the lower three chakras or energy centres. External power—which as we have explored is closely related to money—is also something that exists ONLY on the world plane of the lower three chakras. You see, everything above the third chakra has little to do with the physical world. Think of 3D (3rd Dimension) as being the realm of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd chakras. As people evolve into living with an active heart chakra (the 4th chakra) they start to enter the 4th Dimension of reality. Here the tangible sense of time most people disappears. A person’s normal sense of space and form will also change.

Healing, spiritual guidance, and anything “spiritual” in nature is something that plays out through the 4th chakra and above. Money does not exist at this level of reality. The impact of this is that people still living primarily below the waste (1st-3rd chakras) actually are not wired up to “feel” the value of these services. They might intellectually understand that “this healing is helping me”, but it is much harder for them to feel it in the way they might feel the benefit of buying a new plasma TV or a nice new car.

The other side of the coin is that people who are most likely to be wired up in such a way that affords the ability to heal, to teach, and to serve humanity, etc., will tend to be more strongly developed above the waste than they are below the waste. Quite often they are actually carrying deep wounds (or wounded, dysfunctional perceptions) in one or more of their lower three chakras. The effect of this is that they have tended to float up above the waste energetically when relating to life. This has enabled them to avoid the pain and hardship they feel when approaching life below the waste. It also means that they become more highly developed above the waste because that is where they spend most of their time.

When people in this sort of situation start to recognize the value in their skill as a healer, or teacher, or whatever, they have in fact started to literally connect the dots—setting up a connection between the lower chakras and the upper chakras where their gifts reside. It is at this point that they will start to feel moved to bring these gifts out into the open (into the external world) even if only shyly. They are literally bringing these “heavenly” gifts down to the level at which their tribe and relations operate at. Yet what happens is that initially they are still affected by not being fully present, balanced, and healthy in their lower three chakras (they may have spent most of their life so far staying as far away from these chakras as they can). This in turn makes it very difficult (seemingly impossible) for them to put a realistic price tag on their services. It simply won’t “feel right” to charge for what they do. It’s not uncommon for a person in this situation to get very squirmish a realistic price for their services is suggested to them. Often these people will perform these services very cheaply or even freely, and then struggle to do other worldly work for their source of income.

Can you see that what we have here is a split or gap between the lower energy centres and the upper ones, that ultimately has to be bridged?

A healthy relationship to money

For those of us with vocations that are an expression of activity from above the solar plexus—vocations that are motivate more by a wish to serve the whole rather than focused solely on personal gain—it is important we do what is necessary to create health in our lower energy centres. I won’t go into what this means nor what it looks like because that is a vast topic I don’t wish to cover here.

If there is dysfunction (a lack of integration) within the lower chakras then a spiritual healer or teacher is likely to either fail to charge an appropriate amount for their work, and/or they might go the other direction and make unreasonable monetary and possibly sexual demands in exchange for their work. Either way, there is an imbalance that is calling out for Love and correction. What can also create distortion is when a person has perceptions within the upper chakras (such as thought-forms within the 6th chakra or Third Eye) that are out of touch with reality—the pragmatic reality of the lower three chakras. For instance, I know of a spiritual teacher who has numerous grandiose perceptions that she is spiritually superior to just about any other being on this planet, and that even to be her friend, or to be shouted at by her, to spend time with her, or talked to by her, etc. is somehow a blessing and a service to the recipient. If she should so decide at the time then such a “service” is repayable in a sum of money. Her behaviour has displayed to me that she feels she can ask for (and even take) what she wants in return. In my experience, because most people wouldn’t go along with simply paying her as demand, she often resorts to manipulating the recipient into given her what she wants—which the recipient generally feels really uneasy about. Here we have a situation where her highly developed upper chakras contain distortions that get rather messy when they hit the lower chakras.

So what does a healthy relationship to money look like?

Essentially money, as mentioned, is simply a symbol for energy or life-force. This life force was originally “extracted” from the Earth (the “Earth” as a Conscious Being, as opposed to a mere lump of rock floating around the sun). We continue to extract this energy from the Earth in the form of oil, gold, metals, timber, fish, and many other so-called “resources”.

Money is neutral.
Having heaps of it is fine. It’s all relative.
Having little or none of it is also fine. It’s all relative. Having no money can, however, make life more difficult in a commercially orientated human world.

Charging money in exchange for services rendered is perfectly normal and acceptable. This also applies to so-called “spiritual services”. Of course a fair and reasonable price should be agreed upon by the “seller” and “buyer”. The nature of ones services should not be used to manipulate or coerce a person into paying an unreasonable amount of money. For instance, deceiving people into thinking that your spiritual service is necessary for their liberation from suffering is life-taking. To then turn around and charge the now convinced/deceived “customer” a ridiculous amount of money for these services is even more life-taking. There are many instances of this in the world. It is not wrong. It is simply life-taking and is a call for love by all concerned—the person selling the service and the person getting ripped off by buying the service.

One secret to experiencing abundance is to always give more “value” than you ask for in return. This engages the Law of Increasing Value into your life and experience. Ponder this for a moment if it doesn’t make sense. There are many other ways to silently increase the flow of abundance in your life—we might look at this in another article.

It is not healthy to be attached to money.
It is not healthy to use money as an indicator of how “spiritual” you are, how “good life is right now”, nor how connected with God you think you are right now. You happiness should not depend on how much money or material possessions you have. That is not to say that you shouldn’t obtain money and material possessions and then enjoy them and feel happy to have them. Rather it simply means that if they all vanished you would continue to be just as happy.

I feel to end this article here. If you have questions then please feel free to post them as a comment below.

With love and blessing’s,

Jonathan Evatt