Miracles News

January-March, 2016

I Am Not the Ego

Rev. Ken Gorman, O.M.C.

Rev. Ken Gorman Eckhart Tolle has a great video that describes his sort of waking up experience. He indicated he was going through a lot of depression and darkness. One night he had a thought… ‘I can’t live with myself anymore.’ The next moment he had another thought and noticed… hey, there are two things here, something that can’t live with something else. In the video he says that is when everything collapsed.

I like to do an exercise where I replace the word ‘I’ with ‘my ego.’ My ego is anxious, my ego doesn’t like this or that, my ego feels guilty, my ego just doesn’t get ACIM, my ego has a grievance against so and so, my ego just can’t let go of, etc. I remind myself, then, that my identity is NOT my ego and therefore ‘I’ am not doing these things. My awareness is simply listening to ego’s stories and its insistence on being independent from God. I am identifying with the ego temporarily, but nothing changes because this is not who or what I am.

In my experience, ACIM does a good job telling us what the ego sounds like specifically for the purpose of getting us to turn away from it and choose Holy Spirit and our Higher Mind. This is necessary as ego also has a plan for salvation (Lesson 71 basically talks about ego as a grievance machine). One of the main ways that ego side tracks us is by getting us to believe that ACIM is actually a way to fix the ego. It loves this idea because it validates the ego’s existence and gets us focused on its plan which is guaranteed not to work. The ego’s diversionary tactic keeps us away from the experience of Holy Spirit (temporarily). I don’t believe ACIM is an ego-fixing program. I believe it is all about deliberately and willing allowing and turning towards another authority in our mind, which we often refer to as Holy Spirit.

This is mirrored in the 12-step program where we don’t attempt to fix the alcoholic mind. In Step One we accept we are powerless over it; Step Two we acknowledge God; Step Three we turn to God for help and surrender all aspects of our life. Steps four to nine are all about cutting the ego’s grievance machine that draws us back into the alcoholic mind. There is no attempt to ever fix the alcoholic mind, but simply accept it, give it no credibility and rely on God’s power to be stronger.

One of the most powerful types of ego diversion is one I call ‘spiritual ego.’ This is the same as regular ego (i.e., its main goal is to always lead us to unworthiness stories and set itself up as the solution) but now it has spiritual words and a spiritual context. Suddenly we find ourselves generating more guilt for failing in our spiritual practices, stressing about whether we are doing the right thing and often becoming manic about attending every seminar going, reading every book and sometimes running endless ‘I must save the world’ stories. This is a great strategy by the spiritual ego to stay in control and keep us distracted from the Holy Spirit’s Voice. Thus it keeps us from the one path we need to follow for our healing while simultaneously creating subtle guilt about how we are failing for not doing enough. I like to remember that ‘free will does not mean I set the curriculum’ (ACIM Introduction). To me this means there is one specific path for me, and the only intention (willingness) I need to set is to be on the path. Then I need to relax and let Holy Spirit reveal God’s plan.

One of the best instructions I have heard for dealing with ego is just to attempt to ignore it. Ignoring has an element of acceptance (and respect that it has the ability to create experience) but does not get us giving it any authority or trying to fix it or rail against it, which also seems to strengthen its seeming importance. ACIM does a great job teaching us what the ego sounds like. Once we have that, it is often a simple matter of becoming aware of the ego’s endless stories. Then we can just let them go (or ignore them) and return our intention to the Holy Spirit. Often the ego is very compelling, so at least we can be willing and ask Holy Spirit to help us deepen our attention on God and our Higher Mind. We can remember that a trigger to recognize the ego’s voice is that many of its sentences start with ‘I am….’ Try substituting ‘my ego is….’ Then we can remind ourselves that the ego is not who we are.

Rev. Ken Gorman, O.M.C., is a Pathways of Light minister living in Wimbledon, UK
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