You know how you can have one of those days when, spiritually, you are just on a high? I was having one of those days. I had asked the Holy Spirit for a new way to see something that morning and had received an answer. I had shifted from a problem to the answer, not through thinking, but through grace. I asked and it was given, and I was flying! Just in joy and peace.
I was driving down the road having visited a customer and on my way to see another. The customer I was planning to see next had a problem I was going to have to work out. It was, potentially, a serious situation depending on how things went. As I was thinking about how to handle this I had several thoughts really fast. I thought that this customer was putting a damper on my mood. I thought that if I did not do this right I was going to be in trouble with my boss. I thought how unfair that was and how much I resented him for putting so much pressure on me in a situation over which I had little control. I thought how I wish that I was home writing an article or talking to a student.
All of those thoughts took only a few seconds and I might not have paid much attention to them ordinarily. Just ego monkey chatter, the random firing of neurons that goes on all the time. The reason I noticed this day is because suddenly I was no longer feeling happy and peaceful. It was the change in my feelings that caught my attention. Since feelings always follow from thoughts I went back over the thoughts I just listed to see what changed my mood.
I began to see that it was like I had been walking on clouds and suddenly I fell into a hole. My immediate thought was Alice falling into the rabbit hole. Now I was following strange roads which were leading me deeper and deeper into a fantasy world of danger, fear, doubts, and blame. How did I get here? How could it happen so quickly? More importantly, how do I get out of this hole? And then suddenly, I was out! Just like that, I was out. I laughed to think of how easy it is to fall into ego stories and at the same time, it can be just as easy to let them go if that is what I really want to do.
I started paying really close attention to my feelings and my thoughts the rest of the day. Each time I realized that I had once again fallen into a rabbit hole, I looked around at the landscape to see what got me in there. Something that became very clear to me is that noticing quickly where I am and making a different decision is a lot easier than wandering through the illusory landscape for a while before I decide I want out. The longer I stay in the illusion the harder it is to find my way out.
If I stay in the story long enough it starts to feel so real and so compelling that it is difficult to let go of it. After awhile I become lost, and confused. I think vaguely of extricating myself but something else in the illusion grabs me, or I am hooked by the certainty that someone is wrong and must be punished, or at least admit their culpability. Or I begin to enjoy that little surge of adrenaline I get when I feel righteous and decide to enjoy it while it lasts.
There are so many distractions and so many hooks in this fantasy land. It is just one drama after another, and when I am no longer able to sustain the rush I get from feeling like I’m right, and the drama loses its glamour, I look around and wonder what to do now. It must be what one feels coming off a bender. Where am I, what happened? I feel a sense of shame and guilt and fear that I’m stuck. If I have stayed long enough and gotten too hooked into the story I might doubt my self worth and think I don’t deserve Holy Spirit’s help – again. Do you know that feeling?
No matter what ego thoughts are racing through my mind, the only way out is to want out. I have to want out of the hole more than I want to stay in it. That’s all there is to it. I become very aware of what I am thinking, I ask the Holy Spirit to help me see it differently, I allow that change, and poof! I’m out. I practiced this all day long and it got easier and easier. In fact by the end of the day I was no longer falling in the hole, I was standing over it and noticing it without any temptation to fall into the story at all.
I enjoy finding these little visual aids to help me go quickly from the story to the truth. Now when I become tempted to believe in an ego story I just picture Alice falling down the rabbit hole and this takes me right through the process of deciding differently.
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