Why does the ego create the fear of being no more?

HI burt,
at the end of this video (http://youtube.com/watch?v=ByXOJs4Uvfw) you say "can you imagine never have been or never going to be"? I've never expereinced either of those. However, the "idea" of never going to be creates great fear in many people. If it's never been "experienced", how does the "idea" or "thought" "of never going to be", or "cease being" come from? I know you will say "the ego", all fear comes form the ego, but why does the ego create that thoght? the ego creates fear to protect itself. but how does this scary thoguht of ceasing to be protect the self in any way? it seems like it is only damaging.

You asked, "If it's never been "experienced", how does the "idea" or "thought" "of never going to be", or "cease being" come from?"

Our true nature is eternal, which in terms of bodily existence appears as the need to make everything permanent. We try to make every relationship last and even try to prolong physical life as long as we can? The reason is quite imbedded deep in our being because there is the 'inner knowing' that we last. However, because we believe we are just a body (and many people believe that) then the fear of death enters our consciousness and creates the horrid belief of 'being no more' which we can't even imagine. Just like I said in the video, "You can't imagine being no more." Only the fear of it exists because of our unawareness of the true nature. In fact, all fear emerges from ignorance of our true nature.

The fear of being no more is ego's protection by creating a need in us to survive physically at all costs. Then you asked, "but how does this scary thoguht of ceasing to be protect the self in any way? it seems like it is only damaging.

Another aspect of the ego is its contradictions. Please do not ever try to make sense of the ego, not only it doesn't work but creates further frustration, confusion and even greater fear. This confusion is ego's domain. How can one make sense of war, hatred, revenge, killing innocent children or genocide and so on. This is the insanity of the ego. Now the question is, what is ego? It is simply the belief in separation while in truth every is one interdependent, interconnected and interrelated whole. Just as separation is fear so is Oneness unconditional love. And that's what all spirituality is about -- LOVE!

How to recognize the truth of you!!

I have been practicing spiritual meditation, ritual and study for many years and yet how come I am not living what I know?"

What chooses to be less ego & more witness?

"What chooses to be less ego and more witness? Does the ego decide, in essence being complicit with it's own demise? Is it the witness itself? that doesn't seem right as the witness just witnesses. So is there some other part of myself that "chooses" who is behind the wheel?"

Nothing chooses to be less ego and more witness. Witness is our true nature as pure awareness. However, we are caught ordinarily in what we are aware-of -- awareness of separation from others; awareness of the world; awareness of wars and news and so on. We can put it this way -- you are a human being. The human is what you are aware-of (mind). 'Being' is pure awareness itself (the witness). Since Being is what creates and makes manifest the human, it is also its controller. When we start recognizing who is the driver (pure awareness) then we automatically become more aware of the witnessing part of us. This greater awareness of itself becomes a major fulcrum of our daily life and thus becomes more prominent. This greater focus on the witness automatically minimizes our ego's control thus there is less ego as we see that the witness is our reality. There is no chooser or 'doer' but only 'seeing' more and more into what truly IS!

The ego doesn't decide, it simply chooses automatically from its past experience of fear. For example, you see a very attractive girl and you are drawn like a magnet. The ego will remind you that such an encounter in the past ended in disaster and it might happen again and all of a sudden there is hesitation, uncertainty, even fear. Our natural tendencies get thwarted by the ego's past experiences. Thus, when we do not learn from ego's past we tend to let the ego 'decide' for us. However, when we SEE clearly that the ego is just fear then it loses its influence and we are freer. The ego never decides for greater love or joy but only offers protection. Here's another example, let's say you love dancing and the last time you were the only one on the floor and for some reason you made a fool of yourself. Next time you try to get up to dance and be the first one, the ego will try to protect you against embarrassment. Whereas your true spirit of BEING is more spontaneous and egoless in its pure enjoyment and therefore takes chances. The ego only seems to decide when there is fear of being fully yourself and then tries to protect you by increasing your uncertainty and lack of self-confidence. The ego protects to increase its power and also protect itself from dying. The ego dies when confidence, courage and love take over.

The witness is the driver but sometimes gets twisted by the ego's interpretation. For example, let's say you want the truth of your being and therefore sit still, relax and enter the vast space within you. It will feel peaceful and gentle at first, then the ego gets frightened of its own demise and starts protecting itself by turning this vast space within into a very dark emptiness and a frightening abyss.

Actually no one is behind the wheel doing the driving but Oneness itself. Everyone of us gets driven according to our capacity and readiness to see. The more we see, the greater becomes our freedom and joy.

There are over 6 billion humans on this earth, but there is only One Being, One Awareness, One Witness playing all the roles of the 6 billion humans. Each human evolves at its own pace according to its ability to 'see.' It is all quite perfect in its grandeur.

Do we get punished for our misdeeds?

Do we get punished for our acts of greed, selfishness and need for power?

The interesting fact about LIFE is this -- we are all ONE! Since oneness is a fact and any intelligent being knows this in their heart, then whatever you give you receive. For example, let's say you harm someone, then no one punishes you but yourself. Why? Simply because it is all one.
Now suppose again, you love someone then that love returns to you automatically by the very act of loving itself. If you make someone happy, you feel happy, period. You get back what you give out and exactly to that extent. The more you give, the more you get!! Once you realize Oneness as the Truth of you then you are free and at peace.
Watch the video below for reincorcement of this fact of Oneness as LOVE!

Guilt -- greatest spiritual block

Is unconscious guilt a result of ignorance of our true nature or some indiscretion in this or past life?”

Let’s understand by asking, “What do we mean by guilt?” Guilt is the feeling that we have, somehow, done something wrong and/or the feeling we are bad. This feeling can be either due to something we’ve done or from believing you are just a body that is separate from others. Guilt can also escalate into deep loneliness or emptiness.

Most people carry a burden of guilt. If it is deep seated enough, it can be like an insidious virus that infiltrates every aspect of your life, so that all your responses to life and others are filtered through the guilt feelings.

When we are difficult or heavy handed and reactive, these are signs of guilt. If the guilt is just a nagging ache then it could translate into sadness.

In my work as hypnotherapist people have been helped by seeing the cause of it through traditional religious belief in sin and punishment.

For instance, a young woman, who suffered deep sadness from no apparent reason, came to see me. Her parents were warm and loving and her childhood had been normal. During a regression into a past life she was burned alive for being a witch, which meant she was psychic. Before burning her people hurled insults for her evil ways that she would burn in hell. When she discovered the fact that she wasn’t bad at all, after all, what she wanted was to help people. This realization healed her guilt permanently.

After a few years of conducting hypnotherapy I became acutely aware of the heavy burden of guilt that most people carry.

· Guilt prevents us from having a healthy relationship with other people.

· Guilt causes us to punish those around us for our problems.

· Guilt makes you live in the past and blocks your soul’s purpose.

· Guilt often creates life-threatening pathologies as our bodies attract ill health.

· Guilt causes us to hurt people closest to us.

· Traditional Christian religion encourages guilt for our sins instead of seeing them as lessons for greater love, compassion and forgiveness.

In 30 years of hypnotherapy

I may seem a little forward but I am a very curious fellow. I would truly appreciate sharing what you have learned in your 30 years of conducting hypnotherapy sessions with hundreds of people one-on-one?

I may have mentioned this before in satsangs -- in the 30 years I have conducted one-on-one sessions (which I now call 'Supersentience.') I have witnessed our oneness. Every person is unique with a different personality, gender, desires, hopes and fears, and yet, behind the outer appearance is the same longing for happiness, peace, love and fulfillment. In other words, every human is seeking, consciously or unconsciously, Self-fulfillment. The trouble starts when we believe we are separate and different in our needs. We all want to awaken spiritually but don't know how to go about it or what it is we really want.
When we finally discover that it is spiritual awakening that we need (and this is already a giant leap in awareness) then we believe two things...
1. We believe that awakening is something we are going to attain instead of seeing how things are.
2. We believe that there is something wrong with us that needs to be overcome or resisted.

Awakening spiritually is realizing this NOW itself beyond our past and future. It is seeing that time and space as we know it only exists in our sensual world. We try to grasp spiritual knowledge through books and teachings alone as if information is going to do it. We fail to see that awakening is seeing what is obvious here and now.
Then, something else happens when we fail to realize NOW as all there is, we start blaming our childhood, our conditioned state, our environment and the world in general. We do not see that how we see the world is our mind-set and viewpoint.

So why do most people go through this process initially? The problem is not our weaknesses or vices that block us but our illusions. We are haunted by the images we have placed instead of Reality. For example, anyone with average intelligence knows that only NOW exists, yet we hang on to the illusion that we are the past. The self-image we carry with us is so powerful, so overwhelming that we do not even see it. Assagioli, the Founder of Psychosynthesis said, "We spend over 95% of our energy protecting, defending and maintaining our self-image and it is all an image -- imagination." When we ask, "who am I?" in this moment we become dumbfounded and that's as it should be. We are NOT who we think we are at all -- we are this moment itself. You are this NOW and therefore pure being capable of spontaneous existence filled with laughter, innocence, joy, happiness and fulfillment. Yet the thought of being 'spiritual' (spirit) is scary to our ego (past).
This fear of NOW is so common that we would rather believe we are the past and feel guilty for it then be without an individual identity. The word 'spirit' cannot be computed by the mind and so it creates a substitute, which is an image. This image, based on the past, is also known as unconscious guilt filled with self-doubt. And, it can't be any other way because the greatest illusion is the belief that we are the past. Granted that the past happened and it is history, but 'it happened' and it is not NOW (the only Reality we have).

This self-doubt, better known as 'unconscious guilt' is so strong that we keep favoring it over awakening (of course, this is all unconscious). This guilt manifests as the following feeling...
"There is something wrong with me."
"I am not good enough as I am."
"I am missing something but I don't know what."
This self-doubt (guilt) blocks any ability to see the moment as IT actually IS! It blinds us utterly and even creates emotional and health problems.
This guilt surfaces in various ways...
* playing victim of circumstances (I was brought up this way....)
* Pretend to be somebody special to make up for inadequacy feelings...
* Become an over-achiever to hide misgivings...
* Become overly intellectual to hide the inability to love...
* Overly sensitive to protect a fragile ego...
* Restless, listless and always 'doing' to fill a void...
* Become a perfectionist...
...and hundreds of others. In other words, we are protecting an image that doesn't exist in order to compensate for an emptiness in the center of our being. This emptiness is the resistance of our spiritual Reality believing that if we can be 'something' we can override our incessant feeling of emptiness.
Emptiness is a natural feeling of anyone who is escaping their spiritual essence. Of course, there is no awareness of this escape and so we are often unhappy or depressed for no apparent reason. All unhappiness is the unconscious need to maintain our illusions and not face our spiritual Reality.
It is not easy for a conditioned ego to accept its spiritual nature as being NOW. It keeps choosing fear, control and past to give itself an identity.
Awakening happens when we are willing to see that emptiness is not utter voidness or an abyss but a fullness of spirit. It is joy, happiness, love and peace derived from the falling away of fear. Fear is the result of the belief in death. If you are the fullness of NOW how can death happen? Can NOW die? Awakening sees clearly that you are not being in the NOW -- you are the NOW itself? Do you see the difference?

How can we awaken this knowing despite our egoic conditioning? There is a way and it is not difficult provided you are willing to 'do' it. The simple solution is called 'Quantum Forgiveness.' This is how it is done...
The moment you see yourself getting angry, upset, hurt, offended, defensive, depressed or feeling the need to control or fear loss of control, just forgive it by saying, "There is this low energy and I forgive it." When you start 'doing' this from 10 to 30 times a day, then something starts to happen. You realize that you are egoically conditioned and see clearly why you have been so miserable and unfulfilled. Once you see this clearly then you are ready for the next recognition -- you start to see that all that forgiveness didn't have a culprit. There was nothing and no one to forgive. It was all an illusion. It is at this point (Quantum Forgiveness) that awakening starts happening.

Most people start to forgive fully when they realize there was no one to forgive. It was all a process of seeing what is real.
What is real? The Reality is that you are this NOW itself and therefore an eternal being. This being, having discarded most of its egoic karma, finds that it hasn't lost anything in its shedding but gained so much more. The personality is the same, the 'person' has not vanished into nothingness and still is intact. There is the seeing that much has been gained especially a sense of intuituive knowing that only LOVE is real. God is LOVE.

How do you know?

I listen to your talks and they are simple and effective; what makes you know what you know?

If we were to listen to our own spiritual heart we would also know beyond any doubt. We, as humans, are trained to think about things; to figure things out, to make sense of what we see and experience and to reach logical conclusions based on what we know intellectually. We do not realize two things initially...
a. We can never be fully convinced through the conditioned mind.
b. By using the mind to figure things out we block our natural gift of knowing.
We are conditioned by our five senses and miss the most important sense of all called the sixth sense -- the sense of spiritual intuition. We know more than we realize but do not listen to what we already know intuitively and so we block it from recognizing its obviousness. For example, "how do you know that you exist?" -- It is not a thought nor an emotion, nor a belief or memory. It is a knowing beyond doubt. Ask yourself how you know this? Isn't it your own intuitive knowing because you are an aware being?
Your very awareness that is now reading these words KNOWS beyond any doubt about your true nature.
Let's take another example -- people ask, "How do you know God exists?" and never LOOK at the word 'God' but merely respond to their conditioned beliefs about it and then resolve to continue believing in it or not based on logical conclusions (which are viewpoints of conditioning).
When someone asks me, "Do you believe in God?" I answer by raising the question, "Do you believe in awareness?" Since everyone knows awareness is a fact then I say, "God is the Presence of Awareness." In other words, since awareness is univeersal it is oneness. In that oneness is LOVE. Therefore God is Love.

There is nothing you cannot know unless you are not willing to apply yourself. Most people are so conditioned by the world to the extent that they have lost the ability to LISTEN within.
Spiritual intuition is your higher sense known as the sixth sense. When you know intuitively it is certain without any doubt and nothing could make you budge from it. Intuition is not a belief nor an experience but a knowing beyond any doubt. In fact, if you doubt your intuition then it is NOT intuition.
When you met your present spouse didn't you just know he/she was the one for you?

Here are the points about Spiritual Intuition.
* Spiritual intuition is a sense of knowing. It is spontaneous and NOT a question of analysis.
* If we give the slightest intellectual or emotional effort to understanding it blocks intuitive knowing.
* Spiritual intuition is your gift and birthright and it will enhance every aspect of life. It is your choice to use it.
* You know it is spiritual intuition when you simply have no more doubts. If there is the slightest doubt then it is not intuition but either intellectual or emotional knowing.
* Body discomforts are signs to be inwardly quiet and listen. For example, any guilt, fear or anger is a sign you are not listening and instead 'caught' in what the mind is feeding you -- a story!! I find that when words don't come during a conversation it is time to shut up.
* When something is not right for you there is a subtle or obvious feeling of discomfort. When something is right for you no effort is needed.

HOW TO LISTEN

Train yourself in the following steps and you will awaken spiritual intuition.
1. We have three kinds of feelings -- emotional feelings based on personal attachment. These feelings have to do with your egoic idea of self. The words that hurt and offend you are the words that enslave you from direct knowing. Then we have intellectual feelings based on literal translation and viewpoint of life. In other words, we take words literally without direct experience of their meaning like the word 'God' in conventional religion. Finally, we have true feeling which is awareness itself. This is a feeling-knowing without judgment, comparison, analysis or belief. It is clear-seeing as something actually IS!

2. Start by treating all emotional reactions as the first voice of the conditioned mind. Let this first voice vent itself without 'buying' into it. Allow yourself to see that no matter what the story is -- it is a conditioned response without reality. If you have reached this point of allowing, then you are ready for the real voice.

3. Having allowed yourself to vent with the knowing that it is just an emotional reaction or intellectual conclusion, now you are ready for the Real Inner Voice of Intuition...

4. Sit still and relax by watching your breath for a minute or two without thinking. Then listen to the sounds around you without judgment until you feel quiet inside. Then feeling tranquil and relaxed ask yourself the question that bothered you. Do not reach for an answer but just sit with the question allowing your intuitive voice to guide. Having done that, smile and get up.
Sooner or later you will get an intuitive feeling-knowing what is the 'right' thing to do or a revelation of how it actually IS!

The more you use this discipline, the sooner you awaken your natural inner voice of truth. People will soon start asking you, "How do you know so much?" and you'll say, "Everything I know you also know if you apply yourself. This is the REAL LIFE of the SPIRIT.