The Journey Home

Buddha once said 'The good stuff, do it and the bad stuff, cut it out!' That's indeed a way to return home, yet, even though religions all over the world have tried hammering these moral standards into people's heads, it seemed to have had little success. The problem is that if a spiritual authority or a cultural norm just tells you how to behave, this voice of reason will become a super ego. No, you have to find a way to experience the two voices in you - ego versus the True Self - for yourself. Once you discover who you actually are and once you see for yourself that you can experience Heaven on earth, the ancient journey is over.

You require a Rosetta Stone, a reference point that provides you with a guide post. Some people have a wake up call when they suddenly run into a wall. They realize the hard way that the voice in their head that they always thought was them is in fact alien and not the friend they thought it was. Others discover the quiet voice inside. The voice that always speaks second, the one that is love and that has a constant connection to God.

I discovered a precious insight along my journey. I found out that ego begets ego and that you can very much experiment with that fact. I discovered that the more you engage in ego activities, the more you drain your energy and your peace of mind. Similarly, you can observe that the more you cut out all the impurities along the way, the clearer your thinking, the higher your energy level and the more synchronized you are with your environment.

Try cutting out the stuff your ego is obsessed about, the body obsessions, fascination with money or status, or having conspiracy thoughts about others. Sure, these thoughts and feelings seem to belong to you, but you can observe that as you manage to turn away from them, they do get weaker over time, just as they get stronger when you put your mind on it. Try it, it works, you can experiment with these concepts very much like a scientist would.

Let me give you a little example. In a psychological experiment, people were exposed to money symbols, such as having a bank note as a screen saver, or having monopoly money lying on a a table. It turned out that the people who were exposed to these subconscious money symbols were less helpful in the experiment when a person who passed by accidentally dropped things. It appears that for us money is a ego symbol, and once you activate this voice in your head you automatically deviate from the True Self.

Life is a journey and it turns out that you can redefine these dark symbols by giving it a new spiritual meaning. Sex can be an expression of love, work an expression of love for what you are doing, for being with other people and an outlet of your creativity. Wealth and status can become an opportunity to reach out and help others. The beauty is you don't really have to do anything, just follow life's invites moment by moment to choose love over everything else. Headed in this direction, your journey will soon be over.

Status

Jonathan Haidt provides a thoughtful summary of recent psychological findings verifying humanity's ancient insights about human happiness in his book 'The Happiness Hypothesis'. On the importance of status, he quotes the following survey results: When asked 'would you prefer if you made 90 000 and your colleagues 70 000, or if you made 100 000, but your colleagues earn 150 000 instead', the majority of people prefer having less money, but more status instead. Yet, when the same people are asked about vacation, such as 'you have two weeks of vacation, whereas your colleagues only one, versus you have 4 weeks versus your colleagues have 6 weeks', the majority chooses the cooperative option instead.

Status is a zero sum game, the more the others have, the more your own situation gets diminished. You gain with the very intention to leave your neighbor out in the dust. We have gathered these insights for thousands of years, nothing really has change since. The task of spirituality at hand is to live the cooperative solution, to feel it in your bones that the dog-eat-dog world is nothing but a waste of time. No insight or book can help you with that, you have to feel it as well. Only your unique spiritual path can get you to this advanced stage. However, even we spiritual path travelers have our ego traps. What  if your spiritual quest is nothing but another attempt to gain status, wrapped in spiritual cloth. The ego is ingenious, so please watch out for a quest for status in disguise.