There is a kind of meditation in which we use our available time and energy to confront the parts of ourselves that destroy happiness and wholeness…We must give voice to the recalcitrant, destructive parts of ourselves that deny us the best life has to offer…
To get started, we need to understand the three fundamental layers of the personality. All thee must be involved in the process of meditation for it to be truly effective. The three levels are: 1) The ego, with our ability to think and take action. 2) The destructive inner child, with its hidden ignorance and omnipotence, and immature demands and destructiveness. 3) The Higher Self, with its superior wisdom, courage and love that allows for a more balanced and complete outlook on situations…
What we want to do in meditation, in order to be most effective, is leverage the ego to activate both the immature destructive aspects and the superior Higher Self…It’s actually a sign of great progress when we can allow the belligerent little monster inside us to surface in our inner awareness. Being able to acknowledge this destructive part of ourselves in all its egotistical and irrational glory indicates a measure of self-acceptance and growth…
It can be hard to accept that there is something in us that breaks away so decidedly from how we see ourselves and want to be. This part is an egotistical infant. It’s an immature aspect of the Lower Self. And its antisocial desires need to be exposed in humbling detail…So one direction to take in meditation is for the ego to reach down and say, “I want to see whatever is hiding in me. I want to see my negativity and destructiveness, and I am committed to bringing it all out into the open, even if it stings my pride”…
It is a tall order for the ego to expose all this on its own. It needs the help of the Higher Self, which is the other direction to turn during meditation…The universal powers can also serve in helping to understand the destructive infant correctly, without exaggerating it. After all, we don’t want to go from ignoring it to blowing it out of proportion. We can easily vacillate between self-deprecation and self-aggrandizement. Also, we can fall prey to thinking that ultimately we are that hot mess. That this is the sad reality of who we are…
We need to uncover the consequences to giving in to the short-lived satisfaction of being destructive…We need to follow all the threads until we uncover exacting insight about our issues…If we are diligent in cultivating meditation for three voices, we’ll discover a side of ourselves we have never known before. We’ll realize how our Higher Self can communicate with us, helping expose our ignorant, destructive side, which needs insight and encouragement to change…
Many people meditate but they neglect this two-sidedness and therefore miss out on the opportunity for transformation and integration. Their Higher Self may be activated but the unfree, closed off areas remain neglected. The work of opening and healing, unfortunately, doesn’t happen by itself…
To recap, the first stage of meditation is discovery, the second is exploration and the third is reeducation. Now let’s discuss the fourth stage of meditation, which is desire…Let’s look more closely at the paradox of desire, since both desire and desirelessness are important spiritual attitudes. Only in the illusion of duality are they opposites. Which leads to the confusion that one is right and one is wrong…
Desire and desirelessness are not mutually exclusive. And if our ego has that impression, it can’t grasp the right attitude for moving forward. In our desire lies our belief that new possibilities can unfold and greater self-expression can be enjoyed. But if we’re all tense and tied up in knots about this, we form a block in our system…What we need to find and express is a kind of desirelessness regarding our desire…
In the final analysis, the real source of our tension is the infantile notion that we’ll be annihilated if we don’t get what we want…Our goal is not to slay the destructive aspects of ourselves. No, these parts need instruction so they can be freed and allowed to grow up; then salvation can become a real thing. As we do this, our ego will, sure enough, move steadily closer to becoming unified with the greater Higher Self.
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