How....

Paul Brunton, in his 16 volume spiritual notebook, expresses over and over that the person needs to redirect from ego or small self to larger self, Higher Self. The idea is also in A Course in Miracles: the small ego is not real, the Christ, the Son of God within, is the truth.

From Brunton:

• "Blessed are the poor in spirit," said Jesus. What did he mean? To be "poor" in the mystical sense is to be deprived of the possession of the ego, that is, to become ego-free.
• When all of man's thoughts are put together, this total constitutes his ego. By giving them up to the Stillness, he gives up his ego, denies his self, in Jesus' phrase.
• To surrender the ego is to surrender the thought of it, and this is done by stilling the mind whenever, in daily life, one becomes self-conscious.
• The more he tries to fight the ego, the more he thinks about it and concentrates on it. This keeps him still its prisoner. Better is it to turn his back on it and think about, concentrate on the higher self.

So, how do you renounce the ego without chastising yourself all the time because you reacted to it? This is where I have located the workbook of A Course in Miracles. Each day it gives me a thought which is directed to the higher self and not the ego. I need to be taught to think differently and I need help in order to think differently. There are other books which provide a daily thought. Be careful of most of them because they give a very narrow limited and worldly view of the world and certainly almost all of them see the ego as real. The ego is just thoughts.

I see my life as a journey towards the higher self. The one thing I've desired for decades is a vibrant spiritual connection. There have been turns of events all along which have brought me closer. Like, in my early years of sobriety, a group of us recovering alcoholics were attending seminars by a man who talked about the ego and this lead to listening to a channeled entity who talked about the higher self. AA itself is directed towards ego deflation and surrender to a higher power. In the monastery, I was reading about the small self and the larger self.

And somehow or other, I arrived at A Course in Miracles which discusses the ego delusion in a more complicated way. And somehow, I arrived a Paul Brunton's notebooks. 

I have to say this about the Bible: it is misinterpreted not only by scholars throughout the ages but by the early church. The renunciation of ego combined with identification with the higher self which Jesus practiced made him look special; and his expertise was incomprehensible to the early church so they called him Son of God. Truly he was Son of God, but so are you if you deny the ego and take up the higher self.

Not easy. Maybe I only make a smidgen of progress in this life. But I refuse to give up.

So today, my ACIM lesson is: Love created me like Itself. I vow to hold this idea in mind and use it as the thing I turn to when I notice I am in ego reality. As I return to this thought of Love and It, I also enter silence.

Now, I slept 12 hours last night. I think I'll go to a small park today and run in a forest.