Wearing Your Clothes on Backwards
If everyone wore their clothes on backwards would the fact that everyone else were doing it make it right? Would the fact that everybody went along with it, and by doing so enable everyone else to feel comfortable wearing their cloths on backwards be the right thing to do? What would happen if everyone knew everyone else was wrong but didn’t say anything to anyone else for fear that someone might tell them they themselves were wrong? What kind of world would we be living in when everyone was lying to everyone else?
Luckily no one wears their cloths on backwards, but everyone does wear something that everyone else sees and everyone else knows is not quite right…the ego. Everyone who comes into this world is strapped with an ego…an environmentally, culturally imposed self that suppresses the True Self. Everyone grows up “forced” to wear a “suit” of personality that is not who we really are. No one is in their right mind, acting out, as it were, the complex “self” we “think” we are because we believe in the thoughts implanted in us from birth that “inform” us as to who we come to “think” we are. It is in the “thinking”… about how Italian we are, or how German we are, or how Pygmy we are that we come to identify with our culture to the exclusion of how “child of the Eternal” we really are, but so few discover. As long as we live in unconscious agreement with our unseen thoughts we will remain in our ego and never find the true purpose for which we were created.
One of the main problems with living as one with our ego is that it is a very shaky situation. Egos are fundamentally insecure entities founded as they are upon a faulty mental foundation. Being creatures of the mind and thinking, past and future thoughts, the ego, having its own intelligence, works very hard to avoid the Present Moment because it knows that in the Now it will be exposed and annihilated. The ego can not be still. Therefore the ego, insecure as it is, requires constant reinforcement. Approval from other egos is one of its main support systems. Judgment of others is another. Its easy to see the faults of others and to mentally condemn them so as to raise oneself up in comparison. But it is funny how the ego can not…will not see its own faults.
If you try to point out the faults of an ego you could be putting yourself in danger of loss of friendship, a black eye or worse. But make no mistake about it, pointing out fault in another, like telling them their clothes are on backwards, may cause pain and embarrassment, but is an act of real love. For everyone who wants the best for another will take that risk. Anyone with any real caring for another does not want to see the other less than their full potential. Love will strike at the ego with words of truth hoping to expose it, but bringing the light of truth to a situation, like exposing a vampire to sunlight, will also cause some pain. But love knows that it is not the Real Person who is pained, but the ego. If the Real Person is to be allowed to emerge, the ego shell must be cracked. Love is willing to speak up and speak out at the right time and in the right way for the sake of his brother, at all risks, for everything else is a lie.
Rick Hurst
http://rickhur.blogspot.com