Ego and the Use of Tools
Their faces say it all. Pure joy. When was the last time you were able to experience pure joy? We use tools in our life to create feelings and experiences we want. But the whole individual, who is free of ego and in source, creates the feelings and experiences for themselves. Much like children they are able to experience their desired emotions more intensely. The feelings are created from within and they do not use tools to find what they wish to experience.
The ego has created a sense of lack in us. Ego says we are not enough, I cannot have what I want because I don’t have what I need, I need to reach for it, pull what I want into me. Source says you have it all, you are the creator of it all. You create it inside your soul without any influence from the outside. Your soul, source, is your centre right beside your heart space, sitting there like an alter waiting for you to honour it, to honour yourself. It is from this space that we create everything we dream about, everything we want without reaching or pulling it in. It is already alive within us but has been masked and derailed by the ego and its tools.
The ego’s lack makes us feel like a victim to our surroundings and to our situations. The ego lack creates an ego solution to take control back by reaching for people, places and things in our physical environment to create feelings inside ourselves that are more pleasant. We become addicted to these feelings, they are like a drug we want more of and eventually we need. We use these “tool’s” (people, places, things) to get the high. The tools are the quickest way there but they are a false or temporary high. The high will be destroyed when the tools go away, and go away they will because that is the nature of our physical environment, continual change.
As we start to understand that source is within us we also start to see the ego at play in our lives more and more clearly. You start to see that you are reacting to the outside environment, letting the outside environment dictate how you feel. It might be dictating that you feel bad, this is easier to identify as ego because we of course do not want any negative feelings. But the ego can also create happiness and positive feelings. Here are a few examples of how our environment can create our feelings:
I purchase a new dress I feel beautiful in it. Once I take it off or am finished wearing it the feeling is gone. I’m back to the ego’s feeling of lack, the dress was the tool.
I plant a garden and I feel satisfied and accomplished until a hailstorm demolishes it and I feel defeated. I’m back to the ego’s feeling of lack, the garden was the tool.
I get married and I feel taken care of and in love and on cloud nine, life is perfect until my partner doesn’t take care of me or express their love in the way I imagined. Now I feel unhappy, not taken care of. I’m back in the ego’s feeling of lack, my partner was the tool.
I get a bonus at work and I feel important, valued and seen until the next day when I am not acknowledged for the hard work on my project or the value I brought to a conversation. Now I feel unimportant and angry that I don’t get it all the time. I’m back in the ego’s feeling of lack, the bonus was the tool.
When we create these feelings from source we truly have no lack. There is a wellspring inside of us that bubbles up to give us everything we need and it is never ending. So how do we get to source? Let’s use the first example above to illustrate.
I want to feel beautiful all of the time not just when I use the tool. We have to uncover our inner dialogue, the ego conversations that we let happen and take over our mind about our bodies. We have to reject the ego information and accept source information. Source information will feel like the lie at first, unbelievable. But the truth is you are beautiful, every inch of you is beautiful in every form. You can see that there are a lot of stories to unpack to get to source, to actually feel this as truth. We have been letting the ego make decisions and tell us what is true, we have been handing over our power to the tools. We are so detached from the truth, from our source, that we cannot see it. We only see lack. So we must have blind faith at first until we can actually know, see and feel the truth. We start with what we can believe. We find one thing about ourselves that we love, our eyes, our ankles, our fingers and we sit with the truth of that. We focus on one part of us as being truly beautiful until we believe it, and honour it in all its glory. We gaze at it lovingly. We tell ourselves how beautiful it is. We put a beautiful bracelet on our already beautiful wrist. We give it lotion when it looks dry. We take care of it, show it off. Then we can move on to one more thing and then one more thing until we are so beautiful we cannot even believe we were this beautiful and could not see it all along. As we discover our beauty and truly appreciate it we start treating our bodies differently, we start to honour the body with the care it deserve. We nourish the body better and listen better. We give our body everything it needs and craves because we love truly love it and in return our body truly loves us back. Suddenly there is no lack and a simple dress is added to the total beauty of our body and not used as a tool to make you feel beautiful. Can you feel the difference between ego and source in this situation?
These examples and scenarios are fairly simple. Lack is often much deeper, much more painful to bear and very complicated to unravel. The beauty of source is that even if you do not see it or feel it, it is there waiting for you. It is never leaving you and is always looking for ways to reveal itself to you.
What is the tool you can most easily identify in your life? What or who are you using to make you feel something that can be taken away if that person place or thing is removed? You have to truly sit with the loss of that tool. What are you feeling when the tool is gone? It won’t be a good feeling, it might feel so terrible you don’t even want to acknowledge that it is there, you want to find another tool to use. But we have to feel it to see it is a lie. It has to be unpacked so we can see the truth. The truth is that the good feeling you want is already inside of you, at your centre waiting to be honoured and felt so deeply it can never be taken away from you.
Start by feeling the lack if you do not use the tool. What is the lack, what feeling is coming up? What story is your ego telling you about this terrible feeling? Is it true? How does your soul want to be let out of this lie? What is your soul’s truth? What needs to be honoured inside of you for you to believe the truth? The answers to these questions are not simple and are not easy to find. But just like an addict would wean themselves off a drug and support themselves so they can see the truth about their addictions we must also do the same. Cut the use of the tool out, don’t reach for or pull anything in to cover up that terrible feeling that is coming up, sit in it. Listen to it. Hear its lies and decide to reject them. If you cannot see the truth at first have blind faith that source will reveal the truth you seek, the glimmers will form every time you don’t reach for that tool. The glimmers of truth and light will start to compound until you have no more lack. You will feel that wellspring bubble up and know it is truth, you will honour that part of you so deeply it can never be taken from you. You will know because you are no longer longing to reach for the tool in the same way, to use it. You are adding the tool to the already beautiful feeling you embody at your centre in your alter, source.
