The theme of this website and the course I teach, Live Your Own Life, can be misconstrued as a life of selfishness, the exertion of a heroic will to make things go the way mainstream culture has told us will make us happy, (which is always in the direction of increased security, status, and conformity).
It doesn’t. Because life doesn’t offer security and safety.
To live one’s own life requires that we stop chasing an illusion and exchange the chase for a true life.
Living one’s own life does involves a paradox however. Every spiritual lineage down through the ages teaches that your life is not your own—that Life or God has something in mind for you that transcends the desires of ego. It’s the paradox of having to lose your life in order to find it. Many experience that if they don’t consent to this life, they will suffer emotionally and physically until they do. This consent is sometimes called surrender, but it often feels like being broken. The title of my last book, Dismantled: How Love and Psychedelics Broke a Clergyman Apart and Put Him Back Together describes my experience of this.
What or who is being broken?
I use various terms: ego, performative self, false self, or the trying self.
This expression of self is alienated from a condition of relaxed spontaneity – having learned early and often, too often, that to be natural is to be humiliated, punished, interrupted, corrected and generally mistreated. It is what an individual looks and feels like when s/he learns to protect herself from reality as s/he has known it. The individual dissociates herself from the present, from the body, from the emergent flow of life. Will replaces trust, thinking takes over from a primal trust in the natural, sacred intelligence that is living us, animating us and expressing itself in, through, and as us.
The egoic will, thinking, and behaviour, is recruited in the service of survival, even when survival is not at stake. The dissociation is from life itself. We experience ourselves as isolated creatures forging an existence in a hostile world and with humans who cannot be trusted.
Obviously, if we fashion our life from this condition we are not “living our own life” — we are surviving, imitating conventional norms, finding the words and behaviors that fit somebody else’s ideals.
This condition is actual selfishness. It’s the selfishness born of the survival instinct, when everybody and every thing is recruited in the service of confirming that we matter. And since unconsciously we don’t feel like we matter, we are never done with the recruitment project. This recruiting of life to justify our existence is the very definition of selfish.
This pretty much describes the human condition on our planet today. The political, economic , educational, religious and health institutions, along with toxic families, that define reality for us are expressions of this survival mentality writ large. Believe what we believe, go along with our agenda, don’t ask questions, transfer your inner authority to us and we’ll take care of you. Except that, in truth, we’re being recruited by them to build their power, their influence, and their viability.
We are born into this institutional self-serving corruption. If there is any meaning to “original sin” it is these conditions into which we are born, the “fallen” state of institutions and the violence these institutions and the humans who work within them to perpetuate a false economy, false politics, false religions, false families, etc. Conformity with these institutions, enacted to ensure belonging and identification, inevitably leads to a false life.
How do we break away, break down, break through?
When the suffering of “normal” is acute enough we wake up, then grow up, and then show up to do our part in curating an alternative.
Starting with our own life.
The desire that comes on line once the false self is broken is the desire of Life itself (or Source) wanting to experience Itself through you. “You” are the adventure of Life localized. “You” are the way this localized expression responds to new conditions. (And it’s always new). This means that “you” can never be locked down into a particular image, into an enduring and unchanging expression (which is actually death). “You” are not predictable, even as the world tries to lock you into a past (controllable) expression.
“You” are ever new, like the Intelligence and Love that is living in you, as you, through you. This you discovers, again and again, that it’s natural to treat others well, to treat yourself well, to treat Earth and her creatures well. Because we are all localized expressions of this Big Mind and Big Heart that is living us. And we’re all in this together.
“You” are an individual, meaning that the Big Thing, can know Itself uniquely as you.
Not selfish.
Beautiful. Radiant. Generous.
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