Despite the fact that you are on the Path of the Soul, you still have an Ego. The difference is that your Ego does not play the main role now, as it used to, but you continue to keep it and it influences you. How much, first of all, depends on you and your understanding of this fact.
When you accept the Path of the Soul, a spontaneous loss of interest in a career, achieving financial and material wealth, fame, success in society (we will talk about sex as an obstacle on the Path in a separate text) and everything that makes up a person’s daily life occurs.
After all, you are part of society, you participate in it as much as you need to in order to ensure your physical existence and life activity. As your spiritual development continues, all this will gradually diminish until you reach a state of complete self-forgetfulness, a state of Enlightenment.
Until then, you will encounter some obstacles on the Path from the Ego, and here we will describe a few, so that you have a general idea of them.
Why?
Of all the obstacles that slow down your spiritual development, the word in the title indicates perhaps the biggest one.
"Why?"
You see, the same “why?” again!
The most powerful function of the Life Ego (a hair ahead of sexuality) is survival, the Emotional Ego is desire, and the Mental Ego is “why”.
"Why" is extremely important and useful, but on the Path of Ego. It will explain to you the origin and development of the human species, the planet, the universe, the work of the computer, the change in exchange rates and many other useful and necessary things. "Why" is irreplaceable in Egoland, it plays an important role in it, which is why it should be developed and respected.
Meanwhile, on the Path of the Soul it most often represents an obstacle over which many stumble.
No matter how clever an answer you get to your "why", that very answer will only hinder you in further remembering, for one obvious reason, namely, "why" is, in essence, your Mental Ego, which is constantly looking for new answers to new and new questions. "Why" is the main technique of the Mental Ego, with the help of which it feeds on energy.
Therefore, for him there are no final answers, but an infinite number of mental circles intersecting with each other, where each point of intersection is simultaneously the starting point of a new mental circle, which over time begins to resemble your grandmother's crocheted lace on the living room table. And there is no end to it.
As you gradually begin to succeed in clearing your Mental Body of the Mental Ego and its "why", as you feel less and less the need to ask questions and receive answers to them, then gradually, from the Soul and other Spiritual Energies, through the Mental Body "by itself" the information and knowledge necessary to understand yourself, others and the universe in which you live will come to you.
Untying
We are all connected by energetic threads that arise spontaneously and are strongest between family members, especially between parents and children. Therefore, untying ties is never easy and is always painful for both, you and those who are connected to you.
Perhaps you are often not aware of how much you mean to some people: you are the son/daughter (brother/sister) of these or those parents and as such you represent one of the important "patches" of their Ego, and if you are successful in society, then you mean even more to them, both psychologically and energetically, because they also receive life energy through you.
On the Path of the Soul, you are like a ship that has been in a harbor for a long time, tied to a dock, and that has finally remembered that the main purpose of its existence is to sail. In order for you to begin sailing on the open sea, you must first free yourself from the ropes that tie you tightly to the pier.
You are the one who starts to untie the ties unconsciously, and there is nothing malicious or bad about it on your part. You just started to remember the higher goals of your existence and continue to swim further, but they do not. And so you are forced to "untie" yourself from them, which they are trying to prevent.
Parent-Child Relationships
From a psychological point of view, parents can experience a untying in different ways:
1. They may feel cheated and humiliated, believing that by "leaving" you are telling them that they are not good enough for you. They may also be embittered and jealous towards you, believing that you will be better off "there" than you were "here" with them.
When we say "leaving," we think primarily of removing ourselves from the system of mutual manipulation, surveillance, control, and power struggle on which society is based, although sometimes this may also involve a change of residence.
2. They may be genuinely concerned about your mental health or whether you have become a victim of some cult.
3. They may be sad because they love you and miss you.
1. If they are malicious and if you were a victim in this relationship, you will feel the breakup as a relief, and they will feel a defeat, because it is not easy to find again a good and constant source of life energy, as you were for them. They will try to detain you with humiliation and accusations, and if you still do not "come to your senses", they will begin to hate you, and often try to directly harm you.
2. They may be concerned that you are suffering from some mental illness, that you have been “taken under control” by some cult, or both, because on the Path of the Soul you change, to a greater or lesser extent you change your previous thinking, behavior, your attitude to society, your views on life, etc. And this is an obvious sign to them that “something is wrong” with you.
If you are following the Path of the Soul within the socially recognized religions (as a monk/nun), your family, first of all, and society as well, will be kind to you even if they think that perhaps you are not quite normal because you have renounced the "joys of life". In this case, you continue to have a social status, often greater than you had in your "past life" ("You know, now it has become ...") And this in itself gives meaning to the Ego of those with whom you are connected.
If your Path is outside of social institutions, the attitude towards you will depend on the state of consciousness of the society in which you live, and will be in the range from “loser”, “fool”, etc. to “beware of sectarian!”
3. If they love you, they will pray to God to keep you on your Path.
Spouse and Parent Relationship
If you are a spouse and parent, then your situation is much more difficult, because you are crucified between a strong need for further spiritual development and the responsibilities that you have as a spouse and parent. This is a common case, because many live a completely ordinary life, and then (usually around age 40) spontaneously begin to remember themselves.
Relationships between Comrade and Companion
Your community and business partners from your region will also feel betrayed and deceived by you. Many will consider you a fool ("Well, I told you that he/she...") and therefore will be happy. Many will envy your courage, because you go "where your heart leads you" (although they will not show it openly), and perhaps the most understanding will be shown to you by the female part of your community.
Crayfish in a Bucket
Given that the principle of "let it be as it should be for me, as long as it is not better for him than for me" is strong in Egoland, people are very "vigilant and cautious" regarding the attempts of others to change and achieve some other reality.
Have you ever seen a bucket full of small crayfish?
Freshly caught, they are a bunch of little creatures that swim from one side of the bucket to the other. From the surface of the water to the edge of the bucket is usually 4-5 cm, so from time to time you can see how one of this lump of mixed lives separates with the intention of reaching the edge and returning to the river in which it lived.
And if he succeeds in this, then as soon as he grabs the edge of the bucket with his little claws, at that very moment a bunch of his fellows will hang on to him, creating a cluster of bodies.
At first you will be pleasantly surprised by the general desire of these little creatures for freedom, and then you will understand with horror that they do not intend to escape from the bucket, but to throw back the one who is trying to get out.
Holy Man, Savior, Olympia
Holy Man
The Holy Man is one of the traps of the Ego on the Path of the Soul.
This happens mostly with religious seekers, because the “Holy Man” pose provides the Ego with a high place in the pyramid of power, accompanied by the opinion: “Well, now I am really better than others, because as a Holy Man I am untouchable by the criticism of ordinary people .”
This is such a high, good and convenient position of power that it will never occur to most people that there is anything bad about it.
Savior
For those whose Path lies outside the institutions of society, the “Savior” is the most common trap set by the Ego.
In this case, most often you are entrusted by the spiritual hierarchy with the task of personally leading humanity along the best path to a happy future.
In fact, the message itself can rarely be faulted for anything, because it always contains a wish for love, peace, understanding, equality and justice for all people, etc. All, indeed all people, when they establish a connection with their Soul, will pass through themselves a message of similar content. The danger is to allow the Ego to rise and imagine that it has become the God-given Savior of all mankind. For the fact is that you cannot save anyone except one single person, yourself.
Olympian
The Olympian is another Ego trap.
Often the seeker, having tasted the first fruits on the Path of the Soul, feels the desire to restructure human society, this time based on new rules, in accordance with his experience and vision.
Since humanity is “unreasonable and unwilling to listen,” it needs some center of power to realize these visions. Interestingly, this seems to be the least of the problems, because many centers of power need some kind of leading idea or ideology under which to disguise their need for power. If this idea also has a humane face, so much the better for them.
Meanwhile, given that humanity rarely knows how to notice the beauty of the vision that is presented to it, forced re-education is imposed as the only possible way out.
But anyway, it's all for his own good, isn't it?
Considering that Power has a narcotic effect on the Ego, in view of the duties that he has in the center, the seeker devotes less and less time to spiritual development. At the same time, the center of power very carefully and constantly preserves and strengthens his Ego, endowing it every two or three years with new titles and degrees that bring him closer to the top, thereby binding him to itself for a long time.
And humanity, for whose sake all this was conceived, given that it learns slowly, often causes irritation, anger and revenge from those who have raised themselves to the level of the gods of Olympus.
Sexuality
Do you remember those annoying mosquitoes?
Yes, these little, boring flyers were able to ruin your walk or make you chase them around the room for hours with a newspaper in your hands. And then, when you got tired and admitted your own helplessness before the flying bloodsuckers, everything changed.
As soon as you stopped resisting, usually one of them would come down on your arm or other part of your body, insert its sting through your skin into a blood vessel and start feeding on your blood. Let it drink heartily, get heavy, become clumsy, well-fed and contented, and then just shake it off.
Sex is the easiest and most enjoyable way for the human species to achieve ecstasy, and nothing can bring a smile of genuine pleasure to your face like making love. If you have gone a step further and adopted Reconciliation as your approach to sex, then the pleasure is shared by both partners, felt deeper, and lasts longer.
Meanwhile, on the Path of the Soul, the attitude towards sex changes.
At the beginning of meditation, the ecstasy you feel during sex or sexual arousal is much stronger and better than the ecstasy you feel during meditation. As time passes, this difference becomes smaller and smaller, and at some point everything evens out, so that the ecstasy of sex gradually begins to fade in comparison to the ecstasy of meditation, because meditation fills you with peace, freedom, and knowledge that no physical sensation, including sex, can give you.
As you continue to practice meditation, this difference will become more and more intense until you reach a stage where you begin to perceive sex as an obstacle to spiritual development.
A completely random person you like, memories of pleasant moments from a previous relationship or a sexual fantasy are the most common causes of sexual arousal. Meanwhile, even in cases where there are no "external factors", when you, say, live remotely from society, sexuality manifests itself in a certain internal rhythm.
Once you greeted her joyfully, but now... Now she only gets in your way.
If you fight against it, you activate the Ego by this fight, with the help of which you reject and repress sexuality from consciousness, and at first glance you emerge victorious. The next time it appears, you react even more aggressively and try to drive it even deeper, which causes your Ego to become hyper-vigilant about sexuality. It brings you back to the Path of the Ego, which is bad.
Remember again the mosquito from the beginning of this story.
As long as you were angry with him and chased him around the room, you couldn't do anything to him. When you accepted your powerlessness before him and allowed him to defeat you, things changed by themselves.
Something similar happens with sexuality during the Remembering process.
As long as you fight it and repress it because it is hindering your spiritual development, you are hiding and storing it without realizing it. The only one who can turn off your sexuality, transform it into a higher type of energy, or whatever happens in this process, is meditation, the Soul is in charge. If you repress and hide sexuality, then meditation cannot reach it.
All of the above makes sense only if you were able to establish contact with the Soul during meditation. Otherwise, the effect will be insignificant or non-existent.
How do you know if you have established contact with the Soul during meditation?
At least it is easy. In Soul meditation you yourself do not start and lead the meditation, as you once did when you began to meditate. Now the Soul does it, you do nothing but letting go to meditation.
Oliver
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