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Politics : Should God be replaced? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill Fischofer who wrote (9308)	1/9/2002 12:33:19 PM
From: James Calladine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28931

"just what distinction between "I" and "the ego" is intended?" When you or I, or most everybody, use the personal pronoun "I", we do so without much knowledge of what we actually mean. In the book "Realms of the Human Unconscious" you find described people re-experiencing their earliest conscious awareness in the uterus, which is a state that Bucke, Swedenborg and many others describe, which might be called "oceanic bliss". That state does not have any substantial "I" sense, for the most part. That state starts to be "added to", in terms of increasing sensations of the growing foetus, sounds and sensations from the mother's body, sounds of the mother's voice, and so on. These build (for that physical lifetime) the beginning of the "I" sense as being something separate and apart from the "oceanic bliss" of earliest physical existence. That sense of separation is absolutely confirmed by the birth process, which is a massive contraction, followed by the release into the now-separate world, with all the events of physical life thereafter. The child is profoundly dependent on his parents for his/her life-support systems which adds to the sense of vulnerable dependence. While on the one hand this is a "new" process for that particular life, on the other hand, at the unconscious level there are racial (and even previous-personal) memories of the entire process. The new experience is rapidly associated with the old, forming one body of "experience", being the experience, perceptions, actions, reactions of that particular "person" which thinks of itself, and experiences itself as a separate being, and calls itself "I". All of that could be classified as "the ego-I" On the other hand, all these perceptions arise in a field of consciousness much closer in its actuality to the original "oceanic bliss". However, the ego focuses on (and identifies with) the objects of its perceptions and not on the field in which they arise. This experiential ego-I is what people commonly call "I", but it is based on the sense of separation and on ignoring that which lives it, and that which IS the field of consciousness in which all its perceptions arise. The process of God-realization, simplified, is the process of coming to understand and notice that which constitutes the ego in one's own case, letting that go, and surrendering into the field of consciousness and life which is one's true existence. The original "I" of the ego is progressively released, enroute to the realization of "I AM all and everything, and I AM the witness of all of that" and living as that. Paradoxically, nothing is added in that process, because how one IS, has not changed, just the contraction decommissioned, so to speak. Hope this makes sense. Namaste! Jim