Read Online The Power of Coincidence by David Richo - Free Book Online

as we work to activate our life purpose, an ego-Self axis, the Self moves toward us with the same purpose. The astronomer Tim Ferris says, “Consciousness is like a campfire in the middle of a dark Australia.” Spirituality is igniting ourselves so that such a delicately wonderful thing can light up in ourselves and in our world.
    Our psychological work is to shape our ego so that it can function without inhibition or compulsion. Then our innate gifts and talents can enter the service of the Self and commandeer our every thought, word, and deed into showing all the love, wisdom, and healing we are capable of in our lifetime. The neurotic ego contravenes this work by its prejudice that we are separate, in control, and in no need of humility. The Course in Miracles says, “Your choice to use this device [ego] enables it to endure.” Our psychological work is to dismantle our neurotic ego in favor of our functional ego. As we saw above, our ego is functional when it guides us on our path. If I want to go north, my body is functional when I walk in a northerly direction. If I walk south to go north, something has become dysfunctional, that is, neurotic, based on illusion. The functional ego is the best vehicle for the emergence of the Self, yet, by grace, the neurotic ego too can be harnessed.
    Saint John of the Cross wrote, “Swiftly, with nothing spared, I am being completely dismantled.” Nothing less is required for spiritual growth than the total dissolution of the inflated ego. Half measures do not avail. Inflation is the habit of imagining and acting as if the whole purpose of life was one’s own aggrandizement and the fulfillment of one’s own entitlements. This means bringing attention only to our own needs, demanding to be in control, believing we are entitled to be served by everyone and to have the ordinary conditions of existence repealed or relaxed for us because we are so special. Joseph Campbell says, “Hell is being stuck in ego.” He is referring to the neurotic ego with its compulsive attachment to fear and grasping. Intimate relationships help most in the dismantling of the illusions of our controlling and entitled egos. They show up the ego’s entitlements as fictions that fade in the face of loving-kindness toward all.
    The neurotic side of the ego is not meant to be destroyed but, paradoxically, to be expanded in its healthy humility so that it can extend its creative possibilities to all our psyche. It is liberated by being relieved of its arrogance and then opened to its potential to show power for rather than power over others. This is also our potential for bringing peace into the world and into our relationships. A hero is a person who lives through the pain of this process and is thereby transformed by it. Such a transformation reveals us to ourselves as singular and as one with all that is: “All the lotus lands and all the Buddhas are revealed in my own being,” says the Avatamsaka Sutra.
    Our psyche is driven by a spontaneous urge toward wholeness and therefore strives to harmonize apparent polarities: conscious and unconscious, ego and Self. It is up to us to further this process or to let it slumber. Our lively aspiration might be, “I feel a homing instinct for wholeness. I do what it takes to break the spell of ego.”
    Our functional ego adapts to the external world by socialized behavior and extroversion (mediated by our persona, the appearance we present to others). It adapts to the internal world by introversion (mediated by our shadow, the dark side of us that we hide from others and from ourselves). Our ego becomes more and more functional by disidentifying with any exclusive attachment to our persona, by reclaiming our shadow projections, and by recovering our body as a legitimate and useful tool in the adventure of living.
    The shadow is the part of us that is hidden and unconscious to us. Our negative shadow contains all that we find unacceptable about ourselves but