Living From The Real Self* Print E-mail
Wednesday, 21 September 2005
(Egoless hence peaceful and happy living)

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Phd
What does it mean to be a healthy human being? It means living from ones real self. What does it mean to be an unhealthy human being? It means living from the false, ideal self that one believes that one ought to become.

Very few human beings are psychologically healthy. What is more common is to be a normal human being. A normal human being has minor mental health issues but not sufficient to deter his being able to love, work and make a living. On the other hand, are some human beings with more serious mental health issues that negatively affect their abilities to love (relate to other people) and work (make a living for themselves and for those around them)?

There are degrees of mental disturbances, the minor level is called neurosis and the major level is called psychosis.

Psychosis is the purview of Psychiatrists, doctors who specialize in treating mentally ill persons. We shall briefly define psychosis and then concentrate on normal and neurotic persons. Normalcy and neurosis is where most human beings fit. That which includes most of us is our concern and we ought to understand it and not leave it to other people to understand for us.

Briefly, psychosis is characterized by the presence of hallucinations (in any of the five senses; auditory, visual, tactile, olfactory and feeling) and delusions. Psychotics see themselves and our world and do not like what they see and use their minds to invent what seems to them better selves, better people and a better world. That better self and world is a mental construct and does not exist in the empirical world. The self they invented for themselves, the selves they invented for other people and the world they invented are fictional. Apparently, they prefer that fictional world and totally identify with it and seem to live in it. In other words, they have escaped from our shared world, and live in their own self constructed imaginary world. They are living in their own individually invented world There they prefer to be and most people let them be and not try to engage them and get them out of their fantasy world and draw them into our normal world.

There are many types of psychoses, such as schizophrenia, mania, delusion and depression with psychosis. Each of these is a variant of the overall phenomenon called psychosis, in common language, insanity, madness.

The psychotic is unable to test our shared reality and does not do what it takes to live in it; instead, he lives in his own world.

The neurotic, on the other hand, is a person who is in between normalcy and psychosis. Like the psychotic, he sees his actual self, other people’s actual selves and the empirical and objective world and does not like them; in fact, he rejects them. He sees his actual self and the actual world as not good and constructs ideals to replace them. The neurotic’s ideals are fantasy. They are not existent in the real world but only in the ideational world.

However, it must be stressed that construction of the ideal self, fantasy as it may be, is inevitable for children who inherited pained bodies that they reject. If ones body is too problematic for one, one may reject it and use ones imagination to construct a purely ideal body. Unfortunately, ideals are exactly that, ideal, not reality and can never become reality, no matter how much one wishes for them. Physical and social reality limits how much an ideal can be put into practice.

The neurotic child hates who he knows himself to be, who he thinks that other people are and what he thinks that the objective world is. He uses his mind (thinking and imagination) to invent an ideal self, ideal other people and ideal world and wishes that they were reality. He would like to be his ideal self and for other people to become his ideal concepts for them and for every thing in society and the material world to be, as he wants them to be, ideal. He devotes his mental and social energies trying to make his ideal self and ideal world come into being.

Sooner or later, however, usually in his thirties, he learns that his ideal self, ideal other people and ideal world is not going to come into being. He recognizes that ideals are concepts and images and are in his thinking/mind and are impossible of realization in the external world. The recognition that the mental and imaginary are not the same as the actual and are not ever going to replace the actual world depresses him. He despairs, gives up on himself, gives up on other people and gives up on the world because they are not going to become the ideals he had wanted them to become. He sometimes becomes despondent (neurotic depression, dysthymia).

From then on, life seems ennui, a chore to be tolerated. Often, he no longer sees any reason to live, for he had wanted to live to realize his ideal self and ideal world but now knows that ideals are chimera, futile propositions that are never going to come into being. As it were, something in him dies and he sees no more reason to stay alive; he sees no purpose and meaning to his life, for hitherto pursuit of his imaginary ideal self and ideal world had given his life purpose and meaning, albeit false ones. Now, he merely tolerates existence, going through the motions of living, going along with whatever society expects of him, but in a half-hearted, dispassionate manner.

In Henry Thoreau’s terms, the neurotic lives a life of quiet desperation. He is in the world but not really a part of it; he is in a family but not involved with its members and is on the job but not really doing it well. His heart is not in anything he is doing hence he does not do anything well.

Generally, because the neurotic’s heart is not in any thing that he is doing, he tends not to do them well. Even if he has considerable intelligence and high level education, he tends to end up a failure in life, and is unable to pay his bills or support his family adequately.

In sum, the neurotic is a person who sees himself and the world as they are and thinks that they are not good enough and uses his mind to invent ideal pictures of them and wishes that they were the ideal picture he invented. In mid life, he learns that neither he nor the world is going to become ideal and despairs.

He does not flee into his ideal world and live there, as if it were real, as psychotics do. Thus, he is still aware of his actual self, other people’s actual selves and the actual world most people live in, and attempts to live in it but in a lukewarm manner; he is not fully in the empirical world or in the imaginary world; he has one leg in the actual world and one leg in the imaginary world. His energies are divided and dissipated in doing so and he tends to fail in the objective world.



THE SCIENTIFIC PERSON



The scientific person is unlike the neurotic person. The scientific person accepts the world his five senses show him; he does not wish for that world to be either good or bad but accepts it, as it is, in fact. He accepts himself, other people and the material world as they are, not as he wishes for them to be. He accepts reality on its own terms, not on his own terms.

The physical scientist studies the actual world and attempts to understand how it works, not how he wants it to work, but how, in fact, it is and works.

The physical scientist (and up to a point, the social scientist) does not indulge in making value statements as to whether the world is good or bad but merely studies the world he perceives with his five senses. To the extent that he has understood how the empirical world works, he invents technologies to enable him cope with its exigencies. Put differently, the scientist is a realist, not an idealist; he lives in the actual world and does not waste his time and energy yearning for an ideal alternative to it, as the neurotic and psychotic does.

Because he is dealing with the world as it is, not as he wants it to be, objectively, scientists tend to improve the human living condition more than is done by other approaches to reality. Neurotics merely dream for an ideal self, ideal other people and ideal world but actually do not engage in realistic actions that can change themselves and the world, hence tend to end up not really having a positive transformative effect on themselves or the world, they do not change themselves, other people or the world, they merely dream of doing so. They merely wish and daydream of a better self and world but cannot bring it about. The imaginary world does not replace the objective world. Neurosis and its fantasies are really a terrible waste of mental energy and time.

The sad part of it all is that often the neurotic mistakes his idealisms as reality. Consider. It is conceptually possible to imagine people who are fearless. But the reality is that as long as people live in bodies, they must be prone to pain. As long as they are prone to pain, they must fear pain. They must, therefore, have fear and anxiety over whatever could inflict pain on them. The normal person accepts that he and all people are prone to fear and lives with that fact. He learns to console those in fear without blaming them for being fearful. On the other hand, the neurotic wishes that he and people were not prone to fear. He constructs an ideal human being that is not prone to pain and fear and wishes that he and people were such persons. He identifies with that ideal self. Subsequently, he uses that abstraction, perfect fearless person, to compare real people who feel fear and blame them for feeling fearful. That is, he blames them for being imperfect, for, to his mind, they ought to be perfect, hence fearless. In so doing, he makes life miserable for those whom he expects to be perfect and fearless. He blames his children for showing any kind of fear, for they ought to be perfect and fearless; he blames them for being human and makes them feel guilty for being human.

The neurotic perfectionist idealist uses his perfect standards to hit people and himself on their heads and makes himself and people feel guilty for being imperfect, fearful people. To live with a neurotic who compares himself and other people to imaginary ideal standards is to live in hell.

The scientist accepts that people experience pain and fear and does not ask them not to be pained and fearful; he does not compare them to ideal states that are not possible in the world of matter, space and time. In fact, the scientist does not say anything, good or bad, when he sees people. He just observes their presence without judging them as good or bad, for to judge is to compare the judged to an ideal self and standard that one mentally constructs and uses to evaluate real persons relative to it and find them not good enough.



The normal person, unlike the neurotic and or psychotic person, sees himself as he is, sees other people as they are and sees the world as it is, all imperfect, and accepts them, as they are. He or she is fully in this physical and social world. He does not waste his mental energy imagining how he could become perfect, how other people could become perfect, and how everything in the world could become perfect. He accepts things, as they are, now, this very minute, imperfect. He has no fictional ideal and perfect goals that he is trying to make himself, other people and the world to become. He is realistic in the sense that he does everything he does to cope with the real world, as it is, not as he wants it to become. Actually, he also is imaginative and does conceptualize and imagine how things could become; he is not totally free from neurotic imaginativeness; he merely does it a little bit rather than escapes and lives in the world of dreams, as the neurotic does. The salient point is that the normal person adapts to his world, as it is, without trying to change that world, for good or bad. When he dies, he leaves his world as he entered it, unchanged.

For all the problems of neurosis, it is neurotics that are responsible for the improvements that we see in this world; it is their yearning for ideal social institutions that lead to change. There is some utility in neurotic quest for perfection, provided that it is not obsessive. As it were, the normal person is like a satisfied animal; picture a cow, grazing grass, undisturbed by the imperfect, unequal, warring world he lives in.

The neurotic is so disturbed by that imperfect world, by the social inequalities and conflicts that he wants to bring about a better world. The problem with neurotic idealism is that it is mental and not rooted in the objective world. Those neurotic idealists who manage to conjoin their wishes with empiricism; those who studied science and know the limits of how far we can manipulate matter, man and his society, tend to bring about the little incremental changes, evolution, not revolution, possible in this world. For example, whereas it is impossible to have perfect economic equality, as neurotic socialists dream for, it is possible to provide all children with society paid education and medical health insurance.





The terms normal, neurotic and psychotic are mental abstractions, models of who and what human beings are. In the real world, no person fits exclusively into one of these three categories. Every person is a little bit of all three. It all depends on which one predominates in the individual’s psychological make up. Even the most normal person has some self-rejection and yearns for a better self that motivates him or her to attempt to improve what he knows as himself. The difference between neurotics and normal persons are one of degrees, not absolute difference. If the normal person were totally adjusted to his world and accepted his self, he would not be different from animals; he would be like a cow grazing grass in a satisfied manner. The psychotic is not psychotic at all times. He may be insane during only a few hours in a twenty-four hour period (day) and during the rest of the day is quiet normal and not pursuing his fantasies. The mad person, believe it or not, most of the time, accepts reality as it is and conforms to it and lives with it.

For our present purposes, the salient point is that the reader should see the three terms as models of living and not sees any actual human being as totally one or the other but as a combination of all three. As noted, even the most normal person is not mentally healthy for he is a bit neurotic. Our goal here is to enable the normal, neurotic and even psychotic person to attain as much mental health as is possible in this world.

The terms self concept and personality are interchangeable. Personality derives from Latin, persona, mask. The assumption is that the roles people learned to play in society is their mask and not who they, in fact, are. Carl Jung believes that beneath the mask of learned behaviors is a different self, a spiritual self. Behaviorists like B. F. Skinner, on the other hand, believe that all there is to the individual is his learned personality.





WHAT IS THE REAL SELF?



What does it mean to be fully functioning psychologically? The answer is very simple. A mentally healthy person is a person who lives from his or her real self.

Whereas the answer is very simple, the devil is in the details. First of all, we must understand what constitutes the real self. We must understand the self that when we live as it we are healthy. What is the real self?

In our world, the self is conceptual. Every idea the individual has as who he is or is not is conceptual. (The idea of the self is transformed into an image, self image, and seen in the mind’s eyes; the individual also has ideas of who other people are and see them in images; he seldom sees other people as they are, but as he conceptualizes and images them to be.)

The self is not tangible; no one can see or touch his self. The self is an idea, a concept. George Kelley, a prominent American psychologist, tells us that personality is a mental and social construct. According to him, every human child uses his biological and social experiences to conceptualize a self-concept/ personality for him. The human child invents the self-concept.

The human child not only invents a self-concept/self image for himself but self concepts and self images for other people.

Each of us has an idea of who he thinks that he is, who other people are, and what the world is. Each of us tends to relate to other people as he thinks that they are. Other people, in turn, relate to one as they think that one is. No one relates to other people in a disinterested, objective manner, for the very self he employs in relating to other people is conceptual and was conceptualized by him (building on his inherited body, social experiences, learning, past).



Pause, for a minute, and ponder the implication of the assertion that the self concept was formulated by the human child. First of all, does the assertion make sense and, if so, do you accept it? If yes, it implies that there is a force in the child that uses his biological and social experiences to formulate a self-concept and self-image for him. What is that force?

Some say that that force is not apart from the child’s body, that somehow his body, particularly his brain, has the capacity to think and through thinking comes up with a self for the child, and self for other people. This view is the scientific view. It is rooted in the philosophy of materialism or material monism. Here, it is believed that every thing in the universe is composed of matter and its energy form, and that there is no such thing as mind apart from matter. With regards to thinking and mind, this view is called epiphenomenalism. Here, it is believed that the unique configuration of particles, atoms and elements in our brains somehow produce our thinking. It is believed that through the permutations of matter in our brains we produce our self-concepts and self images, and understand the world.

Scientists do not look outside of people to find out how they came to think that they are whom they are, they look in their biochemistry and biophysics, particularly their brain, to understand how their nervous system produces thoughts. Neuroscience studies the workings of the human nervous system, the chemical and physical nature of the brain, the nerves and the neurotransmitters in them, the ions in them, the electricity in them, the light in them, the sound in them, the heat in them, their mechanics and so on and, hopefully, this purely materialistic considerations would lead to better understanding of how human beings think and act.

I accept the scientific methodological approach to phenomena. It is the only approach to life that has improved our knowledge of our selves and the world. Moreover, in the less than three hundred years that the Western world embraced scientific monism, as opposed to idealistic monism, it has delivered enormous wealth to mankind.

Other methodologies to phenomena tend to beg the question and, sooner or later, become dogmatic superstitious and retard understanding of who we are. Religion often prevents objective understanding of phenomena, and teaches yesteryears primitive speculations on the nature of phenomena. We must, therefore, emphasize the scientific method; it seems our only salvation from ignorance, superstition and material poverty. The more religious a society is, the poorer it is; an example is India.



REAL SELF IS PART OF UNIVERSAL LIFE



Despite the apparent utility of science, it also begs the question to state that there is no thinking agent in the universe apart from the unique configuration of particles and atoms in our brains. We know that there is tremendous information in our DNA (cells) and in every atom. We are only beginning to understand the nature of sub atomic particles. What is self-evident is that enormous information is locked up in each and every particle.

Particles and atoms are everywhere in the universe. This means that there is information everywhere in the universe.

The entire universe is an information system. There is intelligence everywhere in the universe. Human beings have not even begun to understand the nature of this universal intelligence and how it works.

In the absence of knowing, I think that universal intelligence takes on individuation and manifests as each human being (as well as animals, trees and material objects). I think that the medium, body, space and time, universal intelligence manifests in affects its operation.

Universal intelligence/universal life manifests in each human child and uses his nervous system, particularly his brain and his social experience, to formulate a self-concept for him or her. The nature of the child’s nervous system, brain (the child’s inherited biological state), and social experience influences the self-concept/personality he formulates for himself.

Different biological constitutions and social experiences lead the intelligence in children to invent specific self-concepts for themselves and for other people.

The biological datum and social particulars a child is exposed to influences his self-concept/personality. Inherited genes and social learning plays a critical role in the formation of personality.

However, we must be very careful and not overstate the role of biology and society in influencing the individual. These external forces do not completely determine the child’s self concept. They influence the child’s construction of his self concept and concept of the world. However, if later in life, the child comes into contact with improved information, he may re-conceptualize his self-concept and his conception of the world. He can, in effect, change his perception of who he is, who other people are and what the world is.

The intelligence in the child though limited by the reality of matter and society the child inherited, nevertheless, has the ability to change the child’s self concept and concept of the world.

The intelligence in the child is different from the child’s body and social experiences and is different from his self-concept/personality. When the individual’s body dies, his self concept and personality, based on his body and social experiences, die with the death of his body. But since intelligence itself, the constructor of self concept and personality, is not part of his body, it continues to live on. Perhaps, it manifests in different bodies and develops different self concepts and personalities. (This is not the same thing as saying that reincarnation, as taught by oriental religions, is real. This is simply stating that universal intelligence and its units do manifest in matter, space and time and form different biological forms.)



REAL SELF AS LIGHT



The real self is part of the universal intelligence that individuates in every child (animal and tree). If you like, you can conceptualize universal intelligence as light. Light is everywhere and seems to not have units. But, in fact, light has units called photons. There are infinite photons in light.

Light acts as waves and as particles. As wave, all light act in tandem, as one light: as particles, light acts in individuated manner. The same light acts as one and as many.

Universal intelligence is like light with infinite units. We shall call each unit of life each of us. Like light, universal intelligence acts in tandem as one and in individuated forms. Universal intelligence is one yet infinite and can act as one unit as well as act as infinite, different units.

If you anthropomorphize this phenomenon and call it God, God is one self and at the same time composed of infinite units. Each of us is God’s unit. God acts in tandem as all of us and yet acts in an individuated manner when each of us acts.



The real self is not the individual’s self-concept/personality. The real self is apart from the individual’s self-concept/personality. The real self is a unit of universal intelligence. The real self is the individuated unit of universal intelligence. The real self is part of that universal intelligence that formulates the individual’s self-concept/personality.

As noted, the givens of the child’s inherited biological constitution and social experience influence how the real self formulates a self-concept and personality for the child.

The real self, being apart from the self-concept/personality, can change the individual’s self-concept/personality. It does so when the nature of the child’s body is better understood and information in the external environment improves.

However, it must be emphasized that as long as the individual lives inside body, or seems to live inside a body and society, that those two factors always places limitation on what he can do. Matter and society limit how far the individual can conceptualize his self and the world.

As long as one lives in body, or seems to do so, one may wish all one wants that one fly, the fact is that one cannot fly. To fly requires obeying the laws of aerodynamics. That law requires one to have wings to be able to fly. Since human beings do not have wings, the next best thing THAT they can do is design mechanical contraptions that can mimic wings, airplanes and rockets and fly through them. The point is that the internal and external environment human beings live in limits what they can and cannot do.



LIVING FROM THE FALSE SELF



To be mentally healthy, hence be peaceful, happy and successful, is to live from ones real self. The real self is a unit of universal intelligence or simply life. Universal intelligence, real self, cannot be defined or understood in our human categories. To define and understand something is to limit it. Universal intelligence is infinite and limitless hence cannot be defined by any earthly, ego categories. Universal intelligence, the real self, and its units, real selves, are ineffable.

In real terms, if while on earth the individual lives more like the real self, and approximates his real self he is healthy. I have pointed out that the real self, as it is, in fact, is not the body and society the individual lives in, that it is apart from body and society but manifests in them and is influenced by them. The real self is limited by the medium it operates in. But to the extent that the real self overcomes the limitations of the medium it operates in and acts as itself, it is healthy. Conversely, to the extent that the real self is limited by the world it operates in, it is normal or neurotic or psychotic, none of which is mental health.



Empirical evidence shows that most people are not living from their real selves hence are not peaceful, happy and successful in life.

How come most people are not living from their real selves? I will borrow heavily from the psychologies of Alfred Adler, Karen Horney, Carl Jung, Erick Erickson, Eric Fromm, B. F. Skinner, Carl Rogers, Albert Ellis and other psychologies, in my attempt to explicate this situation.

Each human child is born physiologically weak, fragile and vulnerable. He depends on other people, his parents and or guardians, to physically survive. Without adults taking care of his material needs, the human child under age twelve cannot survive on his own.



Because of his biological vulnerabilities, the human child knows that he is weak and powerless. Thus, the initial self-concept that the human child develops is that he or she is weak and inferior Vis a Vis his environment. By age five every child with normal intelligence, has developed this negative self concept. This is a realistic self-assessment.

The child, sooner or later, however, learns that it is not enough to accommodate reality and see himself as weak and powerless. If he is to survive in this world, he realizes that he must be strong and powerful. It takes power to adapt to the impersonal environment human beings find themselves on. Without power, the child fails to do what it takes to master and control his environment and dies.

The life force in the child, the real self, somehow wants to survive in this world. The child came here to live, not to die. Therefore, the child struggles to survive on earth. Since it takes power for him to adapt to the exigencies of the world, he strives to have power.

If the child is relatively physically healthy, he is more able to do what it takes for him to adapt to his world and tends to have only minimal sense of inferiority. Nevertheless, Adler points out that even the most physically strong child has some sense of deficit.

Over ninety percent of children are able to do what their environment requires of them to adapt to it and adapt as normal children, that is, with minimal sense of deficit. In fact, normal persons may not even be aware of their sense of inferiority; it is generally well hidden in their unconscious minds, from where it nevertheless influences their behaviors. Even the most normal person compensates for inferiority with a tiny bit of struggle for power, mastery and control over his world.

Normal children, those with strong bodies hence were more able to adapt to their physical and social environments, develop minor sense of inferiority and superiority and grow up to become normal adults.



Ten percent of children find it rather difficult to do what their environment requires of them to cope with its exigencies. These children become consciously aware of their weaknesses and powerlessness to do what life calls for human beings to do to survive on planet earth. Whereas all children, normal or not, feel inferior, children who inherited weak organs and or were exposed to adverse social environments feel extraordinarily inferior Vis a Vis their world.

A whole number of factors contributes to these children’s exaggerated sense of inferiority. Adler pointed out that inherited biological and or medical diseases (what he called organ inferiorities that make the child unable to cope with the demands of the physical environment) and or adverse social factors such as how the child is raised, whether his parents love and accept him or not, play roles in the feeling of inferiority and superiority. Other observers have buttressed Adler’s observations, especially explicating the social variable, showing how the manner of parental relationship with the child affects his formulation of his self concept. Conditional acceptance of children, Carl Rogers has shown, often lead children to feel not good enough, as they are, and strive to become ideal, perfect as a condition for accepting themselves.

For our present purposes, the critical point is that whereas all children experience inferiority feeling during their childhood that some exaggerate that feeling. Those with exaggerated sense of inferiority feeling, aware that they need power to survive, tend to pursue exaggerated power.

Those who feel inordinately inferior tend to seek to become superior to their world. As Adler sees it, the neurotic child is the child who, for any number of reasons, medical and social, feels inferior and compensates with superiority feeling.



The desire for superiority does not make one superior. The inferior feeling child is still feeling inferior while imagining that he is superior to his world. Superiority feeling is a fiction, a fantasy, and an imaginary state of mind. To feel “I am superior to other people” does not mean that one is, in fact, superior to other people. It means that one is living in fantasyland.

Fantasy or not, one can believe that one is superior to other people and act as such. If one acts as if one is superior to other people one is psychotic (delusional disorder), but if one merely wishes that one were superior to others but knows that, in fact, one is not superior to them, one is neurotic (these days called personality disorders).

The neurotic wishes that he were better than other people (ideal self concept) but knows that, in fact, he is not superior to other people. His wish for superiority, however, is all consuming and affects most of his behaviors. He is obsessed with the desire for superiority. It is as if he cannot help himself but compulsively desire to be superior. As it were, an inner force pressures him to seem superior. That inner pressure is the power of desiring/wishing, neurotic, false wishing. It is as if he has lost ability to choose differently and must obey the inner pressure to seem superior to other people.

The neurotic feels anxious if he does not seem superior to other people. (Such as when he makes poor grades…poor grades mean that he is not superior to the persons who made better grades, hence he strives to have superior grades to guarantee that he is superior. He feels anxious anticipating poor grades. The neurotic child approaches examinations with tremendous trepidations.)

The neurotic’s wish for superiority interferes with the reality of human sameness and equality.



The normal child assumes that he is the same and is equal with other children. The neurotic wishes that he were superior to other children. The psychotic believes that he is already superior to other children.

Please pay attention to the distinction between the three states of psychological being on earth: normal, neurotic and psychotic. (Which one are you? Try to be honest and assess yourself correctly, for those around you do see you as you are, not as you want to be. If you are neurotic seek psychotherapy. I doubt that you would be reading this material if you are psychotic.)

The normal child obviously approximates reality more than the neurotic and psychotic child. Alas, even the normal child is a bit like the neurotic child and, occasionally, especially when life is tough for him, wishes that he were superior to other children (hence transient neurosis) or that he is, in fact, superior to other people (hence transient psychosis).

Normalcy, neurosis and psychosis have nothing to do with the child’s level of intelligence. Most normal persons are average in intelligence (IQ 85-115) just as most neurotics and psychotics are average in intelligence. There are gifted normal persons, as there are gifted neurotics and psychotics (IQ over 132). The salient point is that to be normal does not make one more intelligent than to be neurotic or psychotic. In fact, some of our best minds are neurotic, even psychotic. William Shockley, the gifted physicist who invented the transistor radio was obviously neurotic; he believed that he and his race are superior to other races. Genetically, all human beings, black, white and oriental, are 99.9% the same and equal. Many a brilliant head of state, such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Richard Nixon were neurotics (paranoid personalities).





For our present purposes, the empirical reality, despite individual’s wishes for superiority, is that all human beings, animals and trees are the same and coequal. All living biological organisms are the same and coequal. All living organisms are manifestations of the same life force, a life force that I have called universal intelligence or real self.

A human being is the same as a dog and a tree. The same life force manifests in them, albeit in different forms. Please notice that as far as nature is concerned, man is no more special than animals and trees. Notice how natural forces like earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, germs, plagues of virus and bacteria etc destroy human beings as they destroy animals and trees. Simply stated, nature sees all living things as the same and treats them in the same impersonal manner.

Human beings often have the illusion and or delusion (all people have illusions while some have delusions; illusion is belief in what is not true as true, whereas delusion is the same belief in the unreal as real but has a stronger quality to it) that they are special and better than animals and trees. That is magical thinking and has no basis in empirical reality. All living things are the same and coequal.



Normal persons tend to accept our sameness and equally more than neurotics and psychotics. (Each normal person, like the neurotic, also wishes for some special ness and superiority, albeit in a subdued manner.) As already observed, neurotics wish that they were superior and psychotics, in fact, believe that they are superior beings. Any and all sense of superiority feeling is fictional, is not true, and is fantasy. The reality is that all animals, human beings included are the same and equal.

People tend to behave in accordance with their self-concepts, their ideas of who they are. Those who wish to be superior act as such. Neurotics like Adolph Hitler killed millions of people in an attempt to realize their fictional superior self (and equally imaginary superior race).

The fact that the wish for superiority is imaginary, therefore, should not make us ignore it, for it is in pursuit of that fiction that most human evils are committed. Whereas we can easily point out the evils committed by such well known neurotics as Hitler and white racists, what we do not always see is the evils committed by ordinary persons in pursuit of imaginary important selves. Husbands who want to seem superior to their spouses often expect their spouses to see them as superior and when they do not do so abuse them. (Abuse can be physical, verbal, emotional or sexual.) Parents who seek superiority expect their children to place them on a pedestal and respect them and often abuse their children if they feel disrespected by them (physically or emotionally). Work bosses who want to seem important often penalize workers who insist on seeing them as ordinary human beings.

White Americans used to believe in the neurotic fiction that they are superior to black Americans. In pursuit of that fiction of superiority, they harmed black persons.

Ethnic groups, such as the Igbos, who want to seem superior to their neighbors, sometimes call their neighbors derogatory names and generate hostility towards them; enmity that sometimes results in their being killed. The Igbos look down on Hausas and the latter show their anger by killing them. The Igbos forgetting the role of their neurotic arrogance in generating their fate claim that they are innocent persons killed by “bad” Hausas. (The achievement oriented Igbo culture generally disposes Igbos to be neurotic. Igbos need to heal their neurosis so that they come to see all human beings as the same and equal. Igbos must put a stop to the insanity of perceiving themselves as better than other ethnic groups and must stop disrespecting them. The sign of mental health is perception of all people as the same and equal and respect of them all.)

Simply stated, human beings do commit evils in pursuit of their imaginary big selves. Without pursuit of fictional ideal selves human beings seldom commit crimes. This is one reason why we must help all people to give up their neurotic and or psychotic wish for special-ness and accept our inherent sameness and equality and behave as such.



NEUROTIC MOTIVATION TO ACHIEVE GLORY; THE TRAGIC CHARACTER



Without pursuit of fictional big selves, people seldom feel motivated to achieve great things. The neurotic youth is all excited and pursues transforming the world into the ideal image of it he has in his mind. This idealism may last until his mid thirties. Great things are often achieved during the neurotic’s youthful idealistic enthusiasm period. Many a great achievement in life is motivated by desire to become ones ideal, superior self. Think of Adolf Hitler and what he accomplished, all in pursuit of an imaginary superior self. There in lies the tragedy of the human character. People deny their real selves, posit false selves that desire importance and pursue it. They often attain greatness in doing so but, unfortunately, they also make lots of mistakes. More importantly, in pursuit of their neurotic goals, they often bring harm and suffering to themselves and to those around them.

Sadly, whereas those around a neurotic can see where his goal is leading him and the suffering he is causing the world, he may not see it.

It is particularly tragic because his neurotic goal is bound to lead him to a fall. Hitler pursued greatness and in the process killed people and people rallied to defend them selves. Offense is the best defense hence people attacked and eventually destroyed Hitler. The built in negative aspect of neurosis is bound to destroy the neurotic character.

Americans are at present arrogantly amusing themselves that they are superior to other people. Their haughtiness stimulates other people’s anger towards them. Sooner or later, other people will gang up and tear America down, and bring another tragic hero down.

(See America’s incompetent response to the hurricane Katrina in its Gulf Coast. The country’s inability to help the mostly poor black population of New Orleans has shown the world that racism is alive in America and, more importantly, has shown the world how unprepared America is to meet disaster. Despite all her arrogant boasting that she can conquer the world, it is now clear that, like the Soviet Union, America is built on a soft foundation and that with vigorous internal and external push could collapse in a few months. A decisive attack on America will elicit confused response, as was the case in Louisiana, and lead to collapse of another prideful superpower. Hubris is always a prelude to decline of great empire. Empires come and go. America will not be an exception. China is already emerging as the next great empire…that will also become proud and fall. And so the human tragedy continues, until we learn the lesson of our eternal sameness and equality and behave as such.)



When neurotic idealism is seem for what it is, imaginary and ideational, idealistic persons often become disillusioned. In America, idealists often go from being bleeding hearted, do good liberal to being neo-conservatives that do not see any reason at all why government should help the poor. To these power drunk conservatives, it is the fault of the poor that they are poor. So give the rich tax brakes and help them become richer and let the poor become homeless, who cares. The neoconservative is callous to human suffering, all under misguided realism. Unbeknown to these myopic persons, their tottering empire is about ready to collapse. America has reached its apogee, zenith and has no other place to go but down. It can only stay on top if it discovers an alternative to its liberalism and conservatism. A middle ground, pragmatism, combines both ideologies: here, you help the poor to help themselves; you provide every citizen with prepaid health insurance and public education, give all equal opportunity to compete for the allocation of goods and services in the polity and then urge folks to fend for themselves, with the government acting as an impartial referee, umpire, making sure that the rules of the game are fair and are obeyed by all.



The pursuit of idealized self-concept, an imaginary important, self, is the fulcrum of neurosis. Every human being has a bit of neurosis. Normal persons have a bit of it, neurotics have too much of it and psychotics pretend that they are who they wish that they are but are, in fact, not. As long as a human being is pursuing an idealized important self, idealized perfect self, idealized perfect other people and idealized social institutions, he tends to disturb his inner peace and tends to be unhappy. In excess, neurosis tends to produce paradoxical results, poverty and failure.

Now, let us spend some time examining some negative aspects of neurotic idealism and perfection.





THE EGOAS INTERFERENCE WITH INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS



The pursuit of the superior separated self, in every day language, is often called egotism. We shall, therefore, employ the term ego in lieu of neurotic self. Objectively, ego is Latin for self. The self can be healthy or not healthy. Therefore, it is really a misnomer to employ the term ego as if it is always bad. But, in as much as, folks employ the term ego as if it symbolizes pride and self-centeredness, we shall adopt that tradition. There is no use reinventing the wheel.

By ego people mean a person who feels superior to other people and places his self interests above other people’s self interests.

Some religions employ the term ego to stand for the self that feels separated from God and all other people. This is how Hinduism employs the term ego.

An American clinical psychologist translated Hinduism into Christological categories and employs the term ego as Hinduism does, as separated self. See Helen Schuman, A Course In Miracles. Schucman’s philosophy, though couched in the language of poetry, verse, is akin to mine.

I will, therefore, employ the term ego to mean a separated self that seeks to be important, as well as self centeredness.



The superior seeking self, the ego, interferes with healthy interpersonal relationships. If one desires to feel superior to other people and wants other people to see one as better than them, one cannot relate effectively with them.

To relate well with other people, one must see ones self as the same and equal with them. The moment one sees ones self as either inferior or superior to other people, one cannot relate well with them.

The neurotic seeks to be superior to other people. People do not accept his superiority to them. To retain his imaginary superior self, the neurotic often avoids people. In social avoidance, he manages to maintain his fictional superior self. Social avoidance and social withdrawal, as in shy children, avoidant personality disorder, is a maneuver to seem superior to other people.

Such persons feel inferior and restitute with superiority. They want other people to see them as superior. Nobody sees them as superior. They avoid other people so as to retain their imaginary sense of superiority. (Hence they are said to have a self-disorder, a personality disorder; a healthy personality sees himself as the same and equal with all selves.)

When the superiority seeking neurotic is forced to deal with other people, as social reality forces him to do, since we are social animals and cannot avoid each other at home, play, school, work etc, he is guarded (guards his imaginary big self) and scans his world trying to see if other people would see him as an unimportant person. When he misperceives others as treating him as a no body, he feels angry with them. He is always quarreling with other people, for not respecting him. This phenomenon is more pronounced in paranoid personality disorder.

For our present purposes, the desire for a superior self negatively affects interpersonal relationships. If you want to relate well to other people, to make friends and have social peace around you, you must change your self-concept and see yourself as the same and equal with all people. To the extent that you desire and feel superior to others (this desire can be hidden and seem unconscious…if you do feel angry when disrespected, you harbor a secret wish for superiority), to that extent do you have social conflicts. If you want to reduce and even eliminate your interpersonal conflicts, then see all people, men and women, black and white, as the same with you and love them all. Love and forgive all human beings and harbor no grievances against those who wronged you in the past and you experience peace, joy and happiness.





THE EGO INTERFERES WITH ONES ABILITYTO ENJOY PLAY



If you harbor any wish to seem more important than other people, even if it is a little bit, you cannot effectively play with other people. The child who feels the same and equal with other children plays well with them. On the other hand, the child who wishes to seem better than other children, the neurotic child, tends to avoid playing with other children. When he sees other children playing, naturally, he wants to play with them. Then he thinks: if I play, I may make mistakes. If I make mistakes, other children will laugh at me (true). If I make mistakes I will not seem perfect, as I wished I am (true). I do not want to make mistakes, so as not to seem ordinary hence not admired by other children. Thus, such a child avoids playing with other children, and when compelled to play, do so self consciously, always thinking about what other people think of him.

(Thinking about what other people thinks of one and ones behavior is neurotic pattern of thinking; it is based on the wish for a superior self. The superior self, the ego, wants to be perfect and important and wonders whether its actions would make other people see it as it wants to be seen, important and perfect. If one accepts ones sameness and equality with other people, one tends to be less preoccupied with thinking about what other people think of one. As noted, even the most normal person is a bit neurotic hence, occasionally, falls into the time and energy wasting trap of thinking about what other people think of him. Only the totally healthy person who accepts his sameness and equality with other people, who harbors no secret wish for superiority, does not waste his time and energy thinking about what other people think of him. He could care less what other people think of him. He already knows who he is; he is part of life. All people are precious. God does not make junk. Every person and every atom in the universe is irreplaceable. If it were possible to remove any of them, the universe would be incomplete, collapse and cease existing. Human beings have perfect worth in God but have no worth in separation, ego and body.)

The real self does not feel self conscious or fear making mistakes. As far as it is concerned, the world is a field of play, and it wants to play, maximally. It is the ego that wants to seem special, superior, important and perfect. Desiring power, importance and perfection, it necessarily feels conscious of not living up to those expectations. It is acutely conscious when its performance is not up to par and feels that other egos would see it as not doing well. Not doing well means that it is not perfect and it feels diminished.

If you feel self conscious, which is usually in social setting where you feel that others are watching your behavior and performance, you have an ego that seeks to be a very important, powerful and perfect person. You need to shrink that ego to normal proportions so that you feel the same and equal with all people and have no desire for superiority.

Normal persons, who have no desire to seem better than other people, do not feel excessively self conscious. However, it must be observed that all human beings, normal or not, feel some self consciousness, for, they all identify with the ego, separated self, a false self, and that false self is always aware of itself as separated from God, from other people and from the individual’s real self, Christ self. If a person loses all self consciousness, he loses awareness of separation and returns to the awareness of unified spirit.

Self-consciousness, which is rooted in the neurotic desire to seem superior to other people, interferes with ability to play and enjoy play, hence enjoy life. If you want to enjoy playing, say, soccer, see all the players as the same and equal with you and never mind if you make mistakes or not, in playing. Of course, you will make mistakes, you are not perfect, you are human, just play, have fun and leave it at that.





THE EGO INTERFERS WITH ABILITY TO LEARN AT SCHOOL





The shy, neurotic child is a poor learner. He learns at a rate grossly below his ability. He is preoccupied with his neurotic efforts to seem perfect and important, so as to hide his feeling of inferiority. He is afraid of making mistakes in the learning situation. But there is no way a person can learn new tasks without making mistakes. To avoid making mistakes, hence seeming inferior, the neurotic child wants to avoid school. And since he is compelled to attend school by society, he does so anxiously.

He is always anxious in learning and play situations. He is afraid that he would make mistakes and be exposed as not intelligent, hence as not perfect and all-powerful, as he wishes he were. When called upon to answer questions by teachers, he panics with anxiety, for he is afraid of making mistakes and coming up with the wrong answers (which he thinks would make all the other children laugh at him and see him as no good, he literally panics when he makes mistakes and wishes the very ground he stood upon to open up and swallow him, to avoid the embarrassment he feels). Some such children quit school as soon as they can do so (when they reach the age when society permits them to quit school, age sixteen in America…this is one reason why we must not permit any child to quit school until he has received his bachelor’s degree, or vocational degree, if he chooses the technical route).

The ego and its fear of failure reduce learning by at least thirty three percent. The neurotic child, therefore, is not learning at a level he ought to be; at best, he learns by two thirds of his ability to learn.

We must, therefore, show him the cause of his inability to effectively learn: his wish for superiority, and get him to eliminate it and come to see himself as the same and equal with all children.

The solution to poor learning is the same as in all neurosis: reevaluate the sense of inferiority/superiority and see them as a fiction and come to see one self as the same and equal with all people.

If the neurotic child gives up his sense of inferiority and compensatory superiority, he improves his capability for learning. If hitherto if he was a C student, he would become a B student, and if he was a B student, he would become an A student. He improves by, at least, one grade point for hitherto he was learning below his ability.









THE EGO IS AN INTERFERENCE WITH WORK



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The ego interferes with the individual’s ability to work productively. The neurotic who is engrossed with fear of inferiority and desire for superiority generally does not work productively. He does not put his mind and energy one hundred percent into doing his work and doing it well.

He fears failure. He desires success. To seem a social success, he often goes into a profession that would seem to bring him social prestige. If he is not good at that vocation, he is not likely going to do well in it.

The individual is likely to be most productive if he does a line of work that he truly is interested in, rather than one where his primary motivation is to succeed and obtain social prestige, so as to gratify his neurotic ego’s wish for superiority.

Moreover, the superiority-seeking ego tends to have interpersonal problems. As already observed, he is sensitive to how people treat him. He is acutely aware of how his co-workers treat him, and if he feels demeaned by some of them, he feels angry and withdraws from them, or fights them (depending on whether he is the passive or active type). Generally, he has interpersonal issues in the work place, which interferes with his productivity.

He may resent his boss telling him what to do and not respect him or her and that might lead to him being fired or bypassed for promotions.

If the individual shrinks his egotism and comes to see himself as the same and coequal with his coworkers and people, he becomes more mentally relaxed and concentrated, does more productive work and obtains more satisfaction from work. But as long as he is too busy hiding his imaginary inferiority and protecting his imaginary superiority, he is less productive.

(Inferiority and superiority are false self assessments. Both are not real and are in fact delusional. Human beings are neither inferior nor superior; they have total worth in God. God’s worth is not self conferred but derived from our status as the children of the most holy God. In God’s worth, the only real worth there is, we are the same, equal and unified. Real worth lies in sameness, equality and union. Individual worth is neurotic, psychotic and chimerical.)





THE EGO INTERFERES WITH LOVE AND MARRIAGE



Marriage requires two people to feel the same and coequal. Where one or both partners in a marital situation want to seem superior to the other, there must be conflict. Neurotics in marriage are interesting beings to observe. Each is trying to seem superior to the other, hiding his or her sense of inferiority. The result is that they tend to be upset with each other.

Generally, neurosis interferes with love. The neurotic does not love himself hence cannot love other people and certainly cannot love his spouse and children. One must first love ones self before one can love other people. If one hates and rejects ones self, one must hate and reject other people. One can only give to others what one has first given to one. If one gives ones self love one gives love to other people; conversely, if one gives ones self hatred and rejection, one gives hatred to other people.

Neurotic partners in marriage do not love each other. Love requires the absence of ego. The ego is the absence of love. Love is union.

To unify requires a sense of sameness and equality. Simply stated, where individuals are pursuing personal superiority, their marriages tend to be a mess. Their children tend not to be loved for the ego cannot love. The children in neurotic families are merely expected to attain the egos sense of perfection and glory, become successful, important and perfect.

The neurotic household is characterized by fear, anxiety, anger and insecurity. Only love and forgiveness gives people a sense of security.

The partners in a neurotic marriage must give up their fictional inferiority and superiority and accept their sameness and equality, if they want to have love, peace and joy in their marriage.





THE EGO INTERFERES WITH ABILITY TO LAUGH AND HAVE FUN





The person who feels inferior and seeks to seem superior is usually tense and guarded; he is always acting as if he is important and, as such, is stiff and uptight. He is afraid to let go and relax. He feels that to be relaxed and that to have fun, to laugh, is to seem unimportant. He lacks genuine sense of humor, for he does not want to laugh or be laughed at. He thinks that only inferior persons laugh. In his neurotic mind, neurotic thinking, he thinks that dignified persons, as he wants to become, do not laugh.

The neurotic is all-serious and does not have fun in life. He lives a miserable life, all in pursuit of a fictional ideal, all-important, powerful self. Pursuit of a false self gives him pain and suffering and still he pursues that fictional ideal self.

To laugh and have fun, one must see ones self as the same with all people, relax and enjoy the simple things of life. Relax; you are not that important, you are not God. Relax and smell the roses and coffee.





THE EGO INTERFERES WITH PEACE AND HAPPINESS





The person who wants to seem important always has a big self-concept and big self-image. He uses the various ego defense mechanisms to defend that false big self. (The ego defense mechanisms are repression, suppression, denial, projection, displacement, dissociation, rationalization, reaction formation, sublimation, fantasy, avoidance, minimizing, intellectualization, fear, pride, shame, anger, blaming, perfectionism, and many others.) As such, he is stiff, tense with taut muscles. He is not emotionally relaxed. He is guarded and scans his world trying to see if any one is treating him as if he is not important.

The cumulative effect of all these is that he lacks inner peace and happiness (the two go together and are the same; peace is happiness and happiness is peace).

To be in peace and to be happy, one must see ones self as the same and equal to all; one must not seek superiority towards any living organism, man, animal and trees.

To be mentally healthy, one must be humble. However, to be humble does not mean to be humiliated or to permit other people to push one around. To be humble is to see ones self as the same and equal with all persons. One must be socially assertive, not passive or aggressive. To be humble is to recognize that a higher power, God, is in charge of this world and that one is not in control of the world. But in as much as one is a child of an all powerful God, one has some derived power, not self conferred power.





THE EGO INTERFERES WITH ATTAINING WEALTH





The ego manifests in the individual’s success or lack of it. If the individual feels inferior and pursues fictional superiority, he lives in fear and anxiety, and is insecure. He is tense. He tends to enter vocations that he does not really enjoy but that he thinks could make him seem superior in society’s eyes. In the process, he is not actualizing his inherent potential. Since he desires superiority and fears being treated as if he is unimportant, he tends to have prickly interpersonal relationships. He does not get along with other people. He avoids people, in an effort to retain a sense of importance.

People do to him what he does to them: avoid him. He is, therefore, alone. No one helps him out. He, therefore, ends up not getting much out of life. Thus, he tends to end up a failure and poor, despite having average, above average or even superior intellect.

To avert and or reverse this situation, he must re-evaluate his self-concept, and come to see himself as equal to all people and behave as such. If he does so, he gets along with all people, does the type of work he likes doing, and does it well and makes a good living from it.

To succeed, one must ask and answer some basic questions, such as: what do other people demand that one can supply to them? We live in a world of scarcity. Each of us can only supply certain resources to people, his abilities. What is your skills and ability that you can use to supply to other people what they need?

What do other people need that one can supply to them, sell to them, give to them? Find it out and go about giving it to them.

We live in a demand and supply world, a world of scarcity and one must sell something that meets people’s demands to make profit.

So, what is it that you have and can sell? Each of us must ask and answer that question. For example, people desire knowledge of human nature. I have knowledge of human nature and sell that knowledge to people. I know that living from the real, as opposed to the false, ideal, neurotic self; give people peace, happiness and material abundance, so I give people that knowledge. In doing so, I earn my living.

What do you have aptitude in doing; what are you interested in doing; what do people need that you can give/sell to them? Answer those questions and you have found your vocation, and through it, will bless the world and make a decent living from.



UNION AND SEPARATION



It is inevitable to refer to metaphysics when one writes about the real self. So, here is some metaphysics.

I see the universe as composed of one intelligence that is simultaneously infinite in numbers, one intelligence that manifests in infinite intelligences.

Let us humanize this essentially impersonal intelligence and talk as if it were a human being. We shall call it God.

There is one God. That one God extends his one self into infinite gods (us). One God, one self, extends his one self into infinite selves. One father produces infinite children.

That one God is simultaneously himself and all his children. God is God and, at the same time, all of us. God is himself and yet each of us. One God manifests in all of us.

We are the individuation of a universal intelligence, God. God is himself and is his children.

God and his children are co-extensive. Where God ends and each of his children begin is nowhere. There is no space or gap between God and his children.

God is in his children and they are in him. God is in each of us and each of us is in him and in each other.

God and his children are eternal. There was no time when God and his children did not exist. There was no beginning in eternity, although there is a beginning in time.

In eternity, God extends himself to his children and with his creative power in them; they extend themselves to their own children. The process of creation has no beginning and no end.

The children of God are exactly like God, except in one respect: God created them; they did not create God and did not create themselves. Though each of them does create his own children, he does so with the creative power of God in him and, as it were, co-creates with God.

By himself a child of God can do nothing, but with his father, he is able to do every thing, except create him self, create his brothers or create God.



A MYTH OF CREATION



At some time in eternity (eternity is timeless, so that time has not occurred; the children of God have not separated from him; they remain as he created them: unified with him; it is impossible for a human being not to have a story of how he was created and how he came to be on earth, so examine one more mythology and ontology, one that actually resembles what actually seemed to have taken place), the children of God resented their inability to create God and create themselves. They wished that they were able to be God and create God and create themselves. Their wish is impossible of satisfaction since there is only one father and he is eternal and cannot be killed so that his children take his place.

Still wishing to create themselves, the children of God, as it were, went to sleep and slept and dreamed that they created God, created themselves and created each other. (We are now in the world of metaphors; doing not take anything said here literally; one is trying to state what cannot be stated in words.)

The children of God dreamed and saw themselves separated from God and from each other. In their dream, world, space (separation) and time (which is the inevitable result of separation) and matte occur.

With matter they invented bodies and seem to live in bodies. Now they perceive themselves as in bodies and as separated from each other and from God.

In their dream world, each child of God, with the help of all of them, invents his self-concept and helps invent concepts for others. In that world we invent different separated selves, our current selves, the self-concept, the human personality.

The self we currently know ourselves as is separated selves housed in bodies and live in matter. This new self of ours is not our real self, it is the ego self. The ego is a substitute self, a self we invented and used to replace our real self. Our real self, the self-God created us as, is unified, not separated.

The material cannot unify; only the nonmaterial can unify. We invented matter, space and time as means of separation and use them to make us seem separated from one another and from our creator, God. Our real self is non-material, is unified spirit self.

Our real self is an extension of God and all of us; it is not apart from God and all people. Our real self is unified spirit and is eternal, immortal, all intelligent and all knowing. (The self that we are currently aware of, the ego self, the dream self, the self concept, the human personality, is not all knowing.)

It is the real self, the unified self, the Christ self, the Buddha self, call it what you like, it has no name, for to have a name is to be limited and the real self is not limited, that desired self creation, special ness, and went to sleep and dream this world.

The real self, unified self, Christ self, sleeps and sees itself as the separated ego, self. The ego, the human personality, is the sleeping Christ self.





The dream self is not the dreamer. The dreamer is the Son of God as God created him, Christ, whereas the dream self is a mere dream figure, the ego.



EGO AND HOLY SPIRIT



God entered the mind of his dreaming son, as the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, the immanent God tries to awaken the sleeping Son of God. He does everything to show him that his real self is unified self.

The Holy Spirit, the God in us, uses what our sleeping minds, thinking, ego, made, to show us that we are unified as Christ, not ego. He reinterprets the ego as Christ, separated self as unified self. He teaches love and forgiveness. All people are unified and ought to love each other to love their whole self. If others do not love one, the Holy Spirit insists that one love them, any way. This involves forgiving them. To forgive those who wronged one is to love them.



FORGIVENENESS AS TRUE LOVE



When one loves and forgives all people, one gradually remembers that one is no other than a unit of unified self, and is unified with those one loves/forgives. To forgive is to love the forgiven person; to bear grievances against a person who wronged one is not to love him or her. When one consistently loves and forgives all people, one feels peacefully and happy.

The person who has learned to love and forgive all people has changed his mind; he has changed his thinking about his true self. Hitherto, he saw himself as separated from God and other people, indeed, as separated from his real self (unified self to separate self).



CHANGE OF PERCEPTION: FROM SEPARATED TO UNIFIED SELF



A truly forgiving and loving person has changed his perception of his true identity, from separated to unified self. He has changed his identity from ego to Christ, from hate to love, from grievance to forgiveness.



THE GATE OF HEAVEN



The child of God who has changed his thinking/mind about his true self is now closer to how God created him. He is metaphorically living at the gate of heaven, in New Jerusalem, New Israel, and New world. He has allowed his old self, ego, to die and is now a new man, the saved Son of God.

He is delivered, saved, and redeemed from the ego and its pain and suffering. (As Buddha recognized, our suffering is brought unto us by our desire for separated self, this world; our suffering ends when we stop desiring separated self and the things of this world.)

The mind of a saved child of God is now purified. To purify is to love and forgive, whereas to be impure is to hate and not forgive. A purified person only thinks unifying, that is, loving and forgiving thoughts. He has regained his awareness of real self, his holy self, his sanctified self, his saintly and glorified self, and his innocent, guiltless, and sinless self.

(Separation from God is what traditional Christians call the Original Sin. It believes that separation has already occurred and, therefore, that God will punish us for separating from him. God is eternal union and his children cannot separate from him. If we separated from God, he would die and we would die. Union is the only condition for existence. No one can disobey the will of God, by separating from him; therefore, the children of God remain as he created them, unified with him and each other, hence have not sinned. They merely dream that they are separated from God and from one another. A dream is a mistake, an error, not crime; an error is to be forgiven, not punished. God has already forgiven us our mistake in believing that we are separated from him. We need to forgive each other our belief that we are separated from each other and we would reawaken in the state of union aka heaven.)

(If one believes in separation and sees the separated ego self as who one is, whereas one remains holy but in ones awareness, one is sinful, for to be separated is to be sinful and guilty and to punish ones self with pain suffering and death; to be unified in ones thinking and actions is to be sinless, guiltless and deathless.)





LAST JUDGMENT



When one has judges the separated self as a false self and relinquishes it and re-embraced ones real self, the unified self, one has performed the last judgment on the ego and its world. One has stopped trying to make ones wish replace the will of God. One accepts the Self that God created.



THE SECOND COMING OF CHRIST INTO THE WORLD



Another way of putting it is that Christ has come a second time into ones life. First, God created one as Christ, unified with him and all creation. The Christ in one was born when one was born in eternity. Then the Christ in one metaphorically died when one assumed separated existence and seems to live in this world. Christ is reborn in one when one voluntarily relinquishes the ego, separated self concept and its world and embraces the Christ, unified self concept as ones true identity.



DEATH AND RESURRECTION



The metaphoric dead Christ is the ego self. When one voluntarily permits the ego to die so that the Christ is resurrected in one, one is now saved. One re-embraces ones true self, the unified Christ self. One is now reborn in Christ, and is resurrected from death. One is born again in Christ. (What this means is that one now thinks like Christ: loves and forgives all persons.)

One is now peaceful and happy and can be metaphorically said to be at the gate of heaven. One is now a bringer of peace to a conflicted world. One joins all the enlightened, illuminated and awakened children of God, such as Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed, in teaching the rest of God’s sleeping and dreaming children their true identity. One is now a teacher of union, who is a teacher of love and forgiveness and who is a teacher of God.

One has judged the ego and its world as not real and given them up and accepted what is real, the unified spirit self. One, with the aid of the Holy Spirit and all the awakened ones like Jesus Christ, has passed the last judgment on the world and given it up and returned to the world of union, the world of God. One is now one of the saviors of the world. A savior of the world is a person who teaches people to awaken to their unified state.



RELINQUISHMENT OF MORAL JUDGMENTS





Jesus Christ said: as you judge others, so will you be judged by them. This is true. What you see in other people, good or bad, you must see in yourself. If you see other people as bad, you must see yourself as bad. If you see other people as good, you must see yourself as good. As you judge other people so you judge yourself (and so will they, too, judge you).

In this world, it is difficult not to judge ones self and other people. Without judgment of any kind one would be in union, heaven and not in separation, earth. One has already judged, if one is in the world. It is judgment that invented the world of judgment we live in. So what to do? You must recognize that all judgment is done from two possible stances: the ego’s and love’s (Holy Spirit’s).

You can park your mind in the ego and judge you and other people. In which case, you will do so with your past experiences. You will use the past to judge the present and, in the process, not see the present, as it is. You do not see the person you are judging, as he or she is, but, instead, judges him with your preconceived ideas of good and bad. You would then see that person as not well enough, condemn him and want to punish him. Or want him to change to fit your ego standards of what is good.

(How do you know what is good for other people and, for that matter, for you? The information available any human being is so limited that you cannot possibly know what is good for any one, yourself included. You do not know the past, present and future and really have no basis to judge anything good or bad. However, there is a part of you that knows the past, present and future, your higher self, the Holy Spirit; only he can judge appropriately.)

Since, as long as we are in this world, we must judge (judgment maintains the world of separation; when we stop judging ourselves as good or bad, which is what forgiveness is, we leave this world and return to the world of union), we can decide to judge with the aid of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not a person and is not going to literally judge for you. What it means to judge with the counsel of the Holy Spirit is for you to judge only from the perspective of love and forgiveness. Before you judge yourself and other people pause to ask yourself whether you have first loved the person you are judging and whether you have first forgiven him what he supposedly did wrong. If affirmative, your judgment is likely to be constructive; if no, your judgment is ego based and destructive.

Forgive the past (that is, ignore the past) and love the present. Love the people and not their behaviors.

See people engage in the various ego dances called human behaviors and know that those are dream behaviors and overlook them. Acknowledge the dreamer, the Holy Son of God, and ignore his dreadful dances. Love the Son of God, you and other people, but insist on his loving all people. Do not condemn him when he acts out; nevertheless, seek ways to correct his un-socialized behaviors.

Ego behavior is really self imposed jail term. To live in the ego is to live in hell, and in prison, to feel pain and suffering; all dreadful gifts from ones self to ones self. Have compassion on God’s children who, in pursuit of the chimera of ego separated, special self, inflict pain on themselves.



You are not yet awakened from the dream of separation and special-ness. When you do, you would no longer judge people’s behaviors as good or bad, for people, as egos in bodies, are not good or bad; they are nothing. The ego and its body is a dream self, a dream figure. What exists in a dream does not exist.

What is done in a dream has not been done. People on earth are not good or bad and do not engage in good or bad behavior. What they do on earth, in the dream, is nothing. Nothingness is neither good nor bad; nothingness does not require judgment; it merely needs to be let go. One needs to replace the dream of the world with the reality of God; give up that which has no value and accept that which has real value, God.

One only accepts the reality of the sleeper and dreamer, the Christ, the unified Son of God, the real self, the spirit self. One loves the dreamer but not his dream.





In this world of matter, space and time, there are billions of people. If one remembers that they are all unified with one and loves and forgives them all, one is living from ones real self. If one does so, one tends to experience peace, joy and material abundance.

Consider. If you love all people they would love you in return. If you help people, they would help you. As a result, you would meet your material needs more effortlessly.





CHOICE AS TO WHAT SELF YOU WILL LIVE FROM, REAL OR FALSE SELF?





There are two selves in each of us. These two selves are not persons but patterns of thinking and behaving. We can give those two patterns names. I call them the real self and the false self.

The real self is the self that knows that it is unified with all other selves and with God and loves all people. The false self is the self that wants to be separated from God and from other people and hate other people.

Some call the real self Christ, and the false self ego. In her book, A Course in Miracles, Helen Schucman called these two selves the Holy Spirit or Christ self and the false self the ego. In her view, in our minds are three selves, the One Self we share with God and with each other; this One Self has One Mind. All minds are joined in God’s mind. There is no space and gap between one mind/self and another.



THE EGO/THE WRONG/LEFT MIND



The children of God seem to have separated from God and from each other. Each of them now is aware of himself as having a separated self and separated mind. That separated self is the ego self and the separated mind is the ego mind.

To Schucman, all of us in the temporal universe think and behave from our ego selves and ego minds. The ego self/mind is the mind that sees itself as separated from all people and feels all alone in the universe and does whatever it does to look after its own interests, ideally, by cooperating with other people, but if necessary by placing its interests above other people’s interests. Schucman calls the ego the left mind or the wrong mind.

(Thinking done through the left mind, the left brain, the intellectual part of us, tends to tell us that self interest is our salvation. Economics teaches rational self interests as the best motivator of behavior. Schucman would say that economics is ego based thinking. By the same token, she would call whatever asks us to work together, socialism, for example, the right mind. The right brain is responsible for such soft thinking; the so-called intuition of women would be called the right mind’s love based thinking.)

The ego self/mind perceives other people as out to hurt it, which is true, and is always living in fear. In fact, the ego is synonymous with pain and fear. Feeling pained and afraid, it defends itself with the various ego defense mechanisms. The ego is always well defended. The ego is never not defended. It believes that if it is not defended that it would be destroyed by other people and die. The ego is afraid of death. But die it must. At best it buys a little over a hundred years before the individual’s body dies and the ego (self concept/personality) dies with it.



THINKING ABOUT WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK OF YOU



If you identify with the ego, separated self, you must think about what other people think of you. Why? The ego is a false self. Literally, the ego does not exist, except as in a dream. The ego is a dream self, not a real self. Because it does not exist, it strives to seem to exist. It seeks validation from other egos, people. Other egos, people must confirm it and tell it that it exists for it to believe that it exists.

If people (other egos) did not collude with ones ego and tell one that it exists, one would not know that one, as an ego, exists. (Which is good for one, for one would then awaken to the awareness of ones real self, the unified self.)

We desperately want to seem to exist as a separated, ego selves the self concept, and the human personality. This substitute self compulsively thinks about what other people think of it. It imagines itself as in a fishbowl, the center of attention, and every person sees it and is preoccupied with it, evaluating its every behavior, as good or bad.

The ego would rather be negatively judged by people than be ignored by them. To be ignored by people is to tell the ego that it does not exist, which is the truth (which it does not want to hear), and it would prefer even attack on its body, it would prefer that pain be inflicted on it, to make it seem to exist. (Masochists actually like it if you inflict pain on them, physically and or psychologically, for that reminds them that they exist and are alive. Borderline personalities feel so empty, dead, really, that they inflict pain on themselves and that pain makes them feel like they are alive. Sadists, on the other hand, inflict pain on other people, and, in doing so, feel powerful, hence as if they exist. Sadists feel empty, dead and do not feel like they exist; they feel pseudo existent by hurting other people. The sadistic racist feels dead and feels pseudo alive by hurting black persons and the masochistic black person feels alive by allowing sadistic whites to hurt him. A healthy person does not hurt other people and does not permit other people to hurt him.)





The neurotic ego that is preoccupied with thoughts of what other people think of him is, in fact, the one doing all that thinking. In eternity minds are joined but we are not aware of that fact. On earth, where we seem to be, we do not know for sure that our minds are used and certainly do not know what other people are thinking. Despite the masquerade of schizotypal so-called psychics, no human being is a mind reader. Therefore, whatever one thinks that other people think of one is ones thought.

One thinks what one thinks that other people think of one, and projects ones thoughts to them, and re-introjects them as if they were other peoples thinking about one, and then respond to them as if, in fact, other people did think as one thought that they did.

In effect, one is responding to ones own thinking, not to other peoples thinking. This is disingenuous behavior. The ego is cunning, indeed.

Obviously, it is a waste of time and energy to think about what other people think of one. For one thing, as an ego, one can never know what other people are thinking of one. One is best served if one simply asked other people what they are thinking of one, in which case one would discover that other people seldom think of one. Other people are primarily concerned with their own egos and are going about their business trying to survive. They could careless whether you existed or not. This is not a cynical or skeptical view of human beings but a fact of life.

One is not that important to other egos. People tend to have the delusion that they are important and matter to other people; the fact is that they don’t matter to other people, just as other people do not matter to one’s ego. Of course, if you are in a very important social position, people, particularly sycophants, will flatter you and fawn all over you. They do so not out of love for you but because of what they can get from you. The moment you are no longer in high office, and cannot be a conduit to meeting their ego needs, people will forget about you. The human ego is fickle and totally self centered, and if you have not learned that fact by now, you are like the proverbial ostrich hiding your head in sand. Wake up and realize that no one gives a damn about you. Accept that reality and give up your delusion of existential importance. (Your real importance lies in your status as the child of God.)



One ought to shut up and not think that one knows what other people think of one. Furthermore, even if one knew what other people think about one, since their thinking is ego based, it does not represent ones self hence is worthless.

Yes, other people will respond to one as they think one is, as one responds to them, as one thinks that they are; both they and one are responding to the shadows we see as our selves not to our real selves.



MEDITATION



The ego is constructed as a replacement self; it is used to mask the real self. The ego is a veil used to cover the face of Christ. The ego is a cloud hiding the light of God in one. The ego is a brick blocking the perception of ones real self. As long as one identifies with the ego and acts as such, one would never know who ones real self is. Ones real self is the unified son of God. The real self is formless unified spirit; it is not perceptual but can be experienced.

To know the real self, one must silence the chattering of ones ego. One must tune out all ego, conceptual thinking and ideations and try to make ones mind an empty void. Authoritatively tell yourself that whatever you can consciously think of is done through your ego thinking; a thinking based on the limited information available to you, hence is not the truth. Then try to stop thinking. Try to be still, quiet. When the ego provides its supercilious and spurious answers, say that is not correct, because it makes sense to me and what makes sense to my ego must not make sense to God. The Hindus say: Neti, Neti, not this, not this is the answer and keep quiet until the answer is revealed to them by God, their higher self. (Siddhartha Gautama just sat there…this could last days, even weeks… in meditation, rejecting all ego based answers, until, finally, he experienced nirvana, oneness. He transcended ego understanding and experienced the truth of oneness. In transcending the separate, ego self and experiencing the unified self, Christ, he became the Christ, the Buddha, the enlightened, illuminated and awakened son of God. He is now aware that he is a part of the light that is God; he is illuminated to his real self and awakened from the sleep of the ego and its self forgetful world.)

(Say: I do not know who I am, I do not know who other people are, and I do not what the world is or is for. But I would like to know. God, please tell me what anything is and means.)

If you can obtain mental silence for thirty minutes, deny all ego based thinking, and ask your higher self, the Holy Spirit, to tell you what is true, you would be surprised to know that you, in fact, have a higher self that thinks through you. You would hear the voice for God, the Holy Spirit.

The voice for God is still your voice; it is not another person’s voice or a so-called spirit’s voice. However, it talks calmly, lovingly and forgivingly. It asks you to forgive all people. It asks you not to bear grievances. It is calm and authoritative and has no doubt as to what the truth is. It does not talk in long, chain sentences but quietly states the truth in simple words. It is still the same old you but now “a you” that thinks and acts calmly, for you are in love with your real self and other people’s real selves.

(I worked in the mental health field and heard my clients tell me that they hear voices and see what is not there, hallucinations. I had not heard voices in my entire life and often wondered if the psychotics who told me that they hear voices were putting me on. Well, I joined a Hindu Temple and for three years was practically a monk. I began meditating seriously. I separated from my wife and was preoccupied with whether to go file divorce papers or not and asked my Swami about it. He asked me to ask God that question. He said that I should sit in meditation and when I feel inner silence to ask God, Brahman, Atman, that question and wait for answers.

He said that there is a catch to asking God questions. He said that before one asks God a question that one must first obey the will of God and give up ones wishes. The will of God is that we love and forgive one another. Therefore, one must love and forgive all people before one hopes to receive the answers God had already given to our questions before we ask them. God knows what his children want before they ask him for them, and has already provided them with answers, the answers waiting for them to obey his will before they receive them. As long as there is a person in the world that you have not forgiven, you can not hear the voice for God. The good swami said: “Dr Osuji, are you angry at your wife? If so, do not bother asking God questions. Love and forgive her before you approach your God.”

I tried to do as I was told to do. One evening, as was my practice to meditate for an hour, I sat on my couch, cross legged and tried to meditate. For the first time I obtained inner silence. This is very scary and terrifying, I must tell you. You feel emptied of thoughts, including the idea of who you think that you are; your self concept, ego disappears. You feel like you have disappeared and only a bottomless vacuum exit where you had thought that you are. Most people would panic at his stage and quickly return to thinking, for their egos do not want to disappear; that is, they do not yet want their egos to disappear into the nothingness from whence they conjured it.

I am naturally willful and stubborn and when scared resist the urge to give in to fear. So, I persisted and wanted to experience whatever is at the end of the tunnel. Well, I heard a clear voice, in Igbo language, too, a language I seldom speak. The voice simply told me what to do and I returned to my regular ego state, with my ego chattering away. I had similar experiences which I do not find necessary to talk about here. The point is that we have higher selves that are always trying to communicate with us, and that we shut it out by listening to the chattering of our lower selves, our petulant egos.)

The real self, your true self, which is spirit, knows itself to be joined with all selves and with God. It knows itself to be an immortal spirit. It knows that it is formless and unified with all creation and is permanent and changeless. Nothing that happens in this transitory and ephemeral world affects the real self.

Dreams do not affect reality. The real self is, therefore, always in peace and happiness. Try to become in touch with that aspect of you by shutting down your ego based conceptual thinking. This is called meditation.

Try to meditate twice every day, at least, thirty minutes each time. Find a quiet place and sit down, preferably close your eyes, and breathe in deeply and exhale slowly. Then try to stop thinking and make your mind blank for thirty minutes.

Of course, you may not succeed in making your mind blank. The ego will struggle hard to make its existence seem real by doubling your rate of thinking. You find silly thoughts entering your mind. Just ignore them and remind yourself that all ego thinking is noise making, dreams and not reality. Even the best scientific thinking deals with the illusions of this world and does not represent spirit’s reality. (By all means do scientific thinking; I do so, for science is the best way to adapt to matter, space and time. But also try to, every now and then, return to the real world, the abode of God.)

Perhaps you may succeed once in a life time to stop the empty chattering of the ego. If you do, you would escape from the ego and its dreams and directly experience your real self. This experience has been called Mystical Union, Samadhi, Nirvana, Satori, Holy instant, etc. In it, you know yourself as joined with all selves, as immortal, as all knowing (not about matter and energy; that is the purview of science, but of spiritual matters), and as always in light, a light that has no beginning and no end.

You are a unit of light, the light of God; you are a part of the wholeness called God. Stop worrying about what other people think of you. Just concentrate on doing what is right: love and forgiveness for all creation.

You do not need to worry about what other people, who, like you, are dream figures, think of your dream figure, your self concept, personality aka ego. What dream persons think of your dream person is not relevant and is nothing. Nothingness needs to be ignored, rather than be fretted over. See the world for what it is, noise, and overlook it and live in peace and give your peace to the world.



THE HOLY SPIRIT/THE RIGHT MIND



When the children of God separated from him and from each other, God entered their minds. The God in our minds is the Holy Spirit, the immanent God. This self is called the right mind by Schucman. The right mind reminds us that our home is heaven, oneness, and that we are children of the family of God. It urges us to love and forgive one another. The Holy Spirit is the voice for God in our separated minds, and the voice for unity in separated minds; it is the link between the world and heaven, ego and Christ. It is a bridge linking the temporal and permanent universes.

The Holy Spirit is the comforter of God’s children, when their mutual attack hurts them; the Holy Spirit provides them with solace.

As Schucman sees it, the Holy Spirit does not speak first; it waits for the ego to speak and gently corrects what the ego said. The ego and its world must first seem to exist for there to be a Holy Spirit that corrects its mistakes.

The Holy Spirit is a correction device. It corrects the mistakes of the ego; it teaches us that we have common interests and that we should work for common interests.

Again, one must emphasize that the ego mind (left/wrong mind), the Holy Spirit mind (right mind) are not persons. They are patterns of thinking. Each of us can choose what pattern of thinking he wants. If he chooses separation and self interest, he is thinking as an ego; on the other hand, if he thinks as if he and other people are unified and loves and forgives people, he is thinking as the Holy Spirit. (If it is too scary for you to see your thinking as the thinking of the Holy Spirit, since that implies that you are thinking as God, and you do not want to commit blasphemy by seeing your self as God, then say that the Holy Spirit is guiding you, is counseling you, is your advisor in this world. By the same token, you can say that you are listening to the voice for the ego and that the ego is your counselor.)





HOLY TRINITY



In Christian theology, God is said to be in three states and as having three selves. This is the idea of Holy Trinity/ the Triune.

An idea, a concept is not reality. A metaphor is an attempt to represent reality in words but reality itself is not the metaphor. The idea of Holy Trinity is a metaphor and does not actually explain the reality of God.

Christians talk of God the father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. All three of them are the same God.

Schucman provided the best explanation of this concept than any other person that I can think of. She says that in heaven is God the father, the transcendent God. To understand this phenomenon, conceptualize God as a free flowing creative energy that has no physical dimension. That energy produces parts. In her terms, God extends to a Son; the Son of God is infinite in numbers.

The whole and the part are one. God, the whole, the son of God, the part, share one self, literally. The whole individuates in the part but is both of them. God is God and also his Son. As it were, God is now in two places, God as God and God as the Son of God.

(Hinduism has a similar idea. Here, God, called Brahman, extends himself to a part of him called Atman. Brahman, the whole and Atman, a part of the whole, are one self, literally, not figuratively. God is his son: Brahman is Atman, one of the Upanishads states, Thou art that.)

In Schucman’s story of creation, her mythology, when the Son of God separated from his father (how can that be done when he is literally God? It is impossible), and went to sleep-dream that he is in this world and sees himself as the ego housed in body, God the father created another self, God the Holy Spirit (thus completing the Holy Trinity) and came to the world with his son.

The Holy Spirit enters the mind of the son of God and tries to remind him that he is the son of God and that he is an alien in this world, that his real home is in heaven and that he should come home to heaven, to God, to unified state.

(If you are the ultra rationalistic type, you are probably asking: how can the Son of God, who is literally an extension of God, seem separated from God and dream this world? Since he is a literal extension of God, wouldn’t his sleep and dream be the sleep and dream of God? Schucman begged the question here and did not provide an acceptable explanation of the phenomenon. Pure reason tells one that what the part did the whole did, what the son did the father did. The son cannot act independently; he can only act with the power of the father, the whole. Hinduism comes to our rescue here. According to Hinduism, it is Brahmin himself who went to sleep and dreams this world. Accordingly, when the individual awakens from the sleep-dream, Moksha, Samadhi, he recognizes that he is no other person than God. Self realization is the goal of Hinduism. The self is God and Self realization means the realization that one is God. If you are into studying religious literature, see the writings of Hindu Philosophers, such as Shankara, Ramanuja, Guru Nanak, Vivekananda, and M.The Gospel of Ramakrishna etc.)

Hinduism itself is problematic for obviously the individual is not all the God there is. If he were, we all would have awakened from the dream when folks like Buddha awakened. In as much as we are still asleep, and some persons are already awake, God must have parts that awaken at different times. This is the only logical deduction that can be made from our reality. Therefore, in a way, Schucman is right in stating that God has infinite children and that each of them awakens at different times. (Schucman tended to give the impression that the children of God are apart from their father, for, if what the children did, God did not do; they are separated from him. It is only if we accept that what the children of God did, God did, as Hinduism claims, can we postulate a non-dualistic, Advaita, Vedanta philosophy, Schucman’s goal. Brilliant as Schucman was, she tended to show logical weaknesses in her argumentation. It seems that she was trying very hard to excuse God from responsibility for the mess the world is in and to blame the son as totally responsible for that mess. If the Son is an extension of the father, what the son did the father did, hence God is responsible for the mess of this world. QED)



One God is in infinite places and each unit of God sleeps and dreams that he is an ego. Each child of God awakens at a given time while others may still be sleeping. Ultimately, all of us will awaken to the awareness that we are parts of God. When all of us awaken from the dream of separation, the material universe ends. In Schucman’s lovely metaphor, the Son disappears into the Father and the father disappears into him, each not to be lost but to be expanded. The son henceforth knows himself as part of God and his infinite children and God knows himself as all his children.

For our present purposes, what we need to take from this seeming confusing theology is that we have different ways of thinking, that we can think loving/forgiving thoughts, aka Holy Spirit, or hateful thoughts, aka ego thoughts. The choice is up to us. Whatever choice we make, whatever pattern of thinking we indulge in has consequences for us.



THE WORLD AS OUT PICTURING OF OUR THINKING



As Schucman sees it, we think in concepts and images. The world one sees is the literal representation of ones thinking. The seeming outside world is the out picturing of the thoughts in ones mind.

If you see a happy and peaceful world, then you are thinking peaceful and happy thoughts. On the other hand, if you are experiencing a world of lack, scarcity, poverty and hate you are thinking scarcity and hateful thoughts.

Your thinking, past and present, is what determines the world you see and experience in the now. If you see yourself as separated from other people and exploit other people; if you bear grievances against those who wrong you etc, you are engaged in ego thinking and must take the effects of your thinking. Thinking is the cause, and what happens to you is the effect.

Nothing you do not want to experience can happen to you, the son of God. All things that happen to you, you did to you. In fact, all things that happen to you, you think them and see as images.

Therefore, blaming other people for what happens to you is a waste of time and energy. What happens to you is a direct reflection of your ego thinking.

Instead of blaming other people or struggling to change other people, to change the external environment, you should attempt to understand your thinking and change it. You should change your thinking, from ego based thinking to Holy Spirit, love based thinking.

Think loving and forgiving thoughts and act accordingly and you would see a world and people that are loving towards you and you would experience a world of peace. If you help other people, and they are you, you are helping you, via them helping you.

Giving is receiving. What you give to the world is what you receive from the world. Give love to other people and receive love from other people, give hate and vengeance to other people and receive hate and vengeance from other people.

The world you see as an external world is literally the manifestation of your thinking. You produced your world and what happens to you through your thinking. You are not the victim of the external world; you produced the external world you seem to live in, just as you produced the world you see at night when you sleep and dream and see yourself in a dream.

However, you did not create the people in your dream, at night and during the day. God created all people. You merely assigned roles to you and to other people to play for you in your night and day dream and they, too, assigned roles for you to play for them in their own dream. We distort each other in our dreams.

The day world is our collective dreams. The world is a field of dreams and each of us projects his dreams to it. The fact that it is a shared dream makes the day world seem permanent, but, in fact, it is a temporary dream, an illusion, Schucman tells us.

Day life is a dream because when you experiences what she calls Holy Instant, you momentarily escape from the world of matter, space and time and experience yourself in the world of spirit. Our world that had seemed solid to you disappears, for it was not real, it was a dream that your wish for it to be real made seem real to you.

Those children of God, like Buddha and Jesus Christ, who do not want the temporal universe to be real, merely seem to leave it and are seen no more. They did not die, for they were never born. They merely changed their minds, thinking about their nature, from ego to Christ, body to spirit, separated to unified, and now know themselves as spirit and experience themselves as spirits. We, too, can and must do the same.



At all times, each of us is making a choice as to what self he or she wants to live from. There are two options, two selves to choose from, one real, and the other false. One chooses to live from real self-perspective or from false self-perspective.

The real self and the false self are not persons that one can touch. They are intangible. They are manners of thinking and behaving in this world. One is always choosing which of these selves, these perspectives, and one thinks and acts; and one is always taking the consequences of the self, perspective one chooses.

There is the law of cause and effect. Whichever self you choose and live from is the cause of your thinking and behavior and you invariably receive effects attendant to it.

You can only choose to be unified with all or to be separated from all, union or separation, Christ or ego, love or hate, forgiveness or grievance. These are the only choices you have, as long as you seem to be in this world.

In eternity, heaven, God, you can only choose union. But we are in sleep and dream that separation is real, that the opposite of God/ union, separation is possible. Within the context of the dream of separation, we have choices to make.

Choose differently, this time, choose union, again, and relinquish the earlier choice of separation we made. The choice of separation has already been made, if one sees ones self as in this world. Now, one must choose love and forgiveness to escape from this world of separation and return to the world of union.

If we choose union, love and forgiveness we receive necessary consequences: peace, happiness, joy, material abundance and success. On the other hand, if we choose separation, ego, hate and vengeance and bearing grievances, we receive the necessary effects of conflict, pain, lack of peace and happiness and poverty and failure.

The choice we have made is reflected in the consequences we see in our lives. Are you living in peace, joy and material abundance? If the answer is yes, then you have chosen God, union, love and forgiveness. On the other hand, if you are living in pain, conflict, lack peace, joy and lack material wealth, you have chosen separation, ego, hatred and lack of forgiveness; you bear grievances against those you believe did you wrong.

(Africans chose separation from each other and bear grievances against each other and against the whites that maltreated them. The result is their poverty and suffering. They must choose again, this time choose love, forgiveness and union with each other and work for social service, to become wealthy. Africans were so-self centered that they sold their own people into slavery and deny responsibility for their evil. They blame white persons for their criminal behaviors. Like petulant children, they think that if they deny ownership for their behavior that the crime would go away. See, they are still selling their people. Their leaders do not care for their people. They steal their people’s money and cart them to the West while their people starve. The spirit that made their ancestors sell their children, the ego, is still operating in Africans. They must relinquish the ego and embrace Christ, and learn to love and care for one another, if they hope to manage their world well. Until they give up their egos and accept Christ, love and forgiveness, Africa will continue to be in chaos, and no amount of foreign aid would make Africans well fed. The best type of aid the world could give Africans is to ask them to love and care for one another. The world should not throw money at self centered, corrupt African leaders, but must insist that they be accountable for every penny they spent on behalf of their people. We shall yet humanize primitive African egos. That is the function of Christianity and other higher religions: to civilize human ego, to transform it from self centered to social centered living.)



What do you see manifested in your life? Your life reflects the choices you have made from the time of your birth on earth to the present (from your past lives to the present, although we need not worry about our past lives; we only need to correct our present life, to think loving and forgiving thoughts and act accordingly; love and forgiveness wipes out past lives evils, sansaras; love and forgiveness purifies the mind).

So which one is it, what do you see in your life, pain or joy, peace or conflict, abundance or poverty? Whatever you see in your life, your thinking brings to you. If bad, then change your thinking, which is what is meant by change your mind. From now on, think only of love for all people, forgive all people and serve all people and you would experience peace, joy and material wealth.

Choose differently, my brother in God. Choose again, this time, choose love and forgiveness. Choose Christ and give up ego.

The decision is yours to make. No one can choose for you. All that other people can do is provide you with helpful information as to what to do, as I am doing here. Please do not deceive yourself and say that nobody told you what to do.

Please do remember the law of cause and effect that is operative in this world. You cannot get around it. Choose love, forgiveness and social service and live in peace, joy and abundance, but choose separation, hate and vengeance and live in pain and poverty.

This teacher of love, teacher of union and teacher of God has told you what the Holy Spirit teaches through all of us (some listen to him, others ignore him). The ball is now in your court. Choose how you play, choose how you think and behave. I recommend that you think loving and forgiving thoughts and seek ways to help every person you see, not exploit every person you see; if you want peace, joy and wealth, that is.





DISCUSSION



Each human being has a self concept, also called personality. The self concept is the self that sees itself as separated from God and from other people. It is a self housed in body and lives in space and time. It is a self that adapts to the exigencies of this world hence seem realistic and we cling to it and do not want to relinquish it.

The self concept is not our real self. It is our false self. It is a dream self, a dream figure. It is a substitute self, a replacement self. It is a false self we invented and employ in replacing the real self God created us as, the unified Christ self.

The real self is spirit; the self concept is in body. The real self is not conceptual, for all concepts are of the separated self, the ego.

Since, at present, our understanding is conceptual, and we cannot comprehend anything that is not conceptual, the real self can be construed as a unit in the universal self people call God.





The ego self concept is our main problem. We do not need it. The ego tells us that we are separated from God and from each other when, in fact, we are unified with God and with each other. In truth, we are part of unified spirit self and not the false self concept we currently think that we are.

Clearly, in the world of space, time and matter, the temporary universe, we must have self concepts. Self concepts are adaptive to the separated world, where we currently are, or think that we are. All we can do is change our self concepts, from seeing ourselves as separated from God and each other to seeing our selves as unified with God and with each other.



FAITH AND CONVICTION


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