The only roadblock between me and you and me and my God is the human ego. The best definition of the human ego = "The feeling of conscious separation from". Conscious separation from God, from each other, and eventually from ourselves. Life, Good, God to me are synonymous words. Here I am against the whole world.
Dr Jung wrote Bill that the alcoholic's problem was his search for unity with the life around him and with the God that made him. And when he found the bottle, it seemed to be the missing ingredient. It seemed to let him live a little bit more comfortably with himself and in the society around him. He had found a chemical unity, and it did a pretty good job for him until it became the problem that only a spriritual answer could solve.
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it's not the change that's painful, it's the resistance to change that is painful
then Eckhart is a LOT more intelligent then I am, because my ego sure is
We all have a deep longing and a deep fear of the discovery of what we are, and the ego devises any way it can to avoid this discovery. The most effective way it avoids awakening is to seek it
It tells me I need to meditate, to study, to work harder, to relax faster, it tells me about my past, and it scares me about my future, it's awake before I am in the morning, and as I try to go to sleep at night it's mouth is running, it does ANYTHING it can to keep me away from the present, the here and now, and it does everything it can to tell me "God" is something I have to search for, I search high, and I search low, I search in books, and in meditation retreats, I search in the steps and I find out I never had to go looking for God in the first place, because God is hidden in the very last place we ever think to look
inside
right here, right now, Why is it so hard to find God? Because he ain't lost
and when I have that timeless moment, that timeless time where I am at one with My God, my Ego tells me it was a special set of circumstances I have to replicate, and it sends me chasing after that high, that "spiritual materialism"
My "disease" isn't out in the parking lot doing push ups waiting for me to fail, my ego is, because remember the root of our problem is selfishness, self centeredness, or "the feeling of conscious separation from"
If my Ego hadn't been smarter then me, I would have never had to find my answer in a bottle, nor would I have had to come to AA to learn how to smash it You and I are victims of a combination of characteristics which came with us that make it impossible for us to integrate ourselves into the life that we're born into; into the so-called civilization that we're born into. We cannot integrate ourselves in to the life around us. It's not because we don't want to, because we do. We want so much to be a part of, and we're forever apart from. So this is our problem, a basic spiritual unrest. I too had been born into a society that I couldn't swallow, I couldn't integrate myself into. I had to find a way to be comfortable. When I was nineteen I found a way to get comfortable in that society and for the next fifteen years I used this chemical for an answer. It remained an answer for the first fifteen years, but after fifteen years my answer turned on me and became the problem. The next ten years made it necessary for me to find the right answer, and I did
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it's not the change that's painful, it's the resistance to change that is painful
