This post is an extract from Cissi Williams’s new book Spiritual Medicines: 7 Spiritual Potions to Heal Your Life
What causes us to plunder the World, exhaust Mother Earth of Her resources, take advantage of each other, run up wild debts nationally, internationally as well as personally?
When I asked my Soul this question, she explained that the debts many of us are facing today are a mirror for the debts we are accumulating spiritually. That many of us talk about a rising consciousness, causing us to all evolve spiritually. She said that to some extent that is true, because more light is available around us, so that we may advance on our spiritual paths more quickly than before. That it is as if there is a much faster “spiritual broadband connection†flooding the Earth helping us access our Souls, our Higher Consciousness. At the same time, she said, that many of us are still living our lives in an unconscious state. Even those of us who have begun to awaken, still react time and time again from that dark place within, which she refers to as the ego. Every time we want something for ourselves, every time we want revenge, every time we want to hurt someone else, every time we want to get ahead of someone, every time we feel we need others to accept us, admire us, approve of us and take care of us we are reacting with our ego. Now, for those of us who have awakened more and more into a conscious life, we can feel that we are reacting with our egos yet it is as if we cannot stop ourselves. We promise ourselves that we won’t gossip anymore, that we will not to speak badly of others again, that we will forgive our loved ones, but within just a few hours of making that promise, or perhaps a few days, we find ourselves doing the very things we promised ourselves we would never do again. So we make a promise to let our Soul direct our lives and within a very short span of time our ego has managed to find a way to sabotage this – again.
Naturally, when this happens we feel bad. To feel better we look for excuses for why this happened, just this once.
She explained that if we truly have awakened and want to lead a fully conscious life, instead of finding an excuse, we need to ask our Soul for guidance, surrender this ego-driven behaviour, this thought pattern or habit that has become our default way of thinking, to the Universe. Take this dark stain, which is stopping the light in our Soul from being able to shine ever so brightly and bring it into our daily morning meditation, prayer and contemplation. Surrender it, ask for the learnings, and ask to be shown a way to release this. Doing this, we take full responsibility that we allowed this act, this thought to take place, and surrender it to a higher power, to the Universe, and then asking for guidance in how to heal this.
This is where the real challenge comes, she said, because we now have to act on this guidance and put it into our daily practice. This time it might last a few more days, or even a week, before we find ourselves falling back into that old behaviour pattern again – thinking those old thoughts of judgement, or bitterness, or anger, or blame, or self-pity. What do we then do? Do we excuse ourselves, saying it is because of our childhood? Do we blame ourselves, thinking we are just too weak to do this? Or do we instead state firmly that working on ourselves spiritually just does not work for us? Perhaps we get angry with Life for not making this journey an immediate success? Now, if we truly are evolving into fuller consciousness, what we instead do is to again bring this event into our morning meditation, prayer and contemplation and surrender it to the Universe, and to ask our Soul for the higher learnings, to ask for guidance. It may take several attempts. We have to keep doing it until that darkness, that old behaviour is no longer there. When we surrender it, and have faith that it will go, it does disappear.
I asked my Soul: So why does this happen? Why do we have an ego?
She explained that we were not created with an ego. No-one is. So ‘our’ ego is not actually ours, it is not a natural or innate part of our true being. Your Soul is the real you. The ego is simply a symptom of a sickness that has infected our mind – not our Soul. Our Soul is immune to this infection – ever in perfect, radiant health with an eternal light shining ever so brightly.
When the Soul connects with the human body and thus with its mind, a separation occurs. From the Soul being in a state of complete merging with the divine, a separation now occurs where the mind can experience itself as separate from its spiritual source. That is as separate from the Soul, which is eternally connected with divine consciousness. This separation is a vehicle for growth, allowing us as an eternal Soul to challenge ourselves even more, so we are able to grow even more into the light. As the wise Paramahansa Yogananda (one of the first spiritual teachers who brought Yoga into the Western World) said: “The only difference between a piece of coal and a diamond is the pressure that has been exerted on itâ€.
This pressure causes the diamond to be formed so it can shine ever so brightly. The separation that happens when the Soul inhabits the body is a vehicle of pressure, so we as a Soul are able to develop more and more light.
But this separation was not meant to be as strong and as deep as it is in the human being now. When a baby is born you can feel the light within this little person. In a small child, you can see this light and you can feel it. Even the most hardened heart cannot fail to soften at the sound of the delightful laughter from small children, or the innocent, loving hug from a little human friend. Small children still have a very strong connection with their Souls. Their separation is brand new. So babies are less ‘ego’ and more ‘Soul’ and in that way they are able to help us see our Soul in them and speak to our Soul in ways we recognise. But the older the children get, the longer they have been living in and become conditioned by the human world, and it is as if this collective sickness of the ego rubs off on them, it infects them. This happens quicker usually if the adults in the child’s life have lost touch with their Souls and allowed their egos to run their lives – burdened by anger, irritation, anxiety, judgement, wanting to get more and more, blaming others and themselves, depressed, creating dependency, abusing themselves or others. But even children whose parents and other adults in their lives have awakened more into consciousness, often too become infected with this collective disease of ego madness – perhaps not to the same depth and severity, but still the symptoms are there. Already in school playgrounds, we see children showing the symptoms of greed, jealousy, envy, hatred, judgement, and driven by thoughts of how much they can get for themselves, rather than how much they can give to others.
Each one of us is meant to overcome this. As we overcome this, we will be able to shine even more brightly. There is absolutely no point in feeling despair about failing to do that, blaming the ego or analysing it too much – simply accept it for what it is and just get on with our lives, get on with transforming our own inner darkness into light; and just get on with living the life of our true Self, our Soul and not our ego, being of service to humanity and to the world around us. Then, we will have turned the coal into a diamond.
So how do we do that? How do we heal from this ego-disease?
Spiritual Medicines: 7 Spiritual Potions to Heal Your Life