Relation Realization

People see the world through the filter of their own languaging. This was the point of the recent assignment to try referring to yourself in third person. As long as your words imply that you're the thinker, it's very hard to escape that delusion.

Similarly, worshiping necessarily implies an inaccurate dichotomy. In a relationship of worship, one agrees to a separation between the self and the not self. It requires a deity, or a collection there of, and a subservient individual/ego. So if I were to practice worship, I'd have to assume the role of ego, which I'm clearly not.

We can experience divine presence, but we can't comprehend it. This is a very frustrating scenario for the ego, which needs to have everything tied up in nice little packages in order to deal with them.

But some things are unknowable. If we can just get out of the “I am ego” trap, then we can learn to live harmoniously with the ambiguity and mystery that infuses all of life. We don't need to understand it in order to live and work with it. Few of us know how our cars or cell phones or computers work, yet we use them comfortably every day.

The objective is to incorporate the compassion and wisdom, that comes from experiencing something greater than the ego, into the ego's motivations and actions. And to maintain an ongoing connection with that “other worldly” understanding and insight, as a means of living.

When chained to the belief that we are our ego, we can only deal with things on its terms, which is fairly limiting. The smokers ego wishes that it could stop smoking. His unknowable essence knows that it wishes the body to be healthy and the ego persona to be a non-smoker. One leaves the little mind struggling against its self-fabricated demons. The other simply puts them down, because that's the obvious, appropriate and desirable thing to do.

Worship is commonly done to curry the favor of an imaginary super being, for the benefit of the imaginary self, in an imaginary afterlife. It allows people to remain firmly ensconced in a self centered materialistic existence while thinking that they're doing something spiritual. As long as we try to know the formless/timeless in the ego's language, we're destined to fail.

Yes, we want the ego to be subservient to the greater awareness. But this only truly happens when we shed our presumption that we are ego, and embrace the truth of our own extraordinary nature.

So I will love God, respect Allah, seek council from Brahma and surrender to the great mystery. But I will not worship, because that would be a lie. I am not ego, and the bounty of expansive awareness will never fit inside of words and concepts. So I will do my best to be as selfless and helpful as I can be, and my relationship with whatever consciousness is beyond my minds comprehension, will be friendly, joyful and intimate.

(En sha Allah ;)