The Deep Ego

 Relatives, our social networks seem to be getting hijacked by those who would have us focus on problems, rather than solutions.  Let's remedy the situation.

Political unrest, economic upheaval, environmental crises, religious extremism... everything is upside down and scary, at least if you buy into the problem.  So don't.  These are problems only in the context of the old paradigm. From the perspective of a new paradigm, this is a monumental opportunity - an untapped market bursting with unmet demand.  We as a collective species have an unmet market demand for political, economic, ecological, and spiritual integrity - a holistic model that treats all life as worthy of respect and dignity.  And only the Deep State stands in our way.

The market itself, then, is moving inexorably towards a nonviolent overthrow of the Deep State.  We live in interesting times, indeed.

As President, Dwight Eisenhower once famously said, "I think the people of the world want peace so bad, one of these days government is gonna have to get out of the way and let them have it."

We are now entering an awkward time when government is doing everything it can to prevent peace from breaking out, and failing.  We are on the cusp of a burgeoning global peace.  It's liberating if we can allow it, but it's also quite scary, as change tends to be.

Have you ever seen those pictures of our neural synapses compared to the arrangements of galaxies?  Our neural synapses are arranged in an identical geometrical pattern as the galaxies.  This is known as the doctrine of signatures - as above, so below, as within, so without... the fractal-pattern nature of reality means that the patterns we encounter within a system are systemic patterns, found throughout the system.

Another example is the water distribution of a river system as it branches off into tributaries - compared to the blood vessels of the body that branch off into capillaries, they are obviously the same pattern.  This is the doctrine of signatures - as within, so without, as above, so below. As in the microcosm, so in the macrocosm.  What this means is that we can encounter and overcome the Deep State by encountering it within our own system, as the Deep Ego, and moving our awareness out of ego into embodiment, the body, through the breath.

The practice of moving our awareness out of our "thinking" monkey-mind into an embodied presence through focus on breath and alignment moves us as individuals out of our own habitual deep ego into a somatic, intuitive, intelligent and empty awareness.  This trains us as individuals, and since consciousness is the ground of all being, training our individual consciousness is precisely how we influence the collective - via the doctrine of signatures, we nonviolently evolve beyond the Deep State by nonviolently evolving beyond the deep ego.

Learning to listen to our quiet and submissive bodies over the din of our loud and dominant egos is in many ways analogous to learning to listen to the feminine.  The ego is conscious,  linear, uses the language of logic, and insists on operating rationally in an irrational world.  Most importantly, the ego is loud, in charge, and threatened by everything.  (Sound familiar?  Kind of describes contemporary America, doesn't it?  America is making a difficult transition away from patriarchy towards a more balanced, holistic, integrated center.  We are moving out of an age of excessive yang and entering an age of balance between yin and yang.  It's a wonderful transition, but the yang forces don't like it very much!)

The body is subconscious, nonlinear, communicating through the inarticulate language of feeling and sensation, insisting on the changing truth, even as the ego insists on believing in constant lies (i.e. the primordial lie, the lie that it exists.)  The ego is the conscious sense of self, while the body is the unconscious embodiment of self, and just as we learn to listen to the body to hear its truth over the din of the ego, so to do we learn collectively to listen to the feminine, the unconscious embodiment of the divine as Mother Earth and her denizens over the din of the Deep State.  The Deep State wants our attention, because it wants us to focus on problems, not solutions.    Solutions would end the Deep State and create a responsive system, so it tries to distract us from solutions!

The Deep Ego operates in precisely the same way.  The Deep State is the problem, just as the Deep Ego is the problem, and the solution lies in moving out of ego into the body, just as the solution lies in moving out of the unelected Deep State into the body of the world, the body of Mother Nature and her abundant diversity of life.  Due to the fractal nature of reality, doing our yoga practice (which gives us the opportunity to follow the breath beyond ego into the body) disempowers the Deep State that dwells within each and every one of us.

Nature is the healer. Ecological investment reaps economic dividends, right?  Think of the goose that laid the golden egg.  The farmer killed the goose to get the gold, but no goose means no gold, dummy.  If we want the gold we must nurture the goose.  Excessive yang energy tends to compulsively kill the golden goose out of its insatiable desire for more gold, now.  This is not a path of long-term sustainability.  Learning to nurture the goose in order to receive its never-ending supply of resources over time is is analogous to nurturing the planet in order to receive its never-ending supply of resources over time.

  Mother Earth is the goose who keeps giving us an infinite amount of golden eggs.  I'm not making this up.  Modern Capitalism - the Deep State, the uninitiated masculine, the male ego wants to kill Mother Earth in order to get the gold.  How immature!  Lucky for us, meditation is becoming the new normal (have you sat today?), so this all-consuming excessive yang energy is learning to gaze inward for happiness rather than searching endlessly for happiness out in the world.  This spells the death-knell for capitalism, which, by the way, is a good thing - Albert Einstein called capitalism "the predatory stage of human evolution."   Capitalism, and its colonial mercantilist roots, can be thought of as excessive yang, an uninitiated masculine consciousness that has not yet looked within itself and seen its own opposite, its deep interrelationship with its own shadow, the fertile and nurturing yin.  What will our economy look like when the health of the global ecology is considered a capital investment?

Meditation is the key which initiates the excessive yang energy, the uninitiated masculine consciousness, and tames the flames of desire.  Meditation reveals that real happiness can only be found within us, outside of the context of the sense world.  Through meditation the excessive yang consciousness loses its compulsive need to consume the exterior world in its vain pursuit of real happiness.  When consciousness is not instructed on how to find happiness within, it then turns to the external world for happiness, which is suffering.  Consciousness then becomes desperate for happiness, searching here and there, pursuing this and that, consuming everything in its path.  The Buddha didn't preach the Fire Sermon for nothing - "Everything is burning, burning with desire..."

The mind cannot find peace.  Peace returns to letting go mind.  The deep ego's desire to consume happiness and thus be complete has despoiled the world, and the dawning knowledge of this desire's futility - represented by meditation's arrival on the world stage - also represents the swinging of the pendulum away from patriarchal, excessive-yang hierarchies towards the reawakening of the divine feminine.  For a few thousand years yang has plucked the flower of yin in order to consume it, endlessly and exhaustively, leading to a world without love.  What does it look like for yang to nurture the flower of yin by watering it?  We may be balancing yin and yang energies, both within us and around us.  Imagine what that world will look like, because we are creating it.

What would a public policy of nurturing the golden goose to reap the golden eggs look like?  It would look like a policy of reaping economic dividends from ecological investments:

1.  Make gardening the centerpiece of public education.
2.  Make industrial hemp the centerpiece of ecological and economic rehabilitation.
3.  Audit and end the privately-owned Federal Reserve, and have the U.S. Treasury issue currency.
4.  Focus scientific research and development on the science of meditation.
5.  Make all publicly elected representatives spend at least 1/3 of their time in office managing soup  
     kitchens in their respective districts.

It's a new paradigm, relatives.  Welcome home!  Now let's get to work - we've got a lot to accomplish.