After God’s initial call, but before Christ has suffused your mind, you’ll still deal with compulsive thought, only these will be shot through with what seems to be divine mandate. Not just “I want X,” but “God says I ought to have X.” It will make them harder to let go of. The “Evil thoughts of the higher self” are self pity, shame, blame, remorse, rationalization, resentment, self-aggrandizement, and entitlement. In self pity, there is an “I” who shouldn’t have to deal with the stresses of the moment. In shame, there is an “I” who can’t deal with the mistakes involved in gaining experience. In blame, there is an “I” who attributes causes for our behavior anywhere other than ourselves— to circumstance, to the behavior of others, whatever. In remorse, there is an “I” who emotionally grasps at past mistakes, hoping to wield control over them. In rationalization, ego hopes to avoid the discomfort of changing the things that we can. In resentment, the ‘I’ uses ill feeling at “bearing unequal weight alone” to attempt to manipulate normally uncontrollable factors. Self aggrandizement isn’t just vanity, it’s an “I” that’s avoiding lessons about nervous system regulation, because it’s so accustomed to being exempt from stress. Entitlement is simply an ‘I’ that believes the world should be as it wishes, an ‘I’ that is unwilling to deal, and incapable of dealing with the world as it is.
Especially when combined with the legitimate trauma of personal history, the evil thoughts of the lower self and the evil thoughts of the higher self will be a source of great preoccupation. But it should be said: your mind is built to let thoughts arise, and let them go. Your nervous system is built for feeling and letting go. Attachment or clinging will proliferate anxiety, and that very self-imposed suffering is just your mind and nervous system saying “this is more than we’re built for.” Our job, with our ego, our capacity for craving and clinging and attachment, is simply to bear witness. The more we witness our sinfulness, the more we can let the thoughts arise, let them go without acting on them. In the beginning, there might be a painful period when we think “self is all that we are.” Gradually we’ll come to say “I am my trauma-induced pain body, but I am also higher self and non-self” and it’ll awaken Christ within. Eventually, once the self has entirely identified with Christ, we’ll watch as he says, in us “into your hands I commend my spirit.” Those “steps”--like stations of the cross–will become faster and faster.
The eight evil thoughts of the lower self will be so hard to deal with that you will be tempted to attach to spiritual things just to get away from them. This is called spiritual bypassing, where the positive content of awakening is used to ignore the negative. You may be so unlucky as to experience great consolations, especially when the prayer journey is new, and the positive feelings of the prayer journey will make it all the easier to ignore your attachments, your ego, your unprocessed trauma. Before the end, this will be a source of self-imposed anxiety and suffering. This is normal, it’s perfectly safe, and it’s a terrific bummer.
The eight evil thoughts of the higher self will be so difficult that you will be tempted to use the inherent dignity of your identity to manipulate. This is called spiritual materialism, where the consolations of the spiritual life are seen as exclusive to you–they’re seen as making you better than others. If there are consolations in prayer, they will increase the risk of seeing yourself as better than others. Before the end, this will be a source of self imposed anxiety and suffering. This may render you a jerk temporarily, but don’t worry: silence will make you intolerable to yourself, and this will help you let go.
Too many years of endless crisis management and stimulus response loops of desire fulfillment have left our ability to focus attention and intention permanently damaged. Ego is only capable of attention when distractions are eliminated. Ego is only capable of focusing intention when gratification is immediate. Ego is only capable of doing things that make sense. And so the words of Matthew’s gospel prove true: “To what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market places and calling to one another ‘we played the flute for you and you did not dance; we wailed and you did not mourn.” To the things of life, we have all the wrong responses, because we have settled for thinking about life instead of living it. We have substituted gratifying desire for feeling the emptiness of our physical bodies.
The ego has no more effective strategy than to act on afflictive thought, to make it temporarily go away. There’s a need to learn to deal with afflictive thought without acting on it. First, sit in silence 20 minutes a day. Breathe, listen and feel. The fear, in particularly scary compulsive thoughts, is “it’ll always be like this.” That’s a big lie. When afflictive thoughts arise, a number of strategies are effective in lessening their intensity. Redirecting your attention to the feeling of the breath, to the sound of the air conditioner, to the physical sensation of your left big toe–all of these strategies are effective in diminishing worry. That diminishment isn’t instant, but as patience grows, so does confidence: “shifting attention” can replace “acting on thought” as a way to diminish their intensity. In your psyche, you may notice two difficult thoughts. One is “a suggestion to self terminate” and the other is a deep confrontation with insignificance: “you are nobody and nothing.” Self-termination and insignificance are difficult thoughts for the ego, because of how final the consequences are. But learning to shift attention to physical sensation can give us an effective tool for letting go of even the scariest of thoughts.
Over time, even the scariest of thoughts become understandable. As the lines blur between life and death, pain and bliss, sadness and joy, we can use our higher self to care for our lower self. The lower self’s whole identity comes from never-ending crisis. Suicidality is an understandable suggestion for a mind at the end of its rope–the occurrence of the thought can ultimately function as a radical indicator of the need for self care. But it’s through the daily grind–life itself–that the ego is destined to die. Though it’s scary to hear “you are nobody, and nothing” looping through your head constantly, watching thought arise and depart while we breathe in and out teaches us that “self” is merely a thought. It is as impermanent as everything else. And furthermore, letting that thought go is absolutely safe. Move the body, tick items off to do lists, work a miserable job. Even “automatic pilot” reassures us that, should we choose to let go of the voice in our head that refers to itself as “I, me, and my”--all of the needful things will still get done. In short: In response to the world saying “nobody cares” Christ became a nobody who still manages to care, and it is absolutely safe to let go of our identity and become “a nobody who cares” along with him.
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