Navigating the Ego in Your Spiritual Practice

Episode 57 • 3rd March 2023 • Speaking Spirit • John Moore

Announcer 0:28

Hello, and welcome to speaking spirit where we talk about all things spiritual. Your host, John Moore is a shamanic practitioner and spiritual teacher. And now here's John.

John Moore 0:47

Hello, hello, everybody.

Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, wherever and whenever you might be. Today I'm going to talk about one of my favorite topics. That is ego, and the ego and spirituality. And I think there is a lot of misunderstanding around what ego is and its role in your life and its role in spirituality. I have heard spiritual people talk about killing the ego. I've heard spiritual people describe the ego as the devil. Um, as you might imagine, my opinion is a little bit different about that. And I think there is a general misunderstanding about the ego and its role in our lives. What it is, what do we do with it? How do we navigate it? How do we navigate our ego we we have egos. I have an ego when I say that, when I say I, what am I identifying? That's really what ego is. So I'm going to break it down for you. I'm going to talk about, I'm going to give you some ideas about what the ego is, and where it is a trap and where it is useful. And, and all of those things and talk about navigating it in your spiritual practice. And I'm going to give some practical stuff today. I'm going to talk to you about not letting the ego rule your life. Let's get into it. What is ego? Well, you know, there is a Freudian definition of ego. Not going to use that. And there is you know, we often use ego and English colloquially, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that word, right. We use it as a term to refer to somebody's inflated self esteem or inflated sense of self esteem, that guy's got a big ego, check out that ego and that guy, and we actually, without maybe knowing it means the opposite. That person is so insecure, that they have, they're acting like they have an inflated sense of self. So but let's talk about, let's talk about a more useful definition of ego and what we mean about ego in spirituality. So, ego is this ego is a collection of stories and beliefs that you hold about who you are. I'll add one more thing. It's stories, beliefs, and labels about who you are. So when I say I am John, and I realize in other languages in many other languages, they don't say I am, and then their name. But in English, we frequently say I am John, we don't say I am called John. Identifying with that label, I have a name. You know, John Moore, does a label that my parents gave to me when I was born, but that's not who I am. And it's really interesting because I've been, I've been talking about ego and a number of areas. Very recently a number of outlets. So I've got a I did a YouTube and Facebook Live broadcast about ego and I did some stuff on Instagram. And then the algorithm of Facebook, a video came up for me to see of Bob Proctor fantastic spiritual teacher really, really plugged in I love, love his stuff. It might not be for you, it might not be for everybody, but but I have not heard him say anything I disagree with. He uses different terminology for things. That's fine, that's great. And he was talking about this very thing. He said, You know, I have this name, that this is just a label my parents gave me and I have this body. Right. And I don't say, you know, hand is going to work today. I say I am going to work today. And what I mean is this body, but you have a body, you are not the body. But as humans, it's very easy to identify as the body. You know, when somebody passes away in this culture, we say, you know, my grandfather is buried in the cemetery. Well, my grandfather's ashes, the remains of the body that he inhabited are there, but he's not in the cemetery. Not from a who he actually was, or who he is now spiritual perspective, is he in the cemetery. So, ego is about the stories that we tell ourselves who we are in, a lot of them come with labels. So for example, one story that I have about myself is that I am a dad, I have children, I play the role of father to them pretty frequently, hopefully doing the best job that I can. I describe myself as an amateur parent. Um, but that, again, is just a label. And I have not always been a dad. Right, there was a, you know, a long period of time in my life, where before I had children, and right now, I'm not talking to you through this podcast, in the same way that I would talk to my children. So that that that role doesn't necessarily apply in this moment. And again, it's a label, and it's a set of stories, whether or not those stories are true. Right, we have true stories, and not so true stories. What are some of the stories that you tell about yourself, about who you are? Well, there's all kinds of stuff, right? It's, you know, about your identity, you know, I'm, I'm a man, I am a dad, I am a boyfriend, I am a resident of the United States, I am this I am that and there are, you know, sort of labels, and there are stories behind all of those things. And there are beliefs, right? If you believe you are your body, that's just a belief. True or not, right? You can have true beliefs. And you can have false beliefs, I don't mean to put down the idea of a belief. Beliefs are important, as is your ego, and I'm going to get to that, but beliefs are important. But having a flexible belief system, understanding that everything you hold to be true, whether or not it is objectively true or not, is a belief. The the idea of belief is a habit of thought that we think is true. So if I, you know, I am recording this podcast right now, that is a belief that I have. Now, the truth of it is, I probably am. But I don't know, I mean, the equipment that I'm using to record this might not be functioning. Right. You know, there's all kinds of things back that right. And you know, we have all kinds of all kinds of beliefs about the truth of things. One of the things that's really interesting if, you know, it's not certainly not everybody's cup of tea, but if you read things by the author Robert Anton Wilson, he talks about everybody living in A reality tunnel, right, which is a description of the another word for this is the paradigm, the belief that you have about everything, right, and we rarely ever step out of that reality tunnel, we are very locked in. Why because it's easier, it's easier to live our lives with a single set of beliefs. And one of the things he, he advocated was not knowing anything, or not placing the belief that you knew anything. I know, I know, I know was like a dirty word to him a dirty phrase, I know.

And he advocated for this, you know, sort of radical agnosticism where you don't really this is very philosophical, but where you went around and rare you know, had certain beliefs that allowed you to function in the world but but knew that you couldn't truly know anything, this was his, his thing. That everything we experience in this world, comes to us through our filters, through our conditioning, through filters that were set up from the second we were born. Till till now it comes to us, we you know, we have different cultures, we have maybe different languages, we have different bodies that we inhabit, we have, you know, different histories, different schooling. We've read different things, even our memories, which we you know, a lot of people think your memory is just this recording device that plays things back objectively. We no use that term, we believe very strongly based on scientific evidence, that that is not true, that your memories are reconstructed. Which is why if you ask two people about a single incident that they both witnessed, you might get two very different stories. And both of them are remembering. Right, not only do they have different viewpoints, but they're, you know, they're filtering it through their memory. So when you were born, right, when you were born, you may or may not remember that exact moment. But when you were born, you had no reference, right? And the world like nothing was separate from you. This is the closest thing to enlightenment that many of us will ever experience in this lifetime. Although you can certainly become enlightened in a certain lifetime, in a single lifetime. This is the closest thing to enlightenment, to awakened an awakened state of pure formless consciousness. That places no labels on anything you don't you're, you're, you know, pre verbal, you don't have language to start labeling things. And what happens is, immediately your parents or in the other adults in your life, start referring to you by name. They use your name over and over again, and they feed you you have an instinct to survive, which is, you know, you cry when you're hungry. But that's it. And then eventually you learn that, you know, if you respond to your name, you get fed more you get held, you get, you know, whatever. And so you really, Oh, this must be This must be what I am, who I am. And you're told you're a girl, you're a boy, you're whatever, whatever whatever that never ends, you have all of these stories about who you are, and it starts from birth. And you never kind of unless you work on it really hard, you never really go back to that primordial fluid consciousness because learning and conditioning does that to us. And this is not to say learning and conditioning is bad or evil or the devil or whatever. So. So this is essentially what ego is, it is the you know, simplify it. It is the collection of stories that we hold about who we are. You know, when I say I come from a history of trauma. You know, I grew up with childhood trauma. That's a story. Right? Whether that's true or not, whether that's objectively true or not, that's a story that's part of my identity. It's part of, you know, how I define myself, sometimes it's how I think about myself. So why, why would we have an ego? Why is it? You know, why is this a thing that we've developed? Does it serve us? Well, it must. I mean, that's a belief, but it must serve us somehow. Because otherwise, you know, human beings would have died out. If we, if, you know, having an ego wasn't, didn't serve some purpose. Not only that, let's talk about the spiritual purpose of, of ego and that sort of thing. So one of the things that ego does one of the functions of ego, and I'm talking about ego, like it's a thing now, but ego is a bunch of stuff. It's a series of processes, but it's much easier to talk about it if we lump it in and create a thing out of it. But it's not a thing. It's not, you know, it's it's a, what do you call those, going back to my grammar school days, you know, the, the, it's an abstract noun, right? You can't put ego in a wheelbarrow, or a bucket. So it's an abstract noun, but it's really fluid into collection of things. And your egos is very fluid. For most people. There's some people are really, really locked in. But over time, your ideas about yourself have changed. Think about yourself when you were 13. Think about yourself when you were 18. You know, I don't know how old you are. But I'm 51. Now, I mean, very different person have a very different self concept. I have a lot of more stories now about myself than I did when I was 18 or 13. So your ego changes over time. Right? It's very, very fluid. We don't necessarily think it is. Let's talk about spiritual reality for a minute. And I'm going to use a very, I'm going to use a very specific model. And I'm going to use the word source instead of God or the universe or whatever. If you want to replace that in your mind with the word God with salt when I use source, fine, that's great. I find the word God has a lot of baggage with it. Like, again, people have a lot of ideas, a lot of stories about who or what God is, and some people don't believe in God. And, you know, it's okay, whatever you believe is totally fine. But I'm gonna talk about cosmology a little bit in why ego is spiritual, and it is part of our spiritual development and where does it come from? Okay, and this is one model one perspective, you cannot, words don't adequately describe spiritual reality. So whatever I'm describing to you is just a close approximation of anything, or, I don't know, maybe not so close. And you might have a completely different viewpoint. And I respect that. I am certainly not a you know, fundamentalist of any kind. You you believe in what you believe. But let's, you know, let's go back a minute, let's talk about the origin of everything. So imagine, you know, back before the Big Bang back before, time and space existed, there was a being, but that being was just pure formless consciousness, and we'll call that source, okay. You might call it God, or the intelligence of the universe or whatever, but it is a field of pure consciousness in which nothing exists. Right? So, experience can't really arise in this consciousness. This consciousness is just existence. It's like a it's like a big empty field. And so source or God or whatever does whatever it does. In order to have experience arise in order to explore itself, what would you do? What would you do if you wanted to really explore yourself, you might have to step outside yourself, you might have to ask your friends what you are like you might video or audio record yourself, right, you would have to do some things, really to explore yourself, you can do some level of self exploration, by scanning your body or you know, whatever, but to really, really explore yourself, you've got to kind of get outside of yourself. Well, if you're all there is, what do you need to do.

And I find that one sort of metaphor for source is you think of an infinite beam of white light, right, like a solid beam of white light, in infinite brilliance and infinite length, and, you know, whatever. And if it were passing through the void of space, for example, in space isn't really empty, there's, you know, there's energy, there's all kinds of stuff, you know, cosmic dust and all this stuff. But let's say we're passing through this vacuum of space where there's absolutely nothing, you would see no light. You know, if you shine a flashlight, and there's not dust in the air, you don't see the beam of that flashlight, you only see the flashlight reflected off a wall or surface or whatever. Or there's particles of dust in the air, and you can see the beam, but you don't see the light until it reflects back to you. So this infinite beam of white light can't really see itself, it can't really experience itself. And so what it does is it has to set up limitations, barriers, things for it to bounce off of. And it does that in a couple of ways. One is it splits itself off. So we take that beam of white light, and we put a prism in front of it, right might have done this in school. And it splits that beam of white light that contains all other frequencies of light into a rainbow. Wow. Right. But that rainbow has basically infinite diversity. Which is what we are, what everything in the universe is, you know, as close as we can approximate it infinite diversity in the universe, people are really, really different. But we're also you know, we live on a planet, I can look in my backyard and see, you know, 12 different species of trees. And I know there's going to be dozens of species of fungus growing under the earth and animals and birds and you know, if I go a few miles away, the ecosystem is going to be completely different. Diversity is an observable quality of source, okay. So source or God or whatever, splits itself off and there are models, there are other you know, their spiritual models that talk about this right? The Tree of Life in Kabbalah talks about this, the first thing is just this infinite field of light, the iron soft or and then, you know, intelligence says, you know, let's create reality. Consciousness says let's create reality, and splits itself off in you know, descends down the tree of life, until it gets to physical reality down here. So, this prism happens and then these obstacles up here, right? It sets up source sets up the illusion of individual obstacles. So consciousness can bounce off of those, like light and reflect back. So you, my friend, are undifferentiated. You know, you're differentiated in that you experience a separate identity. This is where ego comes in. But you are connected to source in the same way that everything else is. If you want to describe it. In quantum terms, we are quantum entangled with everything in the universe. Right, scientifically, before the Big Bang there Was this particle, this infinitesimally small particle, smaller than an atom, I guess, that exploded into the entire known universe. They can't even imagine, you know, that created first there was, you know, it split itself out into nothing but hydrogen and then, you know, the hydrogen started grouping together and forming clumps, and then those clumps formed, you know, got denser and denser and denser and formed stars. And then the stars got denser and denser, denser till some of them started forming. Are there elements, right, everything, all of the elements in your body, say for hydrogen. But even the hydrogen in your body at one point was in the belly of a star, all of the carbon, all the stars were the furnaces of creation that created the physical elements that our physical universe is made out of, is pretty amazing.

So, source differentiates itself to have experience. And we are at our core underneath this identity with the body, the our identity with our thoughts, identity with our labels, if we parse through all of that, what we are is a field of consciousness, in which experience arises the experience of having a body, the experience of our thoughts, the experience of the sensations we have, you know, you're hearing my voice right now. Which is, I realize it's an everyday thing, but it is an absolute miracle if you think about it, think about it for a moment I am using muscles in my throat and air for my lungs and making the air in front of my mouth vibrate or you know, inside my throat but coming out of my mouth, the air is vibrating there is a microphone in front of me that converts those vibrations into an electronic signal that goes into a computer that converts that electronic signal into ones and zeros there is nothing else just ones and zeros. Now, you have a computer or a phone or you know whatever but some device some computing device that converts those ones and zeros back to an audible signal something you can hear right so converts that back to an electronic symbol signal. And whether you're listening through headphones or speaker or whatever, there is you know some electronics in there that vibrate the air those vibrations strike your eardrum or eardrums and cause you know nerves to fire in your ear. They go into your brain and what happens is you have this subjective experience of listening to me talk that subjective experience happens inside the field of your consciousness. And that is a beautiful thing to me. The fact that I can you know have some beams of light strike the back of my eyes and I experienced a sunset or you know, my daughter can come up and put her arms around me and electrical signals from my skin and muscles and body give you know out of that out of those electrical signals which are very close to being ones and zeros right because neurons either fire or they don't I have this subjective experience of getting a hug. That's a miracle to me

wow what powerful beings we are Are because what whether you're doing it consciously or not, you are creating everything you experience. This is not to say, there isn't a reality outside of you somewhere. But your experience of that reality is created inside your consciousness. And you know, very well how your consciousness how your state of mind or your emotional state, how tired you are, how, you know, whatever, you know how that can change your experience of things, right, you know, that you're affecting the experience that's arising, whether you're doing that consciously on purpose or not. So if I'm really well, I'll tell you a personal story. I was going through processing, some processing some family trauma. And, um, you know, I was dating somebody who was also processing some family trauma at the time. And she said to me, imagine if we had had normal families. And you know, I had been in this state of mind, we're very, you know, lots of ruminations and depressed and all of these things. And it changed, like my consciousness in an instant changed. And I started laughing uncontrollably laughing so hard tears were running down my face, my stomach was hurting, I was having a hard time breathing, you know, red in the face, ugly, crying, laughing. Right. If I had been in another state, my experience, you know, receiving that information, imagine if our families had been normal. Wouldn't have we reacted the same way it wouldn't have had the same subjective experience of exactly the same data. Misses consciousness. But this is also why ego is useful. Because it allows us to have different experiences. Right, it allows us to play with being depressed or being joyous or being whatever. Now we, we. So I'll get into some of the traps of ego, some of the problems of ego and talk about what what we might do about it, if we decide that it's a problem. What are effective strategies for managing our egos and spiritual practice? How do you develop a healthy relationship with your ego? And how does ego affect your spiritual growth and development? So, the Buddha in his four noble truths, talks about suffering, that there is suffering, which is the cause of suffering is way out of suffering. And suffering is in this model, the result of attachment. Right? Attachment, one of the truths of Buddhism, but of you know, just subjective, you know, subjective objective experience is that everything is impermanent. Nothing lasts forever, everything changes. Everything is in a constant state of change. So our attachment to things that are impermanent and in a flux puts us sometimes in a state of suffering. Let me give you a personal example of that. My daughters have twin daughters, they just turned 16. One of my daughter's has her driver's license, the others will have hers very soon. There they have become independent young women. They have both been dating. They both have jobs. And I'm like, oh, man, I miss the days when they were nine years old. And we used to hang out all the time. And, you know, even in the winter, we'd go walk on the beach. And you know, we would spend so much time together. And we were so so close, because, you know, when they were young, when they were little, their, their mom traveled on business quite a lot. So they spent they spent a lot of their time just with me. And I love my daughters. And I love that they're growing up, and they've become wonderful, caring, compassionate, loving people. By God, I'm like thinking back, oh, my goodness, when they were nine, how wonderful was only when they were five, how wonderful it was. And I look at pictures of us. And there's a picture of us standing in a waterfall together, that is one of my favorites. It was a joyous, a joyous day, lots of laughter. But I can look back at that, and mourn or grieve the loss of that time, but it was inevitable that that was going to change. Nobody stays nine years old forever. That relationship has to change, I could, you know, fight to hold my kids back and be strict and not let them explore the world and all of this stuff. But I'd be fooling myself and trying to be attached to that experience. So to the extent to which I am attached to that memory, that experience, there is suffering. Right, in the same thing, so I have this body. And I think back to you know, when I was in college, it was in my late teens, early 20s. And I went to the gym every single day, and I did karate five days a week, and I could eat anything I wanted. As much as I wanted, I would go to the cafeteria at school and get three dinners and then you know, have five glasses of milk and dessert and never put an ounce on. And I was muscular and thin and my waist size was significantly smaller. You know, this body changes, I have white hair in my beard now. In other places I won't talk about but I have white hair and my beard. If I grow my beard out, it's very white, that your body changes constantly over time. You don't even have to try too hard. There's just an aging process. There are lots of people out there that are trying to work on stuff to make people physically immortal. Can you imagine a world where babies are still being born and nobody ever dies? How quickly would we run out of natural resources and this would become this would become a living hell.

So this body changes and and if I'm attached to it too much, eventually I know this body mind will die. Right? If I worry about that I can cause lots of suffering my attachment to this quote unquote life that is just my identification with this body, this mind these beliefs these perceptions that causes suffering.

Now how do we navigate this? Right? So we are very most of us attached to our egos. We are attached to our stories about who we are. We're attached to our labels were attached to our bodies were attached to our belief systems, all of those things were very attached to those things. And it does cause suffering. Right. If you're attached to who you are, and I insult you, or I invalidate you or you know you know all of those things that people do to be nasty sometimes. That can cause suffering can cause a fight. It can cause you know, all kinds of stuff that leads us astray because we're really, really attached. And I remember my daughter, one of my daughter's coming home from school, elementary school, and she was really angry. And I said, you know, What's got you so, let's get you in a huff. Why are you so angry? So and so called me stupid. And I said, Okay, I said, let me ask you a question. She said, Yeah. I said, Are you a chair? And she kind of giggled. Like, I'm not a chair. I'm like, so if I call you a chair, and I say, You're a chair, Sophia. Are you gonna be upset by that? Say, No, that's, you know, that's silly. And they said, Are you stupid? Said No, I'm not stupid. I said, so why are you gonna get upset? When somebody calls you stupid. Right? It's only if you identify with that. It's only if you cling to that identity that somebody is trying to foist onto you. That it causes suffering. Right, our need to be perceived in a certain way our need to self perceive in a certain way. Right. When I don't live up to my own expectations, sometimes that causes suffering and then I have to remind myself, John, I say, referring to my label. You are part of source you are connected via divine spark to infinite consciousness. You are part of the vastness of the universe, part of all there is and your consciousness is a miracle. So give yourself a break, cut yourself some slack. So let's talk about how to navigate ego in spiritual practice. Because there are traps in spiritual practice. There are lots of traps in spiritual practice I've talked about some of them in other podcasts have talked about spiritual bypassing and spiritual egotism, which I'll talk about again now. There is this tendency for some people to simply shift to their ego. Too, say something more spiritual, right. And this is not to say, you know, I identify as a spiritual teacher I identify myself as a person who practices and teaches shamanism. I identify myself as somebody who teaches meditation and spirituality. You know, that is a part of my ego complex but the trap for me would be if I thought I am that makes me special. That makes me better than that makes me you know, think I have transcended my ego Oh, well, I teach spirituality. I no longer have an ego No, sorry, doesn't work that way. I am beyond ego. No, it doesn't work that way.

The Buddha while he was alive, still out of body, still talk to people still referred to himself. You can't do that without some level of ego. So one of the spiritual traps is spiritual egotism, where we just replace our identity with something that we think is more spiritual or at a higher level or lots of stuff about ascension these days. And five d i have no idea what not to put that down. If that's a practice you're doing or something. I don't really know what it means. I don't know you know, But I've talked to people who are ascended or ascending or you know, whatever, and I don't, you know, that's cool, that's great. Don't let it go to your head. Don't let awakening go to your head. Don't let enlightenment go to your head, I think I'm gonna put that on the t shirt. Don't let enlightenment go to your head. It's not about your head. It's not about having an inflated self concept.

You know, I had a client a couple of weeks ago. And I'm super, super careful about not sharing any personal details of clients. So I'm going to talk in a very generalized manner about this person. So this client, this client is in Europe, I have clients all over the world. This client happened to be in Europe and had worked with another. He referred to this person as a shaman. I call myself a shamanic practitioner. In my practice, in my teaching in my school, one does not call oneself a shaman, because it's considered egocentric. It's one way that we try to prevent the spiritual egotism, by slapping a fancy label on ourselves. But he referred to me as his shaman, and that's fine, whatever. But I got on zoom with him. And he's like, in the beginning, he was like, Oh, I'm an all that I'm meeting with you. And yeah, the idea. And I'm like, okay, you know, no, I'm just a guy. And I have some experiences, I have some skills that I'm going to share with you. You do not bow down to me. I'm not a guru. I'm not a god. Well, we're all you know, we're all part of God. We're all little gods. We're all demigods in our own way. But I'm not any more than he is. I don't want all like that. Why? Well, one thing is, I think it's an I think it's unhealthy. If you're the person on the other side, if you're my client, that's not how I work with clients. But also, it's unhealthy for me, like if I start buying into that bullshit, right? Pardon my French, if I start buying into that, you must be in awe of me when I talk to you know, I, you know, I do like a certain amount of social respect. But I think that's common. I like to have the same amount of kindness that I show to my clients, you know, but you know, I also tell my clients if during a session, emotions come up for you, and you feel like yelling at me and calling me names. Fantastic, do that. But I don't want you and I don't do that with my students either. So there are a few traps with students that I try to avoid. One of those things so I teach people, one of the things I teach people how to do is how to do a shamanic journey, and how to get answers from spirit for their spiritual questions. And there's the temptation to ask the teacher to interpret your journeys for you. And I don't do that. Like I don't journey on your behalf and they don't interpret your journeys. I lead you through experiences. My whole point is to empower you to get your own answers. Shamanism is a spiritual system that is all about personal revelation, individual revelation. There's no doctrine or dogma, in shamanism where there's very little dogma. But it is all about getting one's own answers and your answers are as valid as mine. Just because I've been doing this longer than you or have some things to teach you. Doesn't make my answers better than yours. Right. So you know, I don't I tell my Students, I'm a guide, not a guru, I'm here to lead you to have some experiences. I know how to take you to places to have experiences, I know how to sort of sequence the experiences that you could have, and like a tour guide, right? You know, if I go to, I don't know, where's the, where's the place that has a king of England if I go to England, and I hire a tour guide, to show me around London. You know, so I can experience London, and learn about it and have all those things that tour guides, not the king you know, I'm going to show that tour guide. Respect and, and, you know, as a human being, but, you know, and they and I know, that they've, you know, lived in London and studied London and have more experience and knowledge about London than I do. But I'm not going to go into you know, I'm not gonna go into a pub, and order fish and chips and eat them and ask the tour guide did I like that? Right. That's the kind of the same thing about getting answers from spiritual teachers. I mean, yes, answers about practice, but not deep spiritual answers. And my particular bent of shamanism, I am personally focused on mysticism, which is about merging your consciousness with source. So what do we do? What do we do? You're some you know, you're in spirit, you have spiritual practice. Maybe you meditate, maybe you practice shamanism, maybe you do something else, you pray. What do we do about the ego getting in the way of that? Well, first, the first step is to recognize that you have an ego and understand what it is. Right? And I've just described that to you, it's a set of stories about who you are, but who you who you are at your core is nothing to do with your ego. You just you You are consciousness, you experience the ego. Understand that you are not your body, anything that you have. You cannot be I have a body, I have a name. I have roles that I play out, as you know. I have thoughts, I am not my thoughts. There is a part of the brain called the default mode network is not a part it's actually a bunch of parts of the brain that work together, called the default mode network. And when you are not in meditation is one of the things that takes this offline a little bit. But when you are when your mind is wandering, which is most of the day, believe it or not really hard to focus all day long. But when your mind is wandering, and you have all these thoughts come up and ruminations and all of this stuff. That's the default mode, network processing things. And part of the default mode networks job is to figure out who you are. Right? And so all of these thoughts that you're having, feel like they are you have these ruminations, all of these beliefs, all of the stuff that's coming up, it feels like it's coming, first of all, that it's coming from you. And secondly, you're you know, feeling like your thoughts are you at least to some extent. And, and, and it's just static. It's like picking up a radio station. And thinking that there's somebody inside the radio talking to you you know, your brains picking things up. But that's not where you live. That's not you, right. The brain think of the brain as a receiver of consciousness much like the radio receiving signal holes. And yeah, if you take, if you mess with the brain, it can mess up those signals Absolutely, or mess up the processing of those signals. But subjective consciousness cannot be reduced to brain activity. And that's an it's an interesting problem for science to call it the consciousness problem. And there are lots of people studying it. And there are people who will say, Oh, we've located consciousness in the brain.

No, we haven't. But yes, if I take the brain apart, it will stop receiving the signal of consciousness, but consciousness never goes away. Because it's all all there is. It's the background in which all experience arises. Not to go down, you know, too far down the metaphysical pathway. But you know, this is a spiritual podcast, we're talking about spiritual things. We can talk about metaphysics. So understand that you have an ego understand what it is that it's just stories you tell about yourself, understand that it's sometimes useful. When this body mind needs to interact with my children, taking on the identity of dad is useful. But attachment to any part of that, or the whole thing, or whatever, that's the problem. Thinking that's who I really am at my core, that's the problem that takes us away from our spiritual reality. It's not a problem, it's just a thing to understand. And you can have glimpses of awakening, you can have moments of non dual experience. Many of us have this very frequently. And you can be in a persistent state of, there's a scientific term for it, it's actually like persistent non symbolic experience or something like that. But there is, you know, there's a there are ways you can experience non duality, but that doesn't mean your body and mind stop operating. And this is a lie that the ego, the ego is there for the body survival, right? In part, one of its roles is to keep the body alive by saying, oh, you know, there's a threat to your body, this is an existential threat. If something kills your body, you die. Right, so that's one of the you know, the body doesn't stop existing, when you have persistent, non symbolic non dual experience. When you live from that state of non duality, this identity, this ego doesn't go away, it just kind of moves to the background, in my normal state of consciousness is one of non separation. And it's blissful, right non duality is blissful. Because there, it releases the suffering of attachment to ego. And that is the the most the closest attachment you can have is attachment to your self identity. So when we identify with things that we are not, or we identify with things that we have, you know, you probably you're not like, I remember when I was a kid, and sneakers were a big deal. Right? The brand of sneakers that you owned, were a big deal. And I grew up in a family, we didn't have a lot of money, you know, in a really salon and people say that, um, you know, we weren't, we weren't the poorest people around but we didn't, you know, I wore secondhand clothes, my mom sewed patches into my pants and I don't know that I, you know, maybe on Christmas and a birthday, I might get new, you know, a new shirt and new socks and stuff. But mostly I got hand me downs from older, my older brother and older cousins and you know, you know, there were feast and famine times anyway. So anyway, that's the way I grew up. But my aunt I worked in a shoe factory and was able to buy at certain times of the year I was able to buy shoes basically at cost. So my mom or somebody gave my aunt a little bit of money, maybe $10 which was, you know, still significant those days. And I got a pair of Reeboks because she was sewing, you know, insoles in the shoes or something. I got a pair of Reeboks boy did I love those shoes. And I remember wearing them out and somebody saying hey, Reebok, right, like calling me the name of the brand of my shoes. And what I'm getting at is I'm not a pair of Reeboks, and those Reeboks you know we're, you know, kids Reeboks, I couldn't wear them today. What if I identified as my shoes, I mean, that seems silly, right? Or identify with your car. And you might have an attachment to your car, you might love your car. Some people have cars, they're really really into cars, and they love them. You know, some people identify with the car, some people identify with their house, some people identify with their job. These are things you have they're impermanent. It gives you this sort of spiritual, what I call spiritual schizophrenia, this break from reality. This that affects your identity, affects your personality affects your mood. So, meditation is a great practice, I highly recommend it. Certain types of meditation, such as mindfulness, help to disrupt the identification patterns of the default mode network, we've got brain scanning research about this. So this is, you know, this is why meditation has been practiced forever. And people use it to come to spiritual awakening and spiritual realization. So we do that we meditate. Know that you have an ego. Anytime you find yourself over identifying with anything that isn't you just remind yourself I have a name. I'm not my name. I am you know, I have a body. I am not my body. I have thoughts. I am not my thoughts. Emotions, I am not my emotions. I have sensations, I am not my sensations, right? So we start to dis identify or detach from the ego. And again, the spiritual trap is just replacing that with a different set of stories about yourself. I am a 15th level Ascended Master. I live on a cloud. I shoot laser beams out of my fingertips. I don't know. I don't mean to, you know, I am I am joking. I'm not making fun of anybody's particular system. I don't know enough about them to do that. But what I what I do see a lot is this

this lack of humility, which underlies a lack of understanding about who you really are. If you knew who you really were at an experiential level, that you are an infinite, undying, unborn being that is beyond time and space that is interconnected with everything in this universe that is a part of source that carries a divine spark. You are part of God you are part of source you're part of the universe. You would have real self esteem. You would have real self esteem. Maybe I'll do a whole podcast on spirituality and self esteem. Anyway, I have been talking for longer than an hour. I am going to wrap this up. I hope you are happy and healthy. I hope this has been very interesting information for you. And I will talk to you very soon

Announcer: 1:05:19

You have been listening to speaking spirit with your host, John Moore. For more info or to contact John go to maineshaman.com That's maineshaman.com

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