The wonderful thing about Consciousness is that it doesn’t let you get away with anything. I had just finished the first day of September feeling rather pleased with myself (the first sign that Ego was taking over: Consciousness does not feel “pleased” with itself, rather its manifestations are of love and gratitude; the basic difference is that feeling pleased with oneself is something that ‘enters’ and inflates, where as love and gratitude expand, open and gush forth; the first separates, the second joins) for publishing a rather tongue-in-cheek piece which had its risqué parts, although I should have suspected that something was amiss when I realized I had sent it to my grandchildren and felt obliged to contact my children and warn them (the discomfort was a sure sign: Consciousness produces no discomfort only the desire to serve more). 

            The second sign was my son’s suggestion that I remove his children’s names from my mailing list, especially if I was going to talk about dildos. That should have been the clincher that Ego was using something possibly harmful for another to build itself up, but as my daughter lovingly wrote back that no, please to keep her children on my mailing list and that it was a privilege to be able to read my writing, Ego kept its stance, suggesting scornfully that my son was indeed becoming close-minded.

            A third sign was that I did not send the notice of my new publication to the gentleman I had just met so I was semi-conscious that there was something not exactly agreeable in it that might frighten away further contact.

            As if that weren’t enough, there was a final warning signal. Before turning off my computer in the evening, the last thing I did was check the “blog stats” to see how many “readers” I had gotten with my ‘saucy’ invitation to ‘enjoy’ my risqué piece, and was pleased (once more that inflated feeling) to see that the point on the graph had gone quite high. Even this did not warn me.

            Ego had so successfully moved back into the place that had been overly familiar to me when I was writing professionally way back when -that place that wanted above all to be important and draw attention- that the minor discomforts of Consciousness were pushed aside and I turned in for the night with a satisfied smile (another mark of Ego) on my face. Fortunately, with sleep Ego loses the battle and Consciousness –using the tools that Ego itself puts at its disposal- makes its point. We call it dreaming and what it is –from my experience- is Consciousness using the elements of the Ego-mind to send us a message many times garbled, many times in symbolic form that we find so difficult to decipher. I dreamed. This time it was not necessary to remember what I had dreamed. Upon awakening suddenly at 5am,  as if pulled from sleep by some urgency, I realized I had been dreaming. It was not, in this instance, necessary to remember the dream: the message was uncomfortably lodged in my heart. My mind leapt to the writing of the day before and the heart contracted telling me in its own language that I had to fix it. In the dim light of dawn, I could so clearly see  that part of what I had said could be read as arrogant, unloving, and even disparaging  by men, and the women that love them alike. Consciousness would not let me sleep again so I rose, made myself a cup of coffee and sat with the piece carefully rewriting the part that suddenly seemed offensive and unnecessary.

            This is not a small thing after having lived so many years from the Ego without a clue of why I was so miserable. To be able to see myself, accept it and make it right to the degree that I can is something definitely new in my life. It isn’t that I have never said I was sorry; on the contrary: I used to say it way too often, specially first to my parents and then to my husband. But the motivation behind it in those days was to regain their love and assuage their anger so as to get back some measure of control over their lives. Now it is completely different. It is my own heart I am making amends to when I correct Ego stances that hurt (and they always hurt) because the pain perceived is not that someone might not love me anymore, but that I have been unloving to another human being and this is really the pain, there is no other. So I beg my own heart to please forgive my ego-ness and I promise to begin again and I make amends by correcting that which might be perceived as harmful, and little by little the heart grows softer and the chest relaxes and a warmth spreads up from the chest to the throat bringing tears to my eyes, and then I begin once more to feel love and gratitude as I cry wholeheartedly onto my keyboard.

            I thank Consciousness for being there and understand that it is necessary and even normal to fall back again and again into the confines of Ego so attached to self-importance until one day, perhaps, if Life wills it, I will be free.