Freeing the Self

This morning, as I sat on my meditation cushion, I thought “Today is Monday.” Immediately, concepts that I associate with ‘Monday’ began to arise in my consciousness; thoughts such as “my day off,” “start of a new week,” and “I got to sleep late.” I then realized that ‘Monday’ is a mental construct and that I decide for myself what it means. Granted, to some extent we, the human race, have a shared meaning for many mental constructs such as the day of the week, calendar year and time of day. They help us function together in a somewhat orderly fashion. Yet, on a personal level each of us determines how we operate within these structures. This seemingly small Monday morning realization opened me to a greater awareness of how often I limit myself by the meaning I assign to certain concepts, especially the ones I use to define myself and my world. My guess is that I am not alone.

These meanings become habituated and embedded in our minds. They form the ego structure which most often dominates our lives. Many, if not most of us live within this structure without being conscious of it. The ego structure becomes our comfort zone. We derive a sense of safety and security from these familiar mental constructs. We operate under the false belief that, within this structure of clearly defined meanings, we have some control.  However, these structures can become prisons of our own making. We are often imprisoned by them until we begin to become conscious of them and begin to question them. We have the power, no – we are the power to set ourselves free.

Setting ourselves free from the bonds of the ego structure is in essence the purpose of Lent. In the Christian liturgical calendar Lent is time of preparation for Easter. Easter, in traditional Christianity, is the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In Unity, we also celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, and we honor his resurrection as the physical demonstration of what each of us may experience as the awakening and arising of the Christ within our own consciousness. Awakening to the Christ within sets us free from the self-imposed prison of the ego structure.

Traditional Christianity teaches that Jesus redeemed humanity through his crucifixion and resurrection, thus the importance of Easter. Further, it teaches that if one believes that Jesus died on the cross for his sins that he will be “saved” and know eternal life. In Unity, we teach that Jesus was not here to “save” us through his sacrifice. Instead he was here to show us how to “save” ourselves. In other words, he taught us how to free ourselves from imprisonment within the ego structure. We can only do this by strengthening our conscious awareness of the Christ within and allowing the ego structure to fall away or be transformed.

Jesus knew that in order for us to experience resurrection, which Father Richard Rhor in his book Immortal Diamond equates to the “revelation of the True Self,” that we must also experience death. The death that we must experience is a transformation of the ego structures that we have allowed to define and confine us. It is not that the ego must die as some spiritual teachings suggest, but that our identification with it, as it, must cease. Also, contrary to some spiritual tradition, we must not try to dismantle the ego structure by attacking it. Instead, we must allow the Christ to be the source of our freedom. The Christ within is our power to overcome.

Our attempts to dismantle the ego structure by trying to eliminate it or by dissecting and analyzing it are futile. In fact, that only serves to fortify it. The only way to free ourselves from the ego structure is to strengthen our conscious awareness of the True Self, the Christ within, and allow its Light and Love to dissolve the imprisoning walls of the ego structure.

For this reason, my Sunday morning Lenten lesson series is entitled, “Loving the Self.” I encourage us to commit time daily to the practice of going within to make conscious connection with the Christ of our being, to sit in the heart space of love with it, to see ourselves and the world through the eyes of the Christ, thus to free ourselves to live as the Christ in the world. Freed from the ego structure, the True Self enjoys the space to express in the freedom that it is. This is the promise of Easter. This is the resurrection.

Please join us on Sunday mornings at 10:00 as we explore together how “Loving the Self” is the path to transformation of the ego structure and resurrection of the True Self. This past Sunday, my lesson was “Falling in Love” in which I compared our experience of falling in love on the human level with what it is like to fall in love with our True Self. You may listen to that lesson here or watch it here. This Sunday, my lesson will be “Growing in Love.” I will draw a comparison between what happens in the phase following falling in love with our beloved in human form with what happens as we grow in our experience of “Loving the Self.”