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.”
