THE BEST: EGO REDUCTION IN DEPTH

Both "God Calling" and Eknath Easwaran today are about resisting, the need to resist wrong...to overcome, conquer, wrong.

Easwaran - We need to be able to recognize wrong desires and resist them.

"God Calling" -  Whatever it is must be surmounted, overcome....Do not let a difficulty conquer you. You must conquer it.

Both seem to spit in the face of the one claiming, "Resist not evil," and "We have given up fighting anything and anybody." "Seem" is the word to pay attention to there.

They are both right, they just don't go all the way through to the farthest side where we find that rising to conquer is, in fact, surrendering. All through the rest of both books is the same theme of giving up to win, ceding our ego-power to God-power.

It is that our reasoning mind gets first crack and generally goes the way of the ego, which is always in it to win it, and thus does not like "We have given up fighting" one little bit. However, when we slow our thoughts down to think it through, we recognize that this advice is the first paragraph in the "How To" book of life.

This is the paragraph where we make our decision to conquer through another way than the way we've lived so far; i.e., by our ego-based reasoning mind.

Again, per "God Calling," Remember that life's difficulties and troubles are not intended to arrest your progress, but to increase your speed. You must call new forces, new powers into action.

Easwaran goes on to quote St. Teresa of Avila: We can only learn to know ourselves and do what we can -- namely, surrender our will and fulfill God's will in us.

I believe, as so many spiritual leaders teach, that we win by giving up. Giving up self-determined objectives to be precise. We must let go to get...let go of the good to get the better...let go of the better to get the best. This is also known as "ego reduction in depth."

Thank You.