Always, always, always...what we see is always our self. Again, I don't remember where I read that, who wrote it, but most likely it came to me from "The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment," by Thaddeus Golas. It is the shortened version of another of my favorites, the one about when (not if) we get our toes stepped on, invariably we will find that we've made a decision based on self that has later placed us in a position to be hurt.
I have no idea who first realized and wrote about the phenomenon of our self being our only personal problem, but I know it is found in the "Bhagavad Gita" and in Buddhist literature. I found it first in the "Sermon on the Mount."
I can know that, agreed with it almost upon first reading it, can set you straight the minute you show your lack of doing it (quick, where's my mirror?), and yet Forget Self remains at the top of my To Do list...and without a doubt will be there three days after I'm dead.
Maybe that's why we're born with an ego...it might be that it's God's inside emery board for us to rasp away our ughs, bugs, judgments and jeers. That's how we learn with each seeming failure to love and laugh...inside, at our own self.
Fr Richard Rohr wrote in his "Daily Meditation" this morning, Exclusion might be described as the core sin. If that be so, then we can't exclude ego in our love and acceptance either. Who's kidding whom? If trying to exclude ego by hating it, fighting it, resisting it worked, we'd all be ego free.
Loving our ego does not make it grow stronger; it is accepting our ego with love that gives us a constant to love...and laugh with others about.
Thank you.
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