Staying in Essence in an Ego-Driven World PDF Print E-mail
Post by Gina Lake   
Tuesday, 27 January 2009 05:57
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It’s not easy to stay in essence in an ego-driven world. Being around egos can pull you into your ego. Being in the world means not only being around egos but also being around advertising, television, and other media that reinforces the ego’s values: Be beautiful, be rich, be powerful, be sexy, be young the media tells us, not just once a day but many, many times throughout our day, through pictures and words.

Pictures are a particularly powerful medium for conditioning us. They go straight through any filters we have to the unconscious and program it. So, although you may not approve of or like the message you are receiving, it’s still affecting you. Pictures, and television in particular, are an especially powerful means for programming children because, unlike adults who may turn off the television or turn away from advertising they don’t like, children sit in front of the television and take it in. They aren’t discriminating enough to know what isn’t true and what isn’t good for them. They take in whatever is presented to them. They soak it up like a sponge. In this way, conditioning is happening every day; it’s not just something that happened when we were young.

Society really needs to take this to heart because adults and children are being programmed in very damaging ways today by the media. They are being programmed to want things they don’t need and to eat things that aren’t good for them. And worst of all, they are seeing violence regularly, which sends the message that violence is a normal way to deal with life, a regular and acceptable response to difficulties. To think that violent images don’t affect children, teenagers, and adults, is to ignore the evidence around us and the prevalence of violence in our culture and even among children, which doesn’t naturally occur. Children naturally hit each other, but they don’t kill each other, and today even this is happening.

To expect that you can stay in essence when you are being bombarded by the ego’s values from the media and by other people’s egos and by the stress produced by an ego-driven lifestyle is expecting too much. So what can you do? When you want essence more than anything else, you create a lifestyle that supports it, that gives it room to flourish. This would be a lifestyle that has much less stress and busy-ness, much less striving, and a generally slower pace. This is what the world needs anyway. It doesn’t need more people racing around after everything the ego wants. That’s what has gotten us in trouble environmentally. In looking for happiness in things, we are destroying the environment and wasting our natural resources.

Consuming will never make us happy. This should be obvious by now. Today, more than ever, there is a need to choose more consciously what we spend our money and energy on. If we give our money and attention to getting what the ego wants, we will perpetuate this ego-driven world. But if we give it to what is real and true and capable of providing true happiness (connections, creativity, learning, growth, service, peace, and love), we will discover that we don’t need anything more and we will finally have enough time to just be, which is what we have always wanted anyway. If you are here to bring essence into the world, then essence will show you how to create a lifestyle for yourself that will support you to do that.

If one by one we begin to create a lifestyle that supports essence, then the tone of our society can turn and become more peaceful, humane, and nourishing in the deepest way. All of the consumption is an attempt to fill a hole that can never be filled—a hole that is the ego, which is never satisfied. All the while, true nourishment is available right here in this simple moment. First, we have to realize that living in essence requires a lifestyle that supports it and not fool ourselves into thinking that we can stay in essence while living a strssful lifestyle that reflects the ego’s values.

Visit Gina Lake's website at http://www.radicalhappiness.com

Flower photo: © Dariusz Miszkiel / Dreamstime.com

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