No Thing

The ego, I am led to believe, has its uses.
Most of them, from what I can see, purely malign when considered against the well being and continued existence of most of Life.
I seem to intuit, however, that I'm missing the point of the ego's function here. Something to do with needing an ego to address egomania in the first place? I don't know.

But I have found a very useful little method for – not kicking it into submission, but gentling it into something like a profound doze. Not ego death – ego sleep. Or cat nap, as the case may be.
The detachment of Vipassana meditation is very different from the other regular practise in my daily round – that of Shamanic trance-journeying. The one requires attention, then a deliberate letting go of attention, while the other is a lot more mental sweat – probably because a Shamanic trance is entered into when something actually needs fixing, in myself or another being, while the Vispassana is purely for teaching this particular ego to let go its sometimes vice-like grip on my mind.

As a prime example of rambunctious free will – and concomitant ego – myself, I often run my soul hard up against the malign results of disorderly, demanding ego. Temper tantrums, wounded pride and self-entitlement are some of those ego-effects which I have to deal with in mySelf on a frequent basis.

So I've taught myself to take a world-loading breath, and intone What am I? I am No-One at intervals throughout a trying day. This is alternated with the mantra What am I? I am Every One.

For the two question-and-responses are telling me the same thing: that I Am, in fact, No One. No One at all, a free-floating consciousness of the Cosmos which, by dint of its No-One status, has no needs and no demands to fulfill. At the same time, I am Every One – something I have demonstrated to my ego many times over – and as such have no needs external to my Self, for I Am it All. A part and the whole, Earth-created and Earth-rooted.

In this fashion, I have noticed a gentle lulling of the vicious edge of ego: a drowsiness, a slumber, wherein the poor little “me” is hypnotised into submission to the ultimate ground of all being.

And there I find my Self – laying where I left it, patiently waiting for me to slip it on again, and semi-dissolve into the World, where I am rock and green shoot, beggerman and thief, lover and beloved. Just as I have always been. And you are That, too.