“So much blood spilled uselessly in the name of freedom, and yet we continue to be slaves of ourselves and of others.” – Samael Aun Weor, The Great Rebellion
When I was becoming a teenager, a new kind of desire started to take root in my consciousness. It wasn’t one of the superficial desires that you’d associate with the intensifying surge of hormones, but rather a profound longing that emanated from the depths of my being. It was the longing for freedom.
At the time, I associated that desire with the freedom of physical independence; of being able to go wherever I wanted to go and do whatever I wanted to do. I had a very intense feeling that I was stuck. My house felt like a cage; my tiny hometown and my school felt like a cage; the country I was born in felt like a cage, and this only intensified my yearning.
Eventually, I graduated from high school, and I moved to another country. I studied at a university in one of the world’s biggest cities and after graduation, I started working at whatever jobs I could find to support myself. I was completely on my own and fully independent. I didn’t have a lot of money, but I felt like I had achieved what I’d always wanted. And yet, even though I had all the freedom I’d been dreaming of as a teenager, I still didn’t feel free.
I was living a typical life, working unfulfilling jobs and entertaining myself with activities that numbed me out instead of making me feel alive, alongside other people who were just as lost as I was. At that point, the feeling of emptiness in my life was starting to exacerbate. I was starting to realise that my concept of freedom was just a superficial idea of the truth; that freedom was something much more subtle, much more elusive than what I had thought.
The growing pains of becoming an adult brought about a lot of suffering, which made me want to go within and figure myself out. And this is when the journey to true freedom started.
As humans, we all tend to be extraordinarily self-obsessed. This is not a judgement; it’s simply a fact of life. And this disposition has its use when dealing with existence in the physical realm, where self-preservation and survival are the prevalent states of being.
However, too much of this incessant focus on the self creates a very limited perspective, which in turn leads to the creation of many psychological defects in the form of concepts, beliefs, feelings, opinions, thoughts, etc… These psychological defects form what we call the ego. The ego is erroneously thought of as a single, unified form, but it is really made up of countless mini-egos, or “I’s”. All these “I’s” are psychological aggregates, or defects that we have developed through our experience.
According to V.M. Samael Aun Weor, these aggregates, or egos, are like different people clamoring about in our internal world. Most of them are strangers to each other; most of them aren’t even aware of the other “I’s”. Each “I” has different motives and goals, and each “I” fights with the others to take hold of our conscious mind, so it can fulfil its personal agenda:
“The poor intellectual animal mistakenly called man, is similar to a house in disorder, where instead of one master, there are many servants who always want to command and do whatever occurs to them.” – Samael Aun Weor, Treatise of Revolutionary Psychology
This explains why we act and feel like different people all the time – because we are in the grip of a different “I” at any given moment. Today, we feel that we are in love with our partner, and tomorrow, we feel trapped in the relationship and leave them. The “I” of desire or attachment has been replaced by another “I” that wants to be independent and carefree. We are satisfied with our lives in one moment, and miserable in the next. We feel abundant and generous one day, and the next we feel stingy and in lack, even when nothing in our external situation has changed.
We are full of conflicting thoughts and beliefs that change from one instant to the next. We don’t even know who we are and what we truly believe in at our core because we are always controlled by the different egos in our interior. We have no true agency over our own consciousness, and no real individuality – we are just puppets of the various “I’s” that form our ego.
We are at the mercy of these countless “I’s”; we are their slaves, and the worst part is, we don’t even know it. How can we free ourselves if we don’t even know we are in prison?
To liberate ourselves in any significant way, we must become aware of the different egos that inhabit our inner world and subconsciously control our lives. We must rigorously observe our thoughts and emotions, and we must discover and reflect on every belief we hold if we want to regain control over our own consciousness and over our own experience.
To begin this work, it’s important to truly understand that we are not our thoughts or our feelings. We must stop identifying with our thoughts and the feelings that they propagate, because almost every thought we have comes from one of those psychological aggregates, those “I’s” that we mistakenly identify with at any given moment. We aren’t the one thinking our thoughts, our thoughts are thinking themselves – and we get completely absorbed in them, not realising that we are the awareness behind the thoughts; the one who is observing them.
The human mind is like a wild animal that is constantly in a frenzy. We are incessantly preoccupied with thoughts, and most of us aren’t able to remain with a still mind for even a minute. That’s why meditation is extremely difficult for most people. But if we remain lost in the whirlpool of our thoughts forever, if we never find a way to tame the wild beast that is our mind, then we will always be slaves to it, and we will never taste true freedom or peace.
True freedom is to be free of our mind; to be free of ourselves, of the innumerable “I’s” that dictate our state of consciousness, our mood, our feelings, and our actions at any given moment. The mind is synonymous with the ego. If we can get out of the grip of the mind, we can get out of the grip of our ego, which is comprised of these different “I’s”, these small egos.
We must disintegrate these psychological defects within us, these infrahuman “I’s” that cause us and the world so much suffering, so that we can free our consciousness and self-realise; so that we can become the awakened Creators that we are meant to be.
Engaging in useless, harmful thoughts constantly drains us of all our psychic energy and prevents us from awakening our consciousness. All of these different egos that live within us are feeding off of our psychic energy, devouring it like black holes. It’s urgent to take back our spiritual power from them, so we have enough energy to free our essence, our true self, which they are covering up. And we do this by observing these multiple “I’s” and bringing them to the light of our conscious mind.
A lot of people are put off by the concept of meditation, because they have tried it once or twice and felt completely overwhelmed by their mind, and unable to quiet it. If anything, we feel our minds go even crazier during meditation. In truth, the mind isn’t really more active while we meditate – we just feel that way, because we are noticing it for the first time. We are observing its mechanical, manic nature for the first time rather than being completely swallowed by it, and it’s overwhelming. We think we have failed and that we just aren’t able to meditate, when in fact, we have taken the first real step towards meditation and towards our intimate freedom.
Meditation must start with self-observation first. We shouldn’t expect to have a still mind right from the start of our efforts. This state of deep meditation may not come for years, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean we aren’t progressing. We mustn’t get discouraged; we must continue to self-observe as much as we can. The more we do it, the more we will start to experience spontaneous states of deep meditation, because that is the natural progression of observing ourselves.
Do not sit down to meditate with the expectation of achieving a state of bliss or enlightenment. Don’t sit down to meditate with any expectations at all. All you need to do is aim to separate yourself from your thoughts to the best of your ability. Become the observer. Notice how your thoughts are constantly flowing across the screen of your consciousness, and notice how easily you get consumed and completely identified with them, then come back to the seat of the observer. Continue to return again, and again, and again. It doesn’t matter how many times you get lost, as long as you keep coming back to yourself, the observer.
Notice how it’s easier to assume the position of the observer when you take conscious deep breaths, and when you relax your body. Notice any reactions to the thoughts and the different “I’s” that you observe. Be mindful of any judgement towards your thoughts – that’s just one ego judging the other egos. The observer is neutral; the observer doesn’t have opinions. The observer just is; it sees, and it welcomes everything that comes through.
Consciously observing our inner world is already a successful meditation, and we soon start seeing the fruits of it. If you feel like you aren’t doing a good enough job, just know that this is the ego talking – observe it and smile. This is no small feat – to self-observe is like a psychological workout; the more we practice it, the more we strengthen the “muscle” that helps us rise above the mind. Even if in the beginning it might feel like we are achieving no progress at all, we must be patient and persevere with this practice, because inevitably, it will lead us to significant internal transformation and closer to our truth, closer to freedom.
Once we start to feel a sense of spaciousness, a sense of relief from our mind and from ourselves, we will begin to feel the truth of who we are beyond our human personality, beyond our body, beyond the programs that we’ve been conditioned with, and beyond the concepts of the intellect. We will start activating a type of higher intelligence, one that is far beyond the rigid and limited rational mind that we are used to identifying with.
It’s a type of intelligence that doesn’t need the concepts or thought forms of the lower mind, because it can comprehend great truths in an instant. We can experience this for ourselves – for example, when we finally achieve a meditative state, we naturally gain clarity about our life; we have realisations and revelations that couldn’t have occurred to us otherwise, because the mind is always cluttering our awareness with thoughts.
These downloads don’t come from the ego mind; they come from our Being, our essence, our true self. The more we connect to our real self, instead of the ego, the more we liberate our consciousness from the chains of the mechanical, self-absorbed mind:
“As long as the consciousness, the essence (the most dignified and decent thing we have in our interior), continues bottled up in the “self”, in the “myself”, in my cravings and fears, in my desires and passions, in my preoccupations and violence, in my psychological defects, one will be in a formal prison.
The sense of freedom can only be integrally comprehended when the shackles of our own psychological prison have been annihilated.” – Samael Aun Weor, The Great Rebellion
We can all verify for ourselves that our mind is the cause of all our suffering. Every situation in our external environment is inherently neutral, until the mind distorts it into a negative one. The mind will create problems out of thin air, and because we are slaves to it and we never question it, we can find ourselves miserable even in the most serene or joyful of circumstances.
What a pitiful existence we lead when we are completely identified with the mind! It’s crucial for humanity to start transcending this state of being. This is the next step in human evolution, but it can only happen through our conscious effort.
When we start to disidentify with our mind, we start to perceive the higher perspective of any situation we might experience. We become able to see the benefit even in a calamity. All fear, anxiety, depression, loneliness, unworthiness, etc., fall away naturally, because they are just constructs of the egoic mind; they are an illusion that we can now see through.
We gradually develop a deeper knowing about the nature of reality and life, and we start sensing the truth of our Being, the truth of who we really are at our core. We start seeing through the illusion of limitation, and we get in touch with our personal power and our free will. Gratitude and love replace the fear we felt before. Life becomes light-hearted, and we start finding joy in the smallest things. This is freedom in its fullest, most profound form; this is the true freedom we are all looking for. It was never the money, the security, or the material possessions. It was simply a state of being within us – a state that can be achieved when we finally overcome who we thought we were.