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"If it's all perfect, that is, if it's the best it can be and there's no room for improvement, why is there this possibility for me to actually operate from such a huge chasm of misperception? It's obviously not the perfect way to operate. -- There must be some reconciliation point between realizing that actions from an unclear mind do have hurtful, detrimental effects and realizing that those actions didn't really mess up anything afterall. ?"

Well, after weeks of contemplating this, I think I'm finding what feels like some clarity. Much of my confusion had to do with the idea of the ego. I apologize in advance if this sounds like a ramble.

For example, much of what I read and study says that the ego (thinking I'm separate from God) is nothing but a misperception, an illusion, that it isn't real and that, basically, whatever actions arise from that misperception, which result in suffering for ourselves or others, aren't real either. At least, that's my understanding that's accrued over the years. And yet, there's a lot of talk in the yoga world about a very real thing called the ego, about overcoming it, denying it, getting out of it, being released from it, etc. I understand that I can't actually be separate from God, yet, I have had very real experiences of actually thinking that I am and actually operating from that mindset, inflicting suffering on myself and others as a result.

So, on the one hand, there's no such actual thing as the ego and, on the other hand, there's this thing called the ego. This is highly confusing to me. How can there be both? How can there be what looks like suffering (effects of ego mentality) going on and, yet, how can it also be said that there's not any suffering really happening? To say that suffering does not exist, (and I did this for a long time, thinking I was understanding what I was saying) yet experience it myself and witness it in others on a daily basis is total denial. I'm finally understanding Donny's point of argument with me over all these years. The two just don't add up. They're incongruent and are polar opposites. To say the ego is an illusion, or to say it doesn't exist, yet operate from it myself and watch others do the same just doesn't gel. I mean, I CAN operate from a misperception, indeed. It's a very real experience for me; it's not a non-experience. In fact, it's my experience and my reality a lot of the time. Has been for lifetimes, probably. And to say it's not real, to expect that to change things, while still operating from it is insane. It'll never be congruent and will never be harmonious. This is/was the crux of my problem with all this perfection stuff. And trying to come to an understanding of all this can be very heady...even for me, who likes heady stuff.

I did a lot of researching through Raj transcripts and found something that really opened the door for me on all this. He uses a microscope analogy to talk about the ego.

He says something like you're in your house, things are going along normally, someone's in the kitchen cooking dinner. You've decided to go into your room and get out your microscope. You decide to put a tiny little piece of tissue or something under the microscope and look through to see what you can see. You become fascinated with what's going on in there and you stay and stay and stay and become further and further engrossed in it. You're not somewhere else. You're not actually in another place. You're still in your house, you're still looking at what's in your house, but you've just narrowed down your view of the whole to a teeny, microscopic part. Someone calls from the other room to tell you dinner's ready, but you can't hear them because you're so immersed in your narrowly focused view. Pretty soon, the microscopic view becomes your world. It's all you can see. And your head starts to hurt because you've been squinching your eyes for so long, you get grumpy because you haven't eaten. And this becomes the norm of how it is to live in your world. Headaches and grumpiness and dizzyness is part of life, it's just the way it is.

And someone comes along and tells you the headache is all an illusion. They say what you're seeing is an illusion, that it's not really what's going on. "Oh, okay," you say. "It's all an illusion, this isn't real," while continuing to stare through the microscope, without stepping back, without doing anything differently.

So, going back to that quote up there that we've been discussing, is it imperfect that I should decide to stare at the tissue through the microscope? No. I could do it because it's there to do. But I'm still in the house. Dinner is still cooking. I haven't really gone anywhere else. I only thought I did. I can experience what feels like a separation, a removal from the house and the dinner cooking and my family in the other room. I can experience actual effects of being off somewhere else in my mind, immersed in what feels like something else; something interesting at first, that soon became an obsession.

So, for me, the ego is just being immersed in the microscopic view. The microscopic view isn't something different; it's still the house. The microscopic view just isn't the big picture; it's an extremely narrow focus. And a narrow focus will hurt after a while. As it should.

So, my reconciliation point with all this has to do with that microscope analogy. The effects from being hunched over the microscope for years and lifetimes are real and experiencable - my headache is real, my dizzyness from squinching my eyes is real...it's definitely experiencable...BUT it's totally unnecessary. The headache comes to remind me to change something - to sit back and widen my view. Once I finally sit back, the suffering doesn't last, it goes away...it doesn't endure. That's the big revelation for me. It doesn't endure.

What endures is grace. No matter how bad my head hurts, no matter how bad things get, it's never permanent. There's always a glimmer of light that penetrates. There's always the little plant that makes its way up through the massive concrete street, somewhere, somehow.

I took the quote from Raj that Erich started the thread with and plugged in "ego." I don't know if Erich or Raj would agree with this, but it helped me. So it read like this:
It is really very dangerous to your Sanity to believe that the ego is an illusion. It is also dangerous to your Sanity to believe that the ego is real, but it has nothing to do with God.

In other words, my words, it's insane to believe that the microscopic view is an illusion, while continuing to sit there and stay immersed in it. It's insane to keep taking aspirin for the headache while continuing to look through the microscope. And it's insane to believe that the microscopic view is real, while totally denying that it's the microscopic view of something larger and omnipresent.

Anyway, that's where I am now with all this. Don't know if it's right or wrong or what, but it definitely feels like it reconciles things for me...at least, for now. There's a lot more, but I'll stop here.

with love,
Carie