In those moments when I know how unimportant I am in life, it is almost unbearable. It helps me understand why grandiosity continues despite its ridiculous exaggeration of the importance of my thoughts, feelings and actions. Being mostly retired from psychiatric practice the last few years, however, my own irrelevance becomes more and more inescapable.
We humans have an innate sense of grandiosity that helps us survive and prosper. Galileo's discovery that the earth is not the center of the universe was just the start of a period of scientific discoveries that bruised our collective ego and demonstrated how we are infinitesimally small parts of a minute ecosystem in a vast universe.
This week, my exaggerated sense of self-importance seemed clearest in yet another area as my “sticky thoughts”--the material worries and desires I can't seem to get out of my mind—continued to try to distract me from my spiritual intention.
Two weeks ago, I focused on the importance of waiting out your emotions when they have you in their grips, for they will lessen far sooner than you might expect. By waiting them out, you see for yourself that they are not as powerful as you probably thought.
Overblown pride is always there pushing us to think more highly of our opinions than is ever quite justified. It clouds our thinking and continually subverts our efforts. It creates a slippery slope that once we start falling it's hard to stop. The more sensitive we become to the messages in everyday life, the easier it becomes to catch ourselves before we get too out of control.
In the last few newsletters, I have been explaining how my own everyday life provides regular opportunities for me to fight against my overly high self-regard. In this newsletter, I'd like to focus on the first step that I take in dealing with excessive emotions and the thoughts they create. It is putting up a giant stop sign in front of that emotion.
Before we decode many messages and realize their implications, it's as if the spiritual dimension were a distant imaginary world. We can think of it in any way we want and no one can prove us wrong. As we begin decoding messages, we start to feel as if we are blind, bumping around in a spiritual world but unaware of its order.
In recent newsletters I have been writing about how to get more out of your messages by taking what you learn from the more obvious messages on which your spiritual beliefs rest, combining it with what you can learn from others' messages and using this combined basis to interpret whatever happens to you as being a subtle form of spiritual feedback that you can now decode.
One of the unending tasks in spiritual development is decreasing our egotism so that we can see situations as they really are. In this newsletter, I'd like to explain how viewing events in everyday life as messages help keep this agenda in focus.
