C. G. Jung believes that we need to
go through three births in our lifetime. The first is our physical birth, then
the birth of our Ego, and spiritual
birth of Consciousness. In accordance with that fact, we also undergo three
phases of development in our life. In the first third of our lives, emphasis is
on our bodily growth, in the middle phase of our lives our Ego grows, and the
last third of our lives is the period of our internal development. While at the
first two births the most important thing is the maximum exploitation of the opportunities
offered by the external world. In the third phase, however, the emphasis shifts
on our internal development potentials. Unfortunately, the majority of people
will never experience the spiritual birth for various reasons. Let us examine
the possible reasons for that, to find out what factors prevents spiritual
birth in us.
The Programming of the Mind
Our spiritual birth is usually
prevented by the conditioned deep
programming of the mind. These programs place the development of the Ego in the
foreground, and make efforts to sustain that development until the end of the
life of the individual. The programmings support the progress of the Ego, they
urge us to develop a powerful and efficient Ego for ourselves, and they make us
believe that it is the ultimate goal in human life. These programmings regard
any effort at suppressing the Ego as a sign of weakness that we should be
ashamed of, and that we should avoid at any cost.
These conditioned
mental patterns are realized as various systems of beliefs and
patterns of thoughts in our lives. These patterns of thoughts and beliefs are
not created by ourselves. They have been handed down to us by our parents, our
community and the society in which we grow up, and we have also borrowed some
from the media. We very often accept these ready-made mental patterns and
beliefs uncritically, without any thinking; what is more, we identify with
these patterns that will, in this way, be incorporated into our personalities.
That is how our different convictions
have been created over the years, that is how we have created a system of
values and beliefs for ourselves, and we now organize our entire life based
upon those systems. Those conditioned mental patterns serve as a background to
the events that are happening to us day by day. The majority of our worries,
desires, pleasures and motivations are derived from those mental patterns and
all these, in turn, further reinforce those patterns.
The Social Pattern
All what has been stated above will
lead us to the conclusion that our programmed Mind is a social product.
Reinforcing the
Ego and the never reached spiritual birth, in fact, serve the
interests of society. The most important system of social co-existence on Earth
today is the consumer society. It means that the basis of social development is
economic growth, and economic growth depends on how much we consume.
The most important consumer is Ego,
since all products obtained (house, car, expensive clothes), improve the
imaginary greatness of the Ego. The more commodities or more power we possess,
the more important members of consumer society we are.
If we are able to divert our
attention from Ego, and concentrate on our internal development and our
spiritual birth, our qualities as consumers will considerably drop, since we
are no longer attracted to the things that so far fattened our Egos.
As in the recent decades more and
more people have felt a need for spiritual birth, social strategy changed
accordingly. Spiritual
development has also been made a consumer product, which largely supported
by the survival instinct of the Ego. The Ego, which has been interested in
money and power, now turns towards spiritual development, and disguises itself
in the dress of a spiritual Ego. We try to decorate those spiritual clothes by
adding more and more spiritual knowledge and experience so as to make it more
colorful and individual. With all that, we hope that our spiritual
progress will serve the further increase and eternal happiness of our spiritual
Ego.
Consumer society is all too pleased
to serve us in those needs. A glance at the vivid market of spiritual books,
methods and masters will suffice to convince us about that. Nothing has really
changed; the pattern of the consumer society is the same, only its contents
have been partially replaced.
Spiritual Birth
From the aspect of our spiritual
birth and internal
development, however, the amount of spiritual knowledge gathered, the
spiritual development methods acquired, and the sophisticated spiritual events
we have had in our life are all unimportant.
Spiritual birth can only be the
result of consciousness. Our internal development therefore does not only
depend on our life experience; it depends much more on our ability to divert
our attention from the outside world to our internal world. Are we able to turn
away from the patterns of Mind, programmed by our Egos, and is there a deep
desire to know the true answer to the question ”Who am I?”
The patterns of the consumer society
are determined to prevent us from making the necessary adjustments in our orientation
by gluing our attention to various consumer products or a spiritual development
scheme that involves the Ego. A major element of this spiritual development
pattern is that we are trying to understand the contents of our Minds, to
analyze our thoughts and emotions. Our attention is thus engaged by the various
methods that we are using to examine our thoughts and emotions. That is what we
regard as our real internal world, and we create the illusion of toiling on our
spiritual birth.
From the aspect of our spiritual
birth the–often chaotic–world of our
Mind and emotions is not our real internal world. Our attention should
not be directed to the analysis and comprehension of these; instead, we need to
concentrate on becoming conscious of our existence, to find the center of our
Self behind our external life and personal history. That is our real internal
world.
In the course of our spiritual world
we become conscious of, and alert to that internal center, to that internal
world. Once that has been accomplished, our life is placed on entirely new
foundations. The Mind stops functioning the way it used to and, together with
that, our sense of identifying with the Mind vanishes. The spiritual
Ego, our separate little self disappears, and we are permeated by a permanent,
light presence. The personality is gone, and what remains is silence and
presence, as the real essence of our existence. From that time on, that will
serve as the real foundation for our internal development.
Are you spiritual Newborn?
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This post was republished from Powerofconsciousness.blogspot.com.
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