The Shift Away From Ego To A Life of Meaning - Wayne Dyer Interview

The morning of our lives, the early part of our lives we are almost conditioned to believe that who we are is what we are able to collect, and what we do, and what other people think of us, and to evaluate our essence and who we are as human beings on the basis of how well we are received by others, how much we accumulate, how far ahead we get and so on, but there is something that is very missing in that and that is what we call meaning. The great hunger. The real great hunger that tribesmen said is the hunger for meaning, to know that your life is on purpose.

And if your life is all about what you accumulate and how much you win and what other people think of you, you get a great reputation. The problem with that is that if you are what you do then when you don’t you aren’t and when you are what you have when it disappears your essence as a human being disappears as well. The Shift is really an attempt to teach people what Carl Jung called, “What happens to you when you move into the afternoon of your life.” Which is you begin to focus, not so much on what the ego says, which is what’s in it for me and how much can I get and how far ahead am I than everybody else versus the mantra of the higher self, the spiritual self, is how may I serve, you know god realization, thinking like god thinks.

Interviewer: This all sounds great. I’m sure that everybody around me, for example, would love for me to have a smaller ego, but how do you do it practically?

Dyer: You know, the Dalai Lama once said that if we could take every child on this planet and teach them to meditate on compassion for one hour a week, just one hour a week, in one generation we could eliminate all violence on the planet. Just teaching people to put their focus on reaching out and having compassion for others. And that’s really what happens as you begin to leave the ego behind.

Interviewer: I have and a lot of people who are watching this have very competitive jobs. Are you advising that we should quit our jobs? Or, how do we make this shift that you are talking about and stay in the lives that we have thus far?

Dyer: I would advise anyone to quit a job that doesn’t give them fulfillment and doesn’t make them feel like they are living their life on purpose. I think that if you don’t quit it, it will quit you. It will take you down.
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About THE SHIFT (Book)

The Shift illustrates how and why to make the move From Ambition To Meaning. Such a shift eliminates our feelings of separateness, illuminates our spiritual connectedness, and involves moving from the ego-directed morning into the afternoon of life where everything is primarily influenced by purpose. The Shift doesn’t mean that we lose our drive and Ambition; it signifies that we become ambitious about something new. We make a commitment to living a life based on experiencing Meaning and feeling purposeful, rather than never-ending demands and false promises that are the trademark of the ego’s agenda. As Wayne so eloquently reveals in these pages, we all have the choice to shift our lives From Ambition To Meaning . . . and thereby complete our return to the Source that created us.

Clash With An Enlightened Man ~by Osho

It happened that one Zen master was passing through a street. A man came running and hit him hard. The master fell down. Then he got up and started to walk in the same direction in which he was going before, not even looking back.  A disciple was with the master. He was simply shocked. He said, “Who is this man? What is this? If one lives in such a way, then anybody can come and kill you. And you have not even looked at that person, who he is, and why he did it.”
The master said, “That is his problem, not mine.”

You can clash with an enlightened man, but that is your problem, not his. And if you are hurt in that clash, that too is your own problem. He cannot hurt you. And it is like knocking against a wall – you will be hurt, but the wall has not hurt you.

~by Osho

Find That Separateness Inherently Unsatisfactory ~by Adyashanti

The main force of separation is fear. The experience of separation, although it is illusory, it seems to be a natural stage in the development of consciousness. I even see this sort of ego development with it that comes a sense of separation. It all has to do with how our brain works and the immense power that thought has and it all sort of starts to create this sense of self and so I see that sense of separate self as ultimately illusory but actual quite natural stage of development, but then I think that when you get to the threshold, which I think is where a lot of people are now.

They’ve experienced that separateness and they find that it’s inherently unsatisfactory, not only for oneself, but very unsatisfactory for the world, very unhealthy for the world. And then you feel that pull, right, there’s something else, but that’s when you often start to uncover this tremendous fear, because it’s a sort of death. Moving beyond the separate self it’s a death of an identity. And, on the level of thought, it’s like, it’s a death, it’s very abstract to talk about it or describe it, but when it starts to happen to you, and you literally feel like you’re going to die or you look in and you see the emptiness of the separate self, and it sounds very spiritual, but when you actually see it, it can really be quite terrifying, quite shocking.

~by Adyashanti