A blast from the past: c1987
Again, in the calm before the storm of love and abundance, I’m trying to publish as much helpful literature as I can, to aid the newcomers who are expected in large numbers in the not-so-distant future.
The book I’m writing now draws on research from the early 1980s on restorative listening, a specific type of listening designed to help people through an upset.
A distinction made in 1987 caught my eye. I’d entirely forgotten about it, but it has more power now, given all the learning that’s happened between then and now.
The distinction lies in the words “history, act, and issue.”
Many of us are constantly honing the impression we hope to make on other people. We practice our lines and tell and retell our howdido (how did I do?) story until we come out looking good. I watch myself do it all the time.
We divide our efforts at image management into three areas: history, act, and issue.
(1) Creating a self-serving history is how we manage the past to ensure that we come out looking good. We rehearse our story again and again until we have it just right and set that version in stone.
(2) Creating and practicing an act (plus judicious use of our polished history) is how we try to manage the present. We create our lines, practice our poses, and make sure to look around the room when we flash our best smile.
(3) Creating and maintaining issues is how we manage the future. We scatter eggshells around us. Our friends are those who walk on them; our enemies, those who refuse or crush them.
In my view, our ego has no other purpose than that of ensuring the survival and prospering of itself and everything it owns or identifies with.
It camouflages itself in a history, claims entitlement based on an act, and keeps its enemies off balance and at bay with issues.
The ego is the source of a you-or-me, zero-sum, win/lose world.
The ego isn’t bad and wrong. It worked well for Neanderthals, keeping them safe, dry, and well fed. It just cannot reach to the place where real love resides (i.e., higher dimensions than the Third/Fourth).
Our higher dimensional self – whatever dimension it’s on, beyond the Third/Fourth – is the source of a you-and-me, positive-sum, win/win world. We’re told – and shown – that that’s where we’re headed, that that’s the way of the future.
By observing ourselves creating our history, rehearsing our act, and laying the landmines of our issues, we’re watching ourselves create an identity, a house for the ego. I used to call what we then created “the constructed self.”
Awareness is all that’s needed for our housebuilding activities to cease and fall away. What then is revealed is the Natural Self, beyond the ego.