Yahhhhh … not quite.
There are so many ways we anchor ourselves outside ourselves.
We look for love from others when it exists in abundance in our own hearts. And then we blame the other when they don’t love us enough – as if they’re a gas pump.
We base our good estimation of ourselves on the reactions and opinions of others to us. If someone frowns at us, we might go out and buy a new look.
We want others to lift our mood and we blame them for crashing it (“You made me mad”).
What that says to me is that we’re still watching movies, to use Eric Berne’s terms, of our ancient Parent and Child ego states and we haven’t found our present-day Adult yet. (1)
I call mine the Inner Commander. (2) (Not quite Russell Crowe yet.) (3) He may very well be my Higher Self. I don’t know.
I have far less history with my Inner Commander than I do with either my Parent or Child ego states. I don’t regard myself as having a strong and reliable connection to him yet. Getting there.
I have a stronger constructed self or self-image. I selectively remember and forget, polish my public persona, the whole nine yards. So I haven’t dropped the ego yet.
The Adult, as I observe him, does show the way though. Balanced, self-loving, compassionate. The Adult lives in the center, in moderation, in balance, feeding itself by drawing love up from the heart and circulating it around itself and then out to the world.
The more I hang out with my Adult, the more I believe I create these blessings in my outer world (as within, so without; as above, so below).
I think this is what the Buddha meant by the Middle Way, did he not? The string shall not be too tense or it will break or too loose or the instrument will not play?
The Adult combines the divine virtues. Michael once said to me that he looks forward to the day when we perfect, not just one of the divine qualities, but all of them. I would call that Ascension.
It’s becoming more and more possible and realistic to talk about these matters as the love energies continue to gently rise and we feel better and better.
Footnotes
(1) Berne was talking about ego states in what was at the time a seminal work in Transactional Analysis, Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships. London: Penguin, 1964.
(2) Diametrically the opposite of my Inner Hitler/Parent.
(3) In Master and Commander. And, no, I haven’t actually seen the whole movie yet! Only snippets.