Home Philosophy and Psychology The Art of Peaceful Living: Part II

The Art of Peaceful Living: Part II

Ozodi Osuji Ph.dMarch 7, 202619 Mins read0

The Art of Peaceful Living: Part 11

OBTAINING INNER PEACE REQUIRES ONE TO GIVE UP ONE’S SELF-IMAGE

by Ozodi Osuji

Obtaining inner peace and living in peace is really quite simple. However, make sure that you understand what that means. It means giving up the self-concept and self-image that you assiduously created in your childhood and have been defending because you believed that it is who you are. It means letting the self that you made, and thought was your real self, die, and for a different self that you are not aware of to live through you.
You made the ego separated self and are proud of it; it is your creation, your handwork, your idol; you judge everything in your world with the standards of your ego self-concept. If you do not have it, you would no longer know how to judge anything as good or bad; you would keep quiet.
All advanced religions teach their members to metaphorically die to their self and be reborn in another self; to let the self that plays God go and replace it with the self that accepts that God created it, and it loves God and all people.
Jesus allowed his self-image to die, and a new self, the Christ, loving self, is reborn in him. To be a Christian is to die to your ego and be reborn as God created you, his son, egoless, unified with him and all people. The old self dies and the Christ that God created one as comes a second time to one’s life.

SEPARATION FROM THE REAL SELF AND RETURN TO THE REAL SELF, AND ITS CREATOR, GOD

Our real self is the self that God created; in correct terms, it is an extension of God because it is one with God, with no space or gap between them.
Our real self, aka the son of God, decided to leave its home, unified spirit self, aka God and his heaven, and go live in a universe that offered it the opportunity to live as a special, important, powerful self that created its self (created its ego separated self, created its self-concept, created its self-self-image). It contrived to be born on earth, a place of space, time, and matter, and for it to be housed in a body that gives it a sense of boundaries from other selves and everything.
It contrives for its body to be precarious and vulnerable so that many things in the physical and social environment irritate it, cause it pain, and make it feel like they are about to destroy it; it contrives for parents and other significant others not to really love it so that it feels attacked and abandoned.
Feeling all alone and irritable, it struggles to live. It defends its body with food, medications, clothes, and shelter, and defends its ego self with the various ego defense mechanisms (repression, suppression, denial, dissociation, displacement, projection, rationalization, sublimation, reaction formation, minimization, fear, anxiety anger, acting out, pride, shame, sadness, avoidance, wish for a grandiose self, etc.).
It puts itself where it has other egos in bodies that do terrible things to it, so that it feels attacked and defends itself by either counterattacking those it perceives as attacking it or avoiding them and feeling hated.
According to the judgment of our world, what the ego is doing is realistic relative to the exigencies of the ego’s world.

SALVATION IS LETTING THE EGO GO AND REPLACING IT WITH A UNIFIED SELF

Now one must deliberately tell oneself that one is not the ego separated self, not the self-concept, not the self-image, not the body, and one does not know who one is.
Once you accept that you are not the self you know at the conscious level and do not defend it, then you keep your mind empty, void of all ego self-concepts and wait until your real self, by itself, begins to operate in the mind that you have removed all self-concepts and self-images you made to replace the formless self that God created you as. You resolutely accept, for the time being, that you do not know who you are and do not construct another self that your experience on earth deems appropriate.
Do so, and in a little while, you begin to feel free, feel like you are light and are carried along by forces beyond your control. Don’t panic, just go along with not knowing.

THE HOLY SPIRIT

When all of us pursue the special, powerful self, the self we created, and are separated from the whole self, God, God is no longer able to communicate with us. He created another self that is wholly spirit, not a separate ego, and placed him in our minds.
The Holy Spirit is lodged in our right minds, in the metaphoric Christ side of our minds, whereas the ego is in the metaphorical left mind.
Now that you silenced the ego left mind, the Holy Spirit, representing your real self, the union of God and his son, begins to direct you. He was always directing you, even when you were living from the ego, except that you were not listening to him. Now you listen to him and do nothing without pausing and asking him what the best behavior for you is.
The Holy Spirit guides you to do what serves your higher good, which also serves other people’s higher good.
Love is what serves our highest good, so the Holy Spirit guides you to love your real self and other people’s real selves.
Since other people and you do make mistakes, it guides you to forgive all of us, including the harm to our egos and bodies. When you forgive the other person, since he is you projected out, you forgive yourself. In forgiving others, hence forgiving you, you live from love, and living from love means living in peace.
When you forgive other people, do good to other people, you are really forgiving yourself and doing yourself good.
The best act of selfishness is to forgive other people, hence forgive yourself, for forgiveness returns you to the awareness of love.
In forgiveness, you have overcome the ego that sees you as the separated self and asks you to defend it when other people attack it. If you continue loving all people, you feel peaceful.
Living from love sometimes gives you a glimpse of other worlds. Occasionally, you see our world disappear and be replaced by a world in light forms. Indeed, sometimes you see the entire physical universe, which is an illusion, disappear, and you experience yourself in a formless light world.
The latter experiences are for advanced folks on the spiritual path and are not our goal here, but if you experience them, so be it; if not, don’t worry about it.
Each of us chooses when we awaken from the sleep of self-forgetfulness, and you may have chosen not to awaken in this lifetime.
Our present goal is living in peace; you will know when you are living in peace because it is correlated with your jettisoning your ego, self-image, and living from an inner self that you may call the Christ self, the Holy Self, the Buddha Self, or Chi, or whatever you choose to call it. Peace is our present goal, not transcendence of the world.

FORGIVING THE COMPULSIVE LIAR

A young person around me is always telling lies about his grandeur, claiming to be powerful and God-like. I felt irritated by his constant lying. One day, I realized that he was really asking me to pity him. Since he is me, he is asking me to pity myself for my own lies about my identity (our true self is Christ, the son of God, but we deny that self and claim to be an ego separated self, a lie). He is here to enable me to forgive and love him despite his compulsive lying, and in doing so, to forgive and love myself; in loving both of us, we are saved from our egos’ need to seem self-created and important.

FORGIVENESS IS THE MIRACLE

According to Helen Schucman, it is a miracle to forgive people who wronged one because we came to this world to be at war with each other, attack each other, and defend our egos’ false selves; all the institutions of this world are based on people defending their self-images. To overlook a person who attacked you is to perform a miracle, to see him as one with you, hence regain the awareness of oneness we had in spirit.
Remove the ego defenses you use to defend your separate self, and you return to the awareness of your unity with all people, and in it, feel peaceful and happy.

AS LONG AS YOU HAVE DESIRE FOR SELF IMAGE, SELF CONCEPT, IDEAL SELF, SEPARATED SELF, YOU WILL BE AFRAID, AND HAVE ANGER, PARANOIA, MANIA, AND OTHER MENTAL DISORDERS BECAUSE YOU ARE TRYING TO MAKE THE UNREAL, SEPARATED SELF REAL, IN AN UNREAL WORLD OF SPACE, TIME, MATTER, AND BODIES. THEY GO TOGETHER AND DISAPPEAR WHEN YOU GIVE UP THE DESIRE FOR EGO IDEAL.
HOW SIMPLE IT IS TO RETURN TO PEACE AND SALVATION, DESIRE NO SELF IMAGE, SELF CONCEPT, AND IDEAL SELF, AND DO NOT DESIRE A SELF IN BODY, LIVING IN SPACE AND TIME, AND WHILE STILL LIVING IN SPACE AND TIME, DREAM, YOU ARE CARRIED ALONG GENTLY BY YOUR HIGHER SELF.

WHY IS IT A MIRACLE TO FORGIVE AN ATTACK ON ONE?
THE NORMAL LOGIC OF THIS WORLD SAYS THAT WE ARE BODIES AND URGES US TO DEFEND OUR EGOS AND BODIES WHEN ATTACKED; NOT DEFENDING OUR EGOS AND BODIES IS TO REJECT THE LOGIC OF THE WORLD THAT WE ARE EGOS AND BODIES THAT NEED DEFENSE TO EXIST AND RISE ABOVE IT.

In this world, one correctly perceives constant attacks on one’s body and ego and defends it with food, medications, clothes, shelter, and ego defense mechanisms. This is very realistic if one wants to survive as a body and ego; every person does that.
We establish rules for our mutual survival, but each person looks after their personal survival more than other people’s survival. Defense is appropriate for our survival on Earth, and we all know it.
The miracle is to see the attack on your ego and body and not defend it but forgive the attacker. To do so, you must have judged yourself as not the body and ego, and that you are spirit, and eternal.
That is to say that it is expected of you to defend yourself; all our social institutions, such as police, courts, judges, prisons, wardens, schools, and governments, are designed to defend our individual and collective egos and bodies. Now you decide not to defend yourself and go beyond ego rationalism. This is the real miracle.

THE MIRACLE IS TO FORGIVE THE ATTACKER INSTEAD OF ATTACKING HIM AND DEFENDING YOURSELF

The miracle is interpersonal; it is between you and other people. Other people did something bad to you, and you overlook it, forgive it, only to realize that you forgive yourself, since they did to you what you did to you, and you did nothing to you, and they did nothing to you, since what you perceive as being done is done in a dream and has not been done in reality.
If you do so, that is forgive, perform the miracle, even once, you have escaped the definition of yourself as an ego in body, as separated from God and you experience yourself as a son of God, Christ and know yourself to be one with God and in that state is eternal and permanent and changeless, you cannot change the way God created you, one with him, formless spirit, you have no power to alter the self he made you, unified self.
Your identification with the ego was a symbol of your presumed power to alter who God made you as, one with him, spirit, not ego and body.
You have forgiven God’s one son (you and all people).
To see yourself as ego and body and defend it is to say that you have the power to change the way that God created you, formless spirit and one with him and all creation.
I have finally understood A Course in Miracles; it had stumped me; it is now time to live it, to not see myself as ego in body and not defend my ego and body when others attack it, those I asked to attack it.
For me to attack myself is insane, but to not appreciate the insanity of self-attack, I make other people attack me and thus feel angry at them and avoid seeing that it is I who attacked me.
I attack myself, but to avoid accepting that I attacked myself, hence not knowing that it is insane to attack oneself, I made other people attack me and thus see it as rational for me to defend myself when in fact I attack myself through others, hence am insane.
But to accept that I did not attack me, and that other people did not attack me, is to accept my innocence, other people’s innocence, our holiness, sinlessness, guiltlessness, and sanctified state in God.

TO SAY THAT BLACK PEOPLE DISCRIMINATE AGAINST THEMSELVES, ARE RACISTS AGAINST THEMSELVES IS TO SAY THAT THEY ARE INSANE, BUT TO SAY THAT OTHER PEOPLE DISCRIMINATE AGAINST THEM, ARE RACIST IS TO MAKE OTHER PEOPLE INSANE AND KEEP BLACK PEOPLE FALSELY SANE; WE ARE SANE TOGETHER.

But since other people, whites, are black people, then it is black people who attacked themselves, discriminated against themselves when white folks discriminate against them, hence it is black folks who are insane. But since they did what they did in a dream and have not done it, then they are still sane and innocent, and so are white folks.
This is an amazing way of looking at things!

MY PERSONALITY IS TOTALLY NECESSARY AND RATIONAL ADAPTATION TO THE WORLD GIVEN MY PAINED AND IRRITATED BODY, AND SOCIAL EXPERIENCE.

Each human being’s personality is a correct and necessary adaptation to his body and society, and the time in history he was born, and that he chose to be born. There are no accidents. This does not make the personality healthy; in fact, most of them are abnormal.
Each person thereafter will choose to let go of his identification with his personality, which is his ego and body, accept that it is not who he is, say to himself that although his personality is realistic to the exigencies of his body and society, that he is not his body, society and personality and accept that he could not remake him from the way God made him, formless spirit and do so and awaken.
He will then resurrect his real self, because to be ego and body is to be dead. Resurrected like Jesus Christ, he is no longer his body and ego but can appear in his body to his people, eat with them, knowing that there is no body, no food, no world, but those seem there to teach those who are not yet awakened from body and ego.
A miracle is that which supersedes what we empirically perceive as natural laws, is supernatural, and goes beyond our normal conception of reason, beyond how experience shows us that things are done on earth.
On Earth, when you are sick, your body, as part of nature, needs natural intervention such as medication and surgery. But if praying makes your body heal, we say that it is a miracle. On earth, we are all motivated to live in body and perceive attacks on us and defend ourselves, but do not allow the attackers to destroy our bodies and egos.
To forgive attackers is a miracle, is unnatural earthly behavior. And yet, instead of being destroyed by the forgiven attack on one, one lives; Jesus Christ forgave those who destroyed his body and yet lives, is resurrected from death, gave himself another earthly flesh body, then a light body, and finally a bodiless, formless self, his true self in eternity.

CHANGE OF PERCEPTION, FROM EGO TO CHRIST

The goal of A Course in Miracles is to change one’s perception. Currently, we perceive ourselves as our egos and bodies and defend our egos and bodies; it wants us to change that self-perception to seeing ourselves not as body and ego, but as part of God, as the son of God, as a unified spirit self.
To change one’s perception of one’s self from ego to Christ, one must accept that even those things that happened to one when one identified as the ego in body were not accidental but meant to offer one the opportunity to change ones perception, to reinterpret those events, not from ego perspective that says attack is real, defend yourself; attack is on the body and ego that do not exist, except as in a dream therefore do not defend your ego and body and then you will know that they do not exist but as long as you desire and defend your ego and body they are real for you and exist for you.

IF YOU DEFEND YOUR EGO AND BODY, THEY ARE REAL FOR YOU

Only the defenselessness of the ego and body, first done on faith, makes you experience the alternative self it promises, the eternal self. But as long as you defend the ego, it is real for you, and you will not transcend it.
The goal of A Course in Miracles is to tell you that you are the son of God, the Christ; it wants you to affirm that you are the son of God daily; I am the light of the world, I am not body or separated self.
Affirmation of these mantras convinces your unconscious mind that you are they and urges you to give it a trial in your daily behavior; that is, your inner self accepts that you are eternal, and then your daily behavior sees yourself as the eternal Son of God, hence the ego is dead in you, and you are reborn as God created you, Christ.

A COURSE IN MIRACLES DENIES THE EGO, BODY, AND WORLD

A Course in Miracles denies the reality of ego and body; it is a denial of the world of space, time, and matter, our bodies and egos. This is to be done by the individual, without waiting for other people to do so; if you do it and experience the alternative self and world, then you can teach it.

SUBJECT

J says that she would rather die, kill herself, than be a human being, a neanderthal who is evil and eats children. She said that she is God and that people should call her God. Of course, she is at root a son of God who is one with God, but so are all of us, minus our identification with ego and body, which makes us evil.
She said that we are trying to find our other half. She denies black and white Americans, she calls evil neanderthals and identifies with native Americans, whom, like Rousseau, she sees as noble and all good (but alas those Natives do kill people, do enslave people).

GIVE TO CAESAR WHAT BELONGS TO HIM AND TO GOD WHAT BELONGS TO HIM.

Folks seem to have the impression that if you forgive criminals, they will stop being criminals. This is not true.
People inherited different bodies and had different childhood experiences; they consequently have different personalities. Some are sociopaths, psychopaths, and antisocial personality disordered.
Psychopaths have no conscience and do not feel remorse for doing bad to other people; in fact, the sadists among them seem to enjoy hurting other people. Such people will keep on murdering people, raping people and children, stealing, and engaging in other amoral behaviors despite your forgiving them.
Such people are at the lowest end of human evolution; they are closer to animals than to human beings. These people understand only inflicting pain on other people. Therefore, we must have a government with its laws and law enforcement apparatuses (police, courts, judges, prisons, prison wardens, and so on). Such people need to be hunted down and arrested, tried, and imprisoned for their criminal behaviors. You do not bother trying to understand why they did what they did or preach that they ought to do the right things.
They will stick a knife into your back and take your money and laugh and call you a fool for allowing them to steal from you; indeed, they will see you as a fool for not protecting yourself from thievery.
Simply stated, some people appear to have no souls and need to be supervised and controlled with the dispassionate fists of the law. Talking about God, oneness, forgiveness, and love is for developed human beings, who are less than ten percent of the human population. Ninety percent of the people are more like animals than human beings; they need to be treated as we treat predatory animals and beasts.
Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan), John Locke (Second Treatise on Government), Niccolo Machiavelli (The Prince), and other political philosophers have written on why we need governments; we do not need to rehash their arguments here.

THE EGO GOES OUTWARDS SEEKING WHO ONE IS; SPIRITUALITY URGES ONE TO GO INWARDS TO FIND ONE’S ALREADY PRESENT SELF

In childhoods the human child uses his mind to construct an ego separated self, an ego ideal, ideal self-image and ideal self-concept and places them outside of him, as a kind of goal post and struggles to reach them but the post is always changing so he never reaches them; attain one ego ideal self and another replaces it so that one lives in perpetual anxiety from trying to reach a nonexistent self.
The ego ideal self-image has literally never existed; it is just a desired self that one identifies with and struggles to attain and will never attain.
On the other hand, spirituality tells one that one’s real self, the son of God, is already inside one, and for one to look inwards and stop looking outside to experience it.
The ego tells one that it is pride, arrogance, and grandiosity to see oneself as the son of God, one with God (that is what they killed Jesus for claiming, blasphemy). The ego wants one to humiliate oneself by denying one’s real self, formless son of God, and accept one’s false self, a self in form, a small, nonexistent self.
Accepting your true self, part of God is the truth, not pride, arrogant, and grandiose, as the ego says; it is denying your true self and identifying with a false self that you yourself made, the ego ideal that is arrogance and prideful (hence it makes you feel anxious, sad, angry and personality disordered and other mental disorders).
Accepting the true self that God gave you and whose nature you did not create or define makes you truly humble and realistic. Accepting the real self, the son of God, Christ, gives you peace and happiness, whereas pursuing the ego ideal gives you conflict and a lack of peace and joy.
Which is better, peace or conflict, Christ or ego, God’s creation of you or your self-creation, truth or illusion?

THE CEASATION OF THE DESIRE AND PURSUIT OF IDEAL SELF-IMAGE IS MENTAL HEALTH

Mental health professionals write a lot about mental disorders, and the mental disorders seem to exist by themselves. But the more you understand them, the more you realize that they all emanate from the desire for a grandiose self-image, self-concept, and separate ego in general. If you stop desiring to be an important, powerful, separated self, your fears, anxiety, anger, paranoia, personality disorder, and even schizophrenia and depression, and mania (bipolar affective disorder) go away.
Stop desiring a big self, and not only will you feel peaceful and happy, but you will also be mentally healthy.
Indeed, if you stop wishing to have a big self, your learning improves. Students’ learning is drastically reduced by the desire and pursuit of ideal self-images.
If you want to have a big self, you become conscious of how well or poorly you are doing in the learning situation and generally fear making mistakes. Making mistakes, which we all must make in learning arenas, becomes so anxiety-provoking in some students that they experience the school place as an uncomfortable place, and some actually drop out of school to avoid failing.
Dropping out of school reduces their enormous anxiety; to reduce anxiety from expected failure, which would make them seem not so big and powerful, they stop going to school and learning.
If the individual gives up the desire for a big self, he automatically feels inner peace, as if there is nothing bothering him in his mind.
What is happiness but that sense of inner void, emptiness? That inner sense of void, without obsessive compulsive thinking designed to enable one to live up to an imaginary ideal self, is what mental health is all about.
Indeed, Void is also what heaven is like. Heaven is the awareness that one is not this or that self or thing; in it, one is just a part of an eternal life that cannot be threatened.
It is the concepts we have of ourselves and things that can be threatened, and to avoid those threats, we defend against perceived threats.
Consider the racist, he spends an enormous amount of time defending his imaginary important self, feeling better than other people (that feeling makes him seem alive in his mind). But there is no such thing as his separated self; in meditation he lets the idea of a separated self to die and gains inner peace (before he gets to that level he feels terror from the awareness that the self he devoted most of life and energy wishing and defending is not real, is a puff of smoke that does not exist but seems to exist when desired and defended).
Listen, stop desiring a ginormous self, and do not defend such an imaginary self, and you feel that you are a part of life and live calmly and happily.
Psychologists talk about people’s various levels of intelligence as measured on IQ scales such as the WAIS, WISC, and Stanford-Binet. They do not always talk about how those who score poorly on these tests are those whose inner world is clogged by fear and anxiety.
We create a society where black people are persecuted, threatened, and traumatized, and have stress and anxiety right from the moment they become self-aware in our world. That anxiety and its pernicious effect reduce their learning speed and actually make them do poorly on what Americans call scholastic aptitude tests.
Remove anxiety, and the self it is protecting, and most people will perform at the level of so-called geniuses.
There is intelligence everywhere in the universe; your mind tunes into it, and the calmer and more peaceful your mind is, the more universal intelligence you access and use in your life.

DAILY MEDITATION

Read this paper; make sure that you have understood what it said and then embark on daily meditation.
For at least an hour daily, empty your mind of all thinking, including the ideas presented in this paper. The ideas are a perspective and not the truth. The truth is beyond words. Just empty your mind of all concepts of who you think that you are, who you think that other people are, what you think that things are and what you think that the events in your life are; accept that you do not know who you are, who other people are, what you see in the world is, what the world itself is, and accept not knowing.
You will feel inner peace. If, additionally, you love yourself, love other people, and forgive those who wronged you, you will see magic begin to happen in your life.
Occasionally, you see our world transformed into a light form of it (which is still a fantasy, not true), and ultimately you will experience our world disappear, and you are in a field of peaceful spiritual light and in it know that you have come home; the prodigal son who was on a journey without distance, a journey to nowhere has finally returned.
You feel at one with the infinite other selves in that field; you know them as one with you, same and equal. In that field of being, there are no other people, no seer and seen, no subject and object; there is just oneself experiencing itself in infinite selves. This is perfect peace and joy. It is our home.
In the meantime, we are aliens in our present world, but we can make it relatively peaceful.

CONCLUSION

Our present goal is to give up the ego false self and start living from our real self, or the representative of our real self, the Holy Spirit, the Chi in all of us.
The person who does what irritates you is asking you to forgive him, and in doing so, you forgive yourself; he has become your savior from the ego and the pain it gives us.
Living without the ego gives us inner peace.