The Central Place of the Ego in The Waking Down in Mutuality Process

Part 1 |  Part 2 |  Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

A personal consideration by Krishna Gauci
This was written as a response to a gentleman who wrote asking about comparing different realizations and the way that ego is held in WDM as compared to other teachers and schools. Please remember that this is my own personal consideration which is a result of both my exposure to spiritual traditions as well my own experience of the WDM work in my own body and the bodies of those I've worked with over the last 12 years. I'm not speaking for anyone else.

Part Five
The Urgent Need for this Approach Today:

The main thing that stands in the way of ego transcending its limits is ego not being allowed to be (limits). What you resist persists. So rather that resisting or even worse denying being (or having) an ego, we live as consciously inviting and allowing the sense of being an ego (and a body) and that is what I mean by "embodying ego".

We consciously choose to be egos as well as bodies. We recognize that we've resisted being here as both the body and the ego, even as we've been "forced" to (not quite) be here by virtue of our physical birth. We have resisted being what we are, and now we embrace the whole thing.

The consequences of the denial of the reality of having ego can be devastating.

This is seen nowhere more clearly as in the spiritual world that has unfolded in the West in these last five decades.

The capacity for further development after awakening has been distorted by the notion that one's ego does not exist, or that it is a minor part of us that is merely to be tolerated. Those who are of the "kinder gentler" ego tolerance do not embody the ego in the sense that they do not have a paradigm (or holding container) large enough to allow them to integrate ego in the way Waking Down does in mutuality, but at least they recognize that they have one and are not fighting it.

Unfortunately those teachers who are in total denial about even having an ego can be incredibly brutal in their treatment of their students, who are thought to be egos that need to surrender into non-existence. Students of course do not want to displease someone who they believe is simply an egoless empty vessel of the divine. So they submit to an unskillful unrefined awakened ego that believes it does not exist (as an ego).

Without understanding that ego is the central thing that must be embraced, developed and brought into accountability through mutuality, an awakened teacher can at times be more dangerous than they are helpful. In particular those teachers who claim that they no longer have egos at all tend to be the most obvious and reckless egos. Without a teaching that welcomes and develops the ego consciously, the awakened ego can become unconsciously destructive. It ends up resembling nothing as much as an immature demanding child even as it exhibits genius and awakened power.

One of the most important gifts that Waking Down in Mutuality has to offer to the Spiritual world of the twenty-first century is the context in which fully embodied individuated egos can have the room to grow into mature Divinely Human Beings. There is a great potential in the creative aesthetic power that can be unleashed as we move out into the larger world with this more natural, honest, integral vision together.

2012 Krishna Gauci