What prevents consciousness

Simply put, the ego is what prevents you from being conscious.

The ego (or false self, as some call it), is what you hear as the thoughts in your head. These thoughts also have the remarkable ability to "make" you feel certain things, which in turn influences your behaviour.

So, in essence, your ego is living your life, not you. It's in the driver's seat.

As small children, you learned to identify with certain things, whether they were objects or concepts. For example, you learned that you were a "boy" or a "girl", you learned you were "Joe" or "Grace", you learned the concept of "my"..."my toys", "my food", etc.

As soon as you started to identify with things the ego took over.

Identification with things means that a part of your identity (who you define yourself to be) is tied up in that thing. This is also the beginning of fear. If a part of yourself is in something that is outside of you (again, this can be an object or a concept), there must be fear that that part of you can be taken away, damaged, or lost in some way.

This fear leads to the need to control and possess. Can you see the beginning of the incidious cycle that causes a great deal of suffering in life?

My son, who is three years old, is a living example of the emergent ego. He attacks the dog violently whenever the dog wanders near to him while he's eating something. When I show up at daycare and the other kids are there and come over to say hi to me, he starts, "My mommy!" And heaven forbid you forget his blanket anywhere. To him, it would be the equivalent of losing a limb.

The ego survives on the energy produced by your thoughts and emotions, particularly the negative ones. That is why (if you pay attention ot your thoughts, you will notice this) your thoughts are almost always focused on the past or the future. Neither of which are real, nor do they have much to do with where you are in the present moment.

Have you ever NOT been in the present moment? Were you ever in the past? Will you ever be in the future?

No. You have always been, will always be, and are in the present- the Now. Your ego doesn't want you to know this. If you always live in the present, the ego would dissolve into nothingness.

I'm really just scratching the surface here. I will go deeper into this discussion as I write more. If you are interested in reading a book about this right now, there are three I would recommend, The Power of Now and A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle, and The Secret of Letting Go by Guy Finley.

In the next installment of this blog, I'll talk about who you truly are, if you are not all the things you have learned to identify with.