Quote:
Originally Posted by Michael Chui  You're equating ego with consciousness. Steve is not: he's explicitly separating them. |
Yes, you're right. I think it all boils down to one thing. Whether or not you believe CONSCIOUSNESS is the domain of the EGO. If you believe that to be true, than there *IS* only one consciousness and one ego. That ego is me.
If you believe that consciousness is pure (absolutely no ego) and then there are 7 billion ego's out there, each one seperate with it's own "problems", all connected to consciousness then there really is 7 billion people "out there".
I am more inclined to believe that there is only one ego. Joe Vitale's book "Zero Limits" talks about a Hawaiian psychologist who teaches a method for helping you with your problems by "clearing" the problem within yourself. For example when a womans asks him "My husband does _______ and _______ all the time, how do I fix that?" he doesn't try to "fix" the husband. He doesn't even try to eliminate the habit of blaming her husband in the woman either. He works on eliminating the habit of blaming IN HIMSELF.
It's kind of wacked, but it totally makes sense to me. If you "see a problem", you're seeing YOUR EGO's problem, because YOUR EGO is the only EGO "out there".
On page 8 of the book Joe Vitale lists the following:
"I operate my life and my relationships according to the following insights:
1. The physical universe is an actualization of my thoughts.
2. If my thoughts are cancerous, they create a cancerous physical reality.
3. If my thoughts are perfect, they create a physical reality brimming with LOVE.
4. I am 100 percent responsible for creating my physical universe the way it is.
5. I am 100 percent responsible for correcting the cancerous thoughts that create a diseased reality.
6. There is no such thing as out there. Everything exists as thoughts in my mind."
To me that totally makes sense. Not to say that I am there yet, accepting 100% responsibility for "out there", but every day I see more and more evidence that it is so. I pay attention to "what's bugging me out there" and very often find that it is actually a problem within rather than a problem without.