If you want to stay in your current life, unaware and stuck in your unconscious patterns, then by all means do so. It’s a free Universe—or at least the illusion of a free Universe! We don’t allow ego interventions at Ego Rehab. People have to enter of their own accord.
If you’re happy in your comfort zone, there’s no need to step out of this. But for most people the happiness doesn’t last. Life will give you the suffering you need to wake up. Even the lottery winner’s life quickly deteriorates into an unhappy abyss—often even more unhappy than before they won the lottery!
Eventually, if you suffer enough, you may decide that you want out of this cycle of suffering that I’m calling ego (Adyashanti sometimes calls ego a “vortex of suffering”). You have a few choices here: you can commit suicide—not the best option!; you can talk about all your problems to a therapist for years and make a few inches of progress learning all about your unhappy self—mostly a waste of time; or you can wake up! Hopefully you’ll choose to wake up. And the way to wake up is through awareness. Awareness is the way out of suffering. In Ego Rehab, we will learn about our unhappy selves, by the way, but in order to transcend them.
Of course, if you want to, you can stay where you are, stuck in suffering, stuck in your little stories, your little melodramas, your bad dream. That’s all this life is anyway—a dream. If you’re in a comfortable, relatively happy dream, you have little incentive to wake up. It’s suffering that wakes us up, according to Eckhart Tolle.
I’m choosing to wake up and see that beyond the dream is Peace. Beyond the dream there is no need to force or prove or defend anything. There’s just going with the divine flow and resting in Peace. That’s really what Ego Rehab is all about. It’s about transcending the dream of ego and resting in Peace while we’re still alive—and helping others do the same.
Waking up is everyone’s individual path, and no one can do it for you. But it’s helpful to have support. That’s why I’m creating a support-group-based addiction-treatment-type program to help people stay Present and out of their egos. The support groups will meet virtually either by video conference or in online message forums or in person. We will even have a sponsor program like Alcoholics Anonymous to keep you on the Consciousness wagon.
So far I have one live in-person Ego Rehab support group here in the island of Maui. I have 3 members, including myself—lol! (Well, we have to start somewhere! 😅) I’m trying to start a global conversation about ego, and the importance of ego awareness. When I tell people to look at their egos, I usually get crickets 🦗🦗🦗 or defensiveness🫸 (which is ALWAYS ego, by the way). I love it when people say it’s good to defend themselves. I ask them which self they’re trying to defend?! The false self or the higher self/Soul? And the same goes for proving yourself. Which self are you trying to prove? And to whom? To somebody else’s false self?
These are all questions we will be contemplating together in Ego Rehab. Last I checked, my Soul neither needed to be defended nor proven. The only thing that needs to be defended or proven is something that doesn’t exist! Like an illusory ego self 🫥
That reminds me of another great line from A Course in Miracles:
“When you feel the need arise to be defensive about anything, you have identified yourself with an illusion”
So, the choice is yours: Consciousness/God/Peace or illusion!
No pressure, no judgment. Everybody will get there eventually (it may take a few hundred more lifetimes if you don’t make the choice now, though—lol!)… ⏳💡🤩
