317. Judas

The Ego  has a tendency to live and grow through each and any means which is not closed to it. If the Ego is stopped in one direction, it seeks compensating expansion in another direction. And if it is overpowered by a flood of spiritual notions and actions, it even tends to fasten upon this very force which is originally brought into play for the ousting of the Ego.
If a person attempts to cultivate humility in order to relieve himself of the monstrous weight of the Ego and succeeds in doing so, the Ego can with surprising willingness get transferred to this attribute of humility itself. It feeds itself through attachment to repeated assertions like “I am spiritual”,  just as, in more primary stages, it achieves the same task by assertions like “I am not interested in spirituality”.
Thus arises what we may call a Spiritual Ego or the Ego which feels its separateness through the attainment of things which are considered to be good and highly spiritual. But from the truly spiritual point of view, this type of spiritual Ego is as binding as the primary and crude ego which makes no such pretensions.

The question could emerge in some of you, whether the spiritual Ego is a supporter or an obstructer of the spiritual development.
Can it meddle in the process of spiritual development, and if yes, then how does it do it?  Yes, the spiritual Ego can interfere with innumerable tricks in the life of the spiritual seeker. These spiritual tricks are manifested in various spiritual mind games. Some of the most important ones  I will go through below.

The Self-Developing Mind Game.

The Ego-dominated mind says: Look for truth! Develop your personality to make it the most sophisticated possible! Be spiritual. The Ego-dominated mind keeps coming up with new and new programs. Do this! Do that! Read this! Study that! Then all your problems will be solved!
You try to obey, but in the meanwhile you are wasting your entire life.

Personality development is one of the most dangerous traps on your Journey along the road. The more energy you invest into, for instance, the decoration of your spiritual mask, the more powerfully you will identify with it, and insist on it so desperately that you will be eventually unable to abandon it! In this way, self-development only polishes the Ego shinier and more impressive. In reality, it is the Ego that instigates the individual’s start of a spiritual Journey on the road. It is a defensive mechanism of the mind! It diverts your attention from the possibility of a real internal change by adding an attractive new mask to your collection! Be aware that Truth is already there in you, here and now in the present moment! This search will only take Truth farther away from you, as it either keeps seeking in the future, or presents old obsolete truths of the past to you.

The “I Want to Reach Enlightenment” – Mind Game.

Nowadays you often hear about enlightenment, so the desire to reach arises in many.
We must, though, ask ourselves the question: who is it that wants to reach enlightenment?
It is, obviously, the Ego! The Ego, that has so far longed for power and money, now fell in love with an another idea: Enlightenment. It wants to be enlightened, intends to extend its power in that direction.
The desire to be enlightened arises in it, but that desire and want are exactly what take it away from enlightenment. It is only possible to desire for something that is outside the Self of the individual, we therefore seek enlightenment outside ourselves, but you shall never find it there. Enlightenment is the innermost core of your Self, you are originally enlightened! As the inner Self is already perfect, there is nothing to be added to it! What can you do then? As Egos, you must forget about enlightenment, as you are not enlightened as Egos!

You must deal with what you are: the Ego.

In the course of Journey you must understand the Ego, one layer after the other. It is only possible if we, as mature Egos, do not identify with ourselves, we give up ourselves. As a result of your observations, you’ll always find new and new layers of the Ego, you become more and more conscious of it, and you are able to shed the layers that have been identified. In this way you realize that desire is just one layer of the Ego. After you reveal the entire Ego, the moment will come when there is nothing left of it.

That is the moment of enlightenment!

Enlightening means that you are in harmony with the Existence, so also with the  present moment.

The “I Want Peace and Tranquillity” – Mind Game.

It is the Ego-dominated mind that longs for peace and tranquillity. It wants to be peaceful and powerful so that its inner quiet can open a gate for the Formless.  The mind nurtures the unconscious hope that in the Formless it will be able to continue to exist somehow. That is why so many seekers seek spiritual experience during their Journey.
In reality, however, inner quiet and Ego, unity and Ego are incompatible with each other. Where one is present, the other cannot exist. The Ego-dominated mind is capable of creating some inner quiet and tranquillity, a dead emptiness and, with the effort of the willpower, it is possible to sustain it for a while. But it is not the quiet of the pulsating, alive internal silence, peace and tranquillity saturated with the joy of Existence. Only a mere image of that kind of peace, created and attempted to be implemented by the mind. You are only able to recognize the quiet of the union, already present in human beings (as this is their real Self), if you are able to give up the expectations, desires, hopes etc. of your Ego-dominated mind.

Eliminating Mind Games.

Consciousness is an indispensable condition for us to recognize the Ego and reach Awakening on your Journey. Otherwise it is not possible to observe ourselves. The witnessing, observing Presence should always be there.
The mind will never understand anything that reaches beyond it. But it tries. In this way, though, it will explain everything from the separate aspect that it currently occupies in the time-space continuity. When one is able to reach beyond that separate focus point and identification with the mind, when the person will also recognize this conditioned state and will also be able to reach beyond that too, in that case, the individual will not identify with the mind, but increasingly with the Consciousness (Witnessing Presence). The Presence will gain dominance over the mind to an increasing extent, and will be expressed through the mind.

Understanding  your ego is the key to understanding your freedom, personally and collectively as a planet. A lot has been said about the ego. You all have your own ideas of what the ego is, but I’d like you to consider the ego from a new light. This new light will help you get a liberating and powerful perspective on the ego. This perspective helps you see that: 1. The human being is, first and foremost, designed! Designed deliberately and functionally for a specific purpose. The human is not a random outcome of evolution. There is design, not randomness. This is the first key to this  understanding. 2. Part of the design is what we call the ego. The ego was designed into the human being deliberately, again for a reason. 3. By design, there is a way to transcend the ego. The explanation for this resistance [meaning the struggle, limitations, fears, worries, negativity, low self-esteem, etc.] to life is that something else has been built into the human machinery besides these positive drives for learning and expansion: an ego. You could say that the ego is the villain in the human drama, since the ego provides the greatest challenge to human happiness. The ego, which is driven by fear, greed, selfishness, and a sense of never having enough, rails against reality, misperceives life, and thus makes poor choices, which cause the suffering that is the grist  for human evolution.

The Journey of a Hero.

Overcoming the challenges presented by the Ego develops and strengthens the hero. Eventually, over many lifetimes, the hero gains mastery over the emotions and negative states generated by the ego, and he develops wisdom, discernment, fearlessness, compassion, and kindness, among other positive qualities. In dealing with difficulties, the hero is made strong and is reconnected with his divine nature. Challenges draw forth and develop qualities of character the hero didn’t know he had, which are the gifts hidden in the challenge.

The Ego, as I am using the word, is the programmed aspect of the human being that causes you to feel separate, fearful, lacking, and at odds and in competition with life and others. The ego is a sense of self that feels small, limited, afraid, and combative. The ego is who you are programmed to believe you are, and it is represented by the stream of thoughts that flows through your mind on a nearly continual basis. This thought-stream is primarily about yourself or about others in relation to you.

OK, so that lays the groundwork for understanding the drama that is our lives.

I’d now like to remind you that all our lives basically form a story. A story that follows a universal template that has been referred to as “The Hero’s Journey”. In fact, most movies that you watch are based on this Hero’s Journey template. This is what the Hero’s Journey looks like:

Now, I  said that the human being is DESIGNED. Part of this design is a PROGRAM, a program that is PROGRAMMABLE. That is how we get conditioned by our upbringing and so on. The ego is a PROGRAM that has been PROGRAMMED and continues to be PROGRAMMED throughout our lives.
From the minute you are born, you start to become conditioned, programmed. You watch, you learn, you model what you see around you. Your society, your parents, your friends, your teachers, your culture… All these program and condition you. You learn to do things that give you pleasure and avoid pain. Avoiding pain becomes the biggest driver of your programming. You build a self-concept. A self-view and a world-view. As such, you can think of the ego as part of the SOFTWARE that runs the human being. Other parts of this software include DNA. But in this case, we are focusing on the ego.

When you think about it, it is actually an ingenious device, this ego. Let’s read more about this heroic life. Did you know that your software is significantly flawed? Contrary to the ego’s perceptions, life is not supposed to be different than the way it is. The ego’s perspective does not reflect reality, which is why it causes suffering. Most people don’t know that the software running them is flawed. They don’t realize that their ego’s map of reality is incorrect and therefore the cause of foolish and hurtful actions and poor solutions. If people questioned this stream of thoughts, this would become apparent, but people don’t usually question their thoughts. People also often don’t question the information they have acquired along the way from seemingly reliable sources, such as parents, teachers, and other authorities, much of which is also untrue, unhelpful, outdated, irrelevant and misinterpreted.
Misinformation and mistaken and limiting beliefs make up the greater part of the conditioning that shows up in the thought-stream. This conditioning, along with many unconscious beliefs, was shaped by people you have encountered and your family, culture, religion, environment, gender, and genetic inheritance, including your appearance, intelligence, health, and personality. This conditioning is the script you have been given, and it largely determines how you will behave—unless the script is examined and questioned in the way I have explained in previous articles.

If you have an ego (which you do), then you have been given a script that doesn’t lead to happiness. So even if you had the most ideal parents and upbringing, you will still need to learn how to be happy, simply because you have an ego that is resistant to and fearful of life and has an incorrect map to happiness.

The conditioned self, which includes the ego, is the character you are playing. This character will either follow the script or become the hero of his life despite the script. Everyone has a latent hero, just waiting to be brought to the surface and developed. The ego pretends to be who you are, but it can never live up to your potential greatness because it has a negative and untrue perspective of life.

The hero’s journey is largely about discovering what life is all about, what is true about life. For this, the hero must be an adventurer, a seeker of the Truth, must be willing to discover whatever might be discovered, even if that isn’t what it would like to discover. The search for the Truth requires courage and fearlessness. Fortunately, what this search uncovers is very good news, although not necessarily for the ego. The hero is a lover of the Truth and, as a result of the search, has discovered that life is good. So the hero trusts life.

A desire and willingness to discover the truth about life, about reality, is essential in becoming the hero of your life. Without this, you won’t investigate, examine, ask questions, or confront what is false. You will accept the script you have been given and play the role that script defines. You will complain, blame, feel sorry for yourself, be angry, feel afraid and powerless, and cope with all of these feelings badly, primarily through addictive behaviours. You will suffer, and your relationships will suffer.

The thoughts that flow through your mind aren’t as useful as you might think. They contain only a smattering of truth and are therefore a very poor map for how to live your life. The hero knows this. The hero is guided by something other than the thought-stream—by another stream, which many have called the flow. The flow is reality; it is what is actually happening here and now.

OK, so now you can ask yourselves some important questions…

Have you noticed how that thought-stream determines how you see yourself, how you see life, what you feel, what you do, and how you experience your life? And have you noticed how you identify with the voice in your head? You know, your self-talk, the constant thought-stream that runs around your mind all the time? You call that “me, mine, my”. It is your self-concept, and your world-view. You think you are the thought-stream. Here is the good news… the thought-stream isn’t who you are. You could take away the thought-stream, and you wouldn’t miss a thing. Moment by moment, life would continue. And in each moment, you would know what to do. You can drive your car without the thought-stream. You can speak to people without the thought-stream. You can earn a living without the thought-stream. You can enjoy life without the thought-stream. You can have desires that get fulfilled without the thought stream. And indeed you already do. Think about it, how much of your life happens, every day, all day, without your thought-stream having to manage it? Plenty!

And consider your past – I am sure there are things that you used to think about a lot in the past that you no longer think about – yet, you are here, aren’t you? The thought-stream isn’t who you are. It is simply a program. The ego is the software that gives you the sense that you are “in here”, inside your body, and everything else is “out there”, outside of and separate from you. However, there is something else that is living your life.

That something else, that mystery, is the Presence that animates your movements, looks out through your eyes and recognizes the Presence in your child’s eyes, keeps you breathing, inspires you, recognizes the beauty in the sunset, powers your daily energy system, forgives and understands others, creates coincidences that manifest in your life at just the right time and place, and so on. It is the Presence that enables “you” to see “your” thought-steam – and even to recognize that the thought-stream has errors, and can be changed. That Presence is Who You Really Are. Most people let the thought-stream run their lives. They ignore the Presence and are sometimes even unaware of it. The ego says, “do this now, fear this now, scream here now, grab this now, do this now…”. Where does the ego get those instructions? It gets them from PROGRAMMING. The ego sees only its own past PROGRAMMING, and tries to apply that programming to the future, while escaping the Present. Yet, life is always new, at every Present moment. The Present is not like the past, and the future exists only in the private mind of the ego. You are only ever always in the Present, and the Present is always unique, moment by moment. Can you see why the thought-stream creates so much suffering? Awakening is all about surrendering the thought-stream to the Presence, so that the Presence runs your life. The Presence doesn’t require the thought-stream, which is preoccupied with the “past” and the “future”. The Presence lives in the Present, at peace, in love, with the power of the Universe at One with It. Expecting your software to be capable of defining you and providing a philosophy by which to create a happy, peaceful, and loving life is like expecting your computer to be able to do those things for you. Looking to your thoughts for how to live your life is not much better than asking one of those  fortune telling cards you  have  what to do. Computers are not wise; they only store and process information. Your thoughts are not wise; they only reflect the information that you and others have acquired. Information is useful in its proper place, but information is not enough to guide you in this vast mystery called life. You are so much more than the information stored in your brains and so much more than what your thoughts tell you that you are. And yet, the software is so often what is running people’s lives. It is taken as the master when it is only a servant.

Most of us are so entranced by the nonstop conversation we’re having with ourselves that we aren’t even aware we have a voice in our head. I’m not talking about “hearing voices”, I’m talking about the internal narrator, the most intimate part of our lives. The voice comes braying in as soon as we open our eyes in the morning, and then heckles us all day long with an air horn. It’s a fever swamp of urges, desires, and judgments. It’s fixated on the past and the future, to the detriment of the here and now. It’s what has us reaching into the fridge when we’re not hungry, losing our temper when we know it’s not really in our best interest, and pruning our inboxes when we’re ostensibly engaged in conversation with other human beings. If we don’t pay close attention—which very few of us are taught how to do—it can be a malevolent puppeteer… Under the sway of the ego, life becomes a constant low-grade crisis. You are never sated, never satisfied, always reaching for the next thing, like a colicky baby.

Everyone has that. Everyone!

It is a program. And it is this program that creates suffering, individually and as a society. But the problem is not so much about having a “voice in my head”, the main problem is that we believe that “the voice in my head is me”. That’s the problem. The belief that the voice in my head = me. You don’t have to get rid of the voice in your head. In fact, if you tried to get rid of it, you would always fail. Always. So don’t bother trying to get rid of it. The real secret is to find a way to stop IDENTIFYING with it. This is called detachment. And eventually it will stop when it does not get the attention. Detachment is simply the end of the belief that “the voice in my head = me”, that “I think therefore I am”, that “these are my thoughts”.

Once that belief falls away, the voice itself automatically begins to go away, by itself, and fall into the background until you are left with pure clarity and space, which allows you to experience yourself and your life in full, without the nagging voice and all its fears and dramas. The technique that allows us to gain detachment from “this voice in my head = me” is called  alertness or mindfulness.

But what causes attachment (or resistance) in the first place? Why are we so glued to the thought-stream, to the voice? We are glued because that “voice in my head”-structure includes the following devices (yes, devices – consciousness has physics):

  1. The ego makes it difficult to dismiss the thought-stream (also called the voice in your head, or self-talk), and it does so by having one magical ingredient: the sensation of “ME, MINE, MY”. The thoughts FEEL like they are YOUR thoughts. And so you defend them, hold onto them, or try to fight them. You attach or resist. And, paradoxically, this very attachment and resistance is what creates a “sense of self”, a self that attaches and resists. It is a loop. The sense of self causes attachment and resistance, and the attachment and resistance creates a sense of self. Me, mine, my.  Many of us labour under the delusion that we’re permanently stuck with all of the difficult parts of our personalities—that we are “hot-tempered”, or “shy”, or “sad”—and that these are fixed, immutable traits. Yes ego has an ally, feeling, emotions, and it has spun a web around it!
  2. It gives them a sense of URGENCY. “If I don’t do this now, I’m screwed!”
  3. It gives them a sense of righteous IMPORTANCE. “I better do what MY thoughts say.”
  4. It makes NOT KNOWING feel DANGEROUS. Life itself is friendly, but the ego says it isn’t. And this belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy through manifestation. However, anyone who trusts life will tell you that every moment has all the resources required to handle it, and every moment is designed to help you grow, either by bringing you what you require in that moment, or by illuminating false beliefs. All moments are benevolent in that way. Yet, the ego assumes, consistently, a negative outcome. The ego lives in the past or future, never in the present, and the future is something the ego uses to keep you worried.
  5. It uses REPETITION to create preoccupation that drowns out the Present moment. It then positions this PREOCCUPATION as a life-or-death “virtual reality” drama of avoiding imagined pain/fear and seeking imagined pleasure, a virtual reality that requires more attention than the Present Reality. And have you realised how as soon as the ego gets what it wants, its satisfaction is short-lived? The ego needs to stay in a state of “chasing the future”, otherwise it dies. An example is with money. Money is good as a tool for exchange, nothing wrong with it, nothing wrong with exchange. And practically speaking, you don’t need $10 million. You can have it, you can enjoy it, but it is not a NEED. Yet, when a person gets $10 million, which is beyond their needs, they feel a need to go to $20 million, and then they think they will be satisfied. But when they get $20 million, new fears and insecurities come up, and the chase is back on, this time for $100 million. No amount is ever enough to create a permanent sense of peace, happiness, safety, love and satisfaction. The ego never stops generating PREOCCUPATION, until a person begins to Awaken. It is a machine designed that way. It has nothing to do with the objects and achievements themselves.
  6. It considers Presence to be FOOLISH, DANGEROUS and BORING. It sees the pursuit of being Awakened to be equally foolish, dangerous and boring. And it is right to be afraid of Awakening, because Awakening is an end to the illusion of separation that the unconscious ego thrives in. Awakening threatens the unconscious ego. And the ego tries to convince you that this fear is justified, that it is “your” fear. Yet, the opposite is true. Presence, awakening, is freedom from the suffering of the unconscious ego. One of the questions I hear most often from sceptics is: If I quiet the voice in my head, will I lose my edge? Some think they need depression to be creative or compulsive worry to be successful. We all know people who believe that without their constant worrying and so on, their life will fall apart, right? We feel that we NEED the thought-stream to survive. We literally feel threatened by the idea of dropping the thought-stream, don’t we? Yet, think about it – if you could drop the thought stream, would the thought-stream disappear from life? Yes, it would. The unconscious ego dies if the thought-stream ends. And that is why the ego fears Awakening. Now, if you dropped the thought-stream, do you die? No, you don’t. Your awareness is not your thought-stream. Your awareness is what is aware that there is a thought-stream in the first place. Awareness is eternal. The thought-stream is not. The problem is, we believe we are the thought-stream.
  7. The ego believes it is not safe from Life, that Life is dangerous. It therefore insists on CONTROLLING the events of life, so that they fit its limited program. Surrender, therefore, is perceived as the enemy of the ego, something dangerous. The idea that life is dangerous is one of the ego’s most powerful tools.
  8. Pure FEAR is the ego’s most powerful weapon. Fear has the power to obscure and distortand peace, to fracture and separate, create confusion. Fear is how the ego keeps us glued to the illusion. And love is the only true way out, and that is why the ego tries to convince us that love is weakness. Love, the most powerful force, is seen as weakness by the ego, or at least the ego tries to make us think so. The amazing thing is that Love is Real, and fear is itself an illusion, False Evidence Appearing Real, F-E-A-R. Yet, fear feels real because of one interesting design element like other emotions: the BODY. Fear has a bodily sensation, you feel fear in your body once you begin to believe the fear. If you don’t believe it, you don’t feel it. But if you believe it, you feel it in your body. And this is what makes fear seem real, even though it is an illusion. You can have a thought that creates fear in someone else, but it doesn’t create fear in you – and this is because you don’t believe it, and so it doesn’t generate a bodily sensation.
  9. Judging between DUALITY/POLARITY is the engine that powers the ego. The ego must take a stand. It must say “I like this” or “I hate that”, “I am like this but not like that”, “that person is good but that other one is bad”, “I love the rain, but not too much”… The ego must make judgements for it to survive. Taking a stand gives the ego an identity and a story. Without a story and identity, the ego disappears. And that is why it must keep judging between dualities, between polarities. The ego doesn’t care what stand it takes, as long as it takes a stand. Taking a stand, judging, makes the ego feel like “somebody”, somebody “separate from “everyone else”, someone “special” in some way, and that’s what matters to it.
  10. It likes categorising everything into GOOD/BAD, which gives it a game plan to follow in life. Chase good, avoid bad. Of course, good and bad depends on its judgement system – and that changes too. But it doesn’t matter whether what was bad today is good tomorrow – as long as there is a good/bad system, the ego is happy. Why? Because good/bad helps the ego escape the Present Moment. If you lose good/bad, you go into Acceptance, into Unconditional Love. You lose the “future”, and the ego dies. Hence, the ego must, at all moments, be evaluating the Present moment according to a good/bad system, so it stays “busy” and obstructs Presence. Polarity Integration – aka Unconditional Love, Acceptance – is the enemy of the ego, for it leads to Awakening from the dream, the virtual reality of the thought-stream.
  11. GUILT is another powerful weapon the unconscious ego uses to stay alive and control you. Guilt works by keeping a person in old patterns. It is basically a program loop that reinforces itself by remembering the past in a particular way whereby the person is judged as BAD, and then this calls for punishment, which justifies the bad feelings further, which creates more guilt, more memory, and on and on it goes. BLAME and RESENTMENT are close cousins of guilt. They are all control and punishment mechanisms that trap a person in an unconscious ego. They are all mechanisms of RESISTING YOURSELF, RESISTING YOUR WORTH, RESISTING THE PRESENT. Through GUILT (and it’s cousins, blame and resentment), the ego causes people to overlook the beauty, bounty, and benevolence of life and the value and pre-eminence of love and peace. The opposite of Guilt is Innocence, which is the natural state of Life, of What You Really Are. And that is why Awakening begins by stripping away the illusion that has masked the truth of What You Really Are.
  12. The ego is constantly creating PROBLEMS TO FIX. These are also part of the overall system of PREOCCUPATIONS that it creates to keep your mind busy and distracted. Even when there are no problems, the ego will create one. The sun could be shining nicely, like you always wanted it to, and the ego will find something about it to fix. You could have the best lover in the world, and the ego will find something to fix. You could be a billionaire with theoretically no financial worries, and the ego will find a financial worry to sort out. You could be the most beautiful looking person on earth, and the ego will find something to fix about your body. This is just the way it works, don’t worry about it, it’s just part of the software. You don’t have to believe it and do what it says or try to stop it; just witness it.

These are some of the technical devices that make the ego so believable and persistent, and create attachment. And it is good to be aware of them so we can witness when they are happening. Awareness of the devices and how they work increases our ability to be mindful.

Having known this, we can now understand the whole point of alertness, mindfulness and meditation. Yes, it creates detachment, but so what? What is the real point of that? Is it just to “suffer less”? Or is there a deeper point? Yes, there is a deeper point. Much, much deeper. The main point of alertness, mindfulness is freedom from the concept of a “separate self”. The sense of a “separate self” is the real prison. Suffering is just one aspect of this prison. Even if you got rid of suffering and only kept the “happy” aspects of a self-concept, you would still be limited. The self-concept is like a filter of reality – it filters out most of reality and lets in only a small part of reality, the part that agrees with the self-concept, the conditioning, the programming. In other words, it’s not only who you think you are that holds you back, it is also who you think you’re not. That is why a self-concept limits the individual, and collectively, limits the world!

At the end, the meditator arrives at the true goal of meditation: to see that the “self” that we take to be the ridgepole of our lives is actually an illusion. The real superpower of meditation is not just to manage your ego more mindfully but to see that the ego itself has no actual substance. Close your eyes and look for it, and you won’t find any “self” you can put your finger on.

Liberation.

And the best, simplest tool to use to get there, is the practise of alertness. Mindfulness can be thought of as meditation throughout the day, as you go about your daily activities. And meditation can be thought of as focused mindfulness in private, without having to deal with the activities of the world, and in your practise, as given in the other articles. Alertness as in not seeing through but at….

Alertness, Mindfulness and meditation are  centred on one thing: witnessing the self in operation. Witnessing creates presence, awareness, space. And that automatically creates self-knowledge, understanding. And that automatically liberates you from the “self-concept” and its dramas and fears and limitations.

The story about a warrior and the battle against ego can be found in the Bhagavad Gita, but in the Bible too if one reads it with the alertness or mindfulness that is aware of ego interpretations, its conditioning. But one will be unaware of the structure and storyline if one reads through the identification of ego. Even if  one is a non-believer of the Bible one would still read it through the conditioning, unable to see the truth within it. Just like looking at past experiences, when one identifies with the experienced one only sees it through the experience, the way it perceived it.  While detached, looking at it will provide a different perspective.

 

11-03-2018,

Moshiya van den Broek