Ego agreements
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008Agreements
As a race, we have some pretty outrageous agreements. My purpose in writing this is to shed light on them, take responsibility for them, encourage others to do the same and as a result, start living a more fulfilling, truthful life. Meanwhile, at least perhaps this will help you live with these agreements and still be free in your heart and soul.
The basic “ego” agreement: The Ego is sort of our “identity” made up of all our drama and stories. The spirit simply says “I am”, while the Ego says “I am a 29 year old successful professional with a Mercedes, good taste, blah blah blah”. The most important thing to the Ego is being “right” or “better”. This is what gives the Ego life. Being “wrong” is a kind of death to the ego and as such, the ego will do all sorts of neat little things to thwart it. This would explain, in dazzling clarity, some of our puzzling behavior. Many of us appear to want to be “right” more than we want to be “happy”. The ego indeed will choose intense discomfort over the death of being wrong. The ego takes comfort in failing at a home improvement project if part of its story is “I can barely change a light bulb”. How about some more ingredients for the Ego’s story like “I always seem to screw up relationships just when the other person starts to love me”, or “Why save money when there’s always someone down the road to take it away from you anyway”. When you look at the Ego’s construct from this point of view, can you see some logic to the way we act?
Dearest child, these are the agreements that we live by. We are all equally responsible for creating them. They would vanish in an instant if we decided that they no longer served us. Very few of us are consciously aware of them. At first, they might seem rather depressing. But they are simply a result of us believing that this world and this life are all that there is. We were playing a sort of make-believe and then, somehow began to take it too seriously and now we believe it all to be real. But your job in this life will be so much clearer and pleasurable if you are aware of them because you can use them and live “within” them when you need to without believing them. You can also help others wake up from the dream and join you. You can still “fit in” and be wild and free in your heart. Don’t be surprised though if you stop wanting to fit in once you truly grasp who you really are. I have also included a list of “truths” or “alternate” agreements so that you can stay on course. Remember, the secret is to take ALL the responsibility. Pretend you created it ALL, and then you can help change it. Don’t feel bad about creating it all, though. Just pretend you made it all up.
Krishnamurti said it beautifully, as countless others before and after him. As long as we have one shred of anger, hatred, jealousy, fear, sorrow left within us, then each one of us is responsible for every single war going on in this planet.
The Big “Shhhhh” agreement
Because these agreements, when written or spoken out loud, would seem sad and silly, we agree to not talk about them because if we talk about them no one would believe them and we’d all begin to stop pretending. If the agreement gets too silly, we will quickly get rid of it and try to forget about it as quickly as possible so we can go on pretending.
Ego - Us
you are your body, your mind, your accomplishments and your possessions, and to a great degree, your past
You have an Ego and a spirit, but the ego is your real self and that’s most important.
You have to do things to earn being good and then you are only good as long as you keep doing good (what have you done for me lately?)
We agree that the more we are right, the bigger and better we are, the more “real”, worthy and important we are
We agree to form groups to judge other people as “wrong” for the purpose of giving us more “rightness” and thereby giving our egos more strength and life.
We agree not to acknowledge that even though you and I may judge someone behind their backs, you may also judge me with someone else.
We agree not to tell each other about the hideous gleam in our eyes and how unattractive we are when we’re judging other people.
God
God is someone outside of us - he has a set of rules.
There is no deviation from his rules. You either accept them all, or you go to hell when you die.
We are all born bad because of something Adam and Eve did
Because of what Adam and Eve did, (original sin) We can never be “good” enough for God, we must instead earn his forgiveness by asking for it and accepting that we can only get to heaven through Jesus and that there is only one God.
We are all supposed to simply have faith in the rules of religion. If we question them, we can turn to help from our priests or others who have a better understanding of the rules as long as we’re trying.
If we “question” the rules too much or too long, it means the “Devil” is “knocking on our door” or talking to us.
The fact that God doesn’t just come down and talk to us like a real person is a test
All non Christians are going to hell
Our spirit is something that MIGHT exist but we’re not really sure what it is. We SAY we believe in it because that’s one of the rules of our religion, but truthfully, we don’t wholeheartedly believe it.
Because we’re not really sure what it is, we agree to make it less important than our more immediate reality, like money, work, achievement, etc.
Death
We suspect that something good MIGHT happen to us after we die, but we don’t really believe it. We instead choose to believe that death is an unfortunate thing that we just haven’t become smart enough to beat yet. When someone gets old and sick, we say “they aren’t doing very well”. Because we don’t really believe that death is a beautiful, natural part of life, the following agreements are in place:
We agree not to talk too much about death because we don’t want to think too much about it happening to us.
IF someone does talk about it a lot, we agree to pass judgment on them as weird, strange, or just not socially acceptable. We will do whatever is reasonably acceptable to move them out of our environment so that we don’t have to be made uncomfortable by being reminded of death.
We agree to keep all our conversations about death “arms length”, with some humor to offset the discomfort. We may theorize and get “metaphysical” about it, but we will just stay “light”.
Death is always sad, but the less “ordinary” the death is (too young, too violent, etc.) the MORE sad it is. We will call these deaths “tragic” or “untimely”.
When talking or thinking about death, we agree to mentally “stretch” out the number of years between now and the time we die. This incorrect concept of time might bleed into the rest of our lives in unfortunate ways, but we agree to take that chance to avoid the discomfort that would come from knowing that death could come in just a few minutes.
Because death is an unfortunate thing, we will spend thousands of dollars to have people help us make the death more “clean and attractive and dignified” and to insulate us from uncomfortable thoughts.
Emotions
We agree to get our emotions out alone or with close family.
We agree not to make each other uncomfortable with excess emotion in public.
To enforce this agreement, we agree to openly judge and avoid anyone violating this agreement. We will judge people who openly and immediately express their emotions as undisciplined, weak and possibly even emotionally unbalanced.
Money
Some of these are almost “redundant” but they each have their own flavor.
money is bad because the more dangerous, immoral or illegal a job is, the more money is asked for it.
You should have to work hard and struggle for your money for a long time. If you don’t , you don’t deserve it. This is called “paying your dues” and we agree to judge those who have earned money without paying their dues to add “rightness” to our egos.
If you have too much money, it means you’re greedy OR have an unfair advantage. We can “equalize” our ego to them by coming up with reasons that they have the money and we don’t. (If I had rich parents like him, had no morals or sacrificed time with my family, etc. etc. then I’d be that rich too). We can also take the position of judging something in their lives to be negative, such as a horrible spouse or personal tragedy, then we can say, “he may be richer and more successful than me, but I wouldn’t trade places with him for all the money in the world”. This also equalizes and placates our Ego.
To get rich you have to sacrifice important things like fun, family and purpose
The more money you have, the better person you must be. (this conflicts with our egos and so we must use tools to equalize)
We agree that if a person has more money than us, we will work together to convince ourselves and each other that it is because of something negative, or that the person has something in his life that is negative to balance it out with our state of wealth.
Money and wealth is limited. For you to have more, someone else must have less. This agreement gives birth to another agreement. We agree that because someone else must have less for us to have more, it must mean we are better or more deserving than they are.
Fun
Fun is something you do in moderation, and even then is always a bit suspect.
If you seem to have fun often, the question is always, “did you earn that fun”, what work haven’t you don’t yet? What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you take anything seriously.
Work - these are not true of everyone, simply those who are not doing what they really want to do, not living their “purpose” in life.
We agree not to remind each other that we’re unhappy doing what we’re doing.
We agree to admire each other based on the things we buy and what we have.
We agree to identify with each other MAINLY but what we do for a living.
We agree that if someone doesn’t talk about their job or possessions, it means they haven’t done very well, and we agree to take comfort in that
To compensate for the fact that we are doing what we don’t want to do, we agree that people who “work” are more important and worthy. The more hours or unpleasantness a person endures, the more we agree to canonize and admire them. This is the “martyr” agreement.
Approval
Sex
Beauty
