Our human ego is made up essentially of one thing – our identification with the reasons and meaning we give to the things that happen in our life. Reasons and meaning define who we think we are. It creates the script and story line for the character of “me” to follow. But the trap is that we believe the character we are playing is actually real, is actually who we are, instead of just an experience the limitless potential of consciousness is having.
So we go from pure expanded consciousness, to experiencing ourselves in the most limited way possible, imprisoned by whatever our beliefs are. And these beliefs are all forged from the meaning we have assigned to life.
It all starts the moment we ask one simple question: Why?
“Why did this happen to me?” “Why can’t other people give me what I want and need?” “Why is life so hard?” “Why can’t I ever get ahead and be who I want to be?” “Why do I have to feel this way?” “Why won't that person love me?”
It goes on and on. The ego lives on answering the “why?” question. It is reason-and-meaning super-food.
Let’s take an example. Say in your childhood, you felt like your parents never really listened to you or cared about how you felt. The natural question to ask is “why don’t mom and dad listen to me or care about what I feel?”
Then automatically, the mind starts coming up with possible reasons like: “Maybe I’m not worth listening to.” “Maybe they just don’t love me.” “They listen to bobby, but they don’t listen to me, maybe they just love him more.” And why is that? “I guess I’m not as good as bobby. I guess I’m just unlovable.”
…You see the pattern.
So the conclusion the child mind comes up with is “I’m not lovable” as the most logical answer to why mom and dad don’t listen to him. (As children, this is a common assumption, because we see the world as all having to do with us at the center of it, we don’t have the capacity to think about how mom and dad are really feeling, etc.)
So now without even realizing it, that person has created identification with a thought that gives meaning to the rest of their life.
Every relationship they enter into, that thought will color their experience, and they’ll feel not listened to, only to confirm their belief that they are unworthy of love. It becomes their personal prison.
Or, sometimes it gets really tricky, and we start learning about spirituality, and then start coming up with spiritual reasons to the question “why.”
“Why did that person leave me?”
“I guess he wasn’t my twin flame, or our astrology was off.”
“Why did I spend all my money on these cloths I can’t return, now I’m short for my rent payment!”
“I guess because I’m learning to be more abundant, so to have abundance, I have to act abundant, by buying the things I want!”
And it becomes a bypass from just experiencing the truth of how we feel (hurt, alone), or of facing the reality of our situation (needing to be more disciplined with money), or letting Life show you something deeper. We just create a spiritual ego with spiritual reasons to overcompensate for the lousy self-hating one we had before.
So how do we get off the ego-affirming reason and meaning merry-go-round?
We start by letting go of asking “why.” It’s so hard for the mind to do that! Because that ego is always wanting to know how it measures up, where it stands, am I good, or am I bad. It is so used to gaining its value and substance from the meaning it gives life events, and thoughts that enter it’s awareness that not doing that any more can feel like a death.
It’s like letting all the air out of a balloon, in the same way, the ego is only as inflated as we are attached to believing the stories the mind comes up with in answer to the question “why”.
When the balloon of ego is deflated, we can finally see clearly the Truth of our Divine Essence that is there in the background. We can rest into it, and let it guide our life in a whole new way; Effortless, Joyful, and Free.
The simplest solution to letting go of our attachment to knowing “why” is responding to the mind that wants to know with, “I don’t know.”
“Why did this happen to me?” “I don’t know.”
“Why doesn't anything work out the way I want it to?” “I don’t know.”
“Why doesn't that person love me?” “I don’t know.”
Instead of being so concerned about why it happened, we start to simply acknowledge that it happened. The reason "why", isn’t as important as just accepting what is.
We live in a mysterious and complex universe, and we can never really know why anything happens. We can only make assumptions that may or may not be true, and ultimately only lead us to be more caught up in the fictional story of who we are, and missing out on getting to know the Reality of who we are.
Admitting “I don’t know” allows us to be open to whatever Life may be trying to teach us in any given moment. Our cup is empty, ready to be filled with the Truth that can be given to us, instead of overflowing with our own ideas, assumptions, reasons, and meaning.
There’s a humility to it, to “I don’t know.” It instantly deflates the ego that is filled with thinking it knows best, that it’s in control and has it all figured out. Inevitably Life comes to let the air out of it. Tragedy, challenge, and failure are Life’s main tools for doing this.
The sooner we just accept “I don’t know” and bow to the mystery of life, the sooner our hearts are freed of the burden of having to serve the false identity as it’s master.
Our heart longs for freedom, to live wide open, to love fully, to play and create, and the only way to experience that is to let go of our reasons, our meaning, by letting go of asking “why.”
Accept that we’re not meant to know, we’re just here to marvel at the mystery of it all. When we stop judging it, we see how truly miraculous it all is. When we let go of knowing, of controlling, of believing and assuming, then we can have instead, the birth of true wisdom.
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