SYMPTOMATIC of believing we are our ego is that we live in the past. Most of us don’t know what we are doing in the present moment and if we don’t know that, we don’t know anything else. That’s the problem. We’re not here now. Our thoughts are living our life. If we are walking down the street say, we are thinking about something else other than us walking down the street. We are lost in our daydreams.

One of our major hang-ups is that we are impelled by our ego to put labels on everything and everyone. We then place those tagged images in memory for future reference. That’s quite okay, we need to remember certain things to physically survive, but this mechanism has taken us over, so before recognizing anything at all in life, we must firstly refer to memories of similar past experiences.

When we first see a rose for instance, it is fresh and new, but our ego immediately labels the rose, creates a folder in memory called ‘Roses’ and then stores that image for future reference. The next time we see a rose, the ego immediately goes to the ‘Roses’ folder and compares it with all the other roses it has stored there. So instead of seeing the rose as it is in the now moment, we see a comparative image compiled from the past.

“Come quick and look at the beautiful sunset” someone yells. You rush outside and there it is. If you are quick, you may observe the sunset as it really is, new and fresh, before your ego grabs hold of it and hastily opens the folder on sunsets, catalogues it, compares it, puts a rating on it, (the best one I’ve seen yet, or not as good as the other ones I’ve seen) then adds that image with its rating, to the library of sunsets.

We begin to accumulate memories of every life experience from when we are born and the longer we live, the greater our stockpile grows. Apart from the basic survival memories, we unnecessarily continue to accumulate, becoming lost in a pile of stale, outdated memories from the past that serve no real purpose.

The philosopher Vernon Howard advised us all to do a simple exercise: “When you finish reading this, you’re to know you stand up and know you’re walking. You’re to walk consciously all day long.” That’s all we really need to do…

Dan’s Quote: “Memory has a purpose; to remember the basics for survival in the physical
_____________world, not to dominate our life experience.”