Decentralization Of The Ego

A wonderful passage from the book To A Dancing God by Sam Keen:

"[A person must go beyond the] idiosyncratic and egocentric perception of immediate experience. Mature awareness is possible only when I have digested and compensated for the biases and prejudices that are the residue of my personal history. Awareness of what presents itself to me involves a double movement of attention: silencing the familiar and welcoming the strange. Each time I approach a strange object, person or event, I have a tendency to let my present needs, past experince or expectations for the future, determine what I see. If I am to appreciate the uniqueness of any datum, I must be sufficiently aware of my preconceived ideas and charateristic emotional distortions to bracket them long enough to welcome strangeness and novelty into my perceptual world. This discipline of bracketing, compensating or silencing requires sophisticated self knowledge and courageous honesty. Yet, withot this discipline each present moment is only the repitition of something already seen or experienced. In order for genuine novely to emerge, for the unique presence of things persons or events to take root in me, I must undergo a decentralization of the ego."

Many Gedolei Yisroel would learn a page of gemara as of they never saw it before - even if they had learned it five hundred times before and had brilliant insights that were clearly recorded in their notebooks. They were able to let go of their own preconceived notions about what the gemara was saying because their main concern was for truth - not ego-gratification.

Many, many people have a certain way of looking at the world, of dealing with people, of reacting to experiences, that makes their lives boring repetitions of the same things. We can learn from young children who get so excited about the seemingly most mundane experiences of life. We can start viewing other people NOT AS WE CHOOSE TO SEE THEM, BUT AS THEY REALLY ARE. This involves stepping outside of oneself and letting go of dearly held notions. We can start approaching issues with a renewed sense of dedication to the truth as painful as that may be.

M. Scott Peck [who also quoted the aforementioned book in his The Road Less Traveled]: "What does a life of total dedication to truth mean? It means ... a life of continuous and never ending stringent self examination. We know the world only through our relationship to it. Therefore to know the world we must not only examine it but we must simultaneously examine the examiner.... Examination of the world without is never as personally painful as examination of the world within, and it is certainly because of the pain involved in a life of genuine self examination that the majority steer clear from it."

Maybe I'm not the great parent that I like to think I am? Maybe my level of commitment to my heritage is sorely lacking? Maybe I am not being completely honest with myself or with others?

All change is painful because it involves letting go of what we hold dear.

But it's worth it... It will open up new glorious worlds of light.

Love and blessings!

PS - Any correlation between what I write and the Yeshiva I want to open is not coincidental at all.

:-)