Four stages in the transformation of consciousness

In the previous parts, we have described the historical background of the lightworker’s journey from ego-based to heart-based consciousness.

This part will be dedicated entirely to the psychological characteristics of this transformation. We have divided up this process into four steps or stages, which we sum up again for the sake of clarity:

1.	Being unsatisfied by what ego-based consciousness has to offer you, longing for ‘something else’: the beginning of the end.
2.	Becoming aware of your ties to ego-based consciousness, recognizing and releasing the emotions and thoughts that go with it: the middle of the end.
3.	Letting the old ego-based energies inside you die, throwing off the cocoon, becoming your new self: the end of the end.
4.	The awakening of a heart-based consciousness within you, motivated by love and freedom; helping others making the transition.

Stage one: the ego does not fulfil anymore

The transition from ego- to heart-based consciousness starts with the experience of an inner void. Things that used to draw your full attention, or situations that you got completely caught up in, now leave you empty or uninspired. Somehow, things seem to have lost their usual meaning and purpose.

Before this void is experienced, consciousness is in the grip of fear and the ensuing need to constantly reaffirm itself. It is constantly looking for outside validation, because it is unwilling to face the underlying fear of rejection and loneliness. This deep fear and the need for outside validation may long be hidden as the true motive for many of your actions. Your whole life may be built upon them, without you being consciously aware of it. Perhaps you are aware of a vague restlessness or tension within. But often, a major event such as the break up of a relationship, the passing of a loved one or the loss of a job has to come along to invite you to truly examine what this tension or unrest is about.

When the ego is the centre of your being, your consciousness and your emotional life are in a state of cramp. You are cringed in fear, and from that position, you are constantly on the defence. When you’re in the ego stage, you always experience lack, a need for more. The foundation of your thought, feeling and action is a black hole, a void which can never be filled completely. It is a hole of fear, a place covered in shadows, since you turn your consciousness away from it. In the shadows, there is a void, which you are vaguely aware of, but you don’t want to go there.

In this stage, your relationship with God or All-That-Is is marked by feelings of separation. Deep within, you feel alone and abandoned. You feel like you are a broken, meaningless fragment with no purpose. And as you cover up your fear of this, you only experience it indirectly, as a shadow.

People are terrified of facing the inner void with full awareness. They are terrified of meeting their inner darkness head on and investigating it. However, if you don’t face it, it is still there, and you will need to develop ‘coping strategies’ to make life bearable. The ego’s strategy is always to deal with the problem at the periphery, instead of at the centre. The ego seeks to solve the problem by turning your consciousness outward. It tries to alleviate the inner pain by feeding you with outside energies. The energies it is particularly fond of are acknowledgement, admiration, power, attention etcetera. In this way, the ego seemingly creates an answer to the soul’s deep longing for oneness, safety and love.

This longing in itself is entirely valid and genuine. It is God calling you. It is your own nature calling out to you. You are God! God is the energy of oneness, safety and love. Everyone longs for the unconditional love and embrace of the Energy you call God. In essence, this longing is the longing for being totally aware of, and therefore one with, your own divine Self. Your own divinity is your entrance to unconditional love. You can only find it by going through the fear and darkness surrounding it, and this you do by turning inward, instead of outward. You do it by using your consciousness as a light that chases the shadows away. Consciousness is light. Therefore, it does not need to fight darkness; its mere presence dissolves it. By turning your consciousness inward, miracles will indeed befall you.

The ego, however, proceeds in exactly the opposite way. It registers the need for love and safety but it aims at answering this need without facing inner darkness and fear. To accomplish this, it applies a certain ‘trick’: it transforms the need for love into the need for approval and recognition from other people. It transforms the need for oneness and harmony to the need for excelling and being better than others. Once you think that to be loved is to be admired for your achievements, you don’t need to go inside for love anymore; you simply have to work harder! In this way, the ego strives to keep the lid on the pan of fear.

Your original longing for love and blissful unity has now become distorted into the desire for recognition. You are constantly looking for outside validation, which provides for some reassurance temporarily. Your consciousness is essentially focused on the outer world.

You rely on other people’s judgments and you are very edgy about what people think of you. This is highly important to you, since your self-esteem depends on it. In fact, your sense of self-worth gets lower and lower, since you are giving your power away to outside forces, who judge you for your outside performances, not for your true being.

Meanwhile, the deep-seated sense of abandonment and loneliness is not alleviated. It actually gets worse, since you refuse to look at it. That which you don’t want to look at becomes your ‘shadow side’. Fear, anger and negativity can roam there and influence you, intensified by the refusal to go within.

The ego can be very stubborn when it comes to suppressing certain doubts, hunches and feelings; it will not release control easily.

What you perceive as ‘evil’ in your world is always the result of clinging to personal power. It is the refusal to give up control and accept inner fear and darkness.

The first step to enlightenment is surrendering to ‘what is’. Enlightenment means that you allow all aspects of your being into the light of your consciousness. Enlightenment does not mean you are fully conscious of everything within you, but that you are willing to face every aspect consciously.

Enlightenment equals love. Love means: accept yourself as you are.

The inner darkness, that sense of abandonment in the depths of your soul that you all fear so much, is temporary. The ego-stage is just one step in a large development and unfolding of consciousness. In this stage, the first leap is taken towards an individualized divine consciousness.

The birth of individual consciousness, the birth of you as a ‘separate soul’, goes together with the experience of being left alone, being separated from your Mother/Father. It is comparable to the trauma of birth in your physical world. In the womb, the baby experiences an oceanic sense of oneness with the mother. When it is born, it becomes a unity unto itself.

Because of this birth trauma – speaking now of the birth of the soul – the soul takes with it a sense of being torn apart; it had to part with everything it took for granted.

The newborn soul longs for a return to the semi-consciousness state of oneness, from which she came and which she considers to be her Home. Because this is impossible, she experiences great fear and feelings of desolation and doubt. This inner pain and disorientation will, gradually, form the breeding ground for the ego’s seizure of power. The soul has to deal with the fear and the pain, and the ego promises to provide a solution. The ego holds up the prospect of power and control to the soul consciousness. The soul, feeling powerless and lost, gives in and puts the ego in command.

The ego is that part of the soul which is oriented towards the material, external world. In essence, the ego is the soul’s instrument for manifesting itself as a physical being within time and space. The ego provides consciousness with focus. It makes consciousness specific instead of oceanic, ‘here and now’ instead of ‘all over the place’. The ego translates inner impulses into specific material form. It is that part of you which bridges the gap between the non-physical (spiritual) part of you and the physical part.

For the soul as a non-physical spiritual being, it is quite unnatural to be fixated in time and space. The soul is essentially independent of any (material) form. When you have dreams of flying around, you are contacting this independent and free part of yourself. The ego, on the other hand, binds and fixates. It enables you to function in physical reality. As such, the ego plays a very valuable role that has nothing to do with ‘good’ or ‘bad’. When it operates in a balanced situation, it is a neutral and indispensable tool for the soul who dwells on earth in a physical body.

However, when the ego starts to rule soul consciousness, instead of functioning as its tool, the soul gets out of balance. When the ego dictates to the soul (the hallmark of ego-based consciousness), the ego will not simply translate inner impulses into material form, but it will control and selectively suppress those impulses. The ego then presents you with a distorted image of reality. The unbalanced ego is always in pursuit of power and control and it will interpret all facts as positive or negative in this light.

It is quite instructive to uncover your own power-and-control based motives in your daily going-about. Try to notice how often you want to bend things or people to your will, even if it is for a noble cause. How often do you get annoyed by things not going your way?

It is important to realize that beneath the need for control is always a fear of losing control. So ask yourself: what is the risk of releasing control, of letting go the need for predictability? What is my deepest fear?

The price you are now paying for keeping things ‘under control’ is that your attitude to life is tense and restrained.

When you dare to live from inner inspiration, and only do what brings you joy, this will create a natural and true order in your life. You will feel relaxed and happy, without the need to mould the flow of life. This is living without fear: living with full trust in what life will bring to you. Can you do that?

For a young soul, the pitfall of ego-based consciousness is nearly inevitable. The ego offers a way out of the problem (of fear and abandonment); it shifts your attention from ‘what there is on the inside’ to ‘what you can get from the outside world’. This is not a real solution to the problem, but it does seem to bring relief for a while. Exerting power and control over your surroundings may give you a temporary satisfaction or ‘kick’. There is a brief sense of being loved, admired and respected. This soothes your pain for a while. But it is short-lived and you have to exert yourself again to stand out, to be even better, nicer or more helpful.

Please be aware that under the flag of the ego, you can be both sweet and nasty, both giving and taking, both dominant and subservient. Much that is given seemingly unselfishly is an unconscious call for attention, love and recognition from the receiver of the gift. When you are always caring for and giving to others, you are simply hiding from yourself. So, to understand what ego domination means, you do not necessarily have to think of cruel tyrants such as Hitler of Saddam Hussein. Keep it simple; watch yourself in your daily life. The presence of ego-domination can be recognized by the need to control things. You want certain people to behave in particular ways, for example. To make this happen, you display certain patterns of behaviour. You are compliant and sweet for example, and try not to hurt someone’s feelings ever. There is a need for control behind this behaviour. “Because I want you to love me, I will not go against you”. This line of thinking is based on fear. It is fear of standing on your own, fear of being rejected and abandoned. What appears to be sweet and nice is in fact a form of self-denial. This is the ego at work.

As long as the ego governs your soul, you will need to feed yourself with the energy of others, in order to feel good. You seem to have to deserve acceptance from other people, from some authority outside of you. However, the world around you is not fixed or stable. You can never rely on the permanent adherence of whatever it is you rely on, be it spouse, boss or parents. That is why you have to ‘work’ all the time, being always on the look-out for ‘portions of approval’ coming your way. This explains the tense and nervous state of mind anyone in the ego stage is permanently in.

The ego cannot provide you with true love and self-esteem. The solution it offers for the trauma of abandonment is in fact a bottomless pit. The true mission of the young soul consciousness is to become the parent it has lost.

Please be aware that the structure of earth life, meaning the process of starting out as a helpless babe and growing up to be a self-contained adult, often invites you to do precisely that. How often the key to real happiness in your lives lies in this: that you become your own father and mother, and give to yourself the love and understanding you have missed and are missing from others. On the larger, metaphysical level we have been speaking of, this means: come to the understanding that you are God, not one of his little lost sheep. This is the realisation that will bring you home. This is the realisation that will bring you to the heart of who you are, which is love and divine power.

The end of the ego stage comes within sight when the soul realises that she is repeating the same cycle of actions and thoughts over and over again. The ego loses its dominance when the soul grows tired and weary of struggling all the time for an ever elusive treasure. The soul then starts to suspect that the promises of the game she is in are false and that there is really nothing there for her to win. When she grows tired of trying and being on top of it all the time, she lets go of control a little.

With less energy going out to controlling thoughts and behaviour, an energetic space opens up which allows for new and different experiences.

At first, when you enter this stage, you may just feel very tired and empty inside. Things you deemed important before may appear entirely meaningless now. Also, fears may surface that have no clear or immediate causes. It may be vague fears of death or of losing your loved ones. Also, anger may come up, with regard to situations in your job or your marriage. Everything that seemed self-evident is now in doubt.

That which ego-based consciousness set out to prevent happens at last.

Gradually, the lid is lifted from the pan, and all kinds of uncontrollable emotions and fears pop out and enter your consciousness, seeding doubt and confusion in your life. Until that moment, you were functioning largely on autopilot. Many thought and feeling patterns within you happened automatically; you let them pass by unquestioned. This gave unity and stability to your consciousness. However, when your consciousness grows and expands, your personality gets split in two. One part of you wants to hold on to the old ways, the other part questions these ways and confronts you with uncomfortable feelings such as anger, fear and doubt.

The expansion of consciousness that occurs at the end of the ego stage is therefore often experienced as a spoil-sport, an unwelcome intruder which spoils the game. This new awareness unsettles everything that seemed obvious before and it awakes emotions within you that you don’t know how to deal with. When you start to doubt ego-based patterns of thinking and doing, a whole new side of you enters your consciousness. It is a part of you that loves truth instead of power.

Living according to the dictates of the ego is very repressive. You are serving a little - fearful - dictator that aims at power and control, not just over your environment, but especially over you. Your spontaneous flow of feeling and intuiting are restrained by him. The ego does not like spontaneity so much. It withholds you from freely expressing your feelings, since feelings and emotions are uncontrollable and unpredictable, which is dangerous to the ego. The ego works with masks.

If your ego dictates to you: “be sweet and considerate, to win people’s sympathy”, you will systematically suppress feelings of displeasure and anger within you. If you start to doubt the viability of this dictate, these suppressed emotions come up again at once. Feelings are not eliminated by being suppressed. They live on and gain in intensity the longer you suppress them.

Once the soul experiences the emptiness and the doubt that is so characteristic of the ending ego stage, it is possible to meet and face all the feelings and emotions that were hidden in the dark before. These pent up emotions and feelings are the gate of entrance to your greater Self. By exploring what you truly feel, instead of what you are supposed to feel, you restore your spontaneity and integrity, that part of you which is also called your ‘inner child’. Getting in touch with your true feelings and emotions sets you on the road to liberation. The transition to a heart-based consciousness has then begun.

© Pamela Kribbe www.jeshua.net