Vision

The development of the ego-identity from a young age.

"Each one of us is unique, but in the end we all go through the same stages in life."

As an infant we enter the World with what it seems; a latent sense of awareness, whereby we slowly open our eyes and become more conscious of our surroundings.

(Important side-note: We should really not underestimate what we already can experience as a fetus and in our pre-verbal stage. Also there is such a thing as "past-life conditioning" and "conditioning inherited from ancestors and collective human (cultural) history". In other words: We are not born as blank sheets. More about this, please watch the film "In Utero".)

In the first months we hold ourselves unto our mother for protection and nutrition, while gaining enough confidence and trust that it is safe to set our first steps in this World. In these first months we can not really say that we are yet an individual being. Our being is very much entangled (symbiosis) with our mother. Nevertheless these first months of our lives are very important for our further development.

The moment we got a little bit used to how this World goes about, we are ready to start our own journey, our so called life. In the meantime we have also started to develop a necessary sense of individual identity (separation). Around the age of three we have learned to identify ourselves as a separate being. We are no longer totally entangled with our mother. We now have a psychological ego or personality. We have become our own person.

This ego or person moves into the World strengthening/defending itself by learning new skills, gaining knowledge and achieving goals. There is nothing wrong with that. This is a necessary stage in our development as a human. However the ego-identity has specific characteristics: It is very much susceptible to what other people think of him or her. It compares itself a lot and is most of the time never really satisfied. The ego is driven by strong emotions like fear of abandonment, fear of rejection, fear of loss (preventing pain). And at the same time it wants respect/recognition, attention and care/love from others (gaining pleasure).

This inner-struggle creates a certain degree of falsity/distortion or splitting in our being. The ego-identity, which we believe is us, is driven by the need to be "good enough" is much conditioned by what our parents and social-environment or society has taught us to be good and bad. To make sure we do "fit in" and people meet our desires to be loved we constantly wear our metaphorical "mask". Our ego-identity is all about being socially-adaptable and adjustable.

But when we move on and become older, being an adolescent and later on an adult, something in us can start to feel a bit "off track".

During the years living our lives based on our ego-identity we have become so much separated from what is our natural innate feeling of authenticity and autonomy and now after years; all this adjusting and adapting has become unhealthy. We have lost ourselves. Our needs and desires to be loved and accepted by other people has come with "a high price to pay".

We enter into an "identity crisis".

The difference between our created ego-identity and our true Self has become too big.

We do not know anymore, who we are.

The Path of Self-realization.

The entering of a "crisis of identity" is the initiation on the Path of Self-realization. The Path of Self-realization can in this context be understood as the Path to "return back" to our innate feelings of authenticity and autonomy: A returning home to feel complete and whole again as a being.

To feel completeness and wholeness again we can not keep ourselves stuck in our ego-identity, while "in-completeness" and "never really satisfied" are innate characteristics of the ego-identity. So to find completeness we have to go beyond the ego-identity.

HOW DO WE GO BEYOND THE EGO?

The difference with all other journeys we can take into the World is that this returning home is a journey we take inwards. We travel deep inside ourselves. We become conscious of our internal world. The world inside our physical body. This means going beyond the ego-identity.

This traveling inside of us is motivated by a constant and steady self-reflection/observation or self-inquiry. We become self-aware and in this process our level of consciousness grows. We start to realize our "true nature".

The growth is primarily an internal growth which means we become more aware of our thoughts, feelings, emotions and behavior, which all together we can call our conditioning. It is our conditioning which was responsible for how we experienced ourselves and how we experienced the World.

When we start to change this conditioning, we start to change how we experience the World and in the end we also start to change our sense of who we are. This does not mean that we change our conditioning and we identify ourselves again with this. No, this time we rise above this conditioning and we start to de-identify with our thoughts, feelings, emotions and behavior. We realize that we "have" them, we have a conditioning, but we are not it. We are not our ego-identity anymore.

WHO ARE WE IN OUR DEEPEST ESSENCE?

This does not mean that we do not take responsibility for what we think and feel, but we do not have to take every thought and feeling so serious anymore. We experience a sense of distance to what is going on inside of us and everything what happens outside us.

This experience of distance (which should not be confused with being numb or not-interested) is called the Observer or Witness perspective.

Being the Self is a sense of "spaciousness". Our true identity in our deepest essence is as state of "spacious-awareness". This state has always been there since the very beginning, but has all the time been obscured by the mask of the ego.

THE PROCESS OF AWAKENING.

With more and more insight (realizations), our identity starts to shift from "thought-based ego conditioning" to "spacious-awareness".

We start to feel more and more whole and complete again. More peaceful and present in the moment. In the here & now.

However our ego-identity will start to fight back and it has its ways of tricking us and keeping us stuck. Shifting your identity to your deepest essence is a journey with ups and downs, this is called the "process of awakening".

YOUR GREATEST POTENTIAL.

Because our outside World is a reflection of what is going on inside of us, also our external experience of life starts to change. We start to see things more positive, because we start to understand why things are like they are and how we have created our own reality of life.

In this change life also starts to give us (synchronicity) different experiences: new chances come onto our path like jobs, people, relationships, friends etc. Maybe we travel the World for a while to detach even more from our old-conditioning.

The Path of Self-realization is a path which can not be reverted, so once you start walking it there is no way back. Although walking the Path of Self-realization is the only way towards a life of purpose, real happiness and deep inner-peace the Path can be very bumpy and chaotic, with lots of ups and downs, challenges and pitfalls.

Walking the Path requests sincere honesty, vulnerability and courage.