Freshly Hatched

I’ve always thought that by following one path you could see the whole world. What do I mean? For example, if one committed oneself to being a chef then one could travel the world cooking, learning cultures or languages through food. If one played sport then you could experience being a leader, travelling, winning and losing. Maybe you wouldn’t experience everything, but following one pursuit would bring you a multitude of experiences. Instead of the opposite, which is so often done nowadays, chasing the experiences. Chasing the experience is often disheartening because we quickly realise it is actually very difficult to predict what we will experience from an event. At this moment I don’t know what I will feel when I complete my degree, maybe I have an idea but more than likely I have an expectation and if I am in it to get a certain feeling then I may be disappointed, but if I am in it to get the degree just because I want to do that work, then I am open to experience any number of feelings, thoughts and situations along the way. 

I am a person interested in understanding the self, learning to master that self and one day even being fully conscious of that self. I have been down a number of avenues to try and achieve this in my life but I have always just wanted a quick fix, or someone else to tell me the secret so I wouldn’t have to do the hard work. I had been chasing the experience of mastery, the idea of what I could be if I was suddenly enlightened. I have come to the obvious realisation that I must do the work. Living my life whilst doing the work. And whats the work? Focusing the mind, reminding myself to stay aware of myself, pushing thoughts aside, seeing my habits and patterns, conserving energy, expressing right emotion, understanding behaviour; these are a few of my tactics for this work. 

The work is everywhere for us to do. It shows up everyday, no matter your status, career, or any of it. We have all been programmed and conditioned to some degree throughout our lives and ‘the work’, as I talk about it here, is understanding that programming and then maybe being in a position to change it, or even become the master of it. 

I’ll have the eggs.

I’ve always loved eggs. Ever since I was a kid. Certainly not every part. I’m not particularly fond of that eggy smell that remains if you leave your egg plate in the sink, and Im definitely not one for even slightly undercooked white. But I don’t remember ever being happier about a food. My dad once told that it was bad for you to eat eggs everyday, that the maximum eggs we should be eating a week was 6. I did the math and that meant that I could eat eggs 3 times a week, if I had 2 eggs at a time. I remember feeling a bit disappointed by that but I carried that message of his for years, well into my teens and early 20s. I would make egg sacrifices, meaning I would not eat eggs today so I wouldn’t use my egg allowance for the week. Its astonishing the things that stick in our minds. They get so stuck that we see them as truths, not even thoughts to be questioned, as obvious as the sky being blue or your own name. For sure everything in moderation but I learned a lot about self imposed limitations when I realised I could eat as many eggs as I wanted.

So in this thoughts process I found there is work, just in that small memory I could now see where some patterns were formed. I took a statement of someone else’s and allowed it to become truth inside my mind, I carried that truth and it became somehow a part of me, I identified with it. Its ok to like eggs, but you can see even by this small story that it had become a small part of my identity. This is just a small example of how we form our personalties, there is even more inside this little story and there are a huge number of stories, all with many more little pieces of identification in them. I use the term identification because it is one of the barriers to self understanding and self mastery. It is what the Buddhists are referring to when they talk about detachment. Its ok to like eggs, detach yourself from the persona of liking eggs. 

We’ve seen the situation, of a grown adult having what can only be described as a tantrum because the restaurant was out of eggs but they HAD TO HAVE EGGS, IT’S THEIR FAVOURITE, WHY CAN’T YOU UNDERSTAND? This is not about the eggs, its about their identify coming under attack. They identify as the person who ‘always has eggs at brunch’, no eggs are available, so now in their mind, they cant be who they are. But then there is the truth, you are not what you identify with, not what you are identified as. So to get to who we really are, we need to do the work to find the things we identify with to understand why we behave the way we do. 

Not all identification is tantrums. Sometimes what we hold so dear to ourselves are positive identifications. The thought that I am a kind and thoughtful friend, I’m a loyal person, I always clean up after myself and so on. These can be even harder to spot and dismantle because, well, we like them, we like how thee traits make us feel about ourselves. But they are also false, they were for me. Just ways to avoid really connecting to the essence of my being.  

I’ve always thought that by following a path of one thing you could see the whole world. My experiment here is to see if I can tell the whole story of my spiritual journey through eggs. It may sound totally ridiculous but I think its going to be fun. I have also been a long time enthusiast of evolution and the egg has a lot to say about how we came to be how we are. I still have a lot to learn on my way to the mastery of the mind but over the years all my attempts to attain it have left me with a lot to share. I have learned a great deal from other people, I hope to find more people to learn from and to be a person to be learned from. 

Be a little eggstra today,

Phoebe