Sunday Contemplation # 51 You're So Predictable. I Trust Ya & I Love Ya.

The Lessons Of Murmurations About Ego And Other Things.

Photo by James Wainscoat on Unsplash

This beautiful formation of Starlings is called a murmuration (not an Ai picture…natural).

• A Personal G’day

• This Week’s Quote

• This Sunday’s Contemplation

  • Listening - The Wisdom Within

  • Chop Wood Carry Water - Living Your Wisdom

• A Guided Meditation

• This Week’s Community Chat

• Upcoming Activities

A Personal G’day

Hello Everyone:

I hope that you have had a good good week.

I have tweaked the layout of my weekly post…just a little, not a lot. In the spirit of Living Your Wisdom, I want to more purposefully take an element of what I think is the essential wisdom we all have access to, speak about what I think is its inner value and quality, and then give you my perspective on how we might live that element of essential wisdom in everyday life.

I also want to thank you all for taking time to read my offerings. I really appreciate the fact that you take time to read and consider these, and I appreciate all your feedback and communications. Bless you, thank you, and I think you are all bloody legends!

I offer the following Sunday Contemplation for your consideration and I wish you the peace and resolve to meet this day.

Cheers,

This Week’s Quote

What if we learned to live from a deeper place—not trying to bolster an identity pushed on us by our parents and our culture, but instead what if we look inward to uncover our true nature and look outward for what we might offer others.

Marc Lesser - from a recent article he wrote here on Substack

This Sunday’s Contemplation

You’re So Predictable. I Trust Ya & I Love Ya! The Lessons Of Murmurations
About Ego And Other Things.

Listening - The Wisdom Within

The people who are easiest to trust are the ones you predictably know prioritise caring about you. The predictable element is an internal one. It is amazing how our intuition, I call it inner wisdom, sets off red flags when the words seem right but something just doesn’t seem right about caring priorities.

The ego often wants to say predictability is boring. The ego is wrong.

The inner experience that someone you are connecting with is predictably on your side, is not boring. It is the foundation of spontaneity.

You are finally safe enough to just be you. And so are they.

The ego is most often wrong because it is the seat of defensiveness. The ego is not evil, but we are best served by not letting that monkey, what the Buddhists sometimes call the ego, run our lives.

The understanding of the ego that I most appreciate comes from David R. Hawkins. He says Homo Sapiens survived and thrived because we were excellent at self preservation. We learned how to avoid saber toothed tigers and to stay warm. The ego is just the natural evolution of this self preservation impulse. But it has passed it’s use-by date. Homo Spiritus, the next evolutionary stage according to Dr. Hawkins, recognises that the preservation of our physical body and the identification of our mind and body as our “self” is not a required priority. It is the defence of an illusion.

We can prioritise service and caring about others when we have no need to defend some idea of ourselves that is rooted in the preservation of who we think we are supposed to be. We each have been with people, and likely one of them, at some time in our lives, might have been you and me, who were so concerned with maintaining a persona that they thought would work best for them in the world, that they were constantly defending the margins. Ram Das called it the “space suit” we put on and keep adjusting to stay emotionally safe. We just need to see that the essence of who we are is not the space suit we wear.

The sacred essence of who we are, every one of us, is rooted in the abiding Peace that resides in that part of us that is beyond birth and death. Our identity is infinite and Divine. The joy of that is that now we are free to live, connect, trust and love on planet earth without spending so much energy and time trying to find who we are by looking outside of ourselves.

It is predictable, consistent and beautiful. It is the essence of spontaneity, love and trust.

Chop Wood Carry Water - Living Your Wisdom

The murmations (don’t you love that word!) of birds are incredible. Apparently it all starts close in. Each bird knows how to stay the right distance and respond instantaneously to seven birds around them. They are profoundly predictable and responsive to each other. Here is one explanation I read…”In essence, murmurations are a remarkable example of how complex, coordinated movement can arise from simple, local interactions between individuals, offering both safety and social benefits to the birds involved”. (If you really interested in this, I read this article by a scientist that seemed straight forward).

Here is how I think the murmations lesson of predictability, responsiveness and starting close in is important for us in our day to day lives.

There is no ego involved. It seems entirely natural for the birds to tune into their “team” of seven and work together. They are not focused on how cool their feathers look, or who got more insects in their diet that morning, or if their flight style is adequate.

From that other focused centre the sometimes thousands of birds create patterns and possibilities that are incredible. According to the scientists, this is also a natural protection response when threatened. Working together. Now there’s a concept!

You want peace in the world? Be the peace and act with peace to the close in seven around you. You want your company to be a wonderful place to work and really productive in achieving its central purposes? Be someone it is wonderful to work with, and make sure you and those on your team are aligned in purpose, and focus together on achieving that shared purpose. It’s natural right! You may well achieve something much greater and more beautiful than you thought was possible.

In his book, Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari makes the observation that our human capacity to cooperate and to hold to common defining stories was a profound evolutionary advantage we developed. Cooperation is natural. The trust required for cooperation is natural.

The ego makes the mistake that Starlings cannot imagine. It thinks we are separate from each other. It pretends we are not absolutely interdependent. It thinks that caring for another is at the cost of caring for the imagined self.

In everyday life, including in our work, we are best served by first, caring about the people we live and work with. Some may give you behavioural reasons not to care. Then you have a choice. To care or not to care? When did not caring have any value!

That is when we are challenged to look beneath the behaviour for the real reasons to care. We are not separate, we are interdependent. Be like a Starling. Do you imagine that in those amazing murmurations there are not a bunch of wing clips and head bumps? Don’t you imagine that when they land in the trees to rest that they don’t have some…”you could have flown better man!” discussions?

In everyday life, and in our workplaces we need to care enough about what we do together to make it a priority.

Learning the skills of setting our ego aside, is not only the work of monks, it is critical work for each of us in many many daily situations.

Trust and cooperation are natural. We just need to do the work to return to our nature.

Thank you for reading this. See you next week I hope.

I wish you peace.

A Guided Meditation

This week’s guided meditation will follow in a few days. It is called Give your ego time off. (There are some more guided meditations HERE if you want to start today).

This Week’s Community Chat

The theme in the chat this week is:

How do you talk to your ego and how do you manage its place in your life?

I have found that my ego way too sensitive. I find I need to say to it sometimes…”you worry too much, relax, we are safe”. It doesn’t always listen I find.

Thank you.

Upcoming Activities

Please stay tuned.

Should you want to message me directly, please feel free to do so.