Thoughts on the Ego, Time, and Global North conditioning

In my experience of yoga retreats, meditation retreats, whoo whoo doings (as my mother would say) - they are great on experiences and terrible when it comes to starting on time, ending on time, sticking to a schedule.

I felt myself very confronted by this fact recently and I spent some time sitting with it.

Then I realized - of course meditators are terrible at time - time only exists in the world of the ego.

Time funnels our experiences everyday. Say you are in front of your calendar and talking to the dentist’s office. They have an available appointment at 10 am. Your brain works backwards crunching through whether you can make that appointment when you have a work meeting at 8:30. Then your brain goes forward for whether you will be able to make your lunch appointment after your dentist. You make the dentist appointment and add that block into your numbered grid for that day. A grid that is meaningless except that is how our world functions.* Modern life is dominated by time.

When there is not a deadline, a train to catch, a class to make, a trip to manage, a meeting to zoom in for - my life becomes softer and more peaceful. Soft wind tickles my hair. The bird song chirps over my left shoulder. I have a moment to reach out and admire the soft skin of a frog - I wonder how the frog hopped to the top rung of a ladder. None of those sensations are possible when I am frantically running to get out of the house on time and corral children.

It took me until this past year to not vilify my ego. I had understood Eckhart Tolle’s great insight in identifying the ego so it doesn’t rule your life as meaning that the ego is bad. The Course in Miracles says the ego is a result of the tiny, mad idea where you forgot to laugh when you had a thought that you are separate from the Divine. I had taken these lessons as indications that my ego was THE problem.

I thought my ego was a problem until I encountered Meghan Watterson and her teachings around the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. Mary clearly states that as humans we are Divine and a collection of “seven powers of wrath” - seven powers of the ego - BOTH AND.

Marking the ego as the enemy means we judge half of who we are as the enemy - not a good idea.

The ego/human part of us tells us to put on our seat beats, balance our checkbooks, practice the piano, mulch the trees, carve out time to exercise, eat our vegetables, not drink too much alcohol, get to funerals on time, clock in on time for work, buy tickets in advance - in short, our ego allows us to function as humans in a human world.

Indeed from the perspective of the Divine it doesn’t make any difference if any of those above activities take place because we are Divine. We are DIVINE - regardless of car accidents, bankruptcy, not being prepared at a recital, dead trees, a weedy garden, constipation, hangovers, family resentment, losing one’s job, seeing your friend’s band, etc etc. All of those human activities have nothing to do with our essential nature.

The key is to do both. Use the ego to carve out time to dive into Cosmic Consciousness. When the ego’s desire to check items off the list has become unhealthy, frenetic, and panicked - listen to Cosmic Consciousness - and slow down.

Meditate, but don’t miss the bus for lunch.

*At a recent children’s pediatrician appointment - they asked me what time they go to bed and when do they wake up. We are all conditioned this way. I have been very well conditioned to be on time to appointments, dinners, parties, etc. I will claim this as Global North conditioning because in my travels I have noticed - not every country has the same sense of urgency around being on time.

The synchronisation of time happened with the Industrial Revolution and the necessity for a global clock for commerce and business - a whole other wrinkle of this conversation.

Time is part of our national math curricula. Dragon learned to skip count his fives by learning to read clocks in Kindergarten math. Bean calculated how long Suzie played at the park and what time her violin lesson started (am or pm) in 3rd grade math. It reminds me of that line in Wonder Woman (paraphrasing), “a machine on your wrist tells you when you are hungry?”