Simplifying, it can be said that egoism manifests itself, inter alia, in the tendency to follow one’s own well-established beliefs without much thought about their meaning and source. This makes us feel comfortable thanks to the stability of the inner world that we have created for ourselves. Most of these beliefs are born of the nature of the concrete mind, which, having no tools to understand more involved issues, tends to oversimplify them. This is how stereotypes and prejudices arise that offer easy solutions to complex problems.
This mechanism can result in an instinctive escape into patterns and routine behaviors, both personal and social. Such attitudes are described as conservative. They are attempts to maintain old habits because they provide us with a sense of stability, and therefore security. The emerging new types of interpersonal relationships are perceived as a threat.
However, there are also people who consciously seek to change various well-established patterns. For them, conservative attitudes are associated with a threat, because they do not allow them to fully express their own egoisms, which they would like to show as something extremely progressive.
We can observe a large increase in the activity of these egoisms in people around the world in recent years during disputes, e.g., about how to treat refugees, or how to deal with climate change.
They usually reveal themselves as some kind of caring mainly for one’s own safety and comfort. It should be added that this type of selfish behavior is instinctive and mostly independent of our will, because it results from the karmic dependencies that arose during human evolution and the almost incessant struggle for survival associated with it.
Admittedly, modern people are generally so aware of these mechanisms that they can significantly tone down and mask their manifestations. And yet these egoisms are so intense that they provoke extremely heated discussions among various parties, each of which has its own extremely well-founded, rational arguments.
Religious and social schemas have conditioned us to consider ego and selfishness a bad thing. It was caused by the way in which the Human Ego – creating an element of the bridge connecting our consciousness with the spiritual world – manifests itself in the vast majority of people. Therefore, we have the impression that selfishness is something to be fought against.
However, this issue is much more complicated. For selfishness also serves as a cover for consciousness, which is not yet ready to be fully influenced by the rays of the Spirit, which are also known as Gnosis, that is, proper cognition. When the influence of gnostic energy is too strong, people instinctively activate selfish mechanisms. Thus they avoid the state of being too open to the touch, which encourage honest contacts with other people and cooperation.
For selfishness distorts the way we perceive the world and people. It makes neutral and natural situations seem threatening and gives the impression that someone or something is causing them to harm us. Therefore, under its influence, we close ourselves to cooperation with others and thus interrupt the flow of higher energies.
How to break out of this circle of dependence? You just have to look very objectively at your egoism, your own fears and inclinations, in order to better understand the egoisms of other people and learn to accept it as an objective and natural phenomenon. Having achieved this, we are able to use these known mechanisms for our own development. The ego seems to be an obstacle until we understand the principles and purpose of its activity. After attaining this understanding, it appears to us as a mechanism that allows us to leave our dependence on the reality around us and enter the level of a more subtle state of being.
The dissatisfaction with one’s own life achievements, which often occurs in people, is only information that they are using their ego against its purpose, which is to stimulate them to pursue higher goals.
By examining our own egoism, understanding it better and better and constantly working with it, we develop self-awareness. In this way, we finally reach a degree of maturity where we no longer need the cover of selfishness and are able to fully open up to sincere relationships with other people and to work for the good of humanity as a whole. Then, egoism changes, because it becomes more transparent and does not obscure or distort our perception of both Gnosis and other people.
What does the New Testament passage quoted earlier have to do with all this? Well, it says that by following the man with water, that is, the influence of Aquarius, we will reach the hall where we can prepare the Passover, which symbolizes the inner transformation that allows us to achieve a higher level of being, that is, true humanity. The process of preparing the Passover is very complex, and generally lasts almost the entire length of a person’s life. It consists of countless very small steps, including our daily reactions and behaviors. Assistance in carrying out this process is provided by gnostic spiritual schools.
If we deviate from the literal interpretation of this passage and take Jesus’ disciples as symbols of certain aspects of ourselves, the question of where to eat the Passover is a question of where we can find the real food. Food that we constantly lack and which modern man is constantly looking for, not being satisfied with what ordinary life offers him.
Reaching this place is not easy, because you have to follow the force that we constantly experience every day and that is why we do not attach too much importance to it, taking it for granted. Therefore it escapes our attention. Spiritual schools help people to consciously perceive these energies and accept them internally. The next stage is to adapt our state of being to these impulses through inner work with egoism and follow the direction indicated by them, doing what is simple, obvious and natural at a given moment. And when we are ready for the Passover, we will find a large upper room, furnished and prepared. Then we will be able to eat this farewell meal and thus leave behind the present level of existence, which is already so insufficient and disappointing for us.
