A friend recently had a dream where she was trying to warn her friends of the insight she had received that sounded crazy to them (and to her, as well). Her incite in the dream was that a recreational substance the others were contemplating using was really a tool that the “devil” used to enter human bodies and take control of their lives.

This dream made me think of the 1960’s and the hippie movement that started as a thought system to heal the world. People had come to understand that the only way to overcome war, violence and lack was to come together in love and live as One, by forgiving, accepting and caring for one another. This utopian idea is a thought system that could have healed the world. Indeed we would be living in a very different world now if we had all embraced this thought system in its purity.

Instead substances sneaked their way into the infant paradigm. Substances that seemed to the hippies to be wonderful and amazing were actually being used by another thought system to bring about the demise of their manifestation of a new utopian paradigm.

The ego, which is that opposite thought system seems to have a life of its own, (thus its personification of the devil in some religions). Intelligent in the way of the world, it sets us up for falls through duality. The dual thought system is a system of opposites (the ying and yang, the good and the bad, the rich and the poor, the healthy and the sick, etc.) In fact the original opposite and “set up” was the idea that God has an opposite, that is, of God and the devil, a system of separation, where we would be separate from God and separate from one another (”The” Fall).

Most humans live unconsciously in the egoic thought system. When we choose the thought system of the ego whether consciously or unconsciously, we are easily manipulated by the ego. The ego is very conniving and knows exactly how to set us up for another fall. How easy it was for the ego to bring down the hippies by introducing substances that made their bodies feel good, however temporary. Soon the manifestation of the thought system of addiction overcame the manifestation of the thought system of love. When we look around us today we can still see the thought system of addiction tearing apart the lives of individuals, families, communities and countries.

Perhaps the dream was a reminder of how the ego, or the devil, is still using substances today to delay our inevitable journey back to God.

In what other ways does the ego manipulate us into embracing its thought system rather than the thought system of love and forgiveness? I challenge each of us to take a quiet moment to contemplate this question and then another moment to share your insight.

Namaste

P.S. The good news is that when we become aware of how the ego works, we can overcome its thought system by choosing another, the thought system of love, forgiveness, nurture and acceptance!