Graduation – an exercise in active self-observation.

Warning! There’s a small discussion before the story.

Finally, after nine years of egos delaying it (those egos are in the past), I finally graduated from Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas on Saturday, May 10, 2008 with a Bachelor’s degree in French and a minor in Spanish. Now I can look for better work and finally start saving up to move to Berkeley.

It has been a very bumpy ride since I started all that time ago, but thankfully I gained Gnosis along the way. I look at the time from 2004 to now as a time to really try out what I have learned in preparation for the “real world.”

The last two semesters were really trying, as my homework required me to read a lot and use up my intellect, making the Inner Work harder. I had to put a huge effort into making Gnosis work.

One thing we really have to watch out for is making sure we don’t try to intellectualize the work. We’ll never have control in the astral if our intellect is running the show. We have to really see how everything works by looking inwards towards the five inferior centers and everything exterior with our five senses at the same time, like an archer drawing a bow (as Belzebuub compares it to). When you get this right, it feels so wonderful, and it’s worth every moment fighting for it.

Over the past semester I really had to fight to gain control because my intellect was drained by my homework, so the Inner Work became much harder. I had to keep fighting to really understand how the awareness and self-observation work. And the morning of my graduation, it came together and helped me see the egos in a totally new light.

Here my story begins:

So, I had worked very hard to graduate cum laude (honors) from Lamar. I had gone through everything I needed to that morning and marched out into the Montagne Center, a huge indoor sports facility (pronounced MOHN-TAIN in English, which is the French word for mountain. The French pronunciation is entirely different altogether). I walked in a huge procession, listened to the commencement speech, and finally got ready to walk across the stage.

I was expecting everything to go in my favor. I was expecting to hear the announcer announce my attainment of cum laude, as they always do. But as I crossed the stage and received my diploma holder, I didn’t hear “cum laude”.

A thousand things went through my mind. “I have a high GPA! I met all requirements! etc.” I felt so wronged and there was no reason to feel that way. I was cum laude whether they announced it or not. After returning to my seat the egos kept feeding, and I decided to really push to be aware and observe myself. That’s when it happened.

I felt the ego feeding and it stuck out like a sore thumb in my state of awareness and self-observation. And it kept on going even though I was making efforts to be aware and observe myself. There are three factors that I experienced:

The first one is I had been really studying Belzebuub’s works before going to bed for the past couple of weeks before that, because I really need to get the awareness, self-observation and disintegration right. I had read a section in “Secret Knowledge, Hidden Wisdom” about how this one student “felt” the egos coming in, and Belzebuub discussed further on how we should avoid mentally categorizing the egos.

The second: I also had printed Belzebuub’s Talks in Quebec on his site and found something when Belzebuub talks about how an ego, if it’s large enough and even when you’re clear it can take over. “When that happens,” Belzebuub continues, “that’s when you’ve got to dig your feet in, dig your heels in and ask, even though you don’t feel like asking because it’s the only way to get out of it.” This is on page 7 of his talks on his site.

A third factor of what I experienced comes from “The Peace of the Spirit Within” (pages 61-62 in the chapter “Learning to Look Within”) when one student talks about how he/she caught himself/herself daydreaming and came back to the consciousness and was clear. Though, in my case I was daydreaming and the ego was still going on when I caught it. It was large enough to keep on doing that, just like in the second factor. Unfortunately, I forgot to apply the disintegration.

Later that night, I experienced this again with a different ego and remembered to apply the disintegration. The ego went away and the next time it came back it was significantly weaker. A triumph that was well worth everything! Without that small error in my graduation ceremony, I would have taken longer to realize it!

Ironically, I got a two-for-one deal with this minor inconvenience. The other morning I checked the official list, and I still wasn’t on it. This stirred my anger and I found out more about the active nature of doing the awareness and self-observation at the same time. The simultaneous inner and outer observation has a very active nature to it. This needs more investigation.

I hope you have all gained something very valuable from this.

All the best for your Inner Work,

Tim