Down the Ego Rabbit Hole
An excerpt from From Anxiety to Love by Corinne Zupko
Author Corinne Zupko, a licensed counselor and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction teacher, undertook her study of psychology out of necessity when debilitating anxiety threatened to derail her life. Seeking ways to do more than temporarily alleviate her symptoms, Corinne began to study A Course in Miracles (ACIM), mindfulness meditation, and the latest therapeutic approaches for treating anxiety.
As Corinne healed her own mental anguish, she compiled the perception-shifting process she describes in From Anxiety to Love: A Radical New Approach for Letting Go of Fear and Finding Lasting Peace. We hope you’ll enjoy this short excerpt from the book.
The ego is a belief in your mind that you are a body with a personality instead of an eternal being. It is a belief or idea that you are separate from God. The ego turns our perception upside down because it is a thought system that expresses traits that are the opposite of God. If God is eternal life, the ego believes in death. If God is unconditional love, the ego is an expert at judgment and giving love only to those it deems worthy. If God is perfect harmlessness, the ego calls forth pain. If God sees only what is true, the ego sees only what is false.
The ego may seem like a big deal, but it’s just a “tiny, mad idea” that we have accepted into our minds (ACIM T-27.VIII.6:2). It’s a fearful, false voice that wants to keep us identified with a small sense of self.
Do you ever get a really silly idea that you just can’t let go of? Even if you suspect it’s all wrong, you might take it seriously for a long time. For example, my family once lived in a rental house that had an inground pool, which was freezing cold. Obsessed with the desire to get his kids swimming, my dad got the idea that he could boil four pots of water at a time on our electric kitchen stove and dump the boiling water into the forty-thousand-gallon pool to raise the temperature. Even at the age of ten, I knew this wouldn’t work. But he believed it would, and raced to boil his next batch of water after dumping one batch into the pool. Only after repeated failures to raise the water temperature did he finally look for another way. He discovered solar panels on the roof of the house that could be rigged to warm the pool water.
The ego is a silly thought that we have chosen to take seriously. Believing in it plays a huge role in contributing to anxiety. Until we see how the belief in ego actually causes unhappiness, we won’t be inclined to let go of it. In my quest to find freedom from the ego, I sought answers to some big existential questions that had plagued me for years. One big question is, Why did I accept the ego into my mind in the first place? The answer is specialness.
Our Loving Source doesn’t know specialness. Everything in Love’s eyes is equally special. This means that no one is special — an idea that is almost incomprehensible on this earthly plane, where our specialness is literally equal to our survival.
While we (the Children of God) are really still at home in Love, some of us decide that we want to call the shots, be cooler than the bunch, different from the rest — and we certainly want to write our own script of life, rather than just exist in the perfection that was given to us. Love, being One and only knowing Oneness, cannot give us the specialness we so vehemently desire. You could say that, being children, we have a special case of the “terrible twos”: oneness, unity, and infinite love just aren’t good enough for us because we want to experience two-ness, also called duality. This duality sounds like our own personal, delightful Disneyland.
So, to get the specialness that Love can’t give us, we decide to blow off Love. By turning our back on our Loving Source of Oneness, we believe we can find, maintain, and enhance our specialness. We grab onto our “tiny, mad idea” of specialness and take it so seriously that we end up getting lost in it and can no longer remember being in constant, loving communication with our Source. We are mesmerized by our dream of duality and individuality, but that dream is often a nightmare. This is an error we make not just once but perpetually, as we choose to keep dreaming of a substitute for Oneness. Because this initial choice was not made on a conscious individual level, we have no memory of it. However, we can easily see evidence of our desire for specialness in our lives.
Next, let’s look at another of my big questions: How did we end up in this world? The answer here is likely different from anything you’ve heard (so keep your mind open), but it explains a core source of anxiety: guilt.
When we chose to turn away from Love to claim specialness, that choice had some nasty side effects. Just as a puppy curls its tail between its legs when it perceives it has done something wrong, we feel massive guilt for turning our back on our Loving Source. Right on the heels of this extreme guilt, we become fearful that our Loving Source will get angry and punish us for turning away. This cannot actually happen, because God is Love, and Love only. God is incapable of being anything other than loving. But we accept the idea of guilt into part of our Loving Mind.
Can you think of an example from your childhood where you did something that ended up hurting your parents’ feelings? I sure can. When I was thirteen years old, I was once so angry with my mother that I hid in my bedroom closet and didn’t answer her calls for over thirty minutes. Frantic to find me, she went outside to check if I was on my dad’s boat or had fallen into the river. As she stepped onto the boat, she slipped and severely bruised her leg. I felt guilty not only for causing her emotional distress but also for causing her to get physically hurt. I cried for days and never did anything like that again.
If you can connect with my sense of guilt for hurting my mom, imagine increasing this guilt exponentially by thinking that we have deeply hurt God by choosing to turn our backs on our Source and that God is mad at us for it. Sounds like a great reason to be anxious, right? Unconscious guilt from our belief that we have cut ourselves off from God is a huge source of anxiety. But instead of getting caught forever in this unconscious guilt, we can learn to see it differently and allow it to be healed.
Corinne Zupko, EdS, LPC, is the author of From Anxiety to Love. As a licensed counselor and keynote speaker, she has helped thousands of individuals through her one-on-one counseling, weekly meditation classes for corporations, and the largest virtual conference of ACIM in the world, through the organization Miracle Share International, which she cofounded. Visit her online at FromAnxietytoLove.com.