Inner states, thoughts, feelings, and emotions can be understood more by reflecting upon them, by looking back at what they have done to you and your life, by examining their repercussions and how they make you think, feel, and act.
By looking back over time, you can see the different inner states that have arisen or you can follow a single one, seeing the events they have been part of.
You can do this effectively in an exercise called “analysis of an ego.” To do it, sit or lie down, and relax the body totally, then become aware of your present inner state and watch the different thoughts and emotions as they arise. Concentrate the mind with a practice specifically for that, or pronounce a mantra or a koan to silence the mind, and then remember the egos of the past.
You can look back over the day’s events to see what inner states (egos) manifested and what they made you do, or you can go into a specific inner state in more depth by looking back over it, seeing how it has worked throughout your life, and then analyzing it.
Remember the past as though you are looking at a movie in a detached way, getting information about your inner states and their related events in your life and reflecting upon them.
Analyzing an Ego State
When you analyze an ego, look into it in great depth to get more information about it. Concentrate upon the inner state you want to understand, look at when it first appeared in your life, what it made you feel and do, all the harm its caused, etc., then look at all the different ways it manifests and go into little details in your life, see its different parts, study each of them, seeing what kinds of details come out of it, and the different type of states that come from it.
You can reach a point where you cannot come up with anything new, and it is when you are stuck that you can go into deep and profound meditation, as the mind becomes silent.
A problem you can face when doing this exercise is that when you go to meditate upon an ego and look back on it, you can make the mistake of just thinking about the ego—you can even feed it and make it stronger, as the egos sustain themselves from psychic energy when you are in them. Before you know it, you can get involved in an argument or a fight in your mind, or whatever that particular ego brings.
When looking at a series of events which are taking place during the day, see them like a movie, look at what happened without getting involved in thinking or being emotional about it. By seeing it, you get the right kind of information. Then deeply reflect upon that information in order to find out something that you don’t already know.
Thinking is already what is known. You can work out new ideas, yet there’s nothing really new taking place. But when you use the information from perception (which comes from the present moment) to meditate upon something, you can to go to the point where there’s no thought and then capture something new about it.
If you’re practicing well, you can drift in and out of sleep and can also have out-of-body experiences. So in practicing meditation you can be sleeping, waking up, sleeping, practicing meditation, and then you can dream about the ego that you’re trying to get information about. And in that dream, you can get new information about it.
Falling asleep is not necessarily a bad thing when analyzing an ego, because it gives the opportunity to be taught from the other side in dreams, or to have an out-of-body experience. This analysis is actually quite good for having out-of-body experiences, because you’re concentrating on the ego, and concentration with sleep brings an out-of-body experience.
If you’re trying to find the answers about the ego and there are none that you know of, you can go from concentration to a silent mind, moving from a single thought to no thought, and have proper meditation.
Although much can be understood by reflecting upon egos, how they work, and their repercussions, intellectualization of the egos can be a problem—not only in the practice of meditation, but also in understanding them throughout the day.
In daily life you could make the mistake of trying to observe yourself, but instead just thinking about your inner state; you need to see the ego as it appears.
This gives a chance for remorse to come out more as well, because the conscience comes from the essence when one is psychologically asleep, to push one to do something, or to make some changes.
If you can observe yourself, if you can be aware and reflect, then you can learn to gradually remove the different subconscious states from within with the technique known as the death of the egos. Then, along with alchemy, you can gradually be born to a new spiritual life.
Q: When I’m trying to meditate on a really big problem, I can’t concentrate upon practicing the technique, but on solving the problem. I find that’s a big obstacle.
Belsebuub: Yes, the problem is something that needs to be solved in best possible way, but in this case it’s the emotions driving the mind that are the cause of the inability to concentrate during analysis. To reduce this, you need to tackle the problem and the underlying inner states in daily life, and then when you go to practice analysis at an opportune moment, put all that aside knowing that you will give the time to solving the problem in its own time.
Another issue could be that you don’t understand the analysis exercise properly, or may not have researched and practiced the technique enough for it to work correctly. You can’t expect everything to happen overnight; you have to learn the exercises and that takes time.
After reflecting upon an inner state, it helps to go back and study yourself in daily life, to be watchful as emotions, feelings, and thoughts arise about that particular state and situation. If you’re alert and self-aware during the day, you can spot them and that will give you more information to meditate upon.
But also take into account dreams and try to get into the astral plane if you can. You can get information about the state you are trying to understand in dreams, which can give you a breakthrough. If you fall in and out of sleep in a practice of analysis you can have dreams related to the ego you are trying to understand.
The answer often doesn’t appear in the practice of analysis straight away, but if you watch your dreams and keep looking for that state during the day, you can eventually get breakthroughs in your understanding.
Sometimes it may feel that the spiritual practices don’t work, that you’ll never get them right. But they do work; they are tools which can work for almost anyone. Everyone is educated and brought up to think, feel, and act in certain ways, and it takes time to adjust to the exercises. You may want the results straight away, but you have to be patient. They work if you put in enough effort and persist with them long enough.
What about retrospection upon the egos that have appeared during the day?
Retrospection plays a big role in self-knowledge; it’s a way to study yourself. In it, you sit or lie quietly with your eyes closed and go back over the day you just had, looking at it in a detached way like a movie. You can see what is going on both in the events that happen and in your inner states. This helps you to understand yourself and recognize things better.
With retrospection you can see what inner states are arising and how you spend your day. But you need to be careful, as some inner states can be fed with it as they can in analysis.
Self-observation is the key factor in getting the information for remembrance in the first place; by observing you can see what is going on in events and in yourself and how the ego operates. It is possible not to get much out of the practice if you haven’t observed the ego in daily life, because you won’t have the information to be able to know how the ego operates. This is why it has been said you may as well do a koan.
Analyzing or reflecting upon an ego also brings the risk of feeding it if you don’t do it properly. But done properly it is an important practice; it can bring understanding and information that may otherwise be missed if you were to rely upon self-observation in the moment alone.
Is it best to practice analysis upon an ego each day?
If you don’t do it each day you’ll miss many egos.
During the awareness or the analysis practice, there are thoughts that appear. Do all the thoughts belong to the ego, or can there be thoughts from the consciousness?
They’re usually representations of the mind or thoughts from egos, the subconscious. When you see things in daily life, they form images, those images crystallize into mental forms, and those mental forms keep repeating and keep coming up. Then the egos use the different mental forms and language and feed from thoughts.
Thoughts are so much a part of what a person perceives that the consciousness is engulfed in them and is very weak. Whoever walks along the path creates internal bodies, which at a certain stage allow them to separate themselves from their thoughts, and then later on, to really control their thoughts, so that they don’t have power over the person, and they can detach themselves from thought at will.
Love and happiness are powerful weapons against the egos.
~ A talk by Belsebuub given in Oregon, USA, 2008
