Shining Your Inner Light: Exploring the Journey from Pure Thought to Complex Ego

Q: Is having an ego the problem?

No. It lets you look at yourself, and it holds your whole story, and there is a healthy version of that top layer. The trouble is only living there and calling it solid.

Q: What is the difference between empathy and compassion?

My teacher Doshin put it in five words when I asked him to Zen it out. Empathy is for you, compassion is for them.

Q: Can I actually live at the bottom layer?

For a few seconds at a time, and monks who have given it decades will tell you much the same. The gain is not staying there. It is noticing sooner on the way up.

Read along

The transcript

It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.

ego · spiritual-journey · joy · compassion

Read the transcript

Well, I think it's time that we rediscovered our light, that you

rediscovered your inner light.

And we started living from a place of an open heart and start

living from a place of just freedom and joy and compassion that

we're so capable of.

Once we strip away a few layers of this ego, that just gets

in the way.

And that's what today's podcast is about.

I speak about the funnel coming from the single point of thought.

This time, I'm going to go the opposite way and I'm going to break

that funnel down from the very top to the bottom.

You're going to have to stick around for this one because this

will really.

It will either blow your mind and go, wow, I get it.

Or you will be like, I need to know more.

Whichever way, it's fascinating, it's awesome, and it's

what changes my life so much when I think about this kind of thing.

And all I'm doing is trying to think of different ways to explain

breaking down the ego.

So just before I start, I want to say thank you to everybody that

donates, everybody that keeps these podcasts going.

Angie, Han, you are the latest.

Thank you so much for that, Eva.

Thank you, Jenna, Amir.

Thank you, Jesse.

Thank you, Lily and Stuart.

And there's a few other anonymous that I just want to thank

you, Reach out to you.

Big hug over the airways or whatever it is.

It's not over the airways now.

It's through the wires now in it.

Whichever way, it doesn't matter.

Just want to say thank you to you guys.

You're awesome.

And anybody that reviews, anybody that listens or follows,

you're all awesome.

I love you guys and just keep up the good work.

You're really starting to build this podcast into something.

And we're reaching more people.

We're giving more people a little more inner peace.

Well, let's hope so, anyway.

So I want to.

Whenever I was.

When I was a child, I always used to deconstruct everything.

I used to break everything apart.

You know, if I had a radio, I wanted to make it go louder or I

wanted to tune it to better stations that I.

That I swear was off the dial that I could tune into.

And I never used to be able to put things together properly, and

I used to break everything.

And when I had my first car, we bought it at the auction rooms.

It sat on my friend's drive and I took the wheels off.

I was cleaning it.

I was doing all these different things.

I was being a mechanic for the day.

So I had this kind Of I took the wheels off and I took all the

springs off near the brakes and everything like that.

I put the wheels and all back on.

I don't know what was I doing?

I don't know.

I put the wheels back on and my friend come home and said, what

are those springs doing on the drive?

And I was like, yeah, I don't know what they were.

So what do you mean, you don't know what they were?

Well, I took the wheels off and I took apart the brakes.

I did all these things.

And he's like, you can drive a car now, you've left the springs

off.

I said, yeah, but I couldn't work out why they were needed.

So this is what I've always done.

I've spent my life breaking things down, trying to understand.

And do you know what?

You find out one thing every single time, you find out that radio,

when you break it down, was never a radio.

It was only constructed that way.

The bits put together.

The LEGO house you build, guess what?

Just bits.

And you know, that story, that ego that you are, that whole thing,

this is who I am.

This is how I like things.

This is how I react to things.

This is what I'm good at and not good at.

Guess what?

Just bits.

It's just stories.

And that will either give you a refresh and go, oh, wow, it's just

that I can relax a little or it'll freak the hell out of you.

Of course, who wouldn't be freaked out when you're going to

be taken apart and you're going to be seen through?

It's like imposter syndrome.

Guess what, ego, I can see through you.

I can see you're just a collection of stories and memories

that's going to freak out any ego, right?

But the truth is, on the other side of that deconstruction, there's

freedom and there's joy, and you end up taking life less seriously.

And I don't mean you end up not taking life seriously.

There's the paradox.

I'm not saying you go through life and you don't care and you just

end up just somebody, just not caring, not saying that at all.

But when you take life less seriously, you can take the blows

a little bit more and you absorb them and you become more flexible.

Like the tree that's in the middle of that field that we all

love seeing that great big oak tree or whatever tree, and we go,

how does that stand there year after year, storm after storm?

Because it doesn't take its life too seriously.

And it knows it's going to be okay because it's got the deep roots

and the deep foundation.

So I've gone slightly off topic, what I was going to talk about.

I love trees, as you know.

But yeah, I'm going to.

So this reverse funnel, I'm going to deconstruct the ego and

the story and this person of who you become.

So I'm going to.

Normally I start at the bottom layer, the very point of the bottom.

I'm going to start at the top.

The most complex, the most colorful, the most layers of all

layers.

The most stories, the most memories, all in the top.

So I want you to imagine a funnel.

At the bottom of that funnel is the initial point of thought or

the point of caring.

Below that there's just, ah, just peace, just nothing.

And then the whole funnel goes up and I want you to jump straight

to the top.

And right at the top, this is the outermost layer.

This is where thoughts, beliefs, emotions, they all converge

into this complex web of narratives and opinions.

It's bustling and it's busy and it's noise in your daily life.

All the expectations, the personal ego, the.

This layer is marked by all the diversity and the multitude of

voices.

Oh, I'm just tired to think about it.

Everything is there.

Every belief pops up, every opinion pops up, everybody's thoughts,

all your wishes, you know, everything you are everything.

Every memory, it's all there and you want to be there.

It's all the desires and all that.

And it's not always colorful.

Sometimes it's really hard, sometimes it's tough.

In actual fact, most of it is tough.

The Buddha said, to be alive is to suffer.

That's what he's talking about.

He's talking about, you know, if you're there or if you're on it.

If you're living your life primarily from any layer above the

point of origin, you're suffering.

You're suffering already.

You want more of it or you want less of it.

You're pushing stuff away or you're pulling stuff in.

And I'm just here talking and thinking about it.

It's like, oh, I've just recorded a meditation called do nothing

meditation.

And this is the absolute opposite to that.

So if you want to listen to that, go over to Inner Peace Meditations

by Sister podcast.

And if you go to stephenweb.uk all my links are there.

But yeah, do nothing meditations, just like, okay, do

nothing.

And now I'm thinking about the do everything.

You know, all your plans, all the things you should be doing all

the things you should have done, all the regrets you have and

all the things.

It's all there at the top layer.

It's like the worst possible pea soup you could ever imagine.

It's just everything in it.

And very often we're bumbling along on the top of that.

That's the very top there.

But there's a healthy version of this top layer and an unhealthy

version of this top layer.

And I want to touch upon that because that's also important.

Because I'm not saying you shouldn't ever be there.

I'm saying enjoy it when you are there and recognize that even

that layer doesn't stay there for very long.

And this layer, the complexity and the ego layer, you know, enables

self reflection, it enables personal growth, it enables the opportunity

to enjoy all these things you've experienced.

Enjoy the stories of your life.

The ego enjoys life.

Sometimes I don't know if the ego enjoys life actually.

The ego doesn't carry the weight, just gives you narrative.

And it's up to you whether you enjoy it or not.

But the cons of this is it can lead to, you know, over identification.

It can lead to a real solid version of your role.

This is who I am and this is the status of who you are.

This is my story.

This is my.

This is all my beliefs, all my opinions.

This is who I've become.

This is my family.

I've been like this for generations.

I'm not going to change.

You know, don't look deeper.

You know, don't pull away this layer because I don't want you to.

And it causes stress.

Just dive to another layer.

Let's just go down on this layer.

You've just got your narrative and storytelling.

So it seems similar, but this one, it's not so much other people,

it's not so much.

You got to show the world.

This is just your layer of hey, these are my stories, this is

my narrative.

This facilitates the identity formation, the cultural connection,

people around you.

This forms a part of the foundation of what is above.

Things you enjoy, things you don't enjoy.

And it may trap individuals in the limiting self stories and biases.

You know, if you get stuck here and you don't want to leave

this place, you are stuck to your story, you're stuck to your

narrative.

That is who I am.

Above that, there's a whole experience of things that we've just

been talking about.

No bad, no good.

They're just an experience of things where you bring in everything

along you imagine you're visiting a concert and you get to

the concert and you're bringing all your household stuff

and all your friends, all your stories and all that.

It's like I'm here with everything I've ever owned.

Well, this time you've left a few of your friends and all at home

and you're just bringing up your story and then you go down another

layer.

And when you go down this other layer, this is more about your

opinions and what you've learned.

This is what formed your stories and your storytelling and

the other layers.

But it is here as a foundation to your narrative.

This encourages the learning and adapting.

If you get stuck at this layer and I don't know really whether you

get stuck at these things, but if you come from your opinions and

beliefs and what you learned so rigidly, you'll often be close

mindedness and you'll resist new ideas and you won't get to experience

the two levels above.

I think we all know people that are just so stuck in their opinions

and don't get me wrong, I can be there sometimes and oh boy, you

give me a few days with different people and things like

that.

And oh, I can argue my opinion as if it's fact, as if it's like

the only opinion in the world I know.

An opinion is.

An opinion is just a person's opinion.

That doesn't stop me arguing.

It sometimes really doesn't.

You know, I, I'm my human, my ego is human just like anybody else's.

You know, just because I may invite you to see some of this stuff,

it doesn't mean to say I'm sorry, it doesn't mean to say I've

got all this, you know, you catch me on a bad day and you, you'll

get the opinionated Stevie.

But yeah, this, this is more stress at this level.

I think you might not have as much in your life, but you're, you're

stuck in your opinion, you're stuck in your learned ways and that's

it.

And you ain't going to move from there and then you got another

layer just below.

I suppose this layer comes from your beliefs and your family

and your religion and your core values.

And this is a foundation that if you go through this foundation

and you develop this one properly, the ones above will be

more sensible, there'll be more compassion.

Because as I go down through the layers in a minute, we've got

emotions and significance, we've got compassion and caring,

thought and intention.

But if you bring them along to the beliefs and the core values,

you can have a real good foundation for the levels above.

And bearing in mind you can dip that back down to these.

And you have to, at times, especially when things go wrong,

you have to dip down to these levels.

So your beliefs and core values, this provide stability and

a sense of purpose in life.

That's the pro side of it.

But the con side of it is, can be rigid, preventing personal growth

and adaptation.

Core values can be amazing, but boy, can they hold you back.

And you know, I'm not particularly against religion, but

if you hold your religion too tightly, it will prevent experiences

and freedom.

There's no freedom in holding anything tightly.

And then we get closer, we get closer to the heart of the consciousness

of who you are.

And you can go down through these layers in the funnel, just

like you can almost going down as the ego develops and becomes more

complex as time goes on.

Emotions and significance, you know, this really enriches our life

with depth and meaning.

It's before the foundations of these things get solidified, but

the emotions and significance, who am I?

What's important to me?

But you're not really that rigid on them yet.

That comes in the release in the core values just above.

And it may lead to emotional overwhelm and disconnection.

May mean that if you don't formulate this layer properly, you

won't be able to take your emotions to the other layers.

You won't be able to do it in a way that can be healthy.

So you might end up at the narrative and storytelling from a

place where your empathy is so overwhelming that you can't tell

your story, or you get to the complexity and the ego stage and

your empathy is so overwhelming to you that even when

you tell your story, it's through tears and you take on the

whole world's pain because you have so much empathy with the rest

of the world that you cannot cope with it yourself.

Remember, there's a difference between empathy and compassion.

And when I asked Oshin, my Zen master, the difference between empathy

and compassion, and he's brilliant for wandering off on a

really brilliant talks, but I said, can you zen it out?

And he stood there quite quiet and he leaned in and said, empathy

is for you, compassion is for them.

Just like that, it blew my mind.

It's like, wow.

Yes.

So if you get the emotions and significance, if you get this level,

you can end up with so much empathy that it overwhelms you.

And that's why you might have to disconnect from life and run away

and avoid it.

At all cost.

And then we.

We're diving really deeper into our core, you know, so compassion

and caring, you know, that fosters the empathy of the next level

and the human connection for the first time.

We're more human here at this layer where recognizing that we have

to fit in with others, we have to fit in with society, and we have

to care and have compassion for others and ourselves.

Of course, the problem is overextending.

This can risk to burnout, can risk to, you know, just overreaching

to everybody else and forgetting yourself in a different

way to unhealthy empathy.

I did a podcast.

I don't know, it's probably 50 podcasts ago.

Healthy empathy versus unhealthy empathy.

And trust me, there is two of them, while there's two of everything.

Healthy desire, unhealthy desire.

You know, all these things come with a healthy and unhealthy.

And I call them that because I don't want to call them good or bad,

because good or bad suggest one's wrong and one's right.

And it's just.

Oh, it's more complicated than that.

And that's why we have to.

Now you can see why I took everything apart because I wanted

to know what is the simplest form, and then I can understand.

And that's what we're doing.

We're taking apart the ego.

And then you move to one layer removed from pure awareness.

That's just thought and intention.

So now if we look at it differently, I want you to flip the

coin now or flip the funnel.

So just a thought, just an intention.

So out of the singularity, out of pure consciousness, you have a

thought.

It isn't anything more yet than a thought.

It's not compassion yet until it develops into further layers,

and then that thought becomes a compassion or caring, and then

it adds emotions to it, and then it adds beliefs to it, and then

it adds opinions to it, and it adds a story to it.

And before you know, it's so complex that thought went from just

a thought to this complex opinions and beliefs and all the

other stories that go with it.

And then before you know it, you're back to square one in a mess,

covered up with all these layers, and you have to protect everything

and you're exhausted and overwhelmed again.

Oh, does that sound like that.

That is exactly it in it, you know, in a nutshell, that is exactly

it.

We get a thought, it leads to.

Leads to a compassion and caring.

And I think it always goes to compassion and caring.

I don't think it drops to the Other ones.

Because where does the hate and where does the thing comes in

that comes after beliefs and opinions and stories?

Hate can't come in until you have a story of someone hurting you

or a story of what's right and wrong.

There's no hate down at the compassion and caring at the raw

level.

There's no hate in nature.

There's some horrible things in nature, but it doesn't come from.

Hate comes from evolution.

It comes from.

Yeah, I haven't taken that apart yet.

I don't understand it yet to any large degree anyway.

To be other invite you to a way of looking at it anyway.

But this thought and compassion at that level, it drives

creativity and innovation from that.

Imagine what you can do with a thought instead of jumping to your

beliefs and opinions.

You can do something new with it or nothing.

Whoa, how cool is that?

Do nothing with it.

Yeah, that's just.

It's a revolutionary thing.

And I think 100, 200 years ago when they plowed the fields, they

come back and they read the books and they were quiet, these

thoughts were able to develop in a conscious, more caring way.

Nowadays we're just hit with everything that a thought becomes

a complex ego within milliseconds.

You know, the belief and the story and the opinions are all added

to it.

Boom, just like that.

And it happens in milliseconds.

And then we get to the real core, the real essence, the real

whatever you want to do.

And this is what, this is the light that you have to recognize.

If you can live from this pure awareness.

When you work it out, please let me know.

I don't do a bad job at living just above this, sometimes for a

few seconds a day, recognizing the thought and choosing whether

to go with it, recognizing that I've now got into a belief and

opinion.

Do I continue up the funnel or do I stop and let it go?

But pure awareness, there's just inner peace.

Spiritual enlightenment at this level is just, ah, just here,

just present accepting everything in this moment and the

cons of this, it's difficult to maintain.

If you can maintain this for me on a few seconds.

Oh boy, are you enlightened.

Buddhist monks spend years and years in monasteries.

Most of the time it's a few seconds before a thought comes in

and then an emotion with that thought and then an opinion that

I'm hungry or what food I want.

So that's how these thoughts develops.

This is how we jump out of inner peace.

Because inner peace comes from that, ah, just the quietness right

below everything.

And it may not Be obvious, but how you go up through that funnel

is up to you.

So you imagine a torch at the bottom.

I love this bit.

You're going to like this bit.

I'm a visual person, so.

So imagine a torch at the bottom.

You turn the torch on.

That's a thought.

Comes out of pure awareness.

It goes into the thought and intention and it's still bright,

it's still ready, it's still immature and it's still naive and

it's still a brand new fertile thought, like a brand new seed that's

just popped up out of the ground like a little shoot.

That's the word I was looking for.

And then it goes into compassion because it wants to be

something.

It wants to be something awesome and caring and it wants to

be loving.

And then it has emotions, it feels because it wants to be something.

It's now got a desire.

And now you throw in your beliefs.

Well, you're going to be red or you've got to be yellow or you've

got to be this.

And the problem is the more you throw on it, the darker that

light becomes because there's more in the way.

And then you add the opinions, everything you learn on top of this

because you believe in your core values and your beliefs, they're

okay to add.

And then you add your opinions, they're okay to add too,

because they're your opinions.

So you might have religion and then you've got your opinions of

that religion and then you've got your life experiences.

Let's throw that in there as well.

You're starting to see the problem now.

Now the light barely, you can barely see through that thought that

was so pure and so caring and loving that was ready to change the

world is now so.

Oh, it's so shadowed.

And then suddenly the complexity and ego and we add all

the layers of life and everything to it and that thought

just becomes the same as all the other thoughts.

It becomes tired and overwhelmed and it becomes a story

and a narrative and opinion.

Yeah, and there's your inner peace shattered.

So I hope you enjoyed this podcast.

Now then, the reason why I share this with you is because if

you understand how a thought grows and how we add layers to really

gives you that insight, to stop, enjoy the pure thought, maybe

add a bit of intention to that thought.

Maybe with that intention, add a bit of compassion.

Stop there.

Or if you continue, don't add all your beliefs onto it.

Maybe your beliefs don't need to be added to this thought.

Maybe you can be open minded and grow this thought again, because

I really do think that concepts like this and visualizing

it like this will just change how you end up feeling.

Because the higher you go, the more layers you add to every single

moment of the day.

The more compact you are, the more rigid you are, the more unhappy

you are.

And you can play with these things.

That's the whole point.

If you're not aware of the thought until all the layers have

already added, you're done.

That's like giving a child a painting has already been done.

It's like going to a jumble sale and buying your child a paint

by numbers, but somebody's already done it.

It's like, yeah, that sucks.

Can you buy me another one?

Really?

We want to start at the blank canvas and become aware at that point.

So, on that note, my this podcast has already gone on to nearly

30 minutes, and I'm not going to apologize for that because I think

this podcast is awesome.

This one, I'm really proud of this one because it's the kind of

thing I love talking about, and I just hope it gives you some

insight into how thoughts develop, how our emotions develop.

Thank you for supporting this podcast.

Thank you for donating coffees.

It really makes a difference.

And yeah, and I love you.

Take care.

Have some awesome thoughts.

Shining Your Inner Light: Exploring the Journey from Pure Thought to Complex Ego

In this episode

The question this answers

The heart of it

One small thing to try

Questions people ask

The transcript

One calm email.
Every Sunday.

Shining Your Inner Light: Exploring the Journey from Pure Thought to Complex Ego

In this episode

The question this answers

The heart of it

One small thing to try

Questions people ask

The transcript

More honest conversations

One calm email. Every Sunday.

One calm email.
Every Sunday.