“We just can’t take our little selves and the world too seriously, for they contradict the True Self we share equally with God,” writes Dr. Dana Marrocco.
The point Marrocco is making is that if we can’t find laughter in a situation and we can’t laugh at our faulty beliefs, then we are not ready to let them go.
The result is that we continue to tell ourselves lies — and to defend them vehemently.
In her new book, The Top Ten Lies We Tell Ourselves & How to Stop Believing Them, Marrocco explores these lies and challenges us to let them go.
While our spiritual growth depends on listening to our ego intently, it also depends on learning how to say no to what it asks.
The first step — and one of the lies we must let go of — is to be willing to not be right. Marrocco explains, “We automatically look outward for the source of the problem when it comes to assigning blame. This is because we unknowingly suffer from the worldwide epidemic of directionality confusion. In other words, we all have to learn that nothing is coming at us, mandating our judgement and response. In fact, it’s all coming from us — although we would certainly rather not accept this as the way things are.”
Yet, the reality is that suppressing our own wrongness causes us to project it onto others so we can elevate ourselves in their presence, all while denying what is quite obvious to the world around us.
Drawing on a question from A Course in Miracles, which is the inspiration for the book, Marrocco asks, “Do you prefer to be right or to be happy?”
We can overcome the need to be right and assign blame to everyone else for what distresses us by simply no longer playing judge and jury. Marrocco writes, “Wrap up all existing cases, refrain from focusing on the specifics of a case and shift to a more general analysis.”
All judgement is at its core self-judgment, and what we project onto others we keep alive within ourselves.
The separateness that emerges when we see others as wrong and ourselves as right is also felt as scarcity — others have what we want and think we deserve. Marrocco writes, “Trusting the naturally abundant flow of life can be terrifying. The ego is quick to sort through your memories for evidence of when you chose to “let go” and it all went wrong, casting a shadow of impending gloom over your future.”
Yet what we give, like what we project, we also simultaneously receive.
Marrocco writes, “When we give, we demonstrate to ourselves that we have enough. From there we can go on to recognize that giving is our natural state, and it’s all we can really do.”
We can also choose to live a life free from chaos. “We continue to choose [chaos] because of what we get from it: it allows us to think that our preoccupations are normal while denying that there is anything we can do to change our predicament (our predicament being the sum of all our preoccupations),” writes Marrocco.
The suggestion Marrocco makes is to practice interpreting everything that happens, and everything we do or others seem to do, as either an expression of love or a call for love.
And while we may search for others who we think can finally complete us, this too is a lie. “The search for perfect love in the form of a soul mate is at the very heart of sustaining the heart-less ego,” writes Marrocco.
The result is that we engage in what Marrocco calls “emotional cannibalism” where we seek to feed our own needs while devouring our partner’s needs in the process.
Here again, Marrocco encourages us to embrace Oneness, let go of our need for specialness and embrace the idea that we have nothing to hide and nothing to prove. “Either I’m choosing the ego’s hatred for myself and everyone, or I’m withdrawing my belief in it for myself and everyone,” writes Marrocco. We don’t have to be special, better, or even different from everyone else, but that lie, Marrocco tells us, is perpetuated in the cultivation of our false selves.
The secret to happiness is letting go — letting go of the need to be right, to operate in chaos, to be completed by someone else, to be special, to react out of fear, attack first and hold a grudge — and choosing instead to not fear love, but to actually embrace it and all it has to offer.
Our self-deceptions cannot take the place of truth, our thoughts cannot replace the life-affirming presence of love that we are, and we can all learn to choose wisely, replacing insatiable ego driven needs with a feeling of Oneness.
Drawing on her educational and personal experiences, Marrocco sheds light on timeless philosophical and psychological principles to provide straight-forward, practical, and easily implemented advice for a happy life free from self-deception.
The Top Ten Lies We Tell Ourselves & How to Stop Believing Them
Ixia Press, August 2018
Hardcover, 240 Pages
from Psych Central https://ift.tt/2mS93oC
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