Betrayal or Loyalty – Distinction between Ego and Unique Self #13

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by Dr. Marc Gafni from Your Unique Self

The ego betrays. The Unique Self is loyal. When you are in your ego, and things go bad, you are willing—in your fear—to betray virtually anyone. Your ego is easily identifiable by the shallowness of its integrity. If you live in Unique Self and things go bad, you find your way, through thick or thin, to a deeper center of spirit.

Further discussion:

Betrayal: Isn’t this something from the soap operas on TV, but not something that we would ever do to another person? Can’t we all just relax and say: look at how advanced I am in living my Unique Self?

On the other hand: Haven’t we all had experiences where we felt betrayed? How do we react when we feel betrayed?

Very often, in looking closer at why people were acting the way they did, we actually see that they were in pain themselves – acting from pain and fear, not from evil.

Now, of course, realizing that already involves engaging in what Dr. Marc calls Unique Self perception. Our willingness and ability to look deeper and not identify the other with their “betrayal” is in demand. Instead we can choose to see their pain and fear they are coming from and, deeper still, to identify them with their own yearning essence, their Unique Self.

This perception can make it possible for us to not enter that vicious circle of betraying and being betrayed that can never be broken on that same level. So, the only way out of this vicious circle is by entering a deeper level of integrity – not just to the other person but to ourselves.

Here is another passage from Your Unique Self:

Sometimes our educators, our leaders, and our parents haven’t the eyes to read our insides. And so we write our own stories to fit their skewed sight, even if it means a betrayal of our own tales. Children are all unique until they “try to be.” They try to be in order to get us to notice them—we, who weren’t paying attention when they were painting purple trees. The job of an educator—and we are all educating each other—is to impart basic skills to the student and to honor their purple trees.

The purple tree is rooted in the part of us that cannot be fully expressed, cannot be narrowed into words, and cannot be subjected to laws. Ultimately, every person is completely free and has their own special salvation. No form of instruction exists; no savior exists to open up the road. No road exists to be opened. The road is you. (p. 190)

In this text, betrayal means the betrayal of our own unique story. And only if we reclaim our true story, we can live in true integrity. And to truly live in integrity will help us find our way, “through thick or thin, to a deeper center of spirit” – as Dr. Marc reminds us in today’s distinction, even when “things go bad.” For our true story, the story of our Unique Self IS that deeper center of spirit that grounds us in our own being while truly connecting us to the other person or the situation as a whole.

And deeper still: In another passage from Your Unique Self Marc Gafni instructs us how we can – not integrate our shadow qualities, but – re-integrate shadow that is our unlived life, our true story that we have stuffed away long ago:

Shadow qualities include addictions of every form—rage, betrayal, envy, jealousy, and more. You do not want to integrate shadow qualities. You want to re-integrate shadow.

Your unlived life is stuffed in the darkness. It stagnates and devolves, and re-emerges as shadow qualities. Until the story of your life is lived, you will go on desperately yearning for it. When your desperate yearning is not nourished by the Eros of your story, it devolves to desperate craving, which is filled by the pseudo-Eros of addiction. They are shadow qualities. Once you have realized and integrated your shadow, which is your unlived life, the shadow qualities lose their raison d’être and begin to drop away. (p. 247-248)

But even our ego story of betraying our own deeper self, our Unique Self, by not living true to our deepest knowledge, that story that seems to be a detour, can be re-read on a deeper level as being our destiny/ destination, as this passage from Your Unique Self points toward:

If you are living within the narrow identity of your skin-encapsulated ego and you have suffered betrayal or abuse in your life, then it is likely that the pain of these wounds will take up an enormous amount of your psychic space and emotional energy. However, if you have evolved beyond identification with ego to a lived identity with your Unique Self, your relationship with your wounds will dramatically shift. Your Unique Self lives and breathes aligned with the larger evolutionary framework, seeking to contribute your Unique Gifts for the sake of the larger whole. In such a large context, the evolutionary perspective of Unique Self naturally puts your wounds in perspective.

This means that you will be able to see your wounds from a kosmocentric perspective instead of from an egocentric perspective. Identifying yourself as a Unique expression of the divine, responsible for co-creating the next evolutionary leap toward greater love, inclusion, and embrace—the kosmocentric perspective—obviously places your wounds in such a wider lens that your personal obsession with the insults of your life is exposed for the narcissism that it is.

But narcissism it is—only in part. Holding your enlightened kosmocentric realization more deeply, you understand that you are not merely part of the whole, in the sense of being a cog in a machine or a link in a process. Rather your part is the whole itself. Your part—that is to say, you—has infinite value, dignity, and worth. The pain of your part, your pain, is the pain of All-That-Is. God, the love and compassion that is the substantial reality of All-That-Is, feels your pain. You and God meet in empathetic embrace within the depth of your wounding, for which God cries. (p. 421-422)

In the 10-week telecourse with Dr. Marc Gafni that many of us are engaging in right now – and that you can still join, for all the calls are recorded and much additional material is in the online portal where the community meets and shares – we are given an assignment this week to write about a detour of our life and – in 6 steps – re-write it into the Story of our Life, our unique destiny, the destination we have chosen from our Unique Self:

This process of turning what we have thought of as a regrettable part of our life into the perfect story is what we mean when we say, “mythologize, don’t pathologize.” In it, we have the opportunity to open ourselves to the astonishing perfection of a dynamic emergence of consciousness which is too often obscured by our evaluations and assessments. In that opening, we just might realize that each one of these so-called detours was actually the destination. Every place you have been, you have needed to be. This has been, not your fate, but your destiny.