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Painting with a wide brush, let us perceive, for a moment, that the average individual enjoys a lifespan of roughly 90 years.
The first 30 years of our lives are spent developing and educating our complete ego; mentally, physically, and emotionally.
The next thirty years, roughly from the ages 30 to 60 we spend implementing the ego that we have developed and educated. Us against the world. We work to expand our ego within the multidimensional world that we find ourselves in. We work to provide for our family, which is an extension of our ego. Economically, intellectually and emotionally we establish ourselves. Harden the egg which we are able to more clearly define as the years pass. The pinnacle of the expansion of our ego.
The third trimester of our individual evolution should be spent in observing ourselves. During our elder years are able to better understand that the egg; the ego, which we have educated and worked so hard to establish during the first 60 years of our life will inevitably, break. Just as an egg that is dropped, we will cease to exist and we are better able to understand that all that we consider to be ourselves will soon cease to exist. The outside world will continue, without skipping a beat or even taking notice of our absence. In this time, in this period in our lives, roughly between 60 and 90 years old are we then only able to have the capacity to truly observe our overall being.
It is within this last third of our lives that we face our most difficult and yet our most important struggle.
There are so many things that I love of the writings of Ouspensky. I will attempt to paraphrase a tiny segment of his philosophy here as I believe it pertains:
As human beings, as nature has originally made us, we have have five functions or sometimes called centers. There also can be two other functions available to us if we are able to have our first five functions working, relatively normal.
The five functions that make-up a human being are:
[b]The instinctive function
The moving function
The emotional function
The intellectual function
The sexual functioning[/b]
Our biggest challenge in the last third of our lives is to observe ourselves.
More specifically to observe and estrange ourselves from our intellectual function.
Our intellectual function is a double edged sword.
It wields our power yet ties us to the ever continuing parring between us and the universe around us.
We must stop thinking.
More specifically, stop all unnecessary thinking.
Stop the continuing narration that we actually find ourselves to be.
Stop all things unnecessary within ourselves. For those are the things that we call sin.
That process can only happen on a more consistent basis when we begin to observe ourselves.
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