DEAD MAN YELLING

Who’s yelling at us robbing us of sleep with worries about the future and regrets about the past?
Who’s keeping me awake debating political rivals with perfect logic who don’t even know I exist and don’t care.
Who’s yelling at couples robbing them of peace with escalating irrational arguments and keeping us from connecting in heart?
Who’s yelling in our heads taking us out of the joy of the present?
Who’s yelling at our country dividing us with lies and hatred?
Who is this yelling in the heads of world leaders taking nations into wars nobody wanted?
Paul calls him the Old Man.
Brennan Manning calls him The Imposter.
Paul Tournier calls him The Personage covering up the Person.
Eckhart Tolle calls him The Pain Body.
Others call him The False Self or Ego.
I call him Dead Man Yelling, because he died with Christ (Rom. 6:6), and is only a thought – bad memories and lies.

The Imposter is the false self we created to deal with the pain hurts, and demands of life without the love, comfort, wisdom and grace of God. The Imposter’s method is usually “fight or flight.” He eggs us on to fight with such weapons as anger, vengeance, retaliation, competition, and violence in words or action. The imposter tells others to retreat into such things as withdrawal, depression, defeat, self-deprecation, and even suicide.

This cagy Imposter can take over our identity and bury our True Self deep into our souls and make us act out of what we are not. The False Self can hijack our identity and make our dysfunction seem normal. We don’t know who we are or where we fit in God’s creation. We are out of sync with the unity of God’s universe. We can’t connect with each other. We seem to have learned the wrong lines for the play we are in. We are alone and alienated.

Couples can’t communicate on the same plane.
Mother’s say of wayward sons, “That is not the child I know.”
Churches split on trivial pursuits.
Nations go into wars nobody wants.
The world becomes irrational and plunges into insanity and the madness of inquisitions and genocides.
“If the history of humanity were the clinical case history of a single human being, the diagnosis would have to be: chronic paranoid delusions, a pathological propensity to commit murder and acts of extreme violence and cruelty against his perceived “enemies” — his own unconsciousness projected outward. Criminally insane, with a few brief lucid intervals.” (Eckhart Tolle)

And all this is accomplished by a fictitious Imposter that exists only in our thoughts. His main weapon is lies convincing us he is who we are.

Is there a way out of the grip of the Imposter? Yes!

I can personally confirm it, because a steady peace has settled over my wife and I since we discovered one basic truth:
WE ARE NOT OUR STORY OR OUR THOUGHTS, BUT THE OBSERVER OF THEM.

Eckhart Tolle explains, “When you no longer believe everything you think you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are.”

After living in an extended time of depression and anxiety, Tolle, found himself saying, “’I cannot live with myself any longer.” This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. “Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I’ and the ‘self’ that ‘I’ cannot live with.” “Maybe,” I thought, “only one of them is real.”’ (“The Power of Now”) He woke up the next morning to a totally new life and world. “That day I walked around the city in utter amazement at the miracle of life on earth, as if I had just been born into this world. For the next five months, I lived in a state of uninterrupted deep peace and bliss.”

So how do we not let this false-self take over our identity? First, we have to recognize he is dead. He is fictitious. He is not real, but only the thoughts and story that we have adopted. Secondly, we must see that our true-self is the observer of our story and thoughts and expose them to ourselves. John calls it “walking in the light.” (1 John 1:5-7) If we try to resist our thoughts by pushing them into the dark, they only become magnified. If we simply state what we are thinking, the light will diffuse the lies and magnify the truth.

David practiced this throughout the Psalms. He was the observer of his thoughts saying things like “Why am I so discouraged? Why am I so sad?” (Psa. 42:5)

The encouraging thing is that transformation can take place in seconds. It is not a long struggle. Our true self is our “on call” counselor with all the truth we need to “enlighten our hearts.” (Eph. 1:18)

This “walking in the light” brings us into the NOW, diffusing the worries of the future and the lies of the past. When we live in the eternal present, everything slows down to the secret rhythms of grace of God’s kingdom, and we leave the frantic pace of the world that wears us out and tears us down.

What does all this mean to me?
I am not an evil person, with a desperately wicked heart, (as I believed for 68 years) but a person made in the image of God with his character imbedded in my unique true self. I see what Paul meant when he said, “But if I am always doing what I don’t want to do… Now really it is not that I am doing these things, but it is sin that has its home in me.” (Rom. 7:16,17)The real me is the one that wants to do what is right and avoid what is wrong. I am not the “worm” my religion taught me. My responsibility in life is to “be who I be” – God’s idea of me. I don’t have to try to be good, because the True Self in me is already good. It is the Imposter that is causing all the trouble and sin.

You may ask, as I did, what about that verse that says, “The heart is desperately wicked and deceitful, who can know it?” (Jer, 17:9) This is a poor translation of the Hebrew. “Desperately wicked” is really “frail, feeble, or melancholy.” The “heart” is “feelings, will and intellect” which is more a description of the mind, not the true self or spirit. “Deceitful” means “tracked, and “made crooked or polluted.” So putting this all together, We are born with a pure spirit, and feeble minds. The world begins to “track and pollute” our minds, and our spirits become dormant until brought to life by the seed of the Spirit of God. Then the process is the Spirit begins to reclaim the mind with truth and casting out the lies. The remolding of the mind is what Rom. 12:2 is all about. “Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.” (NLT)

I no longer have to be controlled by my pain body from the past. I tell the Lord what I am thinking and say, “delete,” and we move back into the present where He is, where heaven is, where the kingdom is. Living in the present brings us into His presence, unites us with the eternal law of unity, and we are connected with the whole of creation. As my friend, John, says, “The perfect place to live in the whole world is right here, right now.”

How can I recognize a thought from my false self? Some signs are: worry, fear, anger, frustration, depression, despair, defeat, lack of peace, hate, irritation, desire to control and dominate, most of all an absence of love.

Here’s a practical example. A thought comes into my mind, “You are useless and if you don’t get to work, God will not like you.” I recognize it is coming from my Imposter (who got it from my dad who beat into me, ”make yourself useful as well as ornamental”) and tell the Lord, “This is what I am thinking…” then I say “delete.” It has to be totally honest and accurate, not hiding bad words or thoughts. The amazing thing is bringing the thought into the light, dissipates it. I don’t have to try and not think about it; that just magnifies it. Instantly, my True Self rules, I am back with God in the present, and peaceful.

In addition to deleting my own Imposter thoughts, I do not have to respond to and feed other’s Imposter thoughts. When I hear their expressions of pain bodies (anger, fear, worry etc.) or they are trying to bring judgment, fear or guilt on me, I can take a deep breath, be silent, and starve them. This is what has brought peace to my wife and I. We are learning when a pain body is speaking and not respond to it, but to wait until we starve it with inattention. At this point the True Self emerges and we connect with love and reason.

I can view everyone around me as gifts from God, created in His image, but controlled by pain bodies that have hijacked their true identity. I can be a “see througher” to the real self and not just a “look atter” of pain bodies. I can cease judging from appearance and see through to the real self and help draw him out.

The most powerful weapon I have to change the world is truth. It can overcome all the lies of the world’s pain bodies. As Jesus said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” (Jn.8:33)