Ego location or God Positioning

Amongst a few species of mammals there is a capacity to navigate by way of merely hearing, not seeing. Its called echolocation and it allows bats and whales to determine where they are and navigate a course by sending out sounds into their surrounds and determining where they are from the echo that comes back to them. This permits them to know where they are and continue to move forward assuredly even in complete darkness.

There is a parallel, metaphorically, to the way I find myself and navigate my way through life. When I rely only on my physical senses and surface awareness to determine my sense of self and where I want to go I am using ego-location.  I have thoughts about myself that are based on my physical attributes, my roles, my relationships, the expectations that go with these representations of me. The reverberations of these thoughts inform my sense of self. I am a father, or a teacher, or counselor, or husband, or a trusted friend, a citizen, or neighbor. Nothing wrong with ego-location in navigating our world except when it obviates a deeper inquiry and realization of our true self. 

Sometimes life will hand us circumstances that strip us of one of these “representations” of self or we can by design choose to decommission ourselves for a time from the roles we play. In either case we are given a perfect opportunity to reacquaint our sense of self using a “God positioning system” – intentionally seeking an internal locus of self-awareness that did not originate in the world nor derive its value from our actions or accomplishments. This is what I am seeking during this hiatus from pulpit ministry.

Thus far my time has been one of releasing the tension bound up in expectations as I extricate myself temporarily from the public image of my current process and allow myself to be radically honest and vulnerable and open to who I think I am, and, more vitally, open and receptive to the truth of my Being. There is a time for egolocation and there is a time to a turn a deaf ear to its assessment that would only get you lost again.  It is, after all, the reverberations of Love that give us the singular true sense of what we are and position us most precisely in a state of peace and well-being. May it be so.