An ongoing personal exploration of Divine Guidance and distinguishing between the voice of fear and the voice of love reflecting on the article, How to Distinguish Between Divine Guidance and Fear/Ego/Imagination, on Sir Froggie’s PositiveNews Network .
Today’s pairing is:
Divine Guidance may assign specific goals to work for, such as “sell 1,000 books,” but won’t use that number as a way to assess judgment or failure. It merely keeps you moving in the direction or your goal.
Ego assigns numbers as a way to control, manipulate and judge you and others. These numbers are often difficult or impossible to achieve.
Woohoo! An aspect of ego that I don’t frequently get tussled over! Or am I kidding myself? I love numbers. I find them quite magical. But is my state of being subject to the influence of self-inflicted numbers?
I guess I have been known to obsess about the number of dollars in my bank account and often use it to determine what I can and can’t do. I also notice when when the little Amazon statistic line of my book starts making a downward trend, I always feel a little deflated or likewise over the moon when it shoots up unexpectedly. I suppose I’ve also fallen prey to comparison based on numbers, too. Is he selling more books than I am? Does she have more Facebook likes on her post?
So, yes, I guess ego does use numbers to keep me in a slightly elevated state of anxiety, the better to control me with, my dear.
It’s interesting. The more I think about it, the more I see how deeply ingrained this tendency is in our society. We judge businesses by how big they are, not often by what really matters like do they care about anything other than the bottom line. We judge authors by how many books they sell and movies by box office sales numbers. As a result, we miss entirely those rare gems that could change our entire perception. We determine whether someone is rich or poor based on numbers as well…failing entirely to see that a state of mind can have so much more to do with it than their income. Numbers blindside us…or at least the interpretation of them does.
Can I imagine living free of this tendency? I could stop counting. It wouldn’t be about the number of times I repeated a mantra but the mantra itself. How much something cost wouldn’t be my final determination in whether something was worth it. I wouldn’t be put off my how many days or even years something takes. The number of mistakes I’ve made wouldn’t indicate anything, nor would how often I make the same one over and over indicate the likelihood that I’d do it again. The numbers wouldn’t matter. All that energy could then be directed away from counting and focused towards the goal itself.
The Count from Sesame Street could just cut right to the “Ah, Ah, Ah!” and we could all sit down to a big piece of 3.14.