Larger Than Life

Some years back when I was visiting Toronto, a friend treated me to a ticket to Barbra Streisand's first-ever concert performance in that city. Although we were sitting high in the rafters in a hockey arena that was anything but intimate, I was startled by how fully and personally her energy filled every corner of that venue.

"She's larger than life," I remember gushing to my friend at intermission.

I recalled the experience a few months later while listening to a recording of the concert. “That’s what I want,” I heard myself blurt out loud and was so startled by what seemed such an unspiritual, ego-driven thought that I was embarrassed. It would be a few months more before I was able to recognize the deeper meaning of both the Streisand experience and my response to it.

“Larger than life,” I realized, was not about having Barbra Streisand’s fame. It was about continuing to shed whatever self-imposed limitations I still carried within me in the mistaken belief that they could protect me from some undefined evil. Even if I couldn’t detail all the ways I was holding myself back, I knew that I was.

"Our deepest fear," writes Marianne Williamson in A Return to Love, "is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure." Perhaps even deeper than the fear she describes is the fear of experiencing and expressing our power out in the world, of being larger than life, of living beyond the self-imposed walls and barriers we create in the mistaken belief they will keep us safe.

They can't and they won't.

Our only safety resides in living our largest life to its fullest potential, in living our truth...in living our passion. In walking through life as though we are safe...as though nothing can stop, limit or restrict us.

As I write this, an old Cole Porter lyric keeps running through my head:

Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above / Don't fence me in

At a literal level, the song is sung by a cowboy who longs for the endless space of the open range.

Yet it's also the song of every soul deprived of its fullest expression by the fences of a fearful mind, a soul that seeks only the limitlessness of its natural state.

Whatever you think of Barbra Streisand's talent or personality, when you are in her energy field, you touch that limitlessness and your soul cries out, "Me too! That's who I am, too!!"

Here in the Western world, where we have been taught to play small, we transfer all of our natural desire for the fenceless world of a life lived large to our movie stars and sports heroes.

If we can't play out our own passion and power, we play it out through a celebrity cult that's no healthier than any other cult, one we also find in countries with charismatic leaders/dictators, in religions with unapproachable gods and in all situations where we abdicate the expression of our infinite nature to someone or something outside of ourselves.

In my novel, The MoonQuest, very much a metaphor for all our journeys, the main character is destined for a greatness he continues to resist. Yet destiny, as he is constantly reminded, is not cast in stone. There is always a choice.

"Every choice you have ever made, has led to this moment. Your moment. Still, the power to make a different choice remains yours."

The power to choose is always ours. In every moment and through every situation, we're offered the opportunity to choose our greatness, our passion, our light.

It's what we do with each moment and situation that governs our destiny, that decides whether we live in our greatness or in the shadow of someone else's, that determines whether we build fences or tear them down.

In this moment, what do you choose?

Adapted from Acts of Surrender: A Writer’s Memoir © 2012, 2013 Mark David Gerson

• Look for The MoonQuest and Acts of Surrender: A Writer's Memoir in paperback or ebook from your favorite online bookseller or signed by me to you from my website.

Death to the Ego? Not!

"Despise Fvorag and you despise a part of yourself. For we are all One in Prithi."
— The MoonQuest: A True Fantasy


"Death to the Ego!" I've heard that war cry, so common in personal-growth circles, several times in recent days. And each time, it left me profoundly saddened.

You see, the oft-demonized ego doesn't deserve to die. No part of us deserves to die.

No part of us deserves to be dismissed...or dissed. All parts of us have value. All parts of us have worth. All parts of us are capable of growth and transformation. Of redemption.

Many writers and therapists would have you believe that the ego is some inner evil that must be cut off, stamped out and killed before we can move forward.

"Ego," I read the other day, "is the biggest — and perhaps the only — obstacle to true enlightenment. If we want to be free, if we want to be enlightened, we have to pay the price: death of the ego."

Not only is that view wrong-headed, it is damaging.

Certainly, the ego or "small self" can stand in the way of our evolution. Yet whatever else it is or does, it is still a part of our greater self, of our oneness. Of God.

God, however you define it, is made up of all the pieces of us — dark and light, evolved and not. God is not just the pieces we like or would prefer.

When we use phrases like "death of the ego," we're advocating an act of self-hatred and self-destruction that is not at all godlike.

How can we call for oneness in one breath and the destruction of a part of ourselves in the next? How can we preach love as the energy that creates and heals all when, in the same sentence, we preach hatred toward parts of ourselves?

If your arm is broken, do you cut it off because it's now a useless appendage? Or do you allow it to heal, lavishing extra love and energy upon it because of its weakened condition?

The ego is no less deserving of care and no less capable of healing and transformation.

I passionately believe that we are called to love, honor and respect all aspects of our beingness, not just the ones that behave in right/light ways.

We live in a throwaway culture, tossing out anything that's broken, a culture where imperfection is punished and misbehavior condemned. What have we become that we are now throwing away bits of ourselves?

The ego is nothing more than a terrified, lesser-developed aspect of ourselves, a child-aspect that feels threatened by change it does not understand and so resists, often disruptively.

In many ways, it's like a fearful child. We don't kill our children when they don't act in a divine manner, when they're frightened and act out. We reassure them, we hold them, we love them. We make sure they know that they're safe.

Through these compassionate, godlike acts, we gently correct their failings and contribute to their growth and evolution, and to our own.

Our call is to do the same with the ego. Speaking of killing, expelling, conquering or controlling it is the antithesis of the evolved energy we claim we are seeking to embody.

Some might respond by saying that these are only words, that nothing is really being killed.

Perhaps. But language is not random. We choose our words, and these words reveal more about what we think and feel than we often realize. If we use words like "death" and "killing," than that truly is the consciousness we are projecting.

Oneness, too, is a consciousness, one that cannot thrive outside of us if it doesn't first thrive within. And it cannot thrive within if we reject even a single part of ourselves.

Oneness is an act of integration. Preaching death to the ego is the opposite: dis-integration.

The only path to enlightenment is the path of love. And the only path of love that has any value is the path that begins with self-love, with the love of our entire self — the wounded as well as the healed, the frightened as well as the fearless, the dark as well as the light.

Loving it doesn't free it to be in charge or hold us back. It does free it to have a voice, to express its fears, to cry for help in the only ways it knows how.

That same love frees you to embrace every part of you, to welcome home the ugly, wounded, frightened prodigal-child/ego and to live the fullness of a divinity and godliness that includes all aspects of your beingness.

I believe in you, in every part of you, and I love your darkness as well as your light. Won't you do the same for yourself?

• This piece originally appeared in my now-dormant New Earth Chronicles blog. Unfortunately, it remains as relevant today as it was a few years ago, when I first wrote it.

Image: Detail from the cover of The MoonQuest (The Q'ntana Trilogy, Part 1) by Mark David Gerson

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