The Black Box and the Principle of Karma

How does karma work? Is there a trick to see when it is in action? How to turn it off? 

The Black Box

I had bought a power backup, a black box that should prevent my external disc from being damaged by an eventual power failure and now, for two days I had been trying to figure out how to arrange the electrical cables in the hallway and how to attach them to the devices in the right order. I was drawing map after map with red lines connecting square boxes in different ways, but I could not understand how to do it.
Finally, I gave up and I drove down to the Computer Center and I asked how to do. The guy explained how it should be and I bought the missing cable so now the problem was solved.

I had just come out of the shop when I suddenly remembered that one of those ”computer guys” had earlier said: ”It switches over in a millisecond”.

It must have been about that black box to which I had now bought a cable and I thought about it for a while and I repeated the words: ”It switches over in a millisecond”. Aha... now I understood why the manual says: ”Radiation Warning”. If something like that quickly switches over, changing power source, then a strong electromagnetic impulse can be the result of it and such an impulse can damage other sensitive technical equipment. It does not mean that it produces strong impulses all the time (I had been wondering about that).

I drove home again.
When I had come home I didn´t want to climb around putting up long cables under the ceiling, so I went to the kitchen table where I just sat down with a cup of coffee.

I thought that I wanted to continue to write about the Talking Stick, which I had started to do another day. But instead of that, I got an idea about karma.

I thought that I would just make a little note about it to remember to continue with it another day. But when I had started I could not stop writing because new sentences were coming all the time. When I had written it down and the story seemed to be almost finished it occurred to me that karma is working in the same way as that electric black box, which I had been concerned about for two days.

The box works in a special way and now I had focused on it so much that I had got inspiration about something else that works in the same way: our brain and nervous system in connection to emotions, instincts, and karmic reactions.

Karma

No, karma is not just a judgment from past life-time, being kept by Father God in his golden Book of Life in Heaven. But that is a very good way of describing it in an educative fable.
It is not something mystical that creates your destiny from a secret place far away in kosmos. It is quite natural, but it does not belong to the world of biology and chemistry - it belongs to the world of electricity and frequencies. And it is ”here” equally much as ”there” as it belongs to a dimension that is beyond ”here and there”, like a film on the Internet.

Karma is something that you create over and over again, yesterday, today, tomorrow. You create new karma all the time and then you are entangled in all those threads, which can be visualized as electrical cords with various signals and various frequency patterns, being sent out from stored energy clusters. The cords are symbols for energy pathways that are created and activated by frequency messages that are similar to our normal passwords. It´s a kind of cohesion that makes two poles ”click” with each other.

As the cords are not physical they can also be seen as meridians from your stored memory. They are just laying there, inactively waiting for a specific activation signal from your emotions. Such an emotion is usually triggered by an event in the outer world. It is something that you react to. That reaction is like a power-on-switch and your karma gets a chance to release some of its charges.
Because once upon a time, maybe in your previous life, maybe in this life, maybe last week, you have been emotionally involved in something. It was something that you wanted to do, or it was maybe just something that you wanted to say - but at that time it was not possible to do it or to say it. It was something that you had started to do but then you could not finish it. So this accumulated energy that was directed towards doing or saying this got blocked. The charge remained like the power that is stored in a battery.

This power, this charge, has identity frequencies that correspond to certain thoughts, pictures, and emotions.

If you get a strong emotional reaction to something then it is your memory working and it is your karma working. It is not always something bad because we must have memory and we must learn how to react to everything.

If you have been bitten by a snake, the next time you see a snake you will quickly get away from it. That is very good - you will not be bitten by snakes over and over again, because you have learned to quickly get away from it. But...maybe your instant reaction was not of flight. Maybe it was of fight.
If you got bitten by it and you got a strong wish to kill the snake, but you could not do it, then maybe this karma is waiting there and the energy wants to be released. It is waiting for a release. So to get this chance of release it will attract a snake. It will put you in the same situation again. Because you have an inner unreleased wish to fight a snake.

Such a charge that consists of an unreleased wish is called karma. Karma is not any kind of reaction - it is a certain kind of reaction that leads to an unfulfilled wish.
In this world, we often believe that such a wish is something in the past. I wanted to do it but I never got the chance. So it is over.

But in a spiritual sense, it is not over. It is an action that has started on another lever and it is seen as something that is going on all the time - till it gets released. So they call karma ”unfinished action” but the word just means action. As Sanskrit is a very sophisticated language it probably means only this kind of action.
Indian gurus and Western people see the concept of action in different ways, probably because we use the same word for different kinds of action. And also, we do not see a strong wish or intention as an action. We do not believe that there are invisible actions that are performed on another level. Our language is not suitable for this kind of philosophy. The common way of thinking is in Kali Yuga mainly focused on materia. Right now we are getting into a period where also ”energy” and electricity get included in our view of reality.

A trick

One trick to recognize a karmic reaction is first to be able to recognize an instinct, which is a sudden change of emotion, that is created for the purpose of survival, and then to identify the triggers that ignite it when no danger at all is present. What is being felt is a drive to release stored, blocked energy.
Another trick is to identify and analyze your wishes, especially those wishes that have a strong emotional charge and also those that you consider being ”reality”.

So you are all the time carrying around a lot of unfinished actions. You are a big package of actions that you have started up and now you are searching for the release of them. The big release. The big freedom. It can also be called freedom of reaction. Your actions are no longer initiated by reactions to instincts. Your actions are like still water. You just know what to do. There are no high voltage impulses pushing you here and there.

You are not driven by fight or flight, not by passion, revenge, greed, need or fear. When your worldly reactions, your karma, has ceased to dominate you, then you can focus on a higher spirit and pick up your emotion from that place. You can now get the energy from a steady cosmic source and not from your own karmic battery charge.
Now you are driven by flow and knowledge and your net of entanglement is dissolved.

So we can say that karma works in the same way as a certain electrical device, that you can use as a battery back-up for your stationary IT-equipment. It is meant for those things that should not be exposed to a lack of energy due to a power failure.
If the normal power supply is interrupted this back-up-device will in a millisecond switch on the current from the battery. Now your IT-equipment is no longer run by the universal power-grid - it is run by the charge from your own back-up-battery.

In the same way a sudden emotion can be seen as a sudden switch-over from cosmic energy to personal energy. It changes in a millisecond.
Very often you can see on a person when this switch-over takes place.
You can see and you can feel that a sudden change takes place, You can see it on the person´s face and you can hear it from the voice. There is some kind of sudden change in behavior.

We have taken the word ”karma” from India, from Sanskrit. Other people also had a deep philosophy about human behavior, but they were using other words.

I have heard that some Red Indian medicine men say something similar. They say that the ”shields spin around” and after that you are acting, not from your Adult Spirit Shield, but from your Child Shield. You suddenly switch over to a childish behavior and you lose contact with the higher parts of the brain.

How can karma be possible? 

The only thing we have difficulties in believing is how memory is carried over from one incarnation to the next one. Your memories from other lifetimes, where are they stored?

The best idea is that we have another body (which indigenous people also usually say) that belongs to another dimension and when our physical body dies this other body still remains. It is visible in that other dimension, but not in this one. This would also mean that when you die you do not even notice that you die. You just wake up in another place and you remember having had a dream.
That is also what I have heard from Red Indians. They say that this life is just a dream.

So your karma remains intact. You do not get rid of it when you die. It works in the opposite way: you have to return to Earth to be able to change your karma.
Your karma consists of energy clusters carrying different frequency patterns, and those clusters are parts of your energy body on another level of existence, in another dimension, in another world. Such a cluster draws you into a new incarnation where it can find an outlet of its charge. Your whole life consists of a constant search for these outlets that will free you from these blockages, which prevent you from being fully free.

In our computer world that would correspond to the memories that we can store ”on the cloud”.
The storage takes place in a server somewhere (or soon maybe in a satellite) but in reality, in our natural reality, the spiritual cloud would belong to another dimension and your personal storage place is a spiritual body.

This is why you can contact a spirit, like for example an ancestor, as the indigenous people often do. If you get into full cohesion with grandfather´s light body you also have access to his energy, his memory, and his knowledge. Native people have developed many special methods and ceremonies for this and one good example is the Tokotoko, the ”speaker´s Staff, of the Maori people. Another method is to hold the burning Medicine Pipe while you are directing your prayers and intentions to a certain direction. This can be emphasized by sitting in a Medicine Wheel and also by using a drum or anything that makes a monotonous sound or movement.

It fits very well to have this black box as a symbol of karma. First of all, because it is black and heavy. Karma is what pushes you into this heavy material world and this dark Kali Yuga which is also called the Iron Age. (Dwapara Yuga is cupper, Treta Yuga is silver and Satya Yuga is gold.)
Second, because it fuels your system with a boost of energy that comes from a very powerful but also very limited source of energy. The black box switches over to this power and at the same time, the power from the big grid is lost.
The same for karma, which casts you into getting power from material wishes and actions, while you at the same time get detached from the big cosmic power source, which would provide you with power from life itself, from love, joy, light, and knowledge.

If we make the example in an extended way, humanity is now in Kali Yuga, the Age of Darkness, also called the Iron Age, mainly focusing on solid matter and taking our energy from the man-made electric grid, instead of taking it from sun, nature and natural spirit.

Our modern society is like a big black box where we live on a relatively short-lived external back-up power, where the goal of life will be the perfect artificial intelligence with robots and machines that do all the job for us. We create a power-net around the globe and at the same time we create full control of every individual.
We will do everything we can to support this power back-up, to feed it with energy that we create with various inventions because now our lives depend on it. The end result will be a world where the whole nature is sick, including waters, seas, plants, animals, and humans. Constant technological surveillance will provide us with "the right medicines" all the time and it will be the ultimate dream of Big Pharma, which can now say: "We have won the game!"

This results in a broken connection to God or Brahma and our higher intuition and divine guidance about our dreams. We no longer even believe in such things and that is the first sign of being entangled in this black trap of Iron Age. 

Introversion

The heart is an instrument that reads everything that happens around a person and delivers this information in the form of subtle feelings, so these feelings are fluctuating all the time and if we are not used to listen to the heart we might not be able to recognize them as anything else than attraction and repulsion, whereafter attraction is called love and repulsion changes to flight or anger with accusations and gets called fear, agression or ego.  Some hundreds of years ago they were called God and Devil.

To be able to identify only two dominating, opposite feelings can create a war between them. And then we have to chose and we start speaking intensively about love to push away the opposite force. But this tends to create movements that are similar to religious sekts, where people "believe in love" in the same way as they "believed in God" 150 years ago, now accusing others of having an ego or being driven by fear, when they need to have a principle to fight against.

But in both cases we are excluding all the variations that the heart is giving, if it just gets the chance to be heard. Greed, appetite and desire are in our culture also called "love" so for us it is not easy to know what the old Indian gurus were talking about, when we read the word "love". We don´t have a common language that can reflect variations. 

The guru and the shaman are the masters of interpreting the signals from the heart so they can distinguish between many different emotions and not only the usual instincts, which are not exactly the same as the subtle music in the heart, which is more like a flute playing melodies in the wind. That requires a training in the art of reading these electromagnetic fluctuations. When the shaman can do that he can also manipulate the mind of himself (and others), often with the help of his medicine items, which provide him with shortcuts by playing the right melodies. 

Anyway, if you are not used to interpret inner signals it can be difficult to be suddenly holding a Talking Stick with the demand to ”speak the truth”.
An extrovert person might just know that he is angry, because there is something in the outer world that irritates him, so he just wants to attack it and win the fight.

An introvert person might say that he doesn´t know, because he has to think about it first. He has to be alone and analyze it for a couple of days (or weeks) and then he might know.

Those famous negotiation experts, like William Ury and Marshall Rosenberg, who work with world leaders are probably mostly working with extrovert persons, who are not used to be introvert (thinking and analyzing their own feelings) and MR is then using the method of asking the person (who is supposed to be the one who should solve a big conflict in a country or a big company):

-”What is your need?” Often he has to ask several times before the other person understands the question.

So... how to do with the introspective one in a circle with a Talking Stick? Well, actually I don´t know, because an introvert person might not at all feel comfortable in such a circle. He might get blocked by the presence of other people and then just lose his energy in a way that it is not possible for him to make contact with his inner world. Five hours later, when he is alone, this information comes to him, but that is too late! The circle is over and the other people have gone home.
I believe that one option would be to tell this person in advance what the circle will be about so that he gets the time to figure out what he feels and thinks. Or to have a second circle the next day or next week, about the same issue. (But then all the extrovert people have already gone to another party?)

This is about getting or losing energy. The extrovert ones get energy from being in the circle while the introverts lose their energy. And if you lose energy you cannot think. And if you perceive and experience other people´s thoughts and feelings you no longer perceive your own ones. 

Animals get energy when they are in their own territory and usually they also lose energy when they are in someone else´s territory, so they avoid it. Maybe we can say that the outer world of external sensations is the territory of the extrovert person. He feels at home among a lot of people. 

So, what is the territory of the introvert person? His narrow little room? No, not at all. When he no longer gets disturbed by other people he can create his own space and when he restores energy he starts communicate! He talks with emotions, energies, frequencies, ideas, principles, memories, wind, water, the fire in the stove and spirits! When he is alone he can sail away to his territory of preference, so it is a kind of expansion and his task is to be able to chose the right spirit to communicate with and to sail away with! ("Shamanically speaking"!)

EGO Our new Devil to fight against

New Age philosophy of Confusion

The Divider

In our Western culture we seem to be having a long history of dealing with the fight between opposites. One is good and one is bad and the thing, that leads to happiness, is to get rid of the bad one, regardless of the bad one being an idea, a spirit, a god or certain humans, animals or plants.

"Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust" 

Two souls are living in my chest! 

Goethe: Faust

C G Jung  had the same experience.  As a child, Carl Jung believed he had two personalities, which he later called the ego and the self. According to family legends, Jung's grandfather was Goethe's illegal son and Goethe's Faust influenced Jung deeply.

We can experience two opposite sides in our souls and usually we just prefer one side and ignore the other. Or we like both of them. But we can also try to figure out which one is the best side and then try to get rid of the other one (in ourselves or project it on other people and attack it).

But Jung thought about it during a whole life time and developed it into a mountain of sophisticated theories. Most people have heard about the Ego, Shadow and Persona, but as Jung´s books are difficult we usually don´t really know what these words mean.

Tolle also describes such an experience.
He was depressed and thought that he could no longer live with himself.
"If I cannot live with myself there has to be two of me, one ego and one self. And only one of them can be real."
The idea of an ego cannot have been new to him. He is German and he has been studying literature so he must know Jung´s philosophy quite well.

His intensive thinking process collapsed and then he got filled with inner peace and during some years he was just walking around feeling high and happy. He had stopped identifying with his thinking and then his medicine to humanity is that other people should also get rid of this thinking that builds up our ego. He seems to be taking for granted that thoughts are always negative.

Does he not know that some people have a positive thinking? The inner voice is not negative for everyone just because it was so for him. People have different kinds of thoughts.

He says that the "ego" is the thinking that we identify with,
When Tolle says ego he seams to mean a mixture that is made up from mental identificaton on material concepts within time and space, combined with problems and our defence instinct.

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He talks about being aware in the present and if I get down from his philosophical thoughts and words about reality and look at the collective present here and now I discover the effects of the teachings about the bad ego. 
The effect cannot be seen in his writing because it is not there, it is a behaviour that has started to flourish among some people who seem to have concentrated mainly on the bad ego. 
When his words about the ego have sunk down to the pavement they seem to have got perverted into a new story, which Tolle had maybe not intended.
He says a lot of good things about presence and identifications, but it is the concept of Ego that gets twisted. People do not talk about how they have managed to live in the present moment, they talk about other peoples´egos.

Freud, Jung and Tolle did not intend to give people a new devil to fight against but there are other people who turn the idea into a tool that is used in the mental fighting about what is right and what is wrong and who is the good one and who is not.
Any kind of such fighting is what Tolle would call "ego", but if you have to get away from your ego there is already a conflict in this statement, an inner division.
A mental duality is born and to fullfill the demands of your ego you have to make sure that you are on the right side in this fight between right and wrong.
And the result is that people judge others and accuse them of "having an ego" to feel that they themselves are on the right side. Nobody wants to be the outcast.

Then other people show up on the stage and say:

 "Hey! Stop fighting and be friend with your ego!"

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It has always been in this way: first there was a spiritual teacher who wanted to make people aware of our inner peace and how to reach it, talking about the duality between the good and the bad side of us, the desired and the undesired side.
But instead of reaching this peace, some people start fighting about it with the idea of the bad side being an enemy that should be taken away. In time the fighting can grow and take a new form.

As soon as we focus on getting rid of the bad side it starts growing and turns into an enemy and then our defence mechanisms are activated and more people get more ideas about it, until the block of information is so big that it can form a whole university course.

The word Devil once became the personification of evil, 

a supernatural entity that we got into war with
because it was tempting us to sin.
and to evil actions.

Devil means “the one who divides”.

We feel divided in two parts, one depressed and one happy, one low and one high, one right and one wrong, and then we get the bright idea of getting rid of “the thing that divides”us from our happiness.
It has to be taken away from us, and as it is an undesired part of us it becomes what Jung calls The Shadow, which we then project on to others and the war starts and people get divided into the ones who are on the right path and the ones who are on the sinister path.

Earlier we should get rid of The Divider, who also himself became the bad part in a religious division, and now we should get rid of the Ego, the inner bad side in a psychological division.
In this way The Devil and The Ego have become psychologically the same thing.

But such a division concept is like a spiritual sword for those who like to “fight for God” (any kind of fight gives energy, and to fight for the right must be right) and their Shadow Projections turn the accused people into frustrated victims, who just get the feeling of not having the right to be themselves.

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We have decided that the Devil does not exist so his chair is empty. 

We don´t have this old figure to project on others , so we can invent a new concept, a new word, which people can be accused of "having", like having formed a pact with or got possessed by or mislead by.
We can invent a psychological concept that has to be killed or eliminated.
It has to be something that we do not fully understand, like the Devil in the old days, so the concept “Ego” is perfect for this. We don´t really know what it is and it is so tricky that some even say that it does not exist!

You have an ego? 

Oh... then you are in trouble! 

But I can help you!

That is a common trick of a black magician (or a psychopath), who first scares you and then tells you that he is the one who can help you, because he is the expert of a concept that you do not understand.
Then you get lost in his loving arms!

You have another opinion than I have?

Hahaaa! That is just your ego!!!!

Tolle does not mean to create trouble, but his "ego" being described as something bad "to get away from" gives this opportunity to other people to use this "ego" in the same way as old religion used the word "devil", which became a label that could be put on people, by those who wanted to put them down or get rid of them.

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In ancient times people were accused of being in a partnership with the Devil and later it developed into a systematic killing of ”those people that were under the spell of evil”. The idea had been taken over by a collective defence.

From this we should have learned not to give people a duality to fight about, but... if one behaviour is better there has to be another which is undesired. It is maybe difficult to talk about "the good" without also creating "the bad".
Maybe the Buddhists are the ones who have succeeded in getting behind this problem.

Today many people get a feeling of just being harassed by other peoples´ statements that they ”have an ego” as soon as they claim something. They feel accused of not being ”cosmic enough” to be of any value, so the statement ”that is your ego” is of course quite a perfect tool when it comes to put someone else down.

What you say then, “behind the words”, is that you are so highly developed that you can make this judgment: you can tell the other person that he or she is actually ”under the spell of evil” and has to change. Of the two you are the best one.
To hint that someone else is acting “from his ego” is also what could be called an “ego projection” in New Age terms (which would be Jung´s shadow projection.)

This ego is the part of you that likes to cast a judgement on someone and it is the part of you that likes to win in a conflict.

And then, to show your own ”absence of ego” you ad a statement that proves that you are a very humble and loving person. You might ad: 

“Of course, I also have an ego, 

but I do what I can to get over it.... 

Peace be with you! 

I love you!”
Then you are on the safe side.

This is too tricky for most people and they cannot find out what it is about. There is just a remaining feeling that “something is wrong” and there is no chance to start arguing about it, because any comment or protest would just show “your dependency on your ego, which wants to fight and get big” or it would show that “you are in your mind”, which is also supposed to be totally wrong and another thing that you risk to be accused of.

You have an opinion? You say something? You study to get a good job? You are interested in making something better? You complain about something? You protest against something?

Oh... that is your ego!!! 

You are puffed up, 

you want to be“somebody”  

= you are on the wrong path!

The idea from this New Age religion is that your "ego" is the part of you that gives you a need to be in control, to judge others and to defend yourself and to be better than others.
Do not claim anything that is outside of the common and accepted norms! Remain where you are and preferably take two steps back to show how humble you are!

And... if you do't want to do anything you can always claim that any material action just comes from the ego! People will get angry, but then you can claim that their objections just come from their ego!
They will not easily know what to answer.

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There is in reality no precise, psychological concept with the name of “ego” that all people agree upon. Freud wrote about “das Ich” (the I), but the translator changed it into “the Ego” when he translated into English and by doing so he gave it a new meaning, which was not intended with “das Ich”.
The Latin Ego is emphasized, which the German Ich is not, so in the English world the ego became the bad ego, while for Jung it was also the good ego: your center of consciousness (whatever you were conscious about.)

Then I can only guess that the good ego was forgotten among ordinary people in the English world, while the bad ego developed when philosophical persons explained and developed the idea that we have a bad ego. The bad ego got an existence of it´s own when deprived of the good ego. A new entity was created.
The word ego is also so similar to egoism so we cannot see if there is a difference in the meaning. We just unconsciously take for granted that it is the same.
This personal pronoun has become a noun and is talked about as if it was a "thing".

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As Tolle is German and has been studying literature he must know Freud and Jung. So why does he only mention the negative ego and not the positive ego, that Jung talked about, which was the needed distinction from the group to develop into an individual who had the ability to find himself.

When Jung spoke about “das Ich” (I, ego) 

he meant that conscious part of you 

that no longer obeys to the conformity of society.

He spoke of the part of you 

that makes you step out of that 

and become an individual 

who sets out to find himself 

and the Higher Self.

“Ego” is the part of you that makes it possible and here we have the I on the right path.

 When the ego has done it´s job you don´t need it to be so active anymore. The I still exists, but without armour.

Individual means undivided.

The New Age  sees the word “ego” only in the sense of "negative ego" which is something that we need to get rid of.

New Age gurus are saying this:

The Ego, however, is not who you really are. The ego is your self-image; it is your social mask; it is the role you are playing. Your social mask thrives on approval. It wants control, and it is sustained by power, because it lives in fear.
Deepak Chopra

Your social mask is what Jung calls Persona

One way to think about ego is as a protective heavy shell, such as the kind some animals have, like a big beetle. This protective shell works like armor to cut you off from other people and the outside world. What I mean by shell is a sense of separation: Here's me and there's the rest of the universe and other people. The ego likes to emphasize the "otherness" of others.
This sense of separation is an intrinsic part of the ego.
Tolle

What Tolle calls Ego is what Jung calls Counterego or Shadow .
What Tolle calls ego also sounds like the "left brain".
What Tolle calls ego is also the defence instinct.

"Ego" becomes, in practical life, similar to the old Devil and you will get into that fight like being a modern Don Quijote.

"Your ego" will start fixing your mask and show people that you are one of those humble, cosmic and loving persons that are so much developed that they do not have any terrible ego any longer.

You are fighting to gain recognition by showing that you are not fighting. It is the paradox of fighting to become a piece guru.

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This is how many people do when they want to make a career, at least within the New Age;
they take a concept that another person has made known to the big public and then they either change the word and keep the content, or they change the content and keep the word.
Tolle and Chopra have made both: They have taken the word “ego” from translations of Freud and Jung and the content from the old, Eastern, spiritual traditions and then they just have put it together and sold it, without really checking up on the words.

I don´t deny Tolle´s experience, it sounds as if it was his "left brain" that suddenly got offline from having been overloaded with negative thinking (as he describes).
A  brain crash is not what Jung meant with I (das Ich) and it is not what Indian philosophy meant with I (aham), but it can be what they mean with illumination.

What other people call left brain seems to be what Tolle calls ego, as he talks about silencing the inner voice, and he also describes a sudden  experience that seems to be what Jill Bolte Taylor calls  right brain

He probably already had a strong ego (in the sense of Jung´s theory), because the "left brain" is what you handle language with.
That´s why he could make a constructive use of an ego crash and the same goes for Jill Bolte Taylor.
They had already come to that level of individuation.

If a person with a weak ego gets an ego crash he might just end up in a psychiatric clinic.

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The one who coined the expression “the ego” was Freud´s translator James Strachey.

The psychologist Bettelheim meant that “anyone who reads Freud only in Strachey’s English translation cannot understand Freud's concern with man’s soul.
“Strachey’s translation was also an act of interpretation and it has not been hard to find spots where he went astray.”
The most 'obvious flaw in this translation was the substitution of esoteric neologisms for the plain German terms Freud preferred', so that for example his "I" and his "It"  (das Ich und das Es) become the Ego and the Id.

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The word "I" cannot be used as an indication for something that you should get rid of, because it is you. It is a paradox and we feel that "something is wrong".
When the mystic says. “I am divine love” he uses the word I (aham).
If we use the word ego to indicate the I on the wrong path it would be OK if the I on the right path was also mentioned and explained at the same time (as Jung did). It is not a matter of being I or not being I - it is a matter of my identification = the identification of I.

Using the word I (ego) to indicate only something that you should get rid of creates a language that gives you a problem because it demands from you that you should deny yourself, because ego is used also to indicate aspects of the true ego. 
You are not allowed to be an individual because that is selfish.

And maybe that is what society wants from us:
You should continue to be an obedient part of the collective union, like in communism. As soon as you protest against anything you'd better shut your mouth because you are just possessed by your ego. 

The Power always wanted to have a silent population that remains within the conformity.

......................................

Ego, I, ich, jag, aham: that is your center. It is not something that belongs to you – you are your center.
But this center can be sick or healthy, but Tolle, Chopra &Co talk about the sick ego, which they call ego.
Jung talked about a healthy ego and it´s true function towards your higher Self.

Tolle´s “ego”(=how it is perceived by people) is desirable to Society, because people in power do not want to have any more individual whistleblowers. It is not the first time they use religion to bind people.
Those people who have a sick and blown up ego will not listen to Tolle, but sensitive New Age-people, who are on the first steps towards self-realization, will get pushed back by the idea that they do not have the right to be themselves as individuals (because that would be egoistic and anti-cosmic).

We label and “diagnose” others and ourselves with the slang versions of psychological terms that we have no deeper understanding of.

In Sanskrit you can use “Aham” (I) to indicate a union with the highest where you no longer identifies with your body or your material existence. The “I” is still there.

In BhagavadGita I do not find the word Aham (I) in the sense of “the false ego”. The book uses the word “ahankara” for that.  Aham is used in the positive sense of the true and eternal core: Aham prema.

Your ego forms a union with the object for your identification.

Aham Brahmasmi = I am Brahman, I am Spirit Soul.

….............................

False ego means accepting this body as oneself. When one understands that he is not his body and is spirit soul, he comes to his real ego. Ego is there. 
Prabhupada

He uses the word ego in the same way as Jung uses “das Ich”. (He must have had some German friends who could explain this to him!)

"The key, again, in the Buddhist sense, is not dissolving but developing the ego into a more flexible and permeable ego. This is considered a strong ego, capable of both surrender and function. The weak ego is the rigid, defensive one."
Robert Thurman
Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo- Tibetan Studies at Columbia University, New York City

He also seems to know what Jung meant.

"There is no 'thing' to let go of, but a concept, an idea of an ego that burdens us. As soon as we posit a 'thing' to let go of, we're in trouble. We need to change our view of reality, not attack a nonexistent entity."
Sharon Salzberg
Vipassana Teacher

She looks at how people are functioning: creating an enemy that they then have to fight against, the effect that this anti-ego-teaching can have on ordinary people with low self esteem, who just end up in a conflict from it.
To create an enemy that you then fight to get rid of...

There are many methods for developing the higher side of your inner world and they are often called "developing the right brain".

The left brain makes you effective, 

but also isolated and depressed, 

while the right brain makes you feel 

united with everything and happy.

 Left-brained and right-brained are two concepts that we use to indicate two ways of thinking and perceiving our reality. Science claims that we use both sides of the brain whatever we do, but maybe it just means that science has not yet found the real managers of our two different ways of thinking.
Maybe it is that we connect to different frequencies, but these methods would work in any case.
We can still use this terminology because it works, even if we cannot yet exactly nail down how the brain works.
Ego is also a terminology for something that we cannot find out exactly where it is, not even if it exists..

INNER CHILD

If a trigger brings up frustrations and anger it is not so good to just call it "ego" and push it away.
It is also called The Wounded Inner Child and this "inner entity" needs to be seen. It needs attention and recognition and healing of old forgotten memories.

Jung also talked about making the unconscious conscious.

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2012/09/23/6-steps-to-help-heal-your-inner-child/

EGO Part 2

Left and right brain

If C G Jung had not made the concept “Ego” known to people as a psychological mechanism Tolle would not have been using it. Tolle would have picked some other word, probably from Indian philosophy.
But this new meaning of the word Ego, which means I, is presented to us by English translations of the books by Freud and Jung. It belongs to their language and concepts and there are many books about it if you want to know how Freud and Jung were thinking.

Note that they discovered a psychological function and not a word. The word was just something that he decided to use as it was an old word that now got a new meaning.
If you translate the word ego into another language it just becomes I, and Das Ich was what they wrote in German, not ego.

Now Tolle makes the bright trick: he uses a word that everybody already knows about, but almost nobody understands. So we get the impression that he explains the theory of Jung.

But people react in the same way as they reacted to our old religion: with the formation of a conflict between two concepts, one good and one bad -  and the bad one has to be taken away.
And then people get trapped in this conflict and are unable to solve it.

Please God, save me from the grip of the Devil!

Please anyone, tell me how to get rid of my ego!

Freud used the word ego for many things, as for example control, planning, reality testing, defence, intellect and more. These words belong to the left brain, which is reason and logic.
It is described as an intellectual judge, that separates reality from what is not real.
This also sounds like the left brain, which is focused on what can be scientifically proven. Ego should be the wise guy who finds the balance between passion and reality.
Reading about it I see that they seem to make a mix of sense gratification and spirit calling both passion.
Well, the fuel for passion is dopamine that boosts your will, but your focus can be both anger, greed, hunting, idealism or God or whatever you are passionately interested in. And then you have the ego that separates out what is real by organizing the thoughts in a meaningful way.

As Tolle is not just sitting on the sofa being high all the time he must have re-activated his ego to sort out what to do in this world. He has structured and organized his life into writing books and lecturing and making money. He makes perfect use of his rational ego.

You will be miraculous transformed by being in the now. Just get out of the past and future and be in the now! Past and future have no reality of their own.

It is possible that he is calmly "just present in the now" but he still has a working ego that tells him what to do.

Jung did not say that we should get rid of the ego. His teaching is not that easy and simple.
The ego is the center of consciousness and the word ego or I is in Sanskrit Aham. Here we do not find the idea of getting rid of the I. Aham is used in the absolute highest sense:

AHAM BRAHMASMI= I am full of knowledge. 

The soul now identifies with Brahman and becomes one with Brahman, the highest knowledge.

It is also often said that the ego is what you identify with.
One kind of philosophy claims that the goal is to not identify with anything at all, but to me that sounds like a religion created by the left brain.
There is more beauty, love and life on the right side.
You  have the possibility of letting your ego, your center, identify with anything. Then you become the object of your identification. You merge and become one. Tat tvam asi.
I suppose it means that you do not get to heaven unless you identify with heaven.

By making the totally wrong identifications you can mess up your life and get into endless trouble. So instead og trying to get rid of your ego, maybe you could try to educate your ego and identify with something that brings happiness.
Why not identify with some kind of eternal quality that you cannot lose if the house burns down
.

Whatever you identify with 

will fill your heart and transform your life, 

so there is no need to experience 

a fight between the ego and the heart.

AHAM PREMA 

I am divine love  
Ego sum amore

Play

You can chose if you want to identify with something in your left brain or something from the right side.

Left and right have always been of major symbolic meaning in our old belief system and the word for left, sinister, also has the meaning of perverse, harmful, disastrous, miserable, unfortunate and so on.

Today we do not have to talk about the ego because we have discovered how our brain and our instincts are working, at least on a basic, biological level. Freud and Jung did not know about this and maybe Tolle does not either.

Tolle sounds quite good, as if he really knows what he is talking about. As if he would be a really deep-thinking, wise old guru from Himalaya.
Of course he knows about his own experience, but maybe it can not just be imposed on all other people.

Real old, wise gurus and shamans have traditionally been very careful with giving out spiritual information to people, because if your consciousness is not on a higher level you will very easily misunderstand and misuse any information.
You just twist it a little to suit your own mental status.

That has happened with this Love contra Ego, which now takes part in our eternal conflict between right and wrong. It is like the mental war between God and Devil when people get accused of "having an ego instead of love".

There is a reason why gurus traditionally were the old people with life experience and why the shamans had their apprentices, who were set on a long training to slowly change their consciousness.
There is a reason why we had monks and nuns in monasteries and also why the symbol of deep wisdom, the hermit, appears alone in a cave.  There is a reason why Jesus went out in the desert and there is a reason why Buddha was meditating alone under a banyan tree.
The thing is not to get more information from outside. It is to change consciousness.

It is clear that the majority of people does not have this kind of consciousness that Buddha and the gurus were talking about.
We get so much influenced by the mental standard of the people around us and it is difficult to change into something that is completely different from the group.
As all people have to earn money you get drawn into thinking about how to make and save money and how to take care of house and family and then you are in the “past and future” planning, unless you are lucky enough to have an artistic job that you just love and the money floats in automatically.

But we can always train on developing the right brain or the side that is the weakest one.

When you use the left side of the brain you are more egoistic because you are an individual that has to fight to survive. You are logically calculating and you only accept those facts that you believe have been proven to be true by science. You look at details. You do not believe in God, aliens, angels or astrology or anything that is not fixed and proven to be true in a laboratory or clearly visible.

People that are being dominated by the left brain seem to be so wildly afraid of such “foggy concepts” that they totally refuse to listen to any tiny piece of information about it.
They are the ones that believe that dogs do not have any feelings – unless it has been scientifically proven by brain scanning on the poor dogs.

They give an impression of being in a mental prison behind thick walls of concrete. They do not see the polarity between right and left brain. They just see the polarity between intelligent and stupid.

Start talking about religion, spirits or astrology and they will immediately place you among the stupid ones, who are also the superstitious ones that just “believe in anything”.
They do not believe in "anything", they believe in science even if they know nothing about it.

When your right brain dominates you are focused on concepts that are eternal like symbols, art, music, painting and so on. You have the capacity to see “the whole” and you can see how a symbol is at work everywhere and you can see the relations between the symbols. You can see the eternal truth in an old legend.
Your friends are not your friends only now: they are your friends in eternity and you meet them again and again in lifetime after lifetime where you have to deal with your karmic gains and troubles. The quality of your relations can be seen in your astrological charts.
The right brain can easily grasp such ideas that are beyond our normal concepts of time and space.
It is like a “quantum brain” that transcends our material world.

It is very practical to have a good left brain, but your happiness is in the future and now you have to work on it, otherwise you will never reach this goal. Being only in the left brain can make you depressed.

If your right brain is activated you get happy right now, from beautiful music, fantastic creations of art or from religion. You can easily get a boost of energy from praying to Jesus, God or Krishna or just from using your fantasy in your own way. You are living in an eternity that is overfull of beautiful beings (or any beings that you prefer to focus on).

When I hear someone saying that we should “be in the present” I can easily think that it means to focus on the work that I am doing right now even if I am just washing clothes. And, of course, things work better if you focus on what you are doing. It is also more fun to do something that you are focused on.

But this is true only as long as you know what to do.

If you do not know what to do you will have to start thinking about it, you will be planning and plotting and making up shopping lists and checking your car and your working calendar. If you are working and also having children there are so many things that you have to plan and when you think about it you “are in the future”.
If you cannot handle this your life can easily turn into a mess.

This was not the situation for an Indian guru in the good old days.
He was living in a village where people gave him food because he was a wise man or because he was old. His job was to meditate, to know things and help people. Guru means elder.
He did not need to buy clothes or gasoline for the car or pay the rent.

Life went on in the same way all the time and he knew what to do and so did other people. A farmer was a farmer and he could not change it. They did not have to be planning the future. It was senseless to try to plan anything else than the marriages of the children.
They did not have calendars over-filled with decisions to be made.
They had all the possibilities to use mainly the right brain, as Tolle also had when he was just sitting on a sofa.
So it is not strange that we have got such a lot of wisdom (gods, religions, spirituality, astrology etc.) from these ancient cultures.

It is very much possible that evolution wants both the left and right brain to be developed in balance with each other.
Thousands of years with a right brain dominated life created the opposite of the swing and we are now living in a culture that is focusing on the left brain. Science rules and everything has to be scientifically proven. This turns society into an effective but boring machine where people freak out because it is so boring. Or we live on ssri-pills because we cannot escape from a prison-like life.

The left brain is ego-boosting, but it also helps you to become an individual, if that is what you want,  an individual that has to make his own fight for survival, but also has the free will to change focus of the ego´s identification.

Our problem is that the left brain wants to rule alone so it denies the life of the right brain.

So the famous duality between Ego and Love, between living in the linear past-future or in the eternal world of bliss, is the duality between the left and right brain. But I don´t think that the ego has to be the left brain, it just happens to be so in our culture. So ego becomes the name of the left brain, because that is the dominant identification that rules our whole society.
It is the part of you that says "I am" regardless of what you experience that you are.

I am science and technological inventions!

Instead of saying “past-future contra present” we could better say “time contra eternity”.
Either you focus on a life that is dominated by your experience of being caught in time and space or you focus on a life filled with eternal joy.

This is not just for anyone to do, because if the right brain takes over you will also see anything that you have earlier filled your mind with like horror movies or traumatic memories.
A strong left brain can also stop you from ending up in a mental hospital from having seen a lot of strange things that were scaring you.
The ego can be blown up too much, but it can also be the guardian that prevents you from doing the most crazy things. It is the captain of the ship and he puts up all the sails only if there is a strong wind that holds the ship back.

Of course we can throw the captain into the waves and feel the happiness of drifting around in full freedom on the cosmic ocean and "be one with the wind".

When Tolle says that you should get out of past-future and get rid of your ego he tells you to live in the right brain, as the old Indian farmers could do, and...yes.... if you have a trained right brain with “the right spirits” you might be capable of that.
Stop planning and just pray to God and then rely on getting the right inspiration and intuition that will tell you what to do or simply guide you to it.
But that can increase your sensitivity and throw you into a life where you have to experience a lot of ups and downs and strange adventures that can be difficult to handle.

You will be Parsifal on his quest for the Holy Grail and on this path you can need a guru or a hermit  as a guide.
You will end up on The Path of The Spiritual Warrior, where you can need a shaman or a magician as a teacher.
Or a Guardian Angel.

A stroke of insight!

EGO

Fighting against the Ego.

A word can be an old word with an old meaning and then I think you get wise if you discover the old meaning, because that is what people meant with it when the word was formed.  Or at least we can go back in time and come as near the formation as possible.

In this case ego just means I, which especially in Indian wisdom is not something to get rid of. Rather something to develop towards Aham prema = I am love.

A word can get it´s meaning from peoples´ opinion about it and hopefully people agree.
It was C G Jung who invented this tricky use of the old word for I. So the new meaning of the word kind of belongs to him and if we want to know what it is we can read about it and learn it.
Without Jung the word ego would not have been used in this way.

Then we have the New Age where people "believe" in a conflict between Ego and Love, very much in the same way as people in earlier times believed in the fight between God and Devil. 
They have just changed the words because of this old need to fight about good and evil and feel that they belong to the safe space behind "being right".
I cannot feel high from being on the right side if I don´t have other people who are on the wrong side.

In old times people got accused of being with the Devil and today they are told that they "have an ego".

And it is also used to "win" in discussions: "What you say just comes from your ego! I can feeeeel it in my heart!" It is also used to put other people down:  "Her problems just come from her ego".

Some people seem to be in troble because they feel that they are not allowed to themselves because then "they have an ego". Jung seemed to mean the opposite: Be how you want to be and the ego will help you with that. Then, later, when you have managed to be who you are the ego has done it´s job and calms down.
If you start with denying your ego it will just dream of revenge.

C G Jung invented a whole glossary of his own and these words and concepts are not words that exist in all languages. They belong to the language of Jung.

We all have an old word: egoistic. 

Why not use this word?

Everyone knows what it means and the problem disappears. 

It works better also because it is an adjective and not a noun. 

It is something that you can stop being by changing your mind and behaviour. 

A noun being something that you "have" and then "have to deny" or "get rid of" just makes it difficult to handle or even understand. It is similar to a fight where you think that you have an "evil spirit" in you and then you have to cast it out (without knowing how to do!)
It can easily create a conflict where you feel as if you do not have the right to be yourself and in the same time you have to "find yourself". And the more you indulge in such a fight the more you can get trapped in it and then you have created something that in the beginning did not even exist..

"Ego" has become a  word for identity, it is what you identify with.
But even if you do not identify with anything in this world you would still say Aham prema: I am love.
And Jesus seemed to have identified with God.
If you use the word I or not depends on the grammar of your language.


If you find a good, old shaman from some tribe you can always ask him what ego is - but if he has not studied Latin or Jung he does not know.
Most likely he uses his own words in his own language and he can not translate them properly to English so you would not really be capable of knowing the absolute right meanings of them.
Philosophical words are not really "translatable" between languages that are not closely realated.

But if he speaks English he probably knows what "egoistic" or "greedy" is. Or "wanting to be big" or "to have power" or "to be best" or "to be cruel" or so...
If we just know what we mean we can take it down to easy words and get the same meaning.
Back to reality!

The more you use a tricky language the more you can get payed for giving lectures where you explain your tricky words.

One reason to be wanting to be big and powerful can be that you have been denied as a child. Maybe they told you that you were nothing - and now you want to show people that  you are something.

As far as I remember C G Jung said that the ego has to do it´s work so it might not be the best to deny it. But also not to overdo it in a way that hurts other beings. Of course.

In Latin the word ego is not written if it is not "blown up" (emphazised).
I am = sum
IIII am!!!! = Ego sum
We have the same in Italian.
I am = sono
IIII am!!! = Io sono!

As they don´t have this in German Jung can have chosen the word ego out of this reason. Ego is an I that is blown up.

Ego is also related to our defense mechanism and we have to defend ourselves, but not too much everywhere and not against everything.

To create big bombs is when the defense mechanism has grown too much and has turned into a dragon.

In the old folk legends it was not the ego that was eating up everything and sleeping on a heap of gold: it was the dragon.

St George came and killed the dragon and the Christians tried to kill the Devil by killing the people that were supposed to be his servants.
Today even quite peaceful people are being told that they are being possessed by an invisible monster called Ego. We use the word "have" instead of "being possessed" but the meaning is the same.

It would actually be better to say that we all have a little dragon inside and we should not let it take over.

This metaphoric story should be seen as a reflection of our inner qualities. It tells about the result of greed and a never-ending hunger and to be more precise it is a warning against feeding the "endorphine brain" because it never gets enough. It just grows and grows (the receptors close down) and creates heavy dependency.
This is the old part of the brain that we share with lizards. It is just concerned with the basic survival techniques like sex, food and defense. If you take away this part of the brain you will die.

When Jung wrote about the Ego the instincts and their ways in the brain were not yet discovered so Jung knew nothing about these functions of the brain.

Your defense brain will always work but you can educate it to behave in a good way. Most likely this is also a warning against those foods and chemicals that trigger the endorphins. Such things can be used in ceremonies to boost energy but not every day just for the fun of it.
It also depends on how sensitive you are. Some people easily get sugar addicted (and so on) and I have got the impression that people who are genetically "hunters" have a more sensitive and reactive nervous system.
Can be good to know that wheat is activating the endorphins so it acts in the same way as heroin (but not so strong).

St George must be a symbol for the Higher Self or the Real I, the one I am. When he shows up the dragon looses it´s power.

Continues

Fiery Time Travel

Our Ancestors Slept Twice a Night

Articles about the old habit of sleeping twice a night were put out by Bodvar Bjarke on Facebook so I read it, but fb is “too small” for a long reflection upon it so I write it here:

Here are his links:
http://disinfo.com/2013/08/how-our-ancestors-used-to-sleep-twice-a-night-and-highlighting-the-problem-of-present-shock/ 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783

These articles say that 8 hour sleeping is a modern invention. 

We used to sleep in two shorter periods, over a longer range of night. This range was about 12 hours long, and began with a sleep of three to four hours, wakefulness of two to three hours, then sleep again until morning.

The wise scholars speculate about the reason for sleeping twice a night and say that people used these hours for having sex, having a coffee, making some prayers or reading or so...
Maybe the writers and the artists in Paris were thinking in this way in 1700, but mainstream did not drink coffee in their homes and they could not read.

It feels like a lot of guessing and it just talks about ”having some fun in a spare time”. OK, but why did they have this spare time in the night/morning.
If we had this habit for millions of years out of biological reasons or just for some thousands of years from having  formed a habit or maybe in just some cultures is maybe not possible to find out.
So the door is open for more speculations.

The time 2:30 in the night is a time when it is extra easy to wake up, I have also noticed that.

I have also noticed that we have the ability to know what time it is. The animals also know this, they can repeat the same behavior at the same time every day.
If I eat a piece of chocolate I will automatically suddenly start thinking about chocolate at the same time the next day. The thought just pops up. The brain is very clever in learning a new thing – it just has to be touching the system of the neurotransmitters.
And if you keep a habit a long time it will get stronger and influence even more and finally it will produce effects and a changing on the genes.
Keep a habit for thousands of years and your children will be born with such a tendency.

So, why only sleep four hours when the whole night is dark? Is there any good practical reason for developing such a habit?

We don´t know? Or...?

First we can think about the length of the dark night. Near the equatorial line the night is mostly around 12 hours and it can be difficult to sleep for 12 hours so you will have to invent something to be able to be awake in the darkness so why not do something fun or useful?



In Sweden we have in winter a night that can be 17 hours (or more) and it is not possible to sleep so much.
If I go to bed at 9 pm I also wake up at 2 or 3 am and it is impossible to fall asleep again. If I go up and I do something I will get tired and fall asleep again after some hours.

So why not just  be up the whole evening till midnight and then sleep 8 hours till morning comes?
 Isn´t that easier? As we do today! It is an easy option so why did they not do so?

Well, actually there is a good way of finding out and it is to live in the same way. Then you will discover things that you never thought about before.
All those modern scientists that speculate about the old sleeping habit may never have experienced the old fashioned life in winter in a house without electricity.

If you, just for a short period, live in this way you will see that life becomes so much more easy to handle if you never sleep more than four hours at a time.

Why not? Well, try to think about it first and see what idea you find!

The problem with darkness does not exist in summer when the sun is up all the time, so we can think about winter when there is a real duality between light and darkness.
Imagine that you find yourself in this old way of living! You are in an old house.

The experiment requires that you have not brought any modern tools, so you do not have any flashlight with battery and you do not have a lighter and no lightning fuel and no paper and the house does not have any modern isolation. There is absolutely no electricity.

It can be very cold in the night, in Sweden it was sometimes more than -40C and at new moon it is totally dark! You cannot see anything.
Great! You are now back in the 1500 or so.

To be able to live in the house you must have a stove with a fire and to make the fire in the old way you have flint, fire-steel and some fluffy material, which can easily catch fire. If you do not have that you are dead.

So... now is the first day and you have made your fire in the stove and the fire has been burning the whole day and you feel that everything is working well.
Ha! That was easy! So you think!
In the evening you just leave the fire and you fall asleep.

And... ?

Early in the morning you wake up because you have to pee, just as you are used to do at home (in modern time) where you have a bathroom and lamps everywhere in an oil-heated house.

But now, here in your “ancient time”, you find that the house is so ice-cold that you can hardly get out of the bed. The clothes that you have put beside the bed are so cold that you cannot take them on. First you will have to keep them close to your body in the bed to make them warm.
Having got some clothes on, you will find that you cannot move because it is totally black. You do not see anything at all so to be able to go up you must light some kind of "grease-candle" (?) but in this darkness you cannot find your fire-steel.

You wait till the sun comes up and you put new woods into the stove and start the job with your flint and steel. It takes a while to get a small fire burning and after a while the fire goes out again. 

You start all over again and the same thing happens again.

Why?

As you just left the stove in the evening the damper has been open the whole night and the air has been blowing in through the walls and windows (everywhere) and then out through the chimney and this has made the house extra super-cold.
It has also made the stove quite cold and it is difficult to make a fire in a cold stove when the circulation of air has slowed down too much.

The smoke fills the room and the fire goes out. Again and again.
In this very cold place you now have to be working with your flint and steel for quite a time and then there is a risk that you will finish all the fluffy material that you had, which would be quite dangerous because you can probably not so easily get any new.

People usually do not end up in this situation because today we have flashlights, candles, matches, lighters and if any problem arises there is also a telephone, a car and a shop.

In ancient times people did not end up in this situation because they knew how to handle this kind of life.

After a week in this old house you will also know!

There are two ways of making this situation better.

One is to let the fire go out totally in the evening and then you close the damper. This will prevent the air from blowing through the house the whole night making it ice-cold.
It will also prevent the stove from getting too cold. So now it is easier to make a new fire in the morning, but you will still have to be sitting there with your flint and steel.
You can not easily go up in the night unless you have big windows and the full moon is shining.
You will still get the problem of making a new fire every morning and then also wasting your fire-making material. So it is not the best way.

What you can do to get away from all these problems is to let the fire burn all the night!

Before you go to bed you set the damper on low to prevent the fire from burning to quickly.
After four hours you go up and you put some more woods on the small glowing coals that are still hot. After 30 minutes they will catch fire by themselves.
In this way the fire will burn constantly and there will not be any trouble with a dark night and an ice cold black morning.
As long as there is any glow left you can quickly light a grease-candle on it so you can go up in the dark night if you want to. You just have to know the way to the stove!

You never have to go through the trouble of making a new fire with your flint and fire-steel in the darkness. And there is no risk of using to much of the fluffy fire-material, which was maybe quite precious in the old times.

And... just imagine that something unexpected happens in the night, something that you have to deal with at once. The possibility always exists! Then you cannot be sitting there with your fire-making tools for half an hour before you can move.

I would think that it has been important to keep the fire constantly alive, because it makes life much, much more easy. So it is not so strange that people were sleeping just four hours, which is the time for a fire to burn down. It was practical to do it this way!

Then we have the symbolism.

The stove with the fire was the center of the house, it was the heart of the house.
It was the spirit of the house and the stove with the smoke going up to heaven could be seen as a channel to god.
It was the altar where the holy fire had to be constantly burning.

Your heart should keep you alive also during the night so for the heart there is no sleeping time.
The house should be alive also during the night and there should be no sleeping time for the fire of the house.  As long as the holy fire is burning the house is alive and protected.
A house that has a fire burning has a spirit - in the same way as you can be in your body as long as the heart is keeping it´s metabolism alive.

The worshiping of the fire and the Fire God is found in many ancient cultures.

Wikipedia:
The earliest known traces of controlled fire were found at Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov, Israel and dated to an age of 790,000 years and religious or animist notions connected to fire must be assumed to reach back to such early pre-Homo sapiens times.   

In Vedic disciplines of Hinduism, fire is a central element in the Yajna ceremony, with Agni, "fire", playing the role as mediator between the worshipper and the other gods. 

In the Vaishnav branch of Hinduism, Agni or Fire is considered the tongue of the Supreme Lord Narayana
Fire worship in Graeco-Roman tradition had two separate forms: fire of the hearth and fire of the forge.
Hearth worship was maintained in Rome by the Vestal Virgins, who served the goddess Vesta, protector of the home, who had a sacred flame as the symbol of her presence in the city
Celtic mythology had Belenus associated with fire.
In Slavic mythology, Svarog was the spirit of fire. 
                                                                                     End of quotations from Wikipedia

On the Red Indian Medicine Wheel fire and spirit have the same place.

The Church prescribes that at least one lamp should continually burn before thetabernacle (Rit. Rom. iv, 6)  http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01354b.htm 

A sanctuary lamp, altar lamp, everlasting light, or eternal flame is a light that shines before the altar of sanctuaries in many denominations of Jewish and Christian places of worship
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_lamp   

A special lamp must burn night and day before the tabernacle in which the Blessed Sacrament is reserved, to indicate and honour the presence of Christ'
http://jloughnan.tripod.com/whylamps.htm 

Many different religions but the same idea behind them. 

The concept of the living spirit or god represented by the holy fire.

Sanctuary: the Sacred Space around the altar and tabernacle 

There was a “sanctuary” also in a normal house and that was the space around the stove.

I asked Lucia from Russia about the fact that all the Russian laquer boxes are red on the inside. She said that the red color was symbolic of the fire and the “God´s Angle”, the space by the stove.

Then I looked again at these boxes and I saw that they all were like small symbolic stoves, red inside and black on the outside. they are also similar to icons.
The pictures that are painted on them are the spirits that you can see also among the red flames in a real iron stove. If you just use your imagination.

We lost our connection to spirit 

when we lost our connection to fire.

It is not strange that a practical habit forms a tradition that all people follow. The tradition is in the same time religion.
And then it is not strange that this tradition gets into our genes and then it influences us also when the practical need for it is gone. And then, slowly, we change again into something else.

It is not difficult to see the similarity between the stove and the black PC with the bright screen, which works in the same way as your brain and the old ceremonies and concepts in various religions:

The old magicians said:
You get what you focus on!

Today´s technicians say:
You get what you clic on!