All of the books in my Inspiring Deeper Connections series encourage spiritual awareness and expanded consciousness. Part of this process includes placing Ego and Spirit in the most helpful alignment with each other.

The body, the ego, is an important vehicle for carrying out spiritual action on the physical plane. When the ego is in charge of decision-making, however, we tend to make poor choices that end up hurting ourselves or others. We have much better outcomes when our spirit does the choosing and Ego is placed in service to those choices. In Grandmother Dreams, the teachers describe this arrangement using a train analogy. The engine, the physical body, is our ego. The fuel which moves the energy body is our spirit. And when the engine is appropriately fueled, it travels smoothly along a track which is our Soul Path.

In the following excerpt from The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell explores this Ego/Spirit arrangement through the lens of the aging physical body:

“The problem in middle life, when the body has reached its climax of power and begins to decline, is to identify yourself, not with the body, which is falling away, but with the consciousness of which it is a vehicle. This is something I learned from myths. What am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light? Or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle? One of the psychological problems in growing old is the fear of death. People resist the door of death. But this body is a vehicle of consciousness, and if you can identify with the consciousness, you can watch this body go like an old car. There goes the fender, there goes the tire, one thing after another— but it’s predictable. And then, gradually, the whole thing drops off, and consciousness, rejoins consciousness. It is no longer in this particular environment.”

Ask yourself: What am I––the bulb that carries the light, or the light which comes through the bulb?