People are looking for a "Guru" because they do not want to listen to the one they already have. It took me many years of confrontations, comparisons and encounters with spiritual teachers, masters and "gurus" to realize just recently that I am very happy with a guru I have - the one within me. It served me well. It taught me to rely on it and trust it. My search for someone who will give me a ride in the seemingly slow paced walk is over. I traveled on the road of my spiritual evolution long enough to finally notice that it took me rather far in comparison to others in my profession and in general. I went in January 2008 to New Delhi, India, to speak at the World Congress on Psychology and Spirituality. While listening to educated speakers from around the world I finally realized where I am as the evolving consciousness and how am I connected to it. The wholly grail story became my story. I had to go very far to see what was always so very close. I realized that my years of comparisons with masters and "gurus" were my need to know if I have the right to be a spiritual teacher. Raised in a catholic family in Poland, with nobody in my family to be my spiritual example I became insecure about my right to be the wise one and the teacher. It was useful insecurity that leads me through endless hours of studying and searching, listening and experiencing, talking and walking. The imposition of religious dogma and rampant ego in the environment I grew up in was a huge pile of turd to overcome and I must remind myself that it is only understandable that it needed to take time. All the conditioning that was filled with false beliefs and half-truths, that I needed to "scrape" from my brain, come flying at me in my experiences and reflections faster at times than I can work through it. Based on the unwise knowledge how the world works, injected in conditioning, I created a lot of painful experiences. "The trouble with people is not that they don’t know, but that they know so much that ain’t so" Mark Twain (or Josh Billings, or Will Rogers). However, all the work paid off. My understanding of my inner guru grew and I became more self-reliant in making choices and decisions, and progressively more confident about direction of my path. Pain disappeared and life became magical. Miracles and synchronicity became main theme of my experiences and my reflections and contemplations became filled with gratefulness, appreciation and smiles. One of my searches took me through yet another period of studies and the concept for the first book "Spirituality and Ego Reality" and later this series was created initially as my Spiritual Psychology PhD thesis. It was a text long enough to publish it as a single book but it was described by few that read it to be a such condensed material that could produce at least few books. I sat on it for a year, often thought about publishing it in the initial form but my inner guru was telling me to wait. The feedback from my speech at the congress in Delhi was "I never heard anyone saying so much in such a short time" became the confirmation that my guru was right. My book was written in the same way as my ad lib presented speech. Packed with concepts presented in a very condensed form. If it is "so much" for experienced psychologists how can I expect the book to reach general public and to be useful to them. I decided to do both. Publish the first book and also rewrite it and make a series of books out of it. The main title of series will be "Your Evolution". Your Ego, you are holding in your hand is the first book of the series. The next will be Your Spirituality, Your Intimate relationships, Your Children and perhaps Your Truth. The initial book was a result of many years of a consistent search for a deeper understanding of intimate relationships. In my personal life, and in observing the lives of my patients and students, I had many moments of clear vision of that which we all know as "the unknown." I often came to understand the small pieces of the puzzle that is intimacy, love and sexuality, yet it was the evening of February 19th 2007 when the whole picture came together. Seven years ago I had a patient in my psychotherapy practice that opened my eyes to a possibility of a person being born without an ego or perhaps with such a limited ego, that from encounter with him, the whole concept of conditioning took completely different meaning for me. The man who walked to my office seven years ago was undoubtedly a phenomenon. On one hand it was obvious to me, from the first session, that his life, his thoughts, his language didn’t say anything about presence of the ego, on another hand I couldn’t imagine that this is possible. I didn’t have a representation of an entity like that in my brain and I couldn’t accept its existence. I will define the concept of "the ego" from a spiritual perspective in the first chapter, which differs from the Freudians’ psychological construct, predominant in modern human sciences. Definition from spiritual perspective is closer to truth in my perception and is crucial in understanding of ourselves and our interactions with those around us. For now, let's just say that the ego is a program that comes with a brain. It is brains’ capability and characteristic to copy all what’s happening around it in the time of its formation and it is stored in the subconscious similarly to installed program files stored on a computer. The program seems to be necessary when creating responses to the world which reassure self-preservation of the body, and this program also becomes essential in self-gratification of both the body and the mind. In a computer language the brain is the hardware and the ego is the software. The ego program is progressively downloaded and upgraded from the environment, starting from the time of the formation of the brain-second trimester of pregnancy, until the age six or seven, with not much of a choice from the owner of the brain. Throughout the childhood (and adulthood if solicited) there are constant upgrades and downloads of the ego program that a person, at certain times, accepts willingly, but often accepts without any awareness of the content and its impact on his or her life. Just like you cannot operate a computer without the software of the operating system, you as a person cannot function in a society without your ego (see: Chapter 1, enlightenment idea and deleting ego). However, the man who came seven years ago to my office to seek psychotherapeutically help didn’t show much signs of presence of the ego. I tried to help him with his life problems by offering him usual upgrades of the ego programs according to the idea "healthier and stronger ego, healthier human" but the man didn’t have the original ego program so all the bits of upgrades wouldn't stay in. Very early on in our acquaintanceship, I began calling him "an angel," since it was obvious to me that by not having much of an ego he was not one of "us." On the other hand, I secretly thought that the poor man is mentally defective. In the worst moments, I was being a patronizing shrink who had hard time accepting that there is nothing I could do for this man as a therapist. He was above any therapies, and I'd have to go back to school to study different kind of psychology to be of any use to a man like him, even if he is the only one in the world with this mind-boggling condition. The new, just becoming legitimate part of psychology is consciousness and spiritual studies and spiritual psychotherapy. As story of my life often goes I had to be in a burning need to step in the realm of uncharted waters. I went back to school to do my PhD in Spiritual Psychology and Psychotherapy and my new client graduated from therapy. Although I couldn’t take him as a client, he would keep coming back. He knew that I was his opportunity in creating an understanding, the one who could translate the world from the ego perspective. I was the missing link to his understanding why he always felt different from all the people around him. Why his mother thought he was much different than her other 5 children. Since it was my learning opportunity as much as his, I accepted his invitations for dialogue about ego and spirit. At first seriously stretching my expertise, I offered him my pieces of understanding what is so different about his inner and outer world. As we interacted and talked on various occasions, I grew more and more confident that I had discovered a phenomenon and that my better half (not the patronizing shrink), the consciousness, was right from my first glance. Not until five years after he graduated from therapy with me that I clued in that I have "an angel" for a friend, "a male angel" and he can tell me all kinds of things from the perspective of a man who lives in a world without or with a minimal ego. He would see the difficulties that humans experience when they try to relate to each other lovingly, intimately and sexually with the ever present ego. He would see how the ego is always trying to lead us in our thoughts and actions and if we won’t let it, how it demands an inclusion to be looking over your shoulders. He would also know how this whole process looks like when it’s done without ego. On the evening of February 19th 2007 after my Polish home-made-cooked-from-scratch-all-organic borscht supper, with salad and pecan pie (ok, pecan pie was from a store), I pulled out a tape recorder and run by him my spiritual take on intimate experiences. From this conversation, I derived ideas of how the spirit that is housing a woman’s body sees intimacy, love and sex. And then I asked him how it looks from the perspective of the spirit living in a man’s body. What came out of that conversation was the seed for the first book, which consequently became a base for the series Your Evolution. The purpose of the first book of the series, Your Ego is to explain the concept of ego, process of conditioning, show the reader how the ego is entangled in the world we live in and how much of the ego is running our personal world. What life we create when we function as the ego program and what can we do to make it less rampant, first in the inner and then in the outer world. I hope this book will be of use to both men and women, and will add a piece to the evolution of human consciousness. As a note, throughout this text, I will often use the masculine pronoun to refer to a human. At times I will use she, the feminine, it might represent a prevailing condition in that specific gender or it also might represent just an opportunity to use both interchangeably. Please read in every instance as I would be writing him/her.