Mental Health, the ego will never get to God

I have been afraid of covid more lately since the delta variant has picked up in the us. Afraid for the ability of the US and the world to deal with the virus. Afraid of how it will affect the economy and our society. I have been afraid of my ability to engage in the world. I haven't been employed by anyone in a year and eight months and I am worried about my ability to reengage in the work force if I need to. In the past the toxicity of the world has made it difficult for me to be around people. I don't think I have had jobs with the best environments and negativity really brings me down. Like reeeally. To the point where I get totally drained and can't work anymore. I am afraid of going through this cycle again and getting trapped in it. Afraid I will lose what I have gained in it and fall into a despairing weakness. When I feel this way, the world feels like a merciless giant monster going to devour me, in the process of devouring me. I feel powerless, like a helpless victim. It is terrifying and I feel immobilized. I can't see a way out or a way forward. A way to deal with it in a healthy way. I feel totally incapable of doing so. Trapped in traumatic shock. I have been dealing with this for so long it feels like I will never escape it. That I will be stuck in it and in debilitating poverty. It really scares me. So much that I don't even like thinking about it or facing it. I just want to make it go away. It's a really toxic head space. I end up just sitting in it until it passes or until I generate some small amount of strength to get half a breath of fresh air. It just seems so wrong and feels so unnecessary. Like I am missing something that could really help me, if I could only just see it. Panicking in fear, stuck in my thoughts. It doesn't seem to have as much power over me as it used to, but it still seems like it could be dangerously debilitating. I also feel dangerously mentally ill, and I haven't been able to reckon with it for a long time. It has been wreaking havoc on my life. I think I am too terrified to face it in some ways that I think I should be. Very confused often about how to handle it. I have a great deal of success working on it on my own in my own way, but it often feels lacking and I am concerned that I am not doing enough or working on it in the right way, ways that are available, but perhaps I am afraid to utilize. I feel like a lot of this is because of my issues with trust. My distrust of people and their methods. I know I suffer from paranoia and post traumatic stress, I know my fears and worries are disproportional to reality. I feel often emotionally fucked and just unable to deal with life. I don't want to be in this place. It's harder when the world feels unstable and full of many toxic elements. Hard to find healthy spaces. 

There are many elements which make dealing with my mental health challenging. Part of me feels incredibly confident in my ability to work it out on my own and thrives by doing it on my own terms and on my own time. Like it gets hung up on the details and just wants to go. Deeply intuitive, spontaneous and impulsive. This seems to often compromise a straight forward systematic approach. Part of the reason why I'm not more systematic is because their are so many little details to work with that it feels better to deal with them as conglomerates than try to pick them apart. Like I don't have the attention to solve one thing at a time and I understand them well enough to approach them intuitively and as a constantly shifting mass. So much of my approach seems more natural and flushed out, better than adhering to specific techniques and formulas. I have digested many of these and use them intuitively, instinctively and subconsciously. Like programs that run the background that are always updated by new data. The downside is that I often feel so caught up in these automated programs, with so much processing power going to them that my seems to shut down and my power level drops to very uncomfortable levels. I feel like I am so focused on doing things this way that I miss out on other opportunities I have, so entrenched in them that I miss easier alternatives. 

Another element is that I truly think I may not be capable of taking care of what needs taking care of to put me in the kind of space I want and need to be in. I think this is just how life is. Being overwhelmed is a reality, an unavoidable reality for most of us. I feel like I can't learn any faster than I am and that I am committed in good ways, but it is not enough and I suffer because of it. But I don't want to give into this. I can't accept this reality because I don't want it. Yet I don't want to fight because that creates resistance and holds me in a weakened position. I also just don't believe in any of the things I am afraid of. I think it is all hallucinations of a limited mind that isn't who I am. Yet I find myself lost and confused and feeling trapped in this limited non-real space. It doesn't make sense. I shouldn't be here, this shouldn't be possible. I am infinite. I have infinite power infinite ability, why am I not using it. Why am I limited. Why is this happening. How do I engage in something I don't believe in, when engaging with it makes it real and makes the problems real. How do I do this dance? This seems to be the trick. From what I've seen it isn't real. None of these ideas about my separate self are real. They are contrived, it's not who I am. It's not a real person, just ideas. A story. I think the key is realizing that I am not this, but it is content apart of the field of who I am that part of me believes in. Repressing the part of me that believes in it, won't help my suffering, denying that it has a reality when it does leaves a blind spot, even if this reality is changing and ultimately unreal. How it arises in mind affects how I feel and how I am. It seems important therefore to be able to have a good grasp of it and how it fits into my life. How it is changing and what it ultimately will become given the current situation and it's true nature. To allow it to be this way as I attend to it as mindfully as possible to reduce it to the truth in which it may not exist at all. Presently my perception of it lends power to it. Secondly realizing it's ultimate unreality is the solution to this problem. Deeply realizing the illegitimacy of such perceptions and undermining their power. Grounding myself in perception of what is real is the real solution. 

I think this is an additional main element. My trust in my perceptions has been shaken by past events to such a degree that I have been deeply crippled. It seems that my entire system has been affected by this in an awesome way. Not awesome for my sense of wellbeing and security. Awful rather. Being pushed so deeply into mistrust that I distrust fundamental systems of perception. That mind and being is unwilling to bring itself to perform menial tasks such as processing information, or paying attention to aspects of my physical environment. Deeply unrooted, pushed into the sidelines of operation because of fear of disrupting them, because of distrust of my own ability to perform them correctly, which leaves basic things untended that leads to psychosis. Feels terribly hard to get back from here. Part of this is because my mind has become conscious of many of the subtle mechanics of awareness and physiology that lie buried in our minds. Conscious enough to be disrupted by traumatic events. When I became conscious of them I began augmenting them consciously and this conscious will in them when shaken, likewise shakes these mechanics that previously may not have been disturbed because of the lack of depth of my awareness. I feel like the only way to heal is to rebuild this trust, and I think I have known this from the beginning. I think I have consciously allowed myself to be blown in the winds of distrust so that I may again conquer them with consciousness. To let out the full power of what opposes me so I can wrestle with it entirely and be done with it. To the point that I am so immersed in this that I forget that what I set out to do in the first place. Yet this setting out was not a fully conscious intention, perhaps a snap realization that faded as the process consumed my attention. Yet perhaps it was more so than I remember, and I have just forgotten. I remember thinking in the very beginning of this distrust that I would have to rediscover myself in a new way to overcome my doubts because the system I was using was insufficient to deal with my environment. The severe shock resulting from the sudden awareness of the weakness of a system I was supremely confident in made the distrust all the more powerful. It highlighted perhaps the depth of my delusion and my precariousness that profoundly frightened me because of my unpreparedness to deal with such a reality. Being caught so vulnerable and exposed to potentially great destructive energies.Having this happen in a series over nearly a decade as well. Thinking and feeling that I was truly past it all. Jesus Christ. What we don't see beneath our feet that holds up what we do. What is necessary to take full responsibility for one's own life. The skill and awareness needed to do so. The fine road upon which surety lies. The finest narrowest path in all the land. You can't get by with anything less than perfection if you wish to successfully wrestle with the full weight of your soul. Otherwise, it will defeat you time and time again. Your rise being a rise in it's power that you mistakenly believe you realize. In this mistake of judgment, lies your doom. If your means is based on frivolity, then you shan't succeed. This door cannot be entered by one whose master is one's own ego where one's self image has supreme authority. When the ego has supreme authority, the being is blind. Blinded by it, thinking that all of it, is this. This ego, which is inherently limited and thus cannot wield ultimate power because it lacks ultimate wisdom. It cannot be Whole because what it is only can be if it is limited. Thus to think we can take ourselves to infinite power and infinite being is always a delusion. Always. We must learn who we are that is not ourself. That we are, but is not limited to what personal identity we may possess. If we confuse it as our true self, we will fail. There is no getting around this. There is no liberation within the confines of egoic perception. We are liberated from the ego, not in it. Much of your spiritual search may in fact be egoic masturbation. It was for me, and now it appears I am on the threshold of moving past this. We don't realize how consumed we are by egoic consciousness. 

I think this is why I failed, because I still put my ego in the driver's seat. I let it fill me up and take me over. And it did. Until I was blinded by it enough that I couldn't see the wall coming. That I became confident and comfortable in my position. I didn't know any better. I truly didn't. I hope that this time around I will be able to find that window again that I saw before that I believe is the way out of all of this.