When we run into someone, we often greet him or her with, “How’s it going?” This reflects the ongoing concern of the ego about its own world: “How is it going for me?” Have you noticed just how present that question is in your mind throughout your day? The ego is constantly checking: “How’s it going for me?” It evaluates each event, experience, act, and encounter to determine how they enhance or detract from what it’s trying to create: “Will that help get me what I want or not?”

The ego always has an agenda, and what happens is seen as either advancing that or not. It might be as simple as, “I have to be successful” or “I have to get married and have children.” What’s your ego’s agenda? What is it trying to get or where is it trying to go? This agenda is also called a story in spiritual circles. The ego has a story about how the past has gone, how the present is going, and how the future is supposed to go. How it’s supposed to go is the ego’s agenda.

Stories are separate from what’s actually going on. They are ideas the ego brings to life, which shape our perceptions, create feelings, and even drive actions, but nonetheless don’t relate to what’s happening in the moment. When what is going on fits your story, you (if you’re identified with the ego) relax and feel happy; and when it doesn’t, you feel stressed and unhappy. The ego doesn’t consider that its story is the problem. The ego just wants what it wants, and it thinks life should provide that. It doesn’t see that its demands on life are what cause its unhappiness and discontentment. The story seems so real and true, so how can it be the problem? The ego figures there must be some way to make life fit its story, its agenda. And the ego works very hard to do that; all the while, life has its own agenda. Life unfolds in its own way, irrespective of the story and the desires that drive the story.

The story doesn’t create life, and it doesn’t even help us create life. It only creates discontentment with life and with ourselves because we will never be able to make life conform to our story. If you believe you should be able to, you’ll feel bad about yourself. Yes, life does conform to our story sometimes. But that doesn’t mean we can or should be able to get it to conform always. It’s never been that way for anyone yet. No one has ever succeeded in creating their reality just the way they wanted it. That’s because life is not about getting what we want, but about something much deeper and more meaningful. It’s about life creating in all sorts of ways, life evolving, and life serving life.

We are part of the Whole and we function within that, and the Whole has an intention for each of our lives. When we are aligned with the Whole, we feel happy; when we aren’t, we feel empty and unfulfilled. Following the ego’s agenda doesn’t bring us fulfillment, although it does bring us lots of experiences. We can follow the ego’s agenda, or we can fall in love with whatever is happening. When we fall in love with what’s happening, we discover that life unfolds beautifully, purposefully, and happily without the ego’s stories and agendas.

Excerpted from Living in the Now: Reflections from Another Dimension About Being Happy in This One. It is available on Amazon.com.