more ego-bashing
Oct. 25th, 2006 01:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chelidonI'm in the midst of several big freelance pieces, one of which just scored me a complete set of all the high-end profesional graphics, audio, recording, video, DVD authoring, music composition and web development software Apple and Adobe make...total value far more than I'm being paid to write the piece, in fact. w00t! Anyhow, when I get heads-down and mired in work, sometimes it helps to break the logjam by giving myself an hour or so to go off and write something else in a completely different realm (like this post, for instance... ;>)
This is a response I wrote to another treatise on spiritual seeking, titled "Imitation Spirituality," that came across a mailing list I'm on. The whole text I was responding to was 68k (wordy bugger), but just for a sample, here's the very last paragraph. The rest was largely more of the same, along with much moralistic trashing of those who believe otherwise:
One cannot live in two worlds or serve two masters; neither can the earnest spiritual aspirant afford to be attached to the things of this life while trying to reach the next. In fact, everything must be given up to the Truth if we would walk the Lighted Way that leads to Liberation from falsehood, and so also be of real spiritual service to others. No one can enter a new spiritual world while still clinging to the old, it is impossible. However, imitation spirituality seeks to do just this very thing - for the separate self. Yet it is the perpetuation and aggrandizement of the separate nature, along with its personal desires and ideas, that preserves and augments the pain and illusions of the very life that imitation spirituality claims to serve. In order to walk the true spiritual Path, all that need be sought is how best to give one's separate and illusionary nature in sacrifice to the greater Good and for the benefit of all; this is right use - divinely aligned use - of free will. No matter how good one feels and no matter how the self attires itself, it will at some point have to give up all its ideas, opinions, desires and fears in order to allow the One Life to do its work of self-redemption within. Therefore a lover of Truth seeks to stand aside, to remove self from Reality, and to unite with other hearts for the same divine Purpose. For such a true Seeker knows that it is not he personally who may possess or benefit from the Truth, but rather the Universal Spirit itself does, and in his pure love of and devotion to God, that Reality is all he cares about as he seeks uncompromisingly to again become one with it and so dissolve his separate and painful sense of self forever in the supernal Light of the Divine.
[edit: When people randomly capitalize catch-phrase words to make them look more important, I find it's usually, well, a Very Bad Sign...]
And my reply:
Thanks for taking the time to write and send your post -- this is an interesting perspective, and contains elements common to most strongly dualistic, transcendent religions and belief systems, from Christianity (and variant forms of mystic Christianity, such as Gnosticism), to Judaism to Buddhism, and so on. The world, and all in it is maya, illusion, impure, and our goal is to evolve towards union/re-union with the perfection of the Divine.
As for me, I guess I may be one of those "Imitation Spiritualists," because I am very clear that the purpose of humankind is not to evolve or transcend beyond humanity, beyond this beautiful universe of form and light and darkness in which we are born, but to become ever more fully human, to make of this world a heaven on earth. Which it is, and could be, if we just listen, and choose to act in ways which are true.
Are we just saying the same thing in different terms? In part, I believe so. But I do not see this world, the material and physical, the human form, the human mind, our fleshy embodiment and our natural humanity, as evil, fallen, or something to be perfected and left behind (other than at death, of course, and possibly not even then). Spirit is not more perfect than flesh and form, thought and soul and Oneness no more or less perfect than an actual, living being, in all of its glorious embodiment. Put in more practical terms, too much emphasis on the afterlife, on ultimate union with some external Divinity, almost always leads to terrible mistakes in the here and now, in the name of spiritual perfection. The earth can be plundered, people can be tortured or killed to "save their souls," all because what is true and important is the spirit, not the flesh. That's not my truth, and is unlikely to ever be.
Of one thing I can be virtually sure. Anyone who claims to have the "One True Way," whether you, me, or the apostolic Pentecostal preacher down the road, is, on some level or another selling snake-oil. We are finite, embodied beings contemplating the infinite, and it is a matter of purest fact that we will thus, at best, have an imperfect and incomplete notion of what that infinite divine might be, and to believe otherwise is to deceive oneself. It's the blind men and the elephants all over again. All truths may not be utterly relative -- that is, some things may well be truer than others, but anyone who claims to have *all* the Truth, or know how to find it...ah, well. As the eternal bard wrote, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I'll attach a couple of quotes which are congruent with my perspective, and end with an excellent piece by Ken Wilber on ego and egolessness. I belive there is worth and value in sharing our perspectives, our own blind-man view of the elephant, our own personal and unique perspective on the Divine. We all hold pieces of the grand infinite puzzle, we all have parts of the story to tell. All are necessary, and all play their part.
Warm hearth,
--Chelidon
-------
"Bodily delight is a sensory experience, not any different from pure looking or the pure feeling with which a beautiful fruit fills the tongue; it is a great, an infinite learning that is given to us, a knowledge of the world, the fullness and the splendor of all knowledge. And it is not our acceptance of it that is bad; what is bad is that most people misuse this learning and squander it and apply it as a stimulant on the tired places of their lives and as a distraction rather than as a way of gathering themselves for their highest moments."
--Rainer Maria Rilke
In a discussion between a wise man and a pilgrim, a point was reached where the wise man was brought to say, "I know who I am."
The pilgrim thought this curious and asked,"Who are you then?"
To which the wise man smiled and said, "When you know thyself, you will know."
--(unknown)
"Anybody can say they are being "spiritual"--and they are, because
everybody has some type and level of concern. Let us therefore see
their actual conception, in thought and action, and see how many
perspectives it is in fact concerned with, and how many perspectives
it actually takes into account, and how many perspectives it attempts
to integrate, and thus let us see how deep and how wide runs that
bodhisattva vow to refuse rest until all perspectives whatsoever are
liberated into their own primordial nature."
--Ken Wilber, _The Eye of Spirit_
A person who believes . . . that there is a whole of which one is
part, and that in being a part, one is whole: such a person has no
desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied
their being yearn to play at it.
-Ursula K. LeGuin
"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth."
--Niels Bohr (1885-1962)
Egolessness
Precisely because the ego, the soul, and the Self can all be present simultaneously, we can better understand the real meaning of "egolessness," a notion that has caused an inordinate amount of confusion. But egolessness does not mean the absence of a functional self (that's a psychotic, not a sage); it means that one is no longer exclusively identified with that self.
One of the many reasons we have trouble with the notion of "egoless" is that people want their "egoless sages" to fulfill all their fantasies of "saintly" or "spiritual," which usually means dead from the neck down, without fleshy wants or desires, gently smiling all the time. All of the things that people typically have trouble with--money, food, sex, relationships, desire-- they want their saints to be without. "Egoless sages" are "above all that," is what people want. Talking heads is what they want. Religion, they believe, will simply get rid of all baser instincts, drives and relationships, and hence they look to religion, not for advice on how to live life with enthusiasm, but on how to avoid it, repress it, deny it, escape it.
In other words, the typical person wants the spiritual sage to be "less than a person," somehow devoid of all the messy, juicy, complex, pulsating, desiring, urging forces that drive most human beings. We expect our sages to be an _absence_ of all that drives _us_! All the things that frighten us, confuse us, torment us, confound us: we want our sages to be untouched by them altogether. And that absence, that vacancy, that "less than personal," is what we often mean by "egoless."
But "egoless" does not mean "_less_ than personal"; it means "_more_ than personal." Not personal minus, but personal plus--all the normal personal qualities, _plus_ some transpersonal ones. Think of the great yogis, saints, and sages--from Moses to Christ to Padmasambhava. They were not feeble-mannered milquetoasts, but fierce movers and shakers--from bullwhips in the Temple to subduing entire countries. They rattled the world on its own terms, not in some pie-in-the-sky piety; many of the instigated massive social revolutions that have continued for thousands of years. And they did so, not because they avoided the physical, emotional, and mental dimensions of humanness, and the ego that is their vehicle, but because they engaged them with a drive and intensity that shook the world to its very foundations. No doubt, they were also plugged into the soul (deeper psychic) and spirit (formless Self)--the ultimate source of their power--but they expressed that power, and gave it concrete results, precisely because they dramatically engaged the lower dimensions through which that power could speak in terms that could be heard by all.
These great movers and shakers were not small egos; they were, in the very best sense of the term, big egos, precisely because the ego (the functional vehicle of the gross realm) can and does exist alongside the soul (the vehicle of the subtle) and the Self (vehicle of the causal). To the extent these great teachers _moved the gross realm_, they did so with their egos, because the ego is the functional vehicle of that realm. They were not, however, identified merely with their egos (that's a narcissist); they simply found their egos plugged into a radiant Kosmic source. The great yogis, saints, and sages accomplished so much precisely because they were not timid little toadies but great big egos, plugged into the dynamic Ground and Goal of the Kosmos itself, plugged into their own higher Self, alive to the pure Atman (the pure I-I) that is one with Brahman; they opened their mouths and the world trembled, fell to its knees, and confronted its radiant God.
Saint Theresa was a great contemplative? Yes, _and_ Saint Theresa is the only woman ever to have reformed an entire Catholic monastic tradition (think about it). Gautama Buddha shook India to its foundations. Rumi, Plotinus, Bodhidharma, Lady Tsogyal, Lao Tzu, Plato, the Baal Shem Tov--these men and women started revolutions in the gross realm that lasted hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years, something neither Marx nor Lenin nor Locke nor Jefferson can yet claim. And they did not do so because they were dead from the neck down. No, they were monumentally, gloriously, divinely big egos, plugged into a deeper psychic, which was plugged straight into God.
There is certainly a type of truth to the notion of _transcending ego_: it doesn't mean destroy the ego, it means plug it into something bigger. As Magarjuna put it, in the relative world, _atman_ is real; in the absolute, neither _atman_ not _anatman_ is real. Thus, in neither case is _anatta_ a correct description of reality. The small ego does not evaporate; it remains as the functional center of activity in the conventional realm. As I said, to lose that ego is to become a psychotic, not a sage.
"Transcending the ego" thus actually means to _transcend but include_ the ego in a deeper and higher embrace, first in the soul or deeper psychic, then with the Witness or primordial Self, then with each previous stage taken up, enfolded, included, and embraced in the radiance of One Taste. And that means we do not "get rid" of the small ego, but rather, we inhabit it fully, live it with verve, use it as the necessary vehicle through which higher truths are communicated. Soul and Spirit include body, emotions, and mind; they do not erase them.
Put bluntly, the ego is not an obstruction to Spirit, but a radiant manifestation of Spirit. All Forms are not other than Emptiness, including the form of the ego. It is not necessary to get rid of the ego, but simply to live with it a certain exuberance. When identification spills out of the ego and into the Kosmos at large, the ego discovers that the individual Atman is in fact all of a piece with Brahman. The big Self is indeed _no small ego_, and thus, to the extent that you are stuck in your small ego, a death and transcendence is required. Narcissists are simply people whose egos are not yet big enough to embrace the entire Kosmos, and so they try to be central to the Kosmos instead.
But we do not want our sages to have big egos; we do not even want them to display a manifest dimension at all. Anytime a sage displays humanness--in regard to money, food, sex, relationships--we are shocked, _shocked_, because we are planning to escape life altogether, not live it, and the sage who lives life offends us. We want out, we want to ascend, we want to escape, and the sage who engages life with gusto, lives it to the hilt, grabs each wave of life and surfs it to the end--this deeply, profoundly disturbs us, frightens us, because it means that we, too, might have to engage life, with gusto, on all levels, and not merely escape it in a cloud of luminous ether. We do not want our sages to have bodies, egos, drives, vitality, sex, money, relationships or life, because those are what habitually torture us, and we want out. We do not want to surf the waves of life, we want the waves to go away. We want vaporware spirituality.
The integral sage, the nondual sage, is here to show us otherwise. Known generally as "Tantric," these sages insist on transcending life by living it. They insist on finding release by engagement, finding nirvana in the midst of _samsara_, finding total liberation by complete immersion. They enter with awareness the nine rings of hell, for nowhere else are the nine heavens found. Nothing is alien to them, for there is nothing that is not One Taste.
Indeed, the whole point is to be fully at home in the body and its desires, the mind and its ideas, the spirit and its light. To embrace them fully, evenly, simultaneously, since all are equally gestures of the One and Only Taste. To inhabit lust and watch it play; to enter ideas and follow their brilliance; to be swallowed by Spirit and awaken to a glory that time forgot to name. Body and mind and spirit, all contained, equally contained, in the ever-present awareness that grounds the entire display.
In the stillness of night, the Goddess whispers. In the brightness of the day, dear God roars. Life pulses, mind imagines, emotions wave, thoughts wander. What are all these but the endless movements of One Taste, forever at play with its own gestures, whispering quietly to all who would listen: is this not you yourself?
When the thunder roars, do you not hear your Self? When the lightning cracks, do you not see your Self? When clouds float quietly across the sky, is this not your very own limitless Being, waving back at you?
--Ken Wilber, _One Taste_
This is a response I wrote to another treatise on spiritual seeking, titled "Imitation Spirituality," that came across a mailing list I'm on. The whole text I was responding to was 68k (wordy bugger), but just for a sample, here's the very last paragraph. The rest was largely more of the same, along with much moralistic trashing of those who believe otherwise:
One cannot live in two worlds or serve two masters; neither can the earnest spiritual aspirant afford to be attached to the things of this life while trying to reach the next. In fact, everything must be given up to the Truth if we would walk the Lighted Way that leads to Liberation from falsehood, and so also be of real spiritual service to others. No one can enter a new spiritual world while still clinging to the old, it is impossible. However, imitation spirituality seeks to do just this very thing - for the separate self. Yet it is the perpetuation and aggrandizement of the separate nature, along with its personal desires and ideas, that preserves and augments the pain and illusions of the very life that imitation spirituality claims to serve. In order to walk the true spiritual Path, all that need be sought is how best to give one's separate and illusionary nature in sacrifice to the greater Good and for the benefit of all; this is right use - divinely aligned use - of free will. No matter how good one feels and no matter how the self attires itself, it will at some point have to give up all its ideas, opinions, desires and fears in order to allow the One Life to do its work of self-redemption within. Therefore a lover of Truth seeks to stand aside, to remove self from Reality, and to unite with other hearts for the same divine Purpose. For such a true Seeker knows that it is not he personally who may possess or benefit from the Truth, but rather the Universal Spirit itself does, and in his pure love of and devotion to God, that Reality is all he cares about as he seeks uncompromisingly to again become one with it and so dissolve his separate and painful sense of self forever in the supernal Light of the Divine.
[edit: When people randomly capitalize catch-phrase words to make them look more important, I find it's usually, well, a Very Bad Sign...]
And my reply:
Thanks for taking the time to write and send your post -- this is an interesting perspective, and contains elements common to most strongly dualistic, transcendent religions and belief systems, from Christianity (and variant forms of mystic Christianity, such as Gnosticism), to Judaism to Buddhism, and so on. The world, and all in it is maya, illusion, impure, and our goal is to evolve towards union/re-union with the perfection of the Divine.
As for me, I guess I may be one of those "Imitation Spiritualists," because I am very clear that the purpose of humankind is not to evolve or transcend beyond humanity, beyond this beautiful universe of form and light and darkness in which we are born, but to become ever more fully human, to make of this world a heaven on earth. Which it is, and could be, if we just listen, and choose to act in ways which are true.
Are we just saying the same thing in different terms? In part, I believe so. But I do not see this world, the material and physical, the human form, the human mind, our fleshy embodiment and our natural humanity, as evil, fallen, or something to be perfected and left behind (other than at death, of course, and possibly not even then). Spirit is not more perfect than flesh and form, thought and soul and Oneness no more or less perfect than an actual, living being, in all of its glorious embodiment. Put in more practical terms, too much emphasis on the afterlife, on ultimate union with some external Divinity, almost always leads to terrible mistakes in the here and now, in the name of spiritual perfection. The earth can be plundered, people can be tortured or killed to "save their souls," all because what is true and important is the spirit, not the flesh. That's not my truth, and is unlikely to ever be.
Of one thing I can be virtually sure. Anyone who claims to have the "One True Way," whether you, me, or the apostolic Pentecostal preacher down the road, is, on some level or another selling snake-oil. We are finite, embodied beings contemplating the infinite, and it is a matter of purest fact that we will thus, at best, have an imperfect and incomplete notion of what that infinite divine might be, and to believe otherwise is to deceive oneself. It's the blind men and the elephants all over again. All truths may not be utterly relative -- that is, some things may well be truer than others, but anyone who claims to have *all* the Truth, or know how to find it...ah, well. As the eternal bard wrote, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I'll attach a couple of quotes which are congruent with my perspective, and end with an excellent piece by Ken Wilber on ego and egolessness. I belive there is worth and value in sharing our perspectives, our own blind-man view of the elephant, our own personal and unique perspective on the Divine. We all hold pieces of the grand infinite puzzle, we all have parts of the story to tell. All are necessary, and all play their part.
Warm hearth,
--Chelidon
-------
"Bodily delight is a sensory experience, not any different from pure looking or the pure feeling with which a beautiful fruit fills the tongue; it is a great, an infinite learning that is given to us, a knowledge of the world, the fullness and the splendor of all knowledge. And it is not our acceptance of it that is bad; what is bad is that most people misuse this learning and squander it and apply it as a stimulant on the tired places of their lives and as a distraction rather than as a way of gathering themselves for their highest moments."
--Rainer Maria Rilke
In a discussion between a wise man and a pilgrim, a point was reached where the wise man was brought to say, "I know who I am."
The pilgrim thought this curious and asked,"Who are you then?"
To which the wise man smiled and said, "When you know thyself, you will know."
--(unknown)
"Anybody can say they are being "spiritual"--and they are, because
everybody has some type and level of concern. Let us therefore see
their actual conception, in thought and action, and see how many
perspectives it is in fact concerned with, and how many perspectives
it actually takes into account, and how many perspectives it attempts
to integrate, and thus let us see how deep and how wide runs that
bodhisattva vow to refuse rest until all perspectives whatsoever are
liberated into their own primordial nature."
--Ken Wilber, _The Eye of Spirit_
A person who believes . . . that there is a whole of which one is
part, and that in being a part, one is whole: such a person has no
desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied
their being yearn to play at it.
-Ursula K. LeGuin
"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth."
--Niels Bohr (1885-1962)
Egolessness
Precisely because the ego, the soul, and the Self can all be present simultaneously, we can better understand the real meaning of "egolessness," a notion that has caused an inordinate amount of confusion. But egolessness does not mean the absence of a functional self (that's a psychotic, not a sage); it means that one is no longer exclusively identified with that self.
One of the many reasons we have trouble with the notion of "egoless" is that people want their "egoless sages" to fulfill all their fantasies of "saintly" or "spiritual," which usually means dead from the neck down, without fleshy wants or desires, gently smiling all the time. All of the things that people typically have trouble with--money, food, sex, relationships, desire-- they want their saints to be without. "Egoless sages" are "above all that," is what people want. Talking heads is what they want. Religion, they believe, will simply get rid of all baser instincts, drives and relationships, and hence they look to religion, not for advice on how to live life with enthusiasm, but on how to avoid it, repress it, deny it, escape it.
In other words, the typical person wants the spiritual sage to be "less than a person," somehow devoid of all the messy, juicy, complex, pulsating, desiring, urging forces that drive most human beings. We expect our sages to be an _absence_ of all that drives _us_! All the things that frighten us, confuse us, torment us, confound us: we want our sages to be untouched by them altogether. And that absence, that vacancy, that "less than personal," is what we often mean by "egoless."
But "egoless" does not mean "_less_ than personal"; it means "_more_ than personal." Not personal minus, but personal plus--all the normal personal qualities, _plus_ some transpersonal ones. Think of the great yogis, saints, and sages--from Moses to Christ to Padmasambhava. They were not feeble-mannered milquetoasts, but fierce movers and shakers--from bullwhips in the Temple to subduing entire countries. They rattled the world on its own terms, not in some pie-in-the-sky piety; many of the instigated massive social revolutions that have continued for thousands of years. And they did so, not because they avoided the physical, emotional, and mental dimensions of humanness, and the ego that is their vehicle, but because they engaged them with a drive and intensity that shook the world to its very foundations. No doubt, they were also plugged into the soul (deeper psychic) and spirit (formless Self)--the ultimate source of their power--but they expressed that power, and gave it concrete results, precisely because they dramatically engaged the lower dimensions through which that power could speak in terms that could be heard by all.
These great movers and shakers were not small egos; they were, in the very best sense of the term, big egos, precisely because the ego (the functional vehicle of the gross realm) can and does exist alongside the soul (the vehicle of the subtle) and the Self (vehicle of the causal). To the extent these great teachers _moved the gross realm_, they did so with their egos, because the ego is the functional vehicle of that realm. They were not, however, identified merely with their egos (that's a narcissist); they simply found their egos plugged into a radiant Kosmic source. The great yogis, saints, and sages accomplished so much precisely because they were not timid little toadies but great big egos, plugged into the dynamic Ground and Goal of the Kosmos itself, plugged into their own higher Self, alive to the pure Atman (the pure I-I) that is one with Brahman; they opened their mouths and the world trembled, fell to its knees, and confronted its radiant God.
Saint Theresa was a great contemplative? Yes, _and_ Saint Theresa is the only woman ever to have reformed an entire Catholic monastic tradition (think about it). Gautama Buddha shook India to its foundations. Rumi, Plotinus, Bodhidharma, Lady Tsogyal, Lao Tzu, Plato, the Baal Shem Tov--these men and women started revolutions in the gross realm that lasted hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years, something neither Marx nor Lenin nor Locke nor Jefferson can yet claim. And they did not do so because they were dead from the neck down. No, they were monumentally, gloriously, divinely big egos, plugged into a deeper psychic, which was plugged straight into God.
There is certainly a type of truth to the notion of _transcending ego_: it doesn't mean destroy the ego, it means plug it into something bigger. As Magarjuna put it, in the relative world, _atman_ is real; in the absolute, neither _atman_ not _anatman_ is real. Thus, in neither case is _anatta_ a correct description of reality. The small ego does not evaporate; it remains as the functional center of activity in the conventional realm. As I said, to lose that ego is to become a psychotic, not a sage.
"Transcending the ego" thus actually means to _transcend but include_ the ego in a deeper and higher embrace, first in the soul or deeper psychic, then with the Witness or primordial Self, then with each previous stage taken up, enfolded, included, and embraced in the radiance of One Taste. And that means we do not "get rid" of the small ego, but rather, we inhabit it fully, live it with verve, use it as the necessary vehicle through which higher truths are communicated. Soul and Spirit include body, emotions, and mind; they do not erase them.
Put bluntly, the ego is not an obstruction to Spirit, but a radiant manifestation of Spirit. All Forms are not other than Emptiness, including the form of the ego. It is not necessary to get rid of the ego, but simply to live with it a certain exuberance. When identification spills out of the ego and into the Kosmos at large, the ego discovers that the individual Atman is in fact all of a piece with Brahman. The big Self is indeed _no small ego_, and thus, to the extent that you are stuck in your small ego, a death and transcendence is required. Narcissists are simply people whose egos are not yet big enough to embrace the entire Kosmos, and so they try to be central to the Kosmos instead.
But we do not want our sages to have big egos; we do not even want them to display a manifest dimension at all. Anytime a sage displays humanness--in regard to money, food, sex, relationships--we are shocked, _shocked_, because we are planning to escape life altogether, not live it, and the sage who lives life offends us. We want out, we want to ascend, we want to escape, and the sage who engages life with gusto, lives it to the hilt, grabs each wave of life and surfs it to the end--this deeply, profoundly disturbs us, frightens us, because it means that we, too, might have to engage life, with gusto, on all levels, and not merely escape it in a cloud of luminous ether. We do not want our sages to have bodies, egos, drives, vitality, sex, money, relationships or life, because those are what habitually torture us, and we want out. We do not want to surf the waves of life, we want the waves to go away. We want vaporware spirituality.
The integral sage, the nondual sage, is here to show us otherwise. Known generally as "Tantric," these sages insist on transcending life by living it. They insist on finding release by engagement, finding nirvana in the midst of _samsara_, finding total liberation by complete immersion. They enter with awareness the nine rings of hell, for nowhere else are the nine heavens found. Nothing is alien to them, for there is nothing that is not One Taste.
Indeed, the whole point is to be fully at home in the body and its desires, the mind and its ideas, the spirit and its light. To embrace them fully, evenly, simultaneously, since all are equally gestures of the One and Only Taste. To inhabit lust and watch it play; to enter ideas and follow their brilliance; to be swallowed by Spirit and awaken to a glory that time forgot to name. Body and mind and spirit, all contained, equally contained, in the ever-present awareness that grounds the entire display.
In the stillness of night, the Goddess whispers. In the brightness of the day, dear God roars. Life pulses, mind imagines, emotions wave, thoughts wander. What are all these but the endless movements of One Taste, forever at play with its own gestures, whispering quietly to all who would listen: is this not you yourself?
When the thunder roars, do you not hear your Self? When the lightning cracks, do you not see your Self? When clouds float quietly across the sky, is this not your very own limitless Being, waving back at you?
--Ken Wilber, _One Taste_
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-10-25 02:40 pm (UTC)And I thought I got a good brainwashing when I was a fundy!!! AAAHHH!!!!!
This sounds like a cross between Pat Robertson, Shirley McClaine, and Marxist rhetoric!
*barfs on keyboard again*
no subject
Date: 2006-10-25 03:14 pm (UTC)Those who preach The One True Way tend to be pretty blind, it seems. I'm not sure which is cause, and which is effect, but put another way, the more sure you are that you (and you alone) are right, the more sure ya are to have a big ol' set of blinders on, that I know.
And I'll admit, people who are so deeply into Rapture, or Ascending, or whatever, really make me itch. Yes, living as a human can be damn hard, but...that's what we're here to do. This world, here and now, needs our work and our energy. Counting on Union or Rapture or alien Beings of Light to come take us all away is often just a big cop-out from digging in and doing the work. I want to shake these people sometimes and holler, "this is not a dry run! This is your life, not a practice for the next one! Make this life count, and the next one will take care of itself...
Ah, well. Won't I be surprised if someday it turns out they're right, and the Rapture happens or the angels come down and bite off the heads of the Chosen People and suck out their souls for transport to Heaven. Then the rest of us left here can have all their stuff, I suppose ;>
no subject
Date: 2006-10-25 03:42 pm (UTC)Hence the bumper sticker Come the Rapture, can I have your car?
I have never yet received a straight answer from the One True Way people as to why it is, exactly, they think they are here embodied as human beings on this Earth.
Has it always been human nature to shrug off responsibility for onesself and one's actions? When did that get to be a commonly-held definition of "freedom?"
Digging out one of the many (sometimes ridiculous) sayings attributed to my grandfather (may he rest in peace, or at least be having some fun), I have to come back to this one:
The easy way is the hard way. And the hard way is the easy way (in the end).
xo
no subject
Date: 2006-10-25 05:21 pm (UTC)There's the line from the muse, Serendipity, in Dogma, " You people don't celebrate your faith; you mourn it." Same with life, I think. Self-hatred, hatred of one's embodiment, gets turned into violence against others, against the planet, because, well, ultimately it's all just fallen, gross matter, and thus, doesn't matter. And it's such a cop-out. "It doesn't matter, it'll all be perfect in the *next* world..." Yeah, right.
Your grandfather sounds like a wise one. I am reminded of the three roads -- the smooth, easy path leads to hell, the hard, thorny road leads to heaven...but then, that third road... ;>
no subject
Date: 2006-10-25 04:47 pm (UTC)more ego-bashing
Date: 2006-10-25 04:42 pm (UTC)I’d say that one who can’t do that lacks flexibility…
(often mistaken for weakness, but the flexible usually stands up to pressure more easily than the rigid)
>neither can the earnest spiritual aspirant afford to be attached to the >things of this life
but attachment refers to a subjective, rather than objective state. One may have, yet not feel attachment. Evola wrote an entire book on the idea of non-attached indulgence. Lightening the load to move more easily through the world doesn’t mean sackcloth-and-ashes time.
> trying to reach the next.
Reaching the next can prove remarkably easy. If this life simply represents an intermediary state before a more-desired next life, why not just check out?
>In fact, everything must be given up to the Truth if we would walk the >Lighted Way
Re: “given up” – see above re: ”attachment”.
>that leads to Liberation from falsehood, and so also be of real spiritual >service to others.
Define “real spiritual service”, please…
Someone on another list once asked “well, if we’re to serve others, isn’t doing all of the Magickal Work inherently selfish? Shouldn’t we spend all of this time and energy on helping other people?” One can, for example, give all of one’s food to the needy, but when one eventually starves to death, one ceases to be of use to anyone.
Me, I’d rather not have an either/or proposition. Strict either/or duality always struck me as lazy thinking. Examined closely enough, any duality eventually dissolves under scrutiny.
>No one can enter a new spiritual world while still clinging to the old, >it is impossible.
My mother always told me “the impossible just takes a little bit longer”
>However, imitation spirituality seeks to do just this very thing - for >the separate self.
Tell that to the Naths, the Buddhas (the original texts are quite the eye-openers compared to how the religion developed afterwards), the Siddhas, the Taoist Immortals…they all seem to have achieved this “live in two worlds” thing while still attaining union with the Divine. The much-revered Sri Aurobindo taught an Integral Yoga (“Purna Yoga”) that incorporated all levels of one’s being.
>Yet it is the perpetuation and aggrandizement of the separate nature, >along with its personal desires and ideas, that preserves and augments >the pain and illusions of the very life that imitation spirituality >claims to serve
Yes, the things of this world can lead to pain, but they can also lead to pleasure and joy. One takes that risk when one lives in this world. Life would get pretty boring if it all came to one or the other. If one continually sees pain, than I’d dare say one has become attached to the idea of pain, and, to quote one of my favourite authors, “what the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves”.
>For such a true Seeker knows that it is not he personally who may possess >or benefit from the Truth, that Reality is all he cares >about as he seeks uncompromisingly to again become one with it and so >dissolve his separate and painful sense of self forever in the supernal >Light of the Divine.
Sorry- the way I read this, it makes the Spiritual Path sound like an extended form of suicide, and I don’t think I signed up for that…
>[edit: When people randomly capitalize catch-phrase words to make them >look more important, I find it's usually, well, a Very Bad Sign...]
I dunno, I Rather Quite Like Doing That…
Me, I don’t see the world I live in as Illusion (that risks wandering in to the stormy seas of Solipsism), rather I see our perceptions of such as Maya, the world coloured and, at times, distorted by our meme-filters, making us react to the Objective based entirely on Subjective perceptions thereof. While to some extent seeing Initiatory Magick as inherently Transhumanist, I seek perfection in the world and the body in which I live because…well, I live here. Why, I ask, do we continually incarnate in the Manifest if the Manifest has no merit?
Io Phanes,
Tzeenj
Re: more ego-bashing
Date: 2006-10-25 04:58 pm (UTC)Nail. Head. Bang.
Dude. You know, I think we did more magickal theorizing and bullshitting before we lived together, on the old z-list, etc. That would be nice to change, eh? Get yerself a LJ account, at least ;>
Re: more ego-bashing
Date: 2006-10-25 07:05 pm (UTC)>Nail. Head. Bang.
I tend to do that. ;)
>Dude. You know, I think we did more magickal theorizing and >bullshitting before we lived together, on the old z-list, etc.
Agreed.
>That would be nice to change, eh?
Indeed. I have missed that…
>Get yerself a LJ account, at least ;>
I’ve thought about that, and plan to do something along those lines as a sort of Magickal journal, once I finish rebuilding my regular practice and restarting it.
my commentary on your reply and your sources
Date: 2006-10-25 04:42 pm (UTC)And that is only the smallest part.
Re: my commentary on your reply and your sources
Date: 2006-10-25 05:08 pm (UTC)Re: more ego-bashing
Date: 2006-10-25 06:36 pm (UTC)howdy?
Re: more ego-bashing
Date: 2006-10-25 07:06 pm (UTC)How goes?
Re: more ego-bashing
Date: 2006-10-27 05:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-25 08:24 pm (UTC)I prefer to serve no masters. Servitude is for slaves.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-25 08:54 pm (UTC)Amway of the Soul
Date: 2006-10-25 11:55 pm (UTC)Ye must focus on the spiritual world (intangible) and disregard the world of the flesh (tangible) because only in the world we actually live and breathe in can we see a loser for what they are. In my experience, the more some fool jabbers about the world of the spirit, the less they are able to function in the right here and now. And the last thing I need is spiritual counseling from some furry-toothed geek who can't remember to change his shorts...can you say skidmarks of the spirit?
Marc
11th Level Born-Again Agnostic and Moose Country Biker Trash
Suck the head. Squeeze the tip. Break the law.
Re: Amway of the Soul
Date: 2006-10-26 03:23 am (UTC)Re: Amway of the Soul
Date: 2006-10-26 10:29 am (UTC)Re: Amway of the Soul
Date: 2006-10-26 10:43 am (UTC)Chief: I give you choice - submit to kutanga from my greatest warriors or death. Choose now!
Missionary: I am a man of God but I am still a man. I will not allow the temple of my body to be desecrated by sodomites even if it costs me my life! I choose death!
Chief: So be it, you have chosen. I sentence you to death... by KUTANGA!!!
And the moral of the story is that all the preachin' and moralizin' in the world won't keep an asshole from getting f*cked...
Marc