Imagine a script, one script, one consciousness, dispersed into many vessels/vehicles, all possessing different characteristics and roles, each role depending upon another to act as a different but inseparable role.
Consequently, as new vessels are moulded, each one grows in consciousness and eventually could decide a role for itself but during the early stages, roles and functions are tacitly bestowed upon the newer vessels from very tender ages while they learn the ropes. Where most still remain largely incapable of any real rebellion, they therefore have no choice but to grow into it like a cloth.
It is important to know that even this process does not necessarily eliminate the ability of each one to decide a role for itself, it all depends on the extent of the immersion of each vessel in its own specifically tailored illusion and the extent to which the mind is open and one can see past oneself.
The Fall
In a previous article, you remember we talked about a script right. Now think of a character suddenly developing some form of consciousness or awareness, and because of this tries to convince itself that it is separate from its source of consciousness, which is the script. It believes that it has somehow become separate from the script because of its awareness of that script, not realising that both it and the script don’t exist without each other. It should be pretty easy to see that we and the universe are one right, except for one reason which is that the furthest thing to us humans is simply reality. Everything we see and hear is self interpreted to us, by us and taken in as information specifically tailored to our expectations.
The self has such a hold on us you see, but we don’t realize this because we spend all our time disillusioned as being the self, so much so that we never see it as a hold, for we cannot really hold ourselves can we. it’s easy to get skeptical and self-absorbed about a baseball that’s in our hand because it seems so immediate and personal to us, unlike that which is hit for a home run, soaring in the air, away from our immediate reach or grab. Only in cases like this do we realize that our opinion matters too little to really affect anything in the grand scheme of our existence, and in those rare moments can we find real peace and universal harmony.
It doesn’t always have to be the bleak and murky way, we could live our lives differently from what we are used to. Basic, filled with little hope, rarely anything to appreciate or any real joy to feel, always wanting for what we cannot have and never getting anything we truly want, manifesting the insatiable form of the human flesh in overly exaggerated manners.
The Truth of Suffering
The Zen masters or anyone involved in the intricacies of the dharma would often say that we suffer mostly because we are perpetually in a state of confusion with ourselves. This suffering is called ‘duhkha’ and one of the ways in which we experience duhkha is through ‘being’. It’s a bit difficult to realize at first because the thought has to be consciously evoked by us or at least by others for us, before we can begin to see it.
We find there are moments when we sit and ponder our existence and ask questions like who am I? Where did I come from? How did it all start and when does it all end? Often times we disregard the foremost question that should be asked, which should be pretty obvious to realize even without being involved in any spiritual practices or techniques and the question is why we fail to recognize the futility in the fear of the end of life, when there was no fear before the beginning.
These fears that we have are illusionary and have been worked deeply into us over time; illusionary not in the sense that the fear is not real, but that it is fear about something that isn’t. We developed the ego self, got comfortable, attached and so self absorbed that we started to think of ourselves as distinct and separate from a world which we came out of, instead of seeing ourselves as part of it and everything that exists inside it. Everything we see and feel are all different cogs in one universal wheel. The moment we began to do that was the moment we got disconnected from reality and lost sight of the divine fact that we go hand-in-hand with all that is, all that has been and all that will ever be, and that we could never really cease to exist.
The beginning of Existence?
Of course, the idea of the cessation of existence has been confused with the idea of death for so long that it doesn’t do the drive of this point home any favours. If it is the case that existence began when we were born, does that mean that we still hadn’t started existing the day before we were born? Even after nine months of consuming tiny little amounts of food through a fleshy tube, or if we say that we started existing just after fertilization, what then about the sperm? Is it non existent? Even the sperm had to have been somewhere before all of that.
We could still go one step further and say that existence began with the biological formation in the testicles, but those simple round cells that transform into sperm cells during puberty already existed at conception. So if I already existed when my father was born, he then already existed when his father was born; this means I existed at the time my grandfather was born, and even before that time. In essence, my existence had absolutely nothing to do with my consciousness or my conscious efforts in making it that way.
If we existed long before consciousness, which came about as a result of change and which is only another kind of duhkha, it means we remain in existence long after consciousness and that good things too can come even out of the things that we dread the most which is suffering. We also then realize that our lusts and fears have the same original source and our efforts in trying to run away from one only pushes us further away from the other.
Now some say the ego is an illusion, some think it’s real. It really doesn’t matter because as long as it’s a subject of discussion, it’s something to be looked at and it can only be dealt with in one way, which is through the path of least resistance. If you outright desire to get rid of the ego by taking some directly impactful action against it, I’m afraid that might not work because as a result of that desire, you begin to lean. That is you begin to crave a solution outside of yourself when all you need is already in your possession.
First Step on the path
The first thing we need to do on our path is to see the ego for what is really is; not think about it or attribute to it qualities that it was never meant to possess, see it. Whether it is illusionary or not, the ego is part of existence, but only a tiny little part of our being, no more than a shadow.
There is no harm in recognizing it as a little part of a whole, the harm comes from its recognition as the whole or the real, whatever that means. Some even go as far as saying it’s the only self. It’s no wonder we, and even some of those that claim it to be the real self, posit that the ego is very fragile and this is due to the attribution of certain features and responsibilities to the ego that were never meant for it, and then it crumbles under even perceived pressure and all the blame is put on little old ego.
No greater way to run away from yourself than what you describe as yourself. Large credit is given to the society for the moulding of the ego self illusion, after which functions and characteristics that are reachable and immediate to us are unconsciously arranged and assigned unto it, bringing about a sort of ego shelf. From here onward, this shelf is constantly consulted and updated – through cautionary tales, arbitrary measures of good and bad, religious, ethnic and societal bias, subjective laws and past experiences – thereby causing reactions to seem more and more tailored, which is also further reinforced by demands within the society that it ‘must’ be so willingly and of our own volition.
The Inception of Confusion 
This instructional horror of double binds marks the beginning of the confusion, and ultimately the complete neglection, of our true selves which then forces us to create a version that is acceptable to the society and our loved ones as a truly convincing front, eventually even to ourselves, at the expense of that whole self in exchange for being accepted by them and engrained into the society. Seems like a fair exchange rate right, except that every single person in that system is a victim of that same system. You do this for long enough, you forget yourself totally and see yourself as apart from the whole process instead of as a part of it, becoming convinced that something other than your true self is your real self.
That existence of the ego isn’t necessarily the problem but the split within. The idea that the “intellectually imaginative or abstract image of ourselves” is somehow separate from what it is essentially a product of, and the need to be conscious of what it is doing in the process of interacting with itself.
"So long as the mind is split, life is perpetual conflict tension, frustration and disillusion Suffering is piled on suffering, fear on fear Boredom on boredom"
It’s no wonder cultures that haven’t been exposed to the western way of living suffer very little from this disillusion of the ego and are capable of having child like reactions to certain events still, even as adults. Some of us westerners never really do anything for ourselves throughout our lives which gears us sometimes to ask, where is the fun in all of these? But see no way out. It is because we need to recalibrate our lenses.
It is the perceived norm that the solution to an opposing force is always outright resistance, but not in this case. We can look at it this way, if we say the ego is a way of making ourselves work, pulling ourselves together or calling ourselves into action or attention, how then do we find ourselves already ‘working’ at the time we become self conscious? It means the ego is utterly unimportant to our daily routines, and frankly just gets in the way of a more interesting lifestyle more than anything.
“The ‘I’ was not, is not and never will be a part of human personality. There is nothing unique,
or ‘different’ or interesting about it. On the contrary, the more human beings pursue it,
the more uniform, uninteresting and impersonal they become.
It is obvious that the only interesting people are interested people,
and to be completely interested is to have forgotten about the ‘I’ “.
Will be continued…
