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Ego death...
There is a lot of talk about ego death in esoteric traditions and also in current popular works. Am still working to grok the concept, as it seems there are different interpretations of what that means:
The spiritualist idea seems to be that with the dissolution of ego, I now can "go home" into some happy place beyond physicality. This in a way denies the physical existence on this planet as something to be enjoyed, as it apparently only appears to be a vehicle to burn karma and transcend. Sort of an earthschool that we must go through and to deny your identity apparently lets you move to higher levels.
Secondly, there appears to be the conflict of "I" vs "Other". My yoga teacher always said to me, when people start speaking about "Oneness", hold on to your wallet and your girlfriend. While we seem to finally get that there is an underlying unity to all life, each of our perceptions are separate. One might go so far as to require this separation, this original "sin", as a requirement for experience, as without it, the entangled hierarchy that turns wave into particle would not exist. In this case, ego death might mean that we begin to grok the paradox if "I" and "Other" as separate and yet as one. In this case, it would mean giving up egotistical behavior for healthy selfish individuality with an understanding of living in community.
Thirdly, there also appears to be a perspective that ego death is simply to stop identifying with the mental body "only". In our current state of humanity, we seem to define ourselves as "I think therefore I am". It would seem that ego death in this context means dissolving from thought as a primary identity reference, but instead step in the realm, where we identify with spirit, and have body, emotion, thought and energy available as four separate ways of engaging with reality around us, engaging all of them consciously, joyously, and as appropriate - the mental body seems a great tool for solving math problems.
Thoughts??
The spiritualist idea seems to be that with the dissolution of ego, I now can "go home" into some happy place beyond physicality. This in a way denies the physical existence on this planet as something to be enjoyed, as it apparently only appears to be a vehicle to burn karma and transcend. Sort of an earthschool that we must go through and to deny your identity apparently lets you move to higher levels.
Secondly, there appears to be the conflict of "I" vs "Other". My yoga teacher always said to me, when people start speaking about "Oneness", hold on to your wallet and your girlfriend. While we seem to finally get that there is an underlying unity to all life, each of our perceptions are separate. One might go so far as to require this separation, this original "sin", as a requirement for experience, as without it, the entangled hierarchy that turns wave into particle would not exist. In this case, ego death might mean that we begin to grok the paradox if "I" and "Other" as separate and yet as one. In this case, it would mean giving up egotistical behavior for healthy selfish individuality with an understanding of living in community.
Thirdly, there also appears to be a perspective that ego death is simply to stop identifying with the mental body "only". In our current state of humanity, we seem to define ourselves as "I think therefore I am". It would seem that ego death in this context means dissolving from thought as a primary identity reference, but instead step in the realm, where we identify with spirit, and have body, emotion, thought and energy available as four separate ways of engaging with reality around us, engaging all of them consciously, joyously, and as appropriate - the mental body seems a great tool for solving math problems.
Thoughts??
Tags: body, circuit, death, ego, emotional, energetic, mental, philip, physical, spiritual
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by joymonk on -
to know what you want to live for, you have to know what you are willing to die for...
Thank you for the Bruce Lee video... Good one!
Alex Storino said:
I think that ego death is best explained by Bruce Lee at approximately 1:30 in this linked youtube video. It's the art of dying. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlnInq_lB4Q
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Permalink Reply by Vanese Mc Neill on -
Yes! If only I knew that that was in the cosmic sense. I would die for my beloved. I would die for my friends and family. I have grown so unattached to the flux of things, that to die for a cause seems unnecessary. That fight, a hologram of me who is more passionate will take on. The only thing that inspires me now is love laughter and music.
joymonk said:to know what you want to live for, you have to know what you are willing to die for...
Thank you for the Bruce Lee video... Good one!
Alex Storino said:
I think that ego death is best explained by Bruce Lee at approximately 1:30 in this linked youtube video. It's the art of dying. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlnInq_lB4Q
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Permalink Reply by Alex Storino on
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Ego death to me can be summed up quite well between the multitude of communications theories described or shared by Marshall McLuhan and the way of applying them by Bruce Lee (Tao of Jeet Kune Do).
I experienced a powerful ego death while studying in Lismore, NSW away from family and most friends in Canada. At the age of 32, I had the experience of working in public and private broadcast media, and print industries in the U.S. and Canada. After this foray in to a really shitty top-down hierarchical system, I settled on simply doing a community radio gig voluntarily at a campus community radio station. This seemed odd to my colleagues and classmates since I was elected the class's top on-air personality.
I then took a trip in to the world of business intelligence brokering. I worked in Toronto and London England, setting up deals at power summits between pharmaceutical companies and marketers, sales crews, and brand makers. I worked in setting up deals at power summits in finance and regulating. I worked at setting up deals between telecoms and data retention companies. This shit was more toxic than media, so I thought.
I was in a serious car wreck (hit by an 18 wheeler) on Canada's busiest highway and took six weeks off of work for healing. I simply couldn't go back and set up companies in dream deals anymore. With income waning, I grasped at a sales job in the auto industry at a parts supplier (what a bunch of dumb thieving assholes running this vertical sector) I lasted five months before figuring it out, and then went on to selling (or shilling) commercial insurance (yet another crooked industry). It only lasted four months or so, I milked it and saved some cash to put myself through teacher's college in Australia.
After getting a bachelor of teaching to go along with my bachelors in communications studies, I found myself only four credits from a Master's degree. - So I went for it. I thought teaching could be my first true shot at making an HONEST living. It's impossible with the system set up in the way it is... As I came to this realization while researching, I began to lose it. I started flipping out. I came to understand that everything was evil and I simply was a singular weakling who couldn't change it or anything. Then it hit me. I experienced a kundalini awakening that sent me in to mind-orbit for almost a month. I went completely right-brained and embraced the chaos that I had no control over, rather than trying to control it, I decided to ride or surf it. Suddenly, I became 'enlightened'. Shit that used to bother me, I now laugh at. Shit that I like, I laugh at. Just relax. No one is in control. There are no problems. It's all your perception. Whatever you judge to be a problem becomes a problem; whatever you judge to be fruitful and great becomes fruitful and great. You make this happen. Once you become enlightened, your passions will flee. Your motivation will die and you will simply apply your knowledge when you need it. That's it. That's all. It became nearly impossible to write my thesis after this happened. The symptoms are very much like schizophrenia, manic depression, mania, and other mental illnesses. I asked for a month off of uni, and decided to do my own research on myself and found that the symptoms of a "kundalini awakening" are exactly the same as most of these 'mental illnesses' that are talked about and promoted. And since I worked in the pharma industry (in marketing, branding and sales) I knew that psychologists would be pushing Paxil, Prozac, Zyprexa and Zoloft on me if I went to visit a shrink. These incidentally are also the drugs that have been selling and making the most profits for Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Aventis and more. Fuck them! Fuck them! Fuck them! They're suppressing human evolution! GO THROUGH YOUR EGO DEATH - AND COME OUT THE OTHER SIDE STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE. I asked for a month off of uni, and then went back to my writing. Here's a sample that I feel applies to this thread:
“Effort within the mind further limits the mind, because effort implies struggle towards a goal and when you have a goal, a purpose, and end in view, you have placed a limit on the mind.” (Lee, in Lee, 1975, p. 20). As we traverse into the realm of computerized wisdom and learning, plain categorizing becomes inferior and ineffective to the tempo with which information can be sorted out. We are shifting and flipping out of an educational atmosphere of information classification and into the domain of pattern recognition. The greatest intention is to have no intention at all. This non-judgmental state of affairs puts people in agreeable positions and settings in all methods of operational procedures.
"Electronic man, that is, works in a world whose electric services are an expansion into environmental form of his own nervous system. To such a man it is meaningless to say that he should seek or pursue distant goals and objectives, since all his satisfactions and his objectives are already present to him. …Acoustic, or electronic man, understands that the nature and limits of human satisfactions forbid any increase in happiness through an increase in power or wealth. Acoustic man naturally ‘plays it by ear’ and lives harmoniously and musically and melodiously." (McLuhan, 1972, “End of the work ethic”, in McLuhan & Staines, 2003, p. 196).
By taking an interest in grades and marks, schools take away the notion of value from primary education by commoditizing or systematizing children. John Taylor Gatto lays out an argument in September, 2003’s issue of Harper’s Magazine.
"First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. …If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves."
Suppression of genius and imagination through management is also an educational theme that Bruce Lee recognises in his pedagogy and of which he offers a similar solution to. “By an error repeated throughout the ages, truth, becoming law or faith places obstacles in the way of knowledge. Method which is in its very substance ignorance encloses truth within a vicious circle. We should break such a circle, not by seeking knowledge, but by discovering the cause of ignorance.” (Lee, in Lee, 1975 p. 202).
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Permalink Reply by Timm on -
I like to think of ego death as the realization that the ego is afraid to die. Some practices which bind the mind to a state of nothingness, oneness, egolessness, etc., are devolved versions of a proper realization, and represent nothing more than a repression of ego. The example of holding on to your wallet and your girlfriend is apropos of these kinds of practices that give you a taste of realization by teaching this repression of ego. This is not ego-death.
Ego-Death is better thought of in my opinion as a transparency of ego, and a gradual undoing of the knot of personality. Once some sort of transcendent contact is made, the process itself is a guarantee based on evolution ... spiritual practice is about shortening the amount of time the process takes.
The ego does not die until its host body dies. The ego is a thing of Nature which transcends the physical body, while being completely tied to the body. the body is fundamental to the ego's existence. What must occur then, is an embrace of an order of consciousness transcendent to ego, or, transcendent to mind. This is embrace then negates the ego ... but that doesn't mean the ego has gone anywhere.
In fact in most cases, the ego keeps right on spinning out its karma. It is a thing of Nature and Karma is a consequence of Nature. The transcendent contact simply negates the dualistic struggle of the ego, renders it a "non-issue" ... but the ego's struggle CONTINUES in duality.
If your a spiritual panzy, it is at this point you begin sitting unmovable and never going out and getting laid ever again. You become a sage, they write books about you, and being in your presence will enlighten people ... but you never ever get laid again .... booooring.
In fact, the ego's karma is an integral expression of the transcendent experiencing itself in all possible probabilities. To "return to the market" as a Bodhisattva, or to continue "The Great Work" as a Magician, is exactly this realization.
The work of ego-death is the work of playing out your ego's possibilities as Art from a transcendent realization, and manifesting this transcendent realization through the expression. i.e. This is the Tantric View.
$.02
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Permalink Reply by joymonk on
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beautifully said. thank you! Like "is the work of playing out your ego's possibilities as Art from a transcendent realization, and manifesting this transcendent realization through the expression." Been saying that life is about maximizing your experience of and effect on your perceived reality...
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