The Physics of Realization

[Guest guest]

Greetings Ram

 

The ego has a terrible reputation for

being a snare and a delusion of

monumental proportions but my experience

in finding out what the scriptures

actually have to say about it is that

this matter is not nearly as complicated

as it is generally made out to be. The

word ahamkara literally means 'the

making (kara) of the utterance "I"

(aham)', that is, first person speech.

In order to communicate with each other

we have to use the personal pronoun "I"

all the time as if it referred to a real

entity since language does not allow for

the possibility that the grammatical

subject of first person speech could be

fictitious. This habit is of course

ingrained in our culture which is

heavily invested in maintaining the

illusion that we are autonomous doers

(we would clearly have problems with the

ideas of criminal and moral

responsibility if it was thrown out) but

the fact remains that the ego is

primarily a *linguistic* artefact,

something that postmodernist thinkers

have recently discovered (after their

own dismal fashion) but which was

somehow already clear to the rishis of

old. As I see it, being egoless is

nothing more than `not taking one's "I"

literally' (as the BG puts it somewhere)

while continuing to use first person

speech just like everybody else.

 

Regards,

 

Patrick

 

 

Ram wrote

> The question what does it mean to be egoless is quite a challenge to the ego