Egoless Means More not less

September 8, 2001

Egoless Means More [Ken Wilber]

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 who 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 them 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 Teresa was a great contemplative? Yes, and Saint Teresa 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 Bal 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

doesnÕt mean destroy the ego, it means plug it into something bigger. (As

Nagarjuna put it, in the relative world, atman is real; in the absolute,

neither atman nor 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 it with 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 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 the 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?

Material in this column appears in One Taste: The Journals of Ken Wilber,

from Shambhala Publications Inc., Boston. Copyright Ken Wilber, 1998.

______________________

With Love,

Cyber Dervish

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September 8, 2001

Hi Jan,

I'm not sure what Ken Wilber thinks he means

by " ego " and " self " but by any ordinary definitions

he's wrong about both his major points: the

ego does actually go away, and this state is

not the same as psychosis.

There are numerous first-person accounts that

convince me of this. Particularly " Collision

with the Infinite " by Suzanne Segal, " The

Experience of No-Self " by Bernadette Peters,

and Sri Mathru Sarada's contribution in

" No Mind -- I Am The Self. "

By the way, Gary: I recommend those books

to you. You may discount them as anecdotal

but it seems to me that these sorts of books are

the best data that exists. The three authors are

among the best " describers " that this genre of

literature has attracted.

Suzanne Segal's book is particularly relevant

to Wilber's article because she thought she was

psychotic when her ego disappeared, but later,

when she understood the experience better, she

realized that she was not.

Regards,

Rob

-

" Jan Sultan " <swork

<allspirit >; <NondualitySalon >;

Saturday, September 08, 2001 4:32 AM