let there be two..................

[Guest guest]

And the most inhibiting idea of all is that of the ego. Almost every

historic culture, in its own way, has managed to give birth to that

monster. Most social groups on the planet encourage the fabrication

of a false identity — an ego, a persona, and a separate sense of

an " I. " We now therefore set out to explore why this is so and who the

principal programmers are.

 

THERE HAVE BEEN RARE VOYAGERS THROUGHOUT HISTORY who have returned

from the frontiers of their consciousness with the message that the

reality which we take for granted, the one we think we know, is not

the real world at all.

These adventurers in consciousness tell us that we are all fast

asleep in a shadow world projected on a twilight screen which is not

there. There have been enough of these disquieting individuals to make

us suspect that perhaps they may at least have a point worth

listening to.

The message they bring is that the real is ONE. It is a unity, non-

dual and whole. Many of these visionaries ominously add that we have

been duped. For as a result of our various programming we have

divided life into subject and object, observer and observed. We no

longer say to ourselves " Am bodying " but " I have a body " and it is

this sense of separation which is giving the species most of its

headaches. This " I " is the elusive and imaginary entity called ego.

And here we stumble across the central issue of our dilemma. The

moment a line is drawn on a piece of paper a world comes into

existence.

Universes come into being the moment there is any act of division or

separation. The very moment past is separated from future we enter a

new world called " time. " The moment our one undivided consciousness

is reflected upon by our identification with the memory, then two

worlds appear where once there was only one.

Memory is that mirror which creates two worlds from one. Memory has

an intimate relationship with language and the whole socio-system

from which it arose. Yet any of those who have entered higher states

of 'Oneness' or the scientist who sees the universe as a holo-

movement are right, nature is not separate or segmented in any way:

it is a seamless and continuous totality. But language, and the whole

collective socio-agreement based on language, divides and slices it

up, creating such dualisms as hard and soft, hills and valleys, good

and evil which we fondly imagine must always have been there.

Nouns and verbs which are useful tools of survival when it is

necessary to distinguish between " big fish eat me " and " me eat big

fish, " are inappropriate instruments with which to explore the rest

of the universe. If the only tool you have is a screwdriver, then

everything becomes a screw. A word which designates any phenomenon

freezes that event into separate objects and actions, each having a

status, a quantity and a quality quite independent of the whole

reality. It happens that virtually all the languages of the West are

noun oriented, which means that we have effectively fixed the

experiential world into static solid boxes.

A noun is a fixed box, static, consistent and someone else's. It is

by its very nature second-hand but once such words and ideas have

entered into the soft memory machine, our derived ego-selves identify

with these as if they are real.

As we have already learned (see page 88), Richard Dawkins coined a

word for such an idea. He called it a " meme. " These are supposedly

just like their biological counterparts the " genes. " They are codes

with which we build up our view of the phenomenal universe but they

only apparently exist. The memes which make up this book are non-

existential. They are illusions of the real.

The great leap forward, when our ancestors became self-aware,

happened about five hundred thousand years ago. It appears that it

was simultaneous with the rise and growth of language and the use of

shared symbols. In that garden of Eden, man and woman tasted the

forbidden fruit of " good and evil, " of borrowed knowledge and started

using it as if it was their own direct experience. Collective social

language made it possible for them to be both the subject, the center

of activity, and the objects of their own thought. The premature

birth of the huge-headed-child meant that the same " meme " took over

from the " gene " as an evolutionary building block.

Ask yourself: " Who Am I? "

Invariably the internal answer will be autobiographical — an identity

based on the past. It will be a description of a continuity from

childhood through adolescence to adulthood which is all past memories

and no longer exists. Memory is the mirror and we live on the wrong

side. Seldom will anyone answer the question of " Who am I? " with: " I

appear to be the process of reading this page. " (to be cont.)

 

Unknown Man....Yatri

 

posted .......bob