Peter Matthiessen

“Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions, and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, we become seekers.” 

-Peter Matthiessen

Happy Shivaratri

Shiva and Parvati riding on Nandi, Ink and gouache and gold c. 1820 - 40


 A man comes to himself
When he wakes from sleep.
Likewise, I have perceived the God and Goddess
By waking from my ego.

When salt dissolves,
It becomes one with the ocean;
When my ego dissolved,
I became one with Shiva and Shakti.

- Shri Jnaneshwara (Dnyaneshwar, Dnanadeva), 13th century

Einstein on liberation from ego

The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self.
- Albert Einstein

Eliminating inner negativity

"Holy is the warrior who goes to war with himself."

In this Hadith (saying) the Prophet Muhammad made it clear that one should eliminate the ego and negativity within oneself rather than attacking others. The true meaning of the term jihad is inner spiritual struggle, not holy war.

Photo source: www.bbc.co.uk

Finding Yourself in India

One often hears people talk about so-and-so "going to India to find themselves". Most of the time this phrase is said in a disparaging way, and sometimes this suspicion can be justified. 

But actually, the Self does not reside particularly in any place, and not especially in India. Also the Self cannot be found, because it cannot be lost. The Self is who you are, and you cannot cease to be the Self, even if the body dies. 

And when we talk about finding the Self, we are really talking about losing the ego, getting rid of the illusion that we are not the Universal Self; and India is a great place to do that (I can say that from personal experience); but not the only place, by any means.

In India, especially in rural communities, people have not developed the ego to the extent we have in the West. There may be other problems there, but that's a different story. And when you are there, this lack of ego rubs off on to you.

Ego emerged in human beings as part of the self-preservation instinct - if there is something that seems to be threatened, there is a greater motivation to escape from danger or suffering. But that "something" is really just a by-product of body consciousness, and is not the Self. The Self cannot be threatened.

In India, in the past, the weather was mild and the natural environment was fruitful, which meant that there was much less of a struggle for a human being to keep body and soul together, or compete with others. Strong communalism in villages, helped give this sense of security. 

Things are perhaps not so good nowadays, with deforestation changing micro-climates and making it harder to live off the land; also people are increasingly moving to big anonymous cities where the extended sense of self as community is eroded.

India also has some very sacred places where, in a sense, you could say that the awareness of Self is 'concentrated' in those places.

And of course, the legacy of many saints and Incarnations is also to be felt there.

Village dance in Orissa, India.

The Mantra for Overcoming Ego

"Just say 'I forgive, I forgive', and you can overcome your ego."


-Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi 

The Left Brain as Narrator/Interpreter

"We are our narratives" has become a popular slogan. "We" refers to our selves, in the full-blooded person-constituting sense. "Narratives" refers to the stories we tell about our selves and our exploits in settings as trivial as cocktail parties and as serious as intimate discussions with loved ones. We express some in speech. Others we tell silently to ourselves, in that constant little inner voice. The full collection of one's internal and external narratives generates the self we are intimately acquainted with. Our narrative selves continually unfold.

State-of-the-art neuro-imaging and cognitive neuropsychology both uphold the idea that we create our "selves" through narrative. Based on a half-century's research on "split-brain" patients, neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga argues that the human brain's left hemisphere is specialised for intelligent behaviour and hypothesis formation. It also possesses the unique capacity to interpret - that is, narrate - behaviours and emotional states initiated by either hemisphere. Not surprisingly, the left hemisphere is also the language hemisphere, with specialised cortical regions for producing, interpreting and understanding speech. It is also the hemisphere that produces narratives.

Gazzaniga also thinks that this left-hemisphere "interpreter" creates the unified feeling of an autobiographical, personal, unique self. "The interpreter sustains a running narrative of our actions, emotions, thoughts, and dreams. The interpreter is the glue that keeps our story unified, and creates our sense of being a coherent, rational agent. To our bag of individual instincts it brings theories about our lives. These narratives of our past behaviour seep into our awareness and give us an autobiography," he writes. The language areas of the left hemisphere are well placed to carry out these tasks. 

Full article at New Scientist

Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi has identified the left hemisphere of the brain as the area of the subtle body in which the ahamkara (ego) accumulates.

Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? The narrator or the ego?

Drawing Hands is a lithograph by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher first printed in January 1948. It depicts a sheet of paper out of which rise, from wrists that remain flat on the page, two hands, facing each other and in the paradoxical act of drawing one another into existence. Although Escher used paradoxes in his works often, this is one of the most obvious examples.

The lithograph may signify mutual constitution; that is, the principle of one entity being formed by the other and vice versa (e.g., the state vs. the demos, predator–prey co-evolution, the subject and objects, "chicken or the egg?", agency-structure).

It is referenced in the book Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, who calls it an example of a strange loop.

Ran

The film Ran (chaos), by the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, is a retelling of Shakespeare's King Lear but introduces original elements such as the ruthless hi-brow Lady Kaede, whose thirst for revenge plunges the world around her into strife and mayhem.

The story world first begins to descend into chaos when the autocratic warlord in charge decides to abdicate power to his cruel and power-hungry older children. Blinded by ego, he rewards their flattery and exiles those who try to show him the truth, including his youngest child.

King Lear and Ran have both been seen as nihilistic because the chaos and ensuing suffering envelops good and bad characters indiscriminately. However, if seen as a tale of Self-realisation through the deflation of ego, the suffering is not without purpose, and the end is not entirely tragic.

Perhaps the most poignantly tragic figure in Ran is the young lord Tsurumaru, whose family is destroyed when the warlord burns down their castle. Eventually he loses his surviving sister, Lady Sué, a devout Buddhist who is able to forgive the warlord for the ruin of her family.

The film ends with a shot of Tsurumaru, blind and alone on top of the ruined castle, the only survivor of the film's events. Stumbling on the precipice he loses the icon of Amida Buddha his sister has given him for spiritual comfort. Even the gods have abandoned him it seems. Yet, in the often painful stripping away of externals, the Self remains unchanged, here symbolised by the radiant Enlightened One, the witness of the world's endless flux.

Reality

Reality is simply the loss of ego.

Destroy the ego by seeking its identity. 

Because the ego is not a real entity 

it will automatically vanish 

and reality will shine forth by itself.


- Sri Ramana Maharshi

"it is very important to understand that Raghwindra Swami was in this area, and he did a lot of work, and now the time has come to complete his work; also Ramana Maharshi. They didn't know how to explain, so they took to mauna (silence)."

- Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, Madras, India, 1991


Wikipedia entry on Raghavendra_Swami

The Dishonesty of Ego

In Western culture, ego is often thought of as 'healthy', or at worst a necessary evil. But constructing an artificial sense of self based on the lie of separateness, can have catastrophic consequences not only for the person but for entire societies. Dorothy Rowe writes:

Can you bear to remember that time in your life when you were going along feeling secure and thinking, "This is me, this is my world, that was my past, this will be my future," when suddenly you found that you had made a major error of judgement? When you realised that many of the ideas underpinning your whole sense of being a person - that sense of "I", "me", "myself" - had been invalidated by events?

Have you ever had the sensation of falling through infinite space, shattering, crumbling, of being about to disappear like a raindrop into the ocean? Perhaps you knew that what was falling apart was not your sense of self but some of your ideas. You knew that you now had to go through a period of uncertainty until new ideas emerged. But if you did not know this, you would have been utterly terrified, so terrified that you would do anything never to go through such an experience again.

Psychiatrists and psychologists have either ignored this experience, maximised its significance as a full-scale "breakdown", or minimised it as a "panic disorder". Yet this feeling of falling apart is an essential part of our lives and of most of our narratives. In The Wizard of Oz, for example, Dorothy and her companions emerge wiser and strong from the invalidation of their idea that the wizard could solve their problems, while paradoxically Othello is destroyed by the invalidation of his belief that his wife Desdemona had been unfaithful.

We first experience the terror of being invalidated when we are small children, but by the time we are 3 or 4 we have learned a way of avoiding it: we have learned how to lie. From then on, whenever we glimpse the faintest possibility that our "selves" might be threatened with annihilation, we lie.

First of all, we lie to ourselves. Why? Because we fear that we do not have the strength and courage to face the truth of our situation. We even lie about lying, preferring to call our lies anything but a lie. We say: "He's in denial" or "She's being economical with the truth".

All lies have networks of consequences we did not expect or intend. The lies we tell may well protect us and our personal - or collective - sense of self in the short term, but in the long term and in a linked-up, complex world, the consequences can be truly disastrous. After all, when we lie to ourselves and to others, we multiply a thousandfold the inherent difficulties we have trying to determine what is actually going on inside us and around us.

-New Scientist, 21 June 2010
Dorothy Rowe is an Australian psychologist and emeritus associate of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
Read the full article

Service and Duty

Your own Self-Realisation
is the greatest service you can
render the world.

Your duty is to be, and not to be this or that. "I am that I am" sums up the whole truth...
"I-I" is the Self. "I am this" is the ego. When the "I" is kept up as the "I" only, it is the Self. When it flies off at a tangent and says "I am this or that, I am such and such," - it is the ego.

-The Sage of Arunchala

Selbsttodtung

"The true philosophical Act is annihilation of self (Selbsttodtung); this is the real beginning of all Philosophy; all requisites for being a Disciple of Philosophy point hither. This Act alone corresponds to all the conditions and characteristics of transcendental conduct."

-Novalis (Friedrich Von Hardenberg)

"Ego is absolutely superficial like a bubble. It is just like a balloon, which can burst just like that. And it should go. It should go so that you should rise. It should disappear so that your attention rises in your Spirit. And that you see the whole world as a part of that Spirit that you are."

-Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi

Selbsttodtung does not mean suicide; it is the dissolution of an illusory self produced by ego and superego. There is nothing violent or even destructive about this act, because that which is annihilated is already non-existent.

At the Art Gallery of NSW

The Vision of God, The Book of Job
.

This engraving by William Blake is currently on display, along with several others from the Book of Job series, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The Universal Self connects to human beings through the Sahasrara Chakra at the crown of the head. From the perspective of ego and superego (conditionings), universal Selfhood is terrifying. Those who still cling to these two illusory institutions are seen cowering on the right side of the composition.

you are not your ego

When you are fighting the nature the ego develops within you. And then once that momentum has started in you it is very difficult to bring it down. It is such a terrible disease that people have taken it for granted that that’s a part of their lives. You are not your ego. You are not.
- Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi

1978, Agnya Chakra

Economic Anarchy

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that mankind constitutes even now a planetary community of production and consumption. I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis in our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society. The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evil.

- Albert Einstein, 1949

The Black Stone

Self, Martin Puryear
Martin Puryear (born 1941) is an African American sculptor. He is considered one of the foremost sculptors of the present day, and the leading African American sculptor. He works in media such as wood, stone, tar, and wire, and his work is a union of minimalism and traditional crafts. The work shown above is called 'Self'. The Washington Times describes it as "a smooth, black monolith, [which] suggests the unknowable truth within a person."

For thousands of years black monoliths have been seen as sacred symbols of the mystery of the Self, from the black Shiva lingam stones of India to the black stone in the Kaaba at Mecca (MukteshwaraShiva).

Shiva Lingam from the Narmada River, India
.

In the 1968 Kubrick Science Fiction film 2001 A Space Odyssey, an apeman touches a black monolith that has mysteriously appeared in a prehistoric landscape, and this sparks human consciousness. Aeons later, Bowman, an astronaut, comes into contact with another monolith near the planet Jupiter, and receives a state of cosmic rebirth. Before he can reach it however he must overcome Hal, the spaceship's self-conscious computer. Hal represents the ego and the paranoia and fear that comes with it. "I'm afraid" it says just before Bowman finally shuts it down, after it kills the crew it's supposed to be looking after.

Each time a monolith appears it is accompanied by scenes of planetary alignments. The black screen at the beginning and end of the film is the viewer's own close encounter with the monolith of Self.

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Ego and attention

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With the ego orientation, with the ego working, the worst thing that has happened to a human being is that his attention is disturbed, is spread out. His attention is not concentrated. The ego orientation has brought about such a disturbed attention, we cannot keep our eyes at one point. Either we look at others, or we want others to look at us. All our attention goes about like this. We cannot look at ourselves, where the attention has to move. And this is the worst thing that ego has done is to spread your attention around.

- Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi

This blog has a loose theme: the non-duality of the Self, and the illusory nature of the ego. Therefore the quotations chosen from Shri Mataji's discourses reflect this; however, this topic is only a tiny part of the vast ocean of wisdom she, and other great teachers, have imparted over the centuries.

Point of View

Las Meninas (the Maids of Honour), Velasquez, Prado Museum.
Some argue that, because it seems to depict perception itself, Las Meninas is the greatest painting in Western Art.

"All experience is had from a point of view, which is not represented in the experience itself, but is, as it were, its inner limit. Its outer limit is equally elusive, like the boundary of the visual field. beyond which there is nothing else on the same level." Wittgenstein takes up this Schopenhaueresque idea.

Wittgenstein argues "in the Tractatus that, when the solipsist claims that all experiences are had by his ego, he fails to connect his ego with his body and so there is no justification for calling it 'his'. It lacks a criterion of identity and it may just as well be the collective ego of the whole human species - an interpretation which points to idealism rather than solipsism. There is a dilemma here. For if the solipsist does tie his ego to his body, his claim will be self-refuting, because his body is placed in the world among other bodies, each with its own field of consciousness. This shows that the solipsist's field of consciousness cannot be a breakaway world.

The solution to the problem of the ego is implicit in the Tractatus but it is worked out in detail in Wittgenstein's early middle period. The ego itself vanishes without our feeling any sense of loss. My field of consciousness, like the field of vision that it contains, is self-authenticating: if a sensation occurs in it, I do not even have to ask myself whose it is. There is no inner owner for me to point at and I may as well drop the word 'I' and say, 'there is pain'."

- David Pears, Wittgenstein.

Einstein on the Illusion of Discrete Selves

Escher, 'Relativity'

"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us 'universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison..."

-Albert Einstein

Ownership of Consciousness

"The ego is not the owner of consciousness;
it is the object of consciousness."
- JP Satre

Sartre like Heidegger uses phenomenology to attack the Cartesian ergo sum. There is no "I" that thinks, but only thought and reflection upon this thought. With Sartre the dissolution of the Cartesian egological self initiated by Nietzsche reaches its climax. There is no entity that is original, no basis for a reality of ego. Indeed the self only succeeds in reaching authenticity through the act of evacuating into the world. Solipsism becomes unthinkable from the moment that the "I" no longer has a privileged status. Philosophically Sartre stands in opposition to Hegel's absolute idealism, but the ego follows again the same path in the process of exposition. Having established an understanding within holistic practice their thesis suffers complication via the reintroduction of the will. First Sartre contends that "there is no 'I'" on the unreflected level. The act of directing ones consciousness towards the world of objects Sartre describes as intentional but is itself an unreflective noetic act. Reflection upon it produces a new object which did not exist before the act was grasped - the ego. Hence this reflected consciousness generates the "I". This becomes the transcendent object of the reflective act but is not in itself a part of that act. Thus this reflection not only discloses objects, but produces and constitutes them. Sartre goes on to state that we have no privileged access to our own ego over and above "the ego of another". The ego cannot belong exclusively to itself. Sartre refers instead to consciousness to instigate beings freedom because the ego's relation to the world is patently a fabrication. For Sartre, the self is an object constituted within the phenomenal field. "The ego is not the owner of consciousness; it is the object of consciousness". Consciousness is a kind of pure transparency, a mere openness to a world to which it adds nothing of its own. Against this Sartre conceives the character of "authenticity" whereby consciousness is able to make itself free because every intentional act is self-originating, self-determining and "absolutely free". His only reconciliation with holistic meaning rests in his joining Marx, for he says the whole problem of recognising ones own, and others, authenticity, must be shifted to the domain of concrete social and political action.