What would overcome ego; would it not also be egotistical, and dualistic? What would say, “Bad ego!,” if not ego itself? Would you discard manure, or would you dig it into your fields?

Meditating, doing nothing except perhaps a meditation practice, is a route to knowledge of ego. It is helpful to have a friend to talk with about the work. Especially valuable is a friend who has had extensive experience in working with ego, and how ego subverts the work through proposing subtly egotistical diversionary side trips as it struggles to preserve itself, even with its drive to maintain the body.

But, joy of joy, the reported words of the Buddha, “Rejoice, the slave driver for whom we toil, day in and day out, does not exist.”

Thus the value of paradox, in leaving the strictly rational brain and knowing mind itself, which pervades all life.

I will only add that, yes, I too am dealing with death from a spiritual orientation.

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I was browsing your new book – ANOF – in the bookstore the other day. I am debating whether to buy it now (and Carolyn Baker’s) or wait till after I move – I am trying to get rid of a lot of stuff right now, you see.

Anyway, in the beginning, you have the obligatory “we-still-have-a-window-of-opportunity” statement. I was forced to stop and ask myself what exactly this means at this stage of the game.

For someone who devoted their entire adult life to exploring transpersonal psychology and esoteric spirituality and the higher potentials of the human brain/mind/consciousness, I would like to believe that there will be a New Dawn civilization on the other side of the Collapse, and that what we all do now will go toward creating that New Dawn. And, if I had kids, I would tell them about this Work.

Unfortunately, with every passing day, I become more skeptical that this New-Dawn-on-the-other-side-of-Collapse is possible. It keeps looking worse and worse every day.

I find your introspection curious. I don’t understand it and so, it seems curious.

I’ve been down on my hands and knees a lot lately, up close and personal with pieces of the earth and tiny vegetable plants pulling their competitors. “Why are the beets growing over here getting chewed on by something while the beets growing just over there are not?” “This little microcosm is the only place that I want to be right now – so much to learn.”

It seems that none of this has ever been about me or about you. Could conscious efforts to lose the ego be like trying to go to sleep? I don’t know – it just seems like there are much better things to focus on OUT THERE than IN HERE.

I ramble. You are an intelligent and thought provoking individual.

may you be among the survivors

~me~

I must say, that last comment from Bob really makes me tighten up inside. There’s something about it that feels really discounting of you. As if there’s some “there” to get to, and that Bob knows what that “there” is, because he’s already “there”, or at least ahead of you, and so he can give you advice and council, which is to do what you are already clearly doing. As if he missed that.

I’m wondering if there’s something else that Bob’s really trying to say, but his ego got in the way?

Take care, Sally, and thanks!

Deb

You are getting there! Keep on the path.

Do not fear death. Fear the unlived life.

Bob & Lua

What you describe resonates with some of my own experience. I taught high school for several years, and after the fourth year of it began to discover that the miniature (and rather artificial) raft of open time that was summer vacation could become a fairly wondrous period of silence and clarification. I think it was the neurologist Oliver Sacks who once described sitting on a park bench after he had undergone some sort of surgery, and slowly lighting his pipe and observing and enjoying the day, and being unexpectedly pervaded by a powerful sense of peace and relaxation and serenity. He said the world appeared graceful and unhurried, and he experienced a profound inner silence, and, as I recall, was struck by the sudden realization, “I had never had leisure to light my pipe!” That’s the kind of epiphany I experienced during those summers, when I realized deeply, in a combined experiential and intellectual sense, just how rushed and harried I had always been, even during periods of outer quiet. The truth I had pursued during 15 or 20 years of spiritual reading and practice only began to seem really real and understandable during those periods, when I literally found pure bliss in just sitting down and doing nothing, or watching the trees or listening to the breeze and birds and sensing the same stillness positively radiating from the world around me, which of course managed to undermine my felt sense of standard personal identity in all kinds of interesting ways.

It was also instructive to notice how, with the resumption of each new school year, I could literally just “sit back and watch” as the spinning engine of my inner hurriedness began to rev back up, involuntarily, as the weeks went by. I did my job well and all that, and managed with some success just to observe the inner transition back to anxiety from a space of clarity, compassion, and detachment, but still, the return of that locked-in, clamped-down, strung-out feeling of frantic speed and pressure was apparently inevitable when the outer workaday circumstance reasserted itself.

Years ago I read with interest the description by Roshi Dennis Genpo Merzel of the two years he spent in a cabin retreat, after which he descended to the city and reentered the world in full confidence of the permanence of his deep inner stillness, only to find that he was rapidly overwhelmed by it all and had to flee back to the cabin. He said it took him awhile longer to learn to stabilize the stillness, and also to come to grips with the fact that at first he had just been sort of fooling himself by feeling so cocksure of his transcendence of all that anxiety. After my experiences with that summer stillness, punctuated by the nine-month school year of steadily returning and mounting pressure, I still recognize the importance of stabilizing to a point of stillness that endures amidst all circumstances (the “peace that passes all understanding”) but recognize more pointedly than before the real power, not as a matter of faulty spiritual effort but simply as a matter of brute fact, of outer circumstances to affect inner ones with a veritably gravitational pull. I hope to come to the point Eckhart Tolle writes about, where an increase of outer turmoil spontaneously results in an increase of inner stillness, but I also hope the breakdowns that are beginning to convulse the world around us will work in a kind of biblical prophetic sense of clear away the structures built on sand and leave space for a way of life that’s conducted in a more organic relationship to inner truth.

So these are all just reflections inspired by your post, which, again, is wonderful. Thank you for your ongoing missives to the world. I always look forward to them, and I wish you and Tim the best in your current work (and that includes the plans for the new documentary, which I’m pleased to hear about),

Unfortunately, unlike any other culture that existed before ours, I was never taught how to survive. Maybe I’ll have time to learn everything I need to know, maybe not. Maybe I’ll get my yet unborn children set on the right path before it’s too late.

For better (or most likely worse) I see making money right now as a way to give myself a better chance at learning how to survive later, and perhaps creating an environment where survival is more likely. I am fortunate that I love what I do and I get to do it with people I love, but there will come a point where I will have to cut loose and strike out and go into survival mode. I hope my preparations are sound. I hope I make it out in time. I hope we all do. So don’t get too comfortable out there.

Survival – so easy a caveman can do it…

I really appreciate you & Tim’s blogs. They mean a lot!

I have been working on a song called No Fear of Suffering or Death. Ironic.

Coming here really helps me to keep on a good path. Can’t wait for your next doc!

Love,
Jason

The sky holds all our wishes
The dish ran away with the spoon
Chimney smoke ties the roofs to the sky
There’s a hole overhead
It’s only the moon

Will there ever be a tree
Grown from the seeds I’ve sown
Life is a path lit only by the light of those I’ve loved
By the light of those I love

Life’s a path lit only by the light of those I’ve loved
By the light of those I love.