Alan Watts on the ego

As a young adult, I loved the writing of Alan Watts. I felt he opened up new dimensions in my understanding of myself and my relationship to the universe. Reading him now as an adult simply reinforces the feeling of wonder at his insight and skill with words.

The root of the matter is the way in which we feel and conceive ourselves as human
beings, our sensation of being alive, of individual existence and identity. We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that “I myself” is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body—a center which “confronts” an “external” world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. “I came into this world.” “You must face reality.” “The conquest of nature.”

This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole
realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated “egos” inside bags of skin.

Foundations

You were there then, you are there now, and you are there at all times. The three states (sleep, waking and dream) come and go, but you are always there. It is like a cinema. The screen is always there but several types of pictures appear on the screen and then disappear. Nothing sticks to the screen, it remains a screen. Similarly, you remain your own Self in all the three states. If you know that, the three states will not trouble you, just as the pictures which appear on the screen do not stick to it.

On the screen, you sometimes see a huge ocean with endless waves; that disappears. Another time, you see fire spreading all around; that too disappears. The screen is there on both occasions. Did the screen get wet with the water or did it get burned by the fire? Nothing affected the screen. In the same way, the things that happen during the wakeful, dream and sleep states do not affect you at all; you remain your own Self. Ramana Maharshi

The notion that what we conceive of as reality is actually constructed upon a foundation of pure being is so fascinating, so powerful, that it has the capacity to draw the mind beyond its own frontiers.

The play of the self, the ego must subside for us to understand this foundational reality.

Pure, detached watchfulness in daily life.

Separateness

 

When I wake up in the morning, I am immediately conscious of being myself, quite unique and distinct from everything else.

I am obviously separate from the bed I sleep on. I feel very separate from the birdcall outside my window and the sounds of traffic on the distant highway.

Extending further, I feel separate from my friends, my partner, my parents. In theory, I could feel separate from people outside “my” culture, “my” nationality, “my” religion. I can, in effect, feel divided from the rest of the world.

What emotions does the feeling of separation engender? I want to control everything in the world, and I am upset and angry if the rest of creation does not follow my wishes. As control is seldom possible, I seem to be setting myself up for frustration.

When I feel separate, I also look to “others” to fulfil me and give me happiness and pleasure. I depend on the other to complete me, having divided myself in the first place. This dependence keeps me on edge, keeps me hunting for what is in effect a fleeting sense of happiness and peace.

In all this complex chaos, it is important for us humans to explore the sense of being separate in the first place. The premise of meditation is that the sense of being a distinct individual is itself imaginary, a construct.

Watching the sense of the separate “me” closely, unswervingly, during the day, giving all our energy to observing its activities, might be the key to deconstructing the self.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thought (contd)

I would like to explore, again, why I feel that the quote with which I began my earlier post is intimately connected to meditation.

Here is the quote, a sentence by David Bohm from his book Thought as a System:

Thought is always doing a great deal, but it tends to say that it hasn’t done anything, that it is just telling you the way things are.

For me, meditation is not about controlling thoughts, or about chanting a mantra or controlling breath. It is about a subtle awareness of how thought and emotion paint a picture of a world “out there,” and also simultaneously paint a picture of an individual ego “in here” observing that world.

The deep awareness of this painting of our worlds is in my view absolutely essential as a “way” of being free of our psychological worlds. Otherwise we simply repeat the emotion patterns of our egos, whether they are patterns of fear or pleasure or jealousy or anything else.

Freedom may lie in deep awareness, nourished moment to moment in the present.

 

 

Death contd

I have somehow always been conscious of death, the temporariness of things. This awareness goes back as far as I can recall. I remember pulling out a small red copy of the New Testament from my father’s book case (I must have been around seven at the time) and checking the contents and index for the word death. I don’t remember what that particular search revealed!

And yet this awareness or consciousness has  never been a morbid one. There was fear, certainly, around the question, but gradually that fear became focussed as a kind of curiosity, a determination to “understand” the process of death, to try to be fully present when it happened, to figure out what exactly dying while living might mean, an idea many mystics have explored.

Ramana’s description conveys a kind of focussed purity, a consequence of staying with the idea of the dissolution of mind and body without any compromise. I think most of us compromise when it comes to meditating on death; the excuses, the shying away come very naturally. Ramana’s experience reveals, by contrast, a fantastic level of clarity and insight.

Death

I find this account of Ramana’s self-realisation tremendously moving and urgent. 

Ramana:

It was in 1896, about 6 weeks before I left Madurai for good that this
great change in my life took place. I was sitting alone in a room on
the first floor of my uncle’s house. I seldom had any sickness and on
that day there was nothing wrong with my health, but a sudden violent
fear of death overtook me. There was nothing in my state of health to
account for it nor was there any urge in me to find out whether there
was any account for the fear. I just felt I was going to die and began
thinking what to do about it. It did not occur to me to consult a
doctor or any elders or friends. I felt I had to solve the problem
myself then and there. The shock of the fear of death drove my mind
inwards and I said to myself mentally, without actually framing the
words: ‘Now death has come; what does it mean? What is it that is
dying? This body dies.’ And at once I dramatized the occurrence of
death. I lay with my limbs stretched out still as though rigor mortis
has set in, and imitated a corpse so as to give greater reality to the
enquiry. I held my breath and kept my lips tightly closed so that no
sound could escape, and that neither the word ‘I’ nor any word could
be uttered. ‘Well then,’ I said to myself, ‘this body is dead. It will
be carried stiff to the burning ground and there burn and reduced to
ashes. But with the death of the body, am I dead? Is the body I? It is
silent and inert, but I feel the full force of my personality and even
the voice of ‘I’ within me, apart from it. So I am the Spirit
transcending the body. The body dies but the spirit transcending it
cannot be touched by death. That means I am the deathless Spirit.’ All
this was not dull thought; it flashed through me vividly as living
truths which I perceived directly almost without thought process. ‘I’
was something real, the only real thing about my present state, and
all the conscious activity connected with the body was centered on
that ‘I’. From that moment onwards, the I or Self focused attention on
itself by a powerful fascination. Fear of death vanished once and for
all. The ego was lost in the flood of Self-awareness. Absorption in
the Self continued unbroken from that time. Other thoughts might come
and go like the various notes of music, but the ‘I’ continued like the
fundamental sruti note which underlies and blends with all other
notes.

(In Indian classical music, “sruti” refers to a musical note, as Ramana explains).

The Basics: Nisargadatta (contd)

“You give no attention to your self. Your mind is all with things, people and ideas, never with your self. Bring your self into focus, become aware of your own existence. See how you function, watch the motives and results of your actions. Study the prison you have built around yourself, by inadvertence. By knowing what you are not, you come to know yourself.”  I Am That, p4, Ch2

I return often to the quote above, even though I am very familiar with it. It structures so much of what I define as “meditation,” or awareness of inner and outer worlds.

Your mind is all with things, people and ideas. I am humbled by the day by day, hour by hour, indeed minute to minute processes of identification that take place in our minds and bodies.  Our consciousness seems to be spread out, like a drop of water on fine paper, over vastness in space and time. I can identify with my coffee cup, and insist that I drink only from that favourite cup because it gives me some intangible, fleeting comfort. I can pass by a landscape, a road, a house, and find my consciousness imprinted upon it because this particular spot arouses such a wealth of complex feelings in my mind and body: peace, desire, regret, shame. I can look at the moon, 360,000 kilometers away, and feel attached to its beauty and the memories it arouses. And so on all the way, I presume, to the edge of the known universe! Creation seems soaked with my identity; both penetrate and mingle with each other.

And it is this exact process of deep deep identification that the mystics are challenging. Focus on the “I” that identifies, they say, rather than the thing that it is identified with. Strip away all identification so that only the “I” remains. And then see what happens. Impossible, we exclaim. And the masters calmly reply: Who is this who proclaims that it is impossible? And the cycle begins again. . .

The Basics: Nisargadatta

“You give no attention to your self. Your mind is all with things, people and ideas, never with your self. Bring your self into focus, become aware of your own existence. See how you function, watch the motives and results of your actions. Study the prison you have built around yourself, by inadvertence. By knowing what you are not, you come to know yourself.”  I Am That, p4, Ch2

All mystics through the ages have stressed on this basic idea. Forget the blazing lights, the pure bliss, the oblivion of body. The hard work of bringing the daily self into the foreground is what they primarily emphasize (Krishnamurti, Joko Beck, Buddha himself) and yet this is the toughest part, the primary challenge, for our wandering minds.

“Your mind is all with things, people, ideas.” The fundamental point that Nisargadatta stresses upon is our identification with things, people, ideas. I see a picture of a gadget, say the new Kindle. My curiosity is aroused, but it is not just an abstract curiosity. I feel a strange sense of fulfillment, a swelling of my self, an added sense of solidity and self worth, when I imagine myself holding the Kindle. I feel that it will be a deep source of pleasure. I project myself holding it, explaining its power to my friends, I sense their curiosity and slight envy (unless of course they have a better model!) There is a deep abiding bond that is built up between myself and this object. In fact, my identity seems to have penetrated the object, so that we are one entity.

(If you feel that all this doesn’t apply to you–and many people reject the above model–just remember the last time you lost your wallet, or your cell phone, or your car keys. The bond with a familiar object, and with the security it represented, was broken, perhaps forever. What were your emotions at that point?)

And yet, when I acquire the object, why is there the sense of quiet deflation, the sense of a promise not quite fulfilled? Already I am planning mentally on the Kindle upgrade.

If all this is true of things, the depth of identification with people is exponentially stronger. I identify with my girlfriend because she is my primary source of pleasure: the pleasure of sex, the pleasure of “ownership” (yes, very subtle and refined, but ownership anyway), the pleasure of control and the pleasure of submission. The cycle of fulfillment and betrayal, emotional and physical, oscillates gently through the days, bringing in its wake tenderness, anger, jealousy by turn.  This cycle is so fascinating that it keeps me interested for months and years, until maybe a new fascination comes along.

And, finally, ideas. I feel no one has explained our obsession and identification with ideas more clearly than Krishnamurti. My idea of nation and my identification with it; my idea of religion and my identification with it; family; work. The list is endless. And, very much as with relationships, powerful emotions are associated with these identifications. When the identity is questioned, fierce anger and insecurity are aroused. When there is affirmation, there is a glow, an enhancement of self and (seemingly) well being.

…continued

Introduction

After years of reading about Buddhism, Vedanta, and philosophy generally, and after meditating, watching my thoughts and my self in action in daily life, after attending Vipassana courses and spending time in retreat, I thought it would be an interesting learning process to share my observations on these matters with others and listen to their comments and ideas.

I wondered a lot about the format in which to do this sharing. A random guy just spouting off on the net sounds incredibly pompous and vain, and I knew I would be mightily irritated if I came across such a person myself! So I want to avoid inflicting any vacuous generalities onto the innocent blog-reading public out there. Then I thought, finally, of a format which would be comfortable for me, which would structure my writing on a daily basis (or–let’s be realistic–a weekly basis) and which would link my thoughts and perceptions to a serious wider world of enquirers and learners out there.

The three biggest influences on my inner learning have been, in no particular order, Nisargadatta, Krishnamurti and Ramana. And it struck me that one could spend so much energy and attention on just a few of their phrases and teachings. In our age we have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the sayings of these “great ones”: videos, endless reams of text, audio clippings. And we somehow have the feeling that the more we read, the more we watch, the more we visit their shrines, the more we’ll understand. Instead, I have come now to the opposite conclusion: let’s just stay, slowly and patiently, with a phrase, a sentence, perhaps for a day or a week, and see how it plays out in our everyday lives. My writing on this blog will attempt to unravel, very slowly, my thoughts and questions that revolve around some specific quotation or saying by these three thinkers.

My sources will be: I Am That for Nisargadatta (Chetana) and Be As You Are (Penguin) for Ramana. For Krishnamurti, I would like to use a wide variety of sources, including his Notebook and Journal, as well as anthologies prepared by others (mostly published by KFI).

I would also like to share any other exciting material I might find, and to express my thoughts and feelings about it!