The ego despairs its existance
I'm listening to this audiobook C lent me. I don't remember the name, but it is about these four people that meet on the roof of "Toppers" in London. It is a place, like the Golden Gate Bridge, where people famously jump. Anyway, I was thinking about why suicide resonates. Each of the stories potential jumpers despairs her or his future. It seems to me that anyone who looks at all into themselves feels a certain kind of desperation, and maybe everyone with half a mind is in this category. The book gets at this feeling rather indirectly. I find myself struggling with how one can describe what I'm thinking about it without encountering the denial of the ego. It seems to me that one thing the ego most busily denies is its own despair -- what a Buddhist might call suffering.
....
Suddenly it is clear, at the very root of suffering is self-reflection, as in the ego looking at itself and hoping that it can map-out, secure, predict, its future. This is not surrender. The thing we are most proud of is the opposite of peace and inevitably leads to pain. Interestingly, this realization does not in itself lead to any particular peace. Peace is in being, which is in surrender. Ego tells us, "no, no don't surrender!" Ego is always pretending that it is Being and it uses any tool it can grasp at maintaining the illusion. Weird that we should have these multiple viewpoints in us and not question it. Each viewpoint an actor, a false self. But on we go, despairing the demise of each fleeting viewpoint, as if we could believe for a moment that anyone was us. So there it is, any us that we grab on to we know to be only a perspective, different from the other perspectives that populate our minds, and therefore not us in the primal way we want to believe in -- that we are eternal, whole, complete. Instead, we run constantly from the fact that we are empty, void, without meaning, ...
Yet, I can testify, a testimony that has no value, that peace comes not from finding something but from finding nothing and surrendering to that truth. Why does it not have value, because there isn't even interest in writing this from that place of surrender, so I have to hold on to and reflect on my state of suffering to write these things. And if I'm writing from this place of ego reflection, where is the truth, in its self-rejection? But I would testify anyway -- now that is funny in a black humor kind of way.
This is why teachers say something like, "I gained nothing." It is only ego that seeks to gain, the void can't even seek or want or want to seek if it could want.
And where is god-if-there-is-a-god in this? In the void and in the universe, the snake or snakes grabbing their tail(s).
The eyes look in and
they see only the void
the empty nothing in me
dimly though so so dimly
and far away a point
so dim as not to be
yet it grows and becomes
two and four and eight
and sixteen ... points
stars galaxies universes
telescoping in in in
planet continent country
state city road house room
your eyes look back at me
and I know I am and you are
me the eyes look in
----
Staying awake to this seems hard, but the truth is we are always awake to it. No matter how I name it, I make it less than it is. It's not a dream or reality, an illusion or a truth, we can't be but here. What fun, what pain, what joy, what suffering, god-if-there-is-a-god is defiantly laughing and crying.
....
Suddenly it is clear, at the very root of suffering is self-reflection, as in the ego looking at itself and hoping that it can map-out, secure, predict, its future. This is not surrender. The thing we are most proud of is the opposite of peace and inevitably leads to pain. Interestingly, this realization does not in itself lead to any particular peace. Peace is in being, which is in surrender. Ego tells us, "no, no don't surrender!" Ego is always pretending that it is Being and it uses any tool it can grasp at maintaining the illusion. Weird that we should have these multiple viewpoints in us and not question it. Each viewpoint an actor, a false self. But on we go, despairing the demise of each fleeting viewpoint, as if we could believe for a moment that anyone was us. So there it is, any us that we grab on to we know to be only a perspective, different from the other perspectives that populate our minds, and therefore not us in the primal way we want to believe in -- that we are eternal, whole, complete. Instead, we run constantly from the fact that we are empty, void, without meaning, ...
Yet, I can testify, a testimony that has no value, that peace comes not from finding something but from finding nothing and surrendering to that truth. Why does it not have value, because there isn't even interest in writing this from that place of surrender, so I have to hold on to and reflect on my state of suffering to write these things. And if I'm writing from this place of ego reflection, where is the truth, in its self-rejection? But I would testify anyway -- now that is funny in a black humor kind of way.
This is why teachers say something like, "I gained nothing." It is only ego that seeks to gain, the void can't even seek or want or want to seek if it could want.
And where is god-if-there-is-a-god in this? In the void and in the universe, the snake or snakes grabbing their tail(s).
The eyes look in and
they see only the void
the empty nothing in me
dimly though so so dimly
and far away a point
so dim as not to be
yet it grows and becomes
two and four and eight
and sixteen ... points
stars galaxies universes
telescoping in in in
planet continent country
state city road house room
your eyes look back at me
and I know I am and you are
me the eyes look in
----
Staying awake to this seems hard, but the truth is we are always awake to it. No matter how I name it, I make it less than it is. It's not a dream or reality, an illusion or a truth, we can't be but here. What fun, what pain, what joy, what suffering, god-if-there-is-a-god is defiantly laughing and crying.