Ego As Strange Attractor:

I Thought It Was A Goner and that Ego Came Back

I Thought it was a Goner and the Cat [Ego] Came Back

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Why Am I Here? And Who is it that is Actually Here?

Here I am, sitting up rather late on my weekend nights, egoistically writing about a phenomena that appears to exist and not-exist at the same time. A subject likely having as many texts about it as there are university papers on Hamlet. A scant few weeks ago I thought that I had at least temporarily closed the subject for me with the ego-exploration that I had written following being told that I had erroneously taught that the ego is necessary.

Ego and Me, to Be or To Be Not Is that a Question?

An Exploration of Yes, No or Maybe, the Darkness Around us is Deep

To crudely paraphrase that essay the ego appears to exist as a kind of codified unending looping between the nothing (emptiness?) of the ego’s existence into the ego’s existence as the psychic bridge into the empty nothingness of interdependence. And that allows that emptiness (or nothing) that comprises the Universe to be made manifest as the perceivable phenomena of the sensual world. I included several ‘definitions’ of the ego from different eminent psychologists. I thought I was done with it at least for a few years.

A Lorenz Strange Attactor. Music: The Sensual World - Kate Bush

Yet here I am, strangely attracted and drawn to re-draw a picture without tangible borders or even a centre, familiar and chaotically non-repeating recognisable iterated patterns. Drawing down with words the imageless, even though its image is one that is something that each of us is likely to be able to imagine or even claim familiarity with, if not egoistic claims of expert understanding. I can say or write the word ‘ego’ and each of us will nod knowingly with the life-long ego experiences of shame and premature elations, exuberant exultations and erroneous epistemological epiphanies. Ego is big business.

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The Ego Does Not Need to Exist!

And yet, I’m told emphatically from various sources, the ego need not exist! Really?  

Inner Ramana dictated the following, February 20, 2009:

The Importance of Practice

Much of what you do comes from the ego.

Let me define "ego" for you since all words can have varying meanings.

"Ego" is the belief in the false identity "I."

So when I say that much of what you do comes from the ego, I mean that you are being driven or moved by that belief in the mind. That is the same as saying you are listening to and believing thoughts or stories in the mind. And this is belief in illusion (p29 The Teachings of Inner Ramana by Regina Dawn Akers, my emphasis.)

The ego is the belief in illusion. That infers that belief is independent from ego without saying from whence belief arises. Interesting that ego is the child of belief, so-to-speak, and hence under our control and not the other way around. And that the ego will fade away when we let go of the belief in the ‘I’, ‘Me’ and ‘Mine’ stories. 

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Ego as Hungry Ghosts?

The ego, is that the Hungry Ghost’s master? I’ve not heard that in my limited exposure to Buddhism and yet it has a resonance to me. For example, here is an ‘official’ definition that describes the Hungry Ghost in bleak terms of addiction and suffering without connecting the dots to that of it being the ego.

Hungry ghosts are pitiable creatures with huge, empty stomachs. They have pinhole mouths, and their necks are so thin they cannot swallow, so they remain hungry. Beings are reborn as hungry ghosts because of their greed, envy and jealousy.

Hungry Ghosts - I Don't Think About You Anymore But, I Don't Think About You Anyles

Hungry ghosts are also associated with addiction, obsession, and compulsion (Hungry Ghosts by Barbara O'Brien).

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Kitty, Kitty Ego, Where Are You?

Ego, ego, ergo ego, where are you, where did you go go? I wonder if it is hiding in the empty space within the simple Zen ‘まる’ (maru), snuggled quietly on a shapely nape of neck, strong back or plastered brazenly on some empty food-like product?

Maru, the Zen Empty Circle of Life, Pizza as Life and a Fiery Encircled Eye

Is it the fourth member of the Universe, that which is not painted alongside the forms of circle, triangle square, the Hungry Ghost looking for its place to be expressed?

“Once you enlarge your imagination [beyond your fixed beliefs], what seemed fixed opposites or impossibilities switch to multiple options.” Lois F. Stark

Is ego a figment of the imagination? And would that thought be itself an ego seeking something meaningful with a silly word play ostentatiously looking to lighten the load of BS? And if that, what is the imagination that has the power to imagine an ego with the power to imagine an imagination? I suspect that it is the mechanism we have, the power we have, to choose our beliefs.

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In Appreciation of Mara! Raise the Glass and Swallow the Pali

In the course of the last few months, with the help of Michael Stone’s podcasts of Gautama Buddha’s words from the Pali Canon, I’ve come to an expanding appreciation of Mara. I have come to understand and share that Mara ’is the voice and energy inside us that wants to keep us small, even childlike, contained within the confines of Maya, where Maya is the sensual world manifest in things, events, perceptions and ideas that keeps us from seeing the truth of our being unique embodiments of the Universal energy. In other words, Mara keeps us from the power of choice by directing us to Maya.

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Fractal, Fractal Everywhere

In recent months my humble meditation practice has brought to my awareness that where this odd thing called ‘I’ begins and ends is actually impossible to set down or define clearly. The ‘self/other’ boundary is very much like a fractal, is a fractal, in that I can see the patterns that ‘I’ and the other ‘I’s' make, and yet we are so interdependent that careful and close inspection reveals that the separation is false. To rephrase Gautama Buddha’s words, a little: suffering arises when we insist that we are separate from what is being experienced in the moment. The ego is the thing that does the separating, compartmentalising and constricting in its effort to control the uncontrollable existence of being.

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The Earth as Bearing Witness on Gautama’s Behalf

As it turns out, this awareness I have been experiencing in the last fews months, is not new, of course. I discovered that it was clearly articulated by Gautama Buddha in an alternative ‘story’ of his experience of enlightenment that was shared by Stone.

There is another version [of Gautama Buddha’s awakening] in the [Pali] Canon, which is the one most traditions don’t read. Which is in the first person, which is really interesting. And it is the Buddha weeks after his awakening describing what happened. And his description of his awakening is that what he woke up to is quiet and deep and, I’m paraphrasing, but it is difficult for people to wake to the ground. So he describes what he woke up to is not like this [hand gesture up] but is actually the ground, of reality. Then he says the reason why it is difficult for people to wake up to the ground is because they love delight and revel in their viewpoint. And then he says noticing this goes against the stream. … Being able to wake up to the ground goes against the stream. Which a lot of academics say was his critique of religion. Because mostly we think of enlightenment as like this [hand gesture] and the Buddha is saying actually to really be awake is to actually be in touch with the ground. … A lot of the statues of the Buddha in his awakening he is pointing to the ground. He is not pointing up (~43:00  “Family Wakes us Up Book Launch”).

Two days ago, while poking around for this essay, I came across another elaboration on the story that adds some depth by colourfully including the role that Mara and the Earth played in Gautama Buddha’s enlightenment. 

As the about-to-be Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, sat in meditation, Mara brought his most beautiful daughters to seduce Siddhartha. Siddhartha, however, remained in meditation. Then Mara sent vast armies of monsters to attack him. Yet Siddhartha sat still and untouched.

Mara claimed that the seat of enlightenment rightfully belonged to him and not to the mortal Siddhartha. Mara's monstrous soldiers cried out together, "I am his witness!" Mara challenged Siddhartha, ‘Who will speak for you?’

Then Siddhartha reached out his right hand to touch the earth, and the Earth itself spoke: "I bear you witness!" Mara disappeared. And as the morning star rose in the sky, Siddhartha Gautama realised enlightenment and became a Buddha (The Demon Mara  by Barbara O'Brien Updated on July 14, 2018

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I See You and I Come in Peace

Stone points out in one of his podcasts that Gautama defeated Mara’s armies with the simple phrase and peaceful action, ‘I see you’, without rancour or hostility. And the process took seven years! Now I understand that that victory was Gautama letting the false egoistic beliefs drop away and for him to become mindful of the body. (~52:00 ‘Summer Silent Retreat Pt 3’ Jan 30, 2015.)

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Getting Hit by a Bus? Really? What Bus?

On the one hand Michael Stone is adamant that the ego is necessary. He frequently refers to it as that aspect of the human personality that, for example, keeps us from getting hit by buses, ie, that which keeps us grounded in the real world. 

So, in most schools of spirituality your ego is considered something really bad. You want to get rid of it. But when you think about it, that ego structure, that is like so defensive in us, has so much pride, wants to get enlightened. Could [you] imagine that, could you imagine if, when you got enlightened you were like Oh! This is exactly how I thought it would be!’

That ego structure was created when you were a kid. It is created by our families, our caregiving, our mirroring, our culture. So, when you see yourself as being ego, you shouldn’t be so down with that. You should just see your ego as a little kid. When you see a little kid, you don’t think ‘Oh God! They’re a little kid!’ Maybe some of you do. Like you don’t criticise them for being a little kid, because they are a little kid. So you shouldn’t criticise your ego because it is just a little kid. Or maybe it’s more like a little pet. And you can have some compassion for your defensiveness (~30:53  ‘Save a Ghost’ May 14, 2015).

In referring to the ego as a child Stone seems to suggest that we are wise, as ‘good’ parents, to not criticise the child for being ‘just’ a child. By this Stone seems to glide over the challenge of growing up out of being a child. Or perhaps he has an idea that the ego is not just a child, that the ego is expressed in many ways, such as the armies of Mara or as the Hungry Ghosts.

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A Fractal by Any Other Name —Ego as Lorenz Strange Attractor

I have come to see that Stone was actually espousing a Lorenz ego-strange attractor, though, because he also argues that the ego disappears when we are fully alive in the moment. In the podcasts I’ve listened to so far, more than twenty, I don’t think he was aware of that internal schism. In the quotation below, he refers to a ‘false self’. He doesn’t refer to that as the ego, although from his other talks I infer that that is what he means by ‘false self.’ (And that inference aligns with Inner Ramana, quoted above, for example.)

I think [that] there is such [a] thing as a ‘false’ self, but I don’t think there is such [a] thing as a ’true’ self. In other words a ‘false’ self is the self that’s thinking about itself in the moment as a self separated out from the moment. But the absence of that is just what’s happening. Psychologists call that a ‘true self’. And in the moment that you call that a ‘true self’ you have fixed the ‘thing’ and you’ve completely missed it. In other words, when you are fully in your experience, there is not a true self having the experience. There is just the experience. … If you say there is no self having the experience then that’s a reverse theological position also. There is just the experience. It has nothing to do with self or no-self (~31:20 Hatha Yoga (2) Jun 24, 2015).

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Just Experience Experience is to Experience No Ego?

What does it mean, to be ‘just the experience’? With having been doing an expanding muscle testing body awareness process for seven years (which I now call Psyche-Somatic Resonance Awareness Process) I understand that this is Gautama’s earth-witness, his ‘mindfulness of the body’ practice, and of Stone’s just the experience. I now understand that these all have one thing in common: being alive in the body as the existence of life. Our bodies are life. And when I am one, truly integrated without any stories of ‘I’, ‘Me’, or ‘Mine’, the not ‘I’ that is the body of this life can only be present in this moment wherein the not-I is fully connected to the Earth-of-this-moment in full groundedness. In that moment the ‘I’ is gone and being is all. 

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Ten Ox-Herding Pictures

Return to the Source

Thus I seem to have returned to the beginning, although not in a circle, nor in a helix. In a Lorenz strange attractor, or perhaps in the pattern of the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures.

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What? I’m Confused and there is No End in Sight!

Is the ego a strange, strange attractor? Strange in that the phenomenon of life creates in the psyche-somatic complex an ego that in turn creates the psyche-somatic experience that in turn creates the ego? Is the challenge or quest for the missing ox simply to begin knowing and then exercising the not-I to see the pattern of the Lorenz-like ego-strange attractor? Is that what it means in meditation, to see our thoughts float by like clouds, or roar by like crowded city buses? Seeing. And in being seen, the ego, like the armies of Mara under the peaceful and compassionate eye of Gautama, dissipate back from whence they came, the imagination of nothingness.

Lorenz Strange Attractor. Music for 18 Musicians

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Would You Believe It?

It would seem that the ego is not required, not even to keep us safe on city streets. It is simply a belief in what isn’t real. Can you believe that?

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Closing song:

My Brightest Diamond - Before the Words

Before the words there was the voice
Before the verse there was the sound
Before the form there was the music
Before the pen and paper
There was the hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo
Before we sing we take in breath
Imagine fire inside our chests
Then give it out together with one

Hoo hoo hoo hoo hooooo
When we were young
When we were young
We heard our mothers
When we were young
When we were young
We heard the beep beep beep beeep
When we were young
When we were young
We heard our mothers
When we were young
When we were young
We heard the beep beep beep beeep

Before the words there was the voice
Before the verse there was the sound
Before the form there was the music
Before the pen and paper
There was the sound
There was the sound
The sound

Wooo wooo wooo wooo
When we were young
When we were young
We heard our mothers
When we were young
When we were young
We heard the beep beep beeep
When we were young
When we were young
We heard our mothers
When we were young
When we were young
We heard the beep beep beeeep
Wooo wooo wooo