Egoless Means More

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Egoless Means More

Precisely because the ego, the soul and the Self can all be present

simultaneously, we can better understand the real meaning of

egolessness, a notion that has caused an inordinate amount of

confusion. But egolessness does not mean the absence of a functional

self (that's a psychotic, not a sage); it means that one is no

longer exclusively identified with that self.

One of the many reasons we have trouble with the notion of egoless

is that people want their egoless sages to fulfill all their

fantasies of saintly or spiritual, which usually means dead from the

neck down, without fleshy wants or desires, gently smiling all the

time. All of the things that people typically have trouble with

money, food, sex, relationships, desire they want their saints to be

without. Egoless sages who are above all that is what people want.

Talking heads is what they want. Religion, they believe, will simply

get rid of all baser instincts, drives and relationships, and hence

they look to religion, not for advice on how to live life with

enthusiasm, but on how to avoid it, repress it, deny it, escape it.

In other words, the typical person wants the spiritual sage to be

less than a person, somehow devoid of all the messy, juicy, complex,

pulsating, desiring, urging forces that drive most human beings. We

expect our sages to be an absence of all that drives us! All the

things that frighten us, confuse us, torment us, confound us: we

want our sages to be untouched by them altogether. And that absence,

that vacancy, that less than personal, is what we often mean by

egoless.

But egoless does not mean less than personal, it means more than

personal. Not personal minus, but personal plus all the normal

personal qualities, plus some transpersonal ones. Think of the great

yogis, saints and sages from Moses to Christ to Padmasambhava. They

were not feeble-mannered milquetoasts, but fierce movers and shakers

from bullwhips in the Temple to subduing entire countries. They

rattled the world on its own terms, not in some pie-in-the-sky

piety; many of them instigated massive social revolutions that have

continued for thousands of years.

And they did so not because they avoided the physical, emotional and

mental dimensions of humanness and the ego that is their vehicle,

but because they engaged them with a drive and intensity that shook

the world to its very foundations. No doubt, they were also plugged

into the soul (deeper psychic) and spirit (formless Self) the

ultimate source of their power but they expressed that power, and

gave it concrete results, precisely because they dramatically

engaged the lower dimensions through which that power could speak in

terms that could be heard by all.

These great movers and shakers were not small egos; they were, in

the very best sense of the term, big egos, precisely because the ego

(the functional vehicle of the gross realm) can and does exist

alongside the soul (the vehicle of the subtle) and the Self (vehicle

of the causal). To the extent these great teachers moved the gross

realm, they did so with their egos, because the ego is the

functional vehicle of that realm. They were not, however, identified

merely with their egos (that's a narcissist), they simply found

their egos plugged into a radiant Kosmic source. The great yogis,

saints and sages accomplished so much precisely because they were

not timid little toadies but great big egos, plugged into the

dynamic Ground and Goal of the Kosmos itself, plugged into their own

higher Self, alive to the pure atman (the pure I-I) that is one with

Brahman; they opened their mouths and the world trembled, fell to

its knees, and confronted its radiant God.

Saint Teresa was a great contemplative? Yes, and Saint Teresa is the

only woman ever to have reformed an entire Catholic monastic

tradition (think about it). Gautama Buddha shook India to its

foundations. Rumi, Plotinus, Bodhidharma, Lady Tsogyal, Lao Tzu,

Plato, the Bal Shem Tov these men and women started revolutions in

the gross realm that lasted hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years,

something neither Marx nor Lenin nor Locke nor Jefferson can yet

claim. And they did not do so because they were dead from the neck

down. No, they were monumentally, gloriously, divinely big egos,

plugged into a deeper psychic, which was plugged straight into God.

There is certainly a type of truth to the notion of transcending

ego : it doesnÕt mean destroy the ego, it means plug it into

something bigger. (As Nagarjuna put it, in the relative world, atman

is real; in the absolute, neither atman nor anatman is real. Thus,

in neither case is anatta a correct description of reality.) The

small ego does not evaporate; it remains as the functional center of

activity in the conventional realm. As I said, to lose that ego is

to become a psychotic, not a sage.

Transcending the ego thus actually means to transcend but include

the ego in a deeper and higher embrace, first in the soul or deeper

psychic, then with the Witness or primordial Self, then with each

previous stage taken up, enfolded, included and embraced in the

radiance of One Taste. And that means we do not get rid of the small

ego, but rather, we inhabit it fully, live it with verve, use it as

the necessary vehicle through which higher truths are communicated.

Soul and Spirit include body, emotions and mind; they do not erase

them.

Put bluntly, the ego is not an obstruction to Spirit, but a radiant

manifestation of Spirit. All Forms are not other than Emptiness,

including the form of the ego. It is not necessary to get rid of the

ego, but simply to live it with a certain exuberance. When

identification spills out of the ego and into the Kosmos at large,

the ego discovers that the individual atman is in fact all of a

piece with Brahman. The big Self is indeed no small ego, and thus,

to the extent you are stuck in your small ego, a death and

transcendence is required. Narcissists are simply people whose egos

are not yet big enough to embrace the entire Kosmos, and so they try

to be central to the Kosmos instead.

But we do not want our sages to have big egos; we do not even want

them to display a manifest dimension at all. Anytime a sage displays

humanness in regard to money, food, sex, relationships we are

shocked, shocked, because we are planning to escape life altogether,

not live it, and the sage who lives life offends us. We want out, we

want to ascend, we want to escape, and the sage who engages life

with gusto, lives it to the hilt, grabs each wave of life and surfs

it to the end this deeply, profoundly disturbs us, frightens us,

because it means that we, too, might have to engage life, with

gusto, on all levels, and not merely escape it in a cloud of

luminous ether. We do not want our sages to have bodies, egos,

drives, vitality, sex, money, relationships, or life, because those

are what habitually torture us, and we want out. We do not want to

surf the waves of life, we want the waves to go away. We want

vaporware spirituality.

The integral sage, the nondual sage, is here to show us otherwise.

Known generally as tantric, these sages insist on transcending life

by living it. They insist on finding release by engagement, finding

nirvana in the midst of samsara, finding total liberation by

complete immersion. They enter with awareness the nine rings of

hell, for nowhere else are the nine heavens found. Nothing is alien

to them, for there is nothing that is not One Taste.

Indeed, the whole point is to be fully at home in the body and its

desires, the mind and its ideas, the spirit and its light. To

embrace them fully, evenly, simultaneously, since all are equally

gestures of the One and Only Taste. To inhabit lust and watch it

play; to enter ideas and follow their brilliance; to be swallowed by

Spirit and awaken to a glory that time forgot to name. Body and mind

and spirit, all contained, equally contained, in the ever-present

awareness that grounds the entire display.

In the stillness of the night, the Goddess whispers. In the

brightness of the day, dear God roars. Life pulses, mind imagines,

emotions wave, thoughts wander. What are all these but the endless

movements of One Taste, forever at play with its own gestures,

whispering quietly to all who would listen: is this not you

yourself? When the thunder roars, do you not hear your Self? When

the lightning cracks, do you not see your Self? When clouds float

quietly across the sky, is this not your very own limitless Being,

waving back at you?

Material in this column appears in One Taste: The Journals of Ken

Wilber, from Shambhala Publications Inc., Boston. Copyright Ken

Wilber, 1998.