Thresholds

Delusions and the karmic life

CREATING AND FOLLOWING
EGOISTIC DELUSIONS

"Thought of the Week" for July 5, 2004

According to the traditional Buddhist understanding, our human nature is without ego. When we have no idea of ego, we have Buddha's view of life. Our egoistic ideas are delusions, covering our Buddha nature. We are always creating and following them, and in repeating this process over and over again, our life becomes completely occupied by ego-centered ideas. This is called karmic life, or karma. The Buddhist life should not be karmic life. The purpose of our practice is to cut off the karmic spinning mind. If you are trying to attain enlightenment, that is part of karma, you are creating and being driven by karma, and you are wasting your time on your black cushion...

Shunryu Suzuki. (1970). Zen Mind Beginner's Mind. New York: Weatherhill.

Comment:

Letting go: Surrendering
ourselves to our journeys

by Reg Harris

Copyright © 1999 by Reg Harris. All rights reserved. Updated October 2007. All rights reserved. Apart from properly cited quotes and short excerpts, no part of this article can be copied or used in any form without written permission from the author. For permission to use, please contact me.

Karmic action is action done with a motive. The motive separates the "doer" (ego/subject) from the "deed" (event/object) and ties the ego to a desire. One of the most important lessons of the Hero's Journey is that during the journey, in the Abyss, our Ego must die. We must surrender ourselves completely to the journey. We cease to become someone "taking" the journey; we become the journey and the journey becomes us.

With all thought of goals, self and future stripped away by the challenge of survival, we are absorbed completely into "being." The journey then draws from our subconscious new strengths, new perspectives, and a new way of being which is compatible with our new world. The journey really doesn't "change" us; the "us" which exists after the journey is not the same "us" which began the journey. We have become someone new, irrevokably and forever. 

To clutch at ego and, subsequently, at the idea of a goal or a future that is separate from ourselves is to refuse the call to the journey. We act, but our acts are not "pure," that is without attachment to an idea, so the acts and the journey don't change us. Our ego is still in charge, and when it encounters the dual-natured "monster" in the abyss (deity/demon), it finds the demon, the threat.

Threatened, the ego throws up defenses, and the journey turns into its negative. Challenges which, if embraced and assimilated, would be growth inducing become terrible mirrors that throw back at us the reflection of our own fearful and imprisoned ego. Until the ego surrenders its being, it will be caught in an ever-intensifying cycle of challenge-defense. Three eventualities present themselves to the clinging ego:

  1. exhaustion and surrender to the journey (the saving path);

  2. retreat from the world behind walls of anger, bitterness, and victim hood (which may include addictions or evangelism, or which may be a form of a protection);

  3. death (In the case of the tragic hero, often we see surrender, but too late to avoid death, as is the case with many of Shakespeare's characters.)

Suzuki's words are directed at Zen, at meditation, but they are equally valid in terms of all action and the Hero's Journey. Karmic action, action with the intent to control or seeking a specific, ego-centered goal, binds us to ourselves (which is nothing but the past in the form of memories). Action which is spontaneous to the moment, done without motive, is not tied to the past and thus engenders growth and enlightenment.

The operative word in the Hero's Journey is not "goal" or "victory." It's "surrender." Only by surrendering can we win.