...
No matter what you do, if you have not sussed the trouble thoroughly and seen all the way into the matter, it's hopeless. All you can do then is act... and your pathetic theatrics blink like neon to anyone who knows.
Nope. In Zen we talk about host and guest... straightening that out in there. We spend our whole lives mistaking a mere guest for the host of our parties. Nowadays, it helps to think of this confusion of function as laboring under the shortcomings of a guest host.
You will see it as slave and master, or hear the ancients going on about your horse riding you, or you pulling your ass in your cart... you watch Zhaozhou put his shoes on his head and walk out on his teacher. It's not dull.
While it's ridiculously, embarrassingly, uncomplicated, it is almost unerringly a Shakespearean tribulation getting this all straightened out. We witness all these ego-addled youngsters going all turgid over the Trivium, the incredible amount of work it is to get it down as an adult who has been dumbed down by an education jam-packed with lies... and it's at best a waste of effort before getting this little psychological train wreck ironed out.
Since the ego is essentially thin air, not there, pure delusion, a total crock of shit, and you have not noticed this for your entire life, letting it run you, telling everyone it is you, you will now be faced with some shocking revelations if you do truly and faithfully and earnestly set yourself to waking up from this nightmare.
You will find your ego prefers you physically dead to anything remotely like harming an invisible hair on its invisible head. Your lizard brain is the one hallucinating this fake ID. Don't fuck with your lizard brain. You will lose. We will all hope you only take up drinking again or go off in a corner to shoot heroin... but, truly, ego absolutely will kill you before it will stop trying to protect you, unless you are a truly rare individual. I mean like one or two per millennium, so don't get cocky.
You start patronizing it. Ignoring it. Following all those stupid, soppish precepts that make you take insults like a man, genuflect before nitwits, decline to kill a fly, feign piety so heavily that even you stop noticing what a jackass you look like. It's okay. Say the word "Zen" and people will be impressed... some, having met too many modern American excuses for Zen teachers, will probably just roll their eyes... if they don't laugh in your face, but... you know the drill... bow deeply... toddle off meekly.
The point is to acclimate your ego to sucking eggs. It has to learn it's going to live through this stuff. You have to get your ego interested in adopting a spirit of inquiry. You probably don't want it next to get off out-piousing others. Bannh. Fail. Oh, yeah, you get to watch yourself doing all kinds of utterly outrageously idiotic shit... out of habit... out of decades of playing host....
And you can't even hold parties of self-abnegation over busting yourself being such a boob. Nope. You must merely see yourself at it. Stop. Look. Drop it. Press on. Eventually, when you've racked up enough insight, you may find your ego just fails to show up, that your intellect stops being a big history loop with 'tude and reverts to serving its proper function.
If you really want a life without that fuckhead continually ruining your fun, this is how you go about it. You can't kill it. Really. Don't go there. It only makes it worse.
...
You know, it's some hours later and it strikes me that men do not take insults well at all. I meant you're expected to take insults like a man is expected to take pain, bad news, disappointment. Quietly. Stoically. Without complaint.
What an unfortunate turn of phrase. It sounds okay when it's spoken. But, seriously, if there is anything more awful than egos, it's male egos, and they are not noted for suffering insults well at all.
And no retaliation.
Turn the other cheek, baby.
You can't kill what is utterly immaterial. It isn't there! It's pure delusion, no matter how many great people you know who will ardently disagree. You can train pernicious delusions out of of your head. Think of Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind. He'd backed his ghosts off to clear across the auditorium by the end of the movie. You can do the same with yours. It just gets so that they are unremarkable, not trying to run the show anymore, not leaping up into your face through your throat to throttle you with worry and alarm and rabies and terror.
Your riding will improve! Your ass will pull you. You will wear your shoes on your feet. You will be hosting your own party. Someone in mortal pain might see the way out of hell because you did all this work. The whole world might turn back into paradise if you would only do this work.
The delusions lose their place in your hierarchy, are harder to find, float off, fly away or hide somewhere off stage. You might see one pass betimes, but you don't even think to stop and offer tea.
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