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But turns out George has hit upon some of the fundamentals. I don't have time to go into all the qualifiers that might be optimal before my appointment with the eye doctor, but I've been mostly listening to Kavassilas today... because I didn't think I'd gotten a chance to give him a fair hearing in Henrik's first hour.
So I went over to HIS SITE and picked some interviews to listen to. I started with the two with Vivian and Katie.
I'll see if I can't pull myself together to make some points about this stuff when I get back, but I just wanted you to know that I thought there were a few exceptionally good nuggets in this listening, stuff that actually bespeaks real insight. He's not just groping. Heartening. Heartening. Heartening. Even if dressed with space aliens.
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Call me stodgy, but I can never feel wholehearted about this approach to waking up that tells you your ego is jake. It's probably all my Zen training, but the real wisdom of the ancients is completely weighted against the ego getting a chance to think it's okay in advance.
It isn't okay, okay? If it were in fact okay, we wouldn't be here worrying about this. Everything would be groovy and we could all be here proclaiming our undying love for each other... or something.
Of course, everybody has a different idea of what the word "ego" means. What I mean by it is the you you go around thinking is you, the one you've thought was you since you can remember having an opinion on the matter. That is actually thin air, what I have loved to call an air sculpture for a long time. It isn't you. It's ruined your entire life, and it's ruining everyone else's entire lives too.
It will, for instance, leap to the immediate conclusion that anyone counseling that ego is but one's individual personality, and that of course can't be dispensed with, is the person to heed. Not only can your personality be dispensed with, but you might end up wanting to dispense with it. And, your ego will proceed directly to what Kassavilas is calling... oh shit... what was he calling it? Spiritual ego? Cosmic ego? I'm close there, or close enough that you should catch it when/if you listen to it. Anyway, it will go right there. It will park there, happy as a pig in shit the whole time you are doing your wake up work. Anything you do by way of enlightening being will 100% be endarkening being, benighting being, and you will become some smug jackass I have to bitch and piss and moan about after your ego has been honing its transcendental thespianism for X amount of time... gotten X emails from X number of popular poseurs under its belt, whatever feels impressive enough... or whatever feels modest enough!
No shit. Modesty is so problematic! All kinds of people get glued by spiritual materialism and fuck up spectacularly on this account. I am more modest than you. Code for I'm more enlightened than you, it will never do. Yer spinnin' yer disingenuous wheels. Okay?
The drill is: you do not exist; suck eggs at every conceivable turn; keep sucking them until your ego learns you've been making it suck eggs all this time and, lo, you're just fine. You did not die. It's still there. Sulking. Nobody worth a shit thinks any the less of you, and, actually, many find you raised in their estimation. Your ego finally lowers its perpetually raised hackles. You are then competent to be reasonable, and competent to the insight you need to pull you out of being helplessly buffeted by the vicissitudes of the wheel of karma, beat to shit by blindness to it. Sucking eggs is crucial for getting the insight at all and for the insight to end up doing its job right.
That's why I get jangled when Tsarion goes on about how ego is great, the individual is the thing, yadda, yadda, yadda, rightist libertarianism is the only way to run a society, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.... This made it take me much longer to have any confidence it was okay to link him, endorse his work. He knows what he's doing. He's taking a different approach.
It boils down to his way of culling the nincompoops, but having a spiritual friend like him, even under that backassward approach, is gonna have to be good, if he'll have Thing One to do with you, because he knows the territory. Won't steer you wrong. I don't even know if he ever bothers steering anyone one-on-one, but if he did, he'd be a good choice for someone who just can't grok those inscrutable old Asian dudes.
Kavassilas may actually be approaching. It's clear he doesn't mean by the word "ego" what I mean by it. I might see if I can't talk him out of using that word to mean "personality"... or content myself that he can use it whatever way he wants without endangering sentient beings with big enough soulaches already... but he hit a few right notes in there... the really right kind... da kine... in those interviews I listened to earlier and linked here for you.
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