Ted. Glad you are back!

@Donn(!) Good to see you back, buddy! It’s been a while, I hope all is well with you. And thanks for the kind words, as always.

@Ted: I’m not sure I agree on all the particulars (and I have not had a chance to watch that video). But I do agree that there is a lot grouped under what’s often called “the ego” and that certain parts are not so bad, and other parts can be really problematic. I think the brain can be retrained, and I think meditation can be a good way of doing that.

I also think the idea of “ego is a spotlight” is pretty spot on. Just consciousness as it looks on various unconscious processes at work. Maybe we just need to be sure not to confuse the two.

Like Gupta was saying in the clip, the conscious mind is like a spotlight. Maybe the ego is a confluence of various factors. One factor is this spot light, another factor is a socially constructed identity. So you have the spotlight on a socially constructed identity. So that would be the square. But I am thinking a spot light is still a spotlight weather you identify with the square or not.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEtyMHbf08U

I got it from ran Prieur, who mentioned a person healing from Fibromyalgia, through this thrapy. This goes into the amygdala. Its really interesting. Our brains have billions of years of evolution to draw from.

I think the ego is just the conscious mind. I don’t think its the “Donald Trump” or the “Ghengis Khan” inside everyone. “ego” means so many contradictory and confusing things with all these negative connotations.

I think its like the concept of “the flesh” in Christianity. The concept of the flesh is associated with the libido and designed to make people feel ashamed of themselves, to second guess themselves, to repress themselves.

I think negative connotations surrounding the ego, serve a similar purpose. In the right light its not neccesarily sinister. But its a way of getting past “the gate keeper” in everyone. To help people suspend judgement and enter a suggestive state. To be molded.

But I mean to get rid of the conscious mind is not a positive goal in and of itself. Conversely to get the conscious mid to be fully conscious of every unconscious activity, like heart beat etc. is probably problematic too.

So what I get from that is all you can do is move stuff around. Make different patterns. Everything new is made out of something already at hand.

Different patterns work better for different things. But you can’t really get rid of anything or make anything totally new. You have to take everything into account.

So enlightenment is made out of stuff thats already there inside you and inside everybody. Where else would it come from? Its just a pattern that you create. It may not be anything.

And yes, please do report back on the Christopher Alexander stuff. What a great christmas gift. They’re on my list to buy, once the money starts rolling in…

[Y'know, I only recently noticed what the word 'kindle' means... I was reading a recent interview with Ray Bradbury... :) ]

>> Like that Christopher Alexander indigenous wisdom stuff, always making new things according to the changing environment. We’ll never reach a point where everything is simply OK all the time …

Indeed. I got a couple of his books for Xmas, will report back… :)

But as for the deeper question, of whether “digitization” is a “final solution” for knowledge or not, that’s a good one. The middle way is, I think, the acceptance of continual work. Like that Christopher Alexander indigenous wisdom stuff, always making new things according to the changing environment. We’ll never reach a point where everything is simply OK all the time without our being involved (which is how I interpret “true stasis”, everything permanently safe all the time).

I think the key is more to have a developed ego, but be able to let it go, to see both your needs and the other person’s needs and be intelligent, imaginative, and aware enough to come up with a solution that doesn’t involve the ignoring of the other person’s needs. Knowing the square fully the square so it’s as low as the big circle, and letting the fountain water wash over it too. Not needing to keep the square out of the water.

But yeah, I think I was wrong about dissolving the square. There is definitely a danger in being too diluted.

Yes indeed.

I have this feeling there’s something very deep here which we’re all missing. There is a marked tendency for this sort of project to be seen as some kind of ‘final solution’. I am 99% certain that that is not the case: it is just another step in the preservation of something important. True stasis is of course impossible (and probably undesirable). But no preservation is ridiculous. What, then, is the nature of this middle way?

I am just saying, being all diffused and not having an ego identity, and identifying soley with the source of all being, or whatever, may not be that unusual.

I mean I think there are people more or less normally like that. In some traditions they would be Shamans, often they are artists, sometimes considered insane, especially schizophrenic diagnoses. Recently things are maybe looking a little better, with Outsider art and so forth.

But I am thinking, religions have been built from this state of being. Its been mapped out over time.

I tend to think that its more like a group experiment, people have been adding to in certain traditions from ancient times. Is it the goal of life? Like its carved in stone? Ordained by God that people should disolve their ego and become one with everything?

Some people say with complete certainty that celibacy is the only way and that the way to do it is sublimate your sex energy in order to open the third eye. As if its not simply a technique, like some kind of hack people came up with, but rather God made us with sex organs in order to not use them but instead open our third eye with our sex energy.

Like that is what sex is for, period.

Some people like to study quantum physics, some people dream about exploring outer space, others take lots of steroids and lift weights and get grotesquely huge. Others experiment with psychadelic drugs.

Maybe people just like to explore things and try to push limits as far as they can. Exploring “inner space” insight, meditation, etc. maybe is just something people do. It started with a bunch of bored rich people in Asia. That’s my opinion. They already conquered everything and lived like kings with all these subjugated people serving their every need, so they figured why not get into meditation and see what is beyond this life we seem to have completely dominated and reaped from it every fruit?

The type of people I was describing above, that exist more from the circle I think don’t really have a strongly developed ego. Its very permeable to outside influences. So this font of creativity is open to them, plus all this wierd paranormal stuff. Plus they are usually very empathic.

I think a person with a really strong ego, is basically a person with a socially constructed identity. Its an opposite extreme, but its a very limited point to view, very materialistic, literal minded. So those are opposite ends of the perspective.

I think Gurus know how to operate from both ends of the spectrum. They know how to draw from the circle but also keep the square going strong.

But I don’t know if the square needs to be brought below the “waterline”. I think the purpose of the square is that it “floats”. Trying to “push” the square below the “waterline” just makes it pop back up, sometimes violently so, possibly damaging the stability of the square. A bad thing, if we still need to identify with the square to continue our personal growth.

My take on it is we need to slowly dissolve the square in the water until we no longer see our “self” as the square, but rather as the larger circle. Then it becomes much easy to find and drink from the central “fountain”.

But I think depending on how aware they are in porportion to how well they are to deal with it, would be a determining factor in terms of their mental health.

For example, picture a really fragile dreamy person. I have some people like this in my family. Really bright creative people, that are very psychic and not really that tough. They tend to be hypochondriacs, because they are more in tune with their bodily processes in kind of a morbid way. Like for example they sensitive to how different foods effect them. They are very in touch with their dreams and also “spiritual” stuff like Chi, and auras, ghosts, spirits, stuff like that.

They are kind of like in a waking dream all the time. Also, other people around these dreamy “fey” types may be more instinctive in their motivations. Instinctive people are ruled by unconscious drives. They are ruled by them even though they aren’t aware of them. Their rational minds just create rationalizations.

So to the dreamy people, instinctive people seem like dangerous wild animals, because basically that is what they are. They do basically what chimps do. Its all about sex and social status.

It’s hard to let go of centuries of scholarship, I imagine. And I think it’s questionable what the use would be of doing so, so long as they can be preserved. I believe this was in response to the Chinese destruction of monasteries and their libraries, more so than a historical “must save all culture” kind of initiative, which I agree is a dubious blessing at best.

But what I was really getting at was the fundamental idea of digital permanence. Surely that’s the very definition of ‘clinging’. In fact any living body of work is a process, continually being rediscovered and reinvented by the users.

“This is way too much for most of us. It reminds us of the ‘I AM’ poems of the ancient Celts – poetry where you made vast associations between your temperament and the curlew, the nut heavy branch, the indigo sky of a lightning storm. You take up a lot of space, an awful lot of space. No longer is the head bent in either trained piety or shame, but bent back and roaring loud into the hurricane. You are the swift footed wolf-singer, the mud smeared fish that learns to breathe, a mighty procession of snow tipped mountains, a curly god with a harvest of lovers.”