Ego Monster

While working on this coming Sunday’s sermon I followed the following down the way for a bit, but eventually saw it really didn’t fit in the sermon. I’ve walked down any number of these alleys in the past. And in the past this passage would be cut and maybe, if I really liked it, filed away. Although truth be told probably never to see the light of print. However, now I have a blog…

Buddhist scholar Jeff Wilson cites Henry David Thoreau’s line, “I am a parcel of vain strivings tied by a chance bond together.” Our sense of self, yours and mine, our egos, are a construct, the momentary product of genes and history coming together in a passing moment as a body with a sense of self. Speaking from the perspective of a sixty-year old and uncomfortably aware of how my own body is beginning to fall apart, let me tell you, we are as temporary as a flash of lightning, as a bubble in a stream.

When we engage the world from the place of ego, from our sense of an isolated self, we actually present a danger to ourselves and to everyone else. As we look out at the world from this place of ego, everything becomes a threat, because somewhere along the line everything will inevitably challenge our sense of stability, of constancy. And what human beings have done to protect this sense of self is pretty awful. The litany of ill that follows our trying to protect this false sense of self is in fact very long.

However, there’s a different way of standing in the world. It is a place of healing, of reconciliation, of possibility. When we shift gears and instead of standing as isolated beings, allow the world to inform us, to act upon us, to run through us, to be us; then we discover how we are actually tied up together. Here the boundaries of self and other become a little less clear. And in that moment that vain parcel Thoreau spoke of ceases to be vain, and instead becomes a bundle of intimacy.

The Thirteenth century Japanese Zen teacher Eihei Dogen said it much better than I in his Genjokoan, his essay on the “deep question of every day life.” About the only thing you need to unpack that sentence is to know “the ten thousand things” is a metaphor for the sum total of existence in all its glorious messiness. Dogen tells us “That the self advances and confirms the ten thousand things is called delusion; that the ten thousand things advance and confirm the self is called enlightenment.”