THE USUAL US IS BUT A THOUGHT AWAY

Whatever its individual and social value may be, ego remains a self-enclosed, self-centered, mechanically governed coalition of survival-oriented habits that automatically refers to itself by our name.

Ego is a cult of one.

Identification with ego is the essence of “I”. This means that “I” is not an entity, but a practice, a habit, a doing.

In its ossified, tenaciously reinforced, and innately contracted subjectivity, “I”

is not only literally uptight, but also appears to exist over against a universe, inner and outer, of objects (that is, whatever apparently is, or can be classified as, “not-I”), including the body in which it seems to be bound.¹

Much of “I’s” self-conceptualization and self-presentation is based on its relationship to these objects, which in turn is based on the notion that they in fact exist apart from “I.” The apparent separation between “I” and its objects not only allows “I” to maintain its identity — if only through its sense of the

“otherness” of its objects — but also isolates and scares it. “I” may squat

ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS

~ 81 ~

upon the throne of self, but its rule is shaky at best, with so much that is “not-I” lurking within and without.

When “I’s” headquarters are investigated, it is discovered that “I” has no fixed location, no fixed identity, no fingerprints, no more substance than a thought. “I” is then recognized not as a being, but as an undertaking. A choice.

The more attention that “I” monopolizes, the more real “I” seems to be.² Bringing awareness to “I” not only exposes its anatomical peculiarities and multiplicity (each personality being a community of differing voices and perspectives), but also its instability, its flimsiness, its object-dependency, its pretender-to-the-throne ambitions, and its unavoidably contingent nature. Like everything else, is it not constructed of other-than-itself elements? Like everything else, it cannot exist apart from its constituent elements, which themselves, being in exactly the same position, also cannot claim even the slightest degree of truly independent existence.

This is a core realization in many spiritual practices, perhaps most clearly presented in Buddhist teachings. Nevertheless, when it is first applied — and not just intellectually! — to our self-sense, level upon level, it can sometimes be disorienting. My earlier experiences of investigating the nature of “I”, mostly during meditative practices dating back to the early 1970s, were all quite positive, in that they deepened and stabilized me. Paradoxically, recognizing the “no-self ” nature of self had only made me feel more at home, more intimate with what seemed to be “my” true identity. But now, I felt far, far from being at home; the “empty of inherent selves” universe in which I seemed to be embedded was the most alien of cradles, rocking in a cosmic nightmare.

The very efforting of “I” to fortify its existence, aside from its ontological function in the development of our “somebody-ness,” seemed to me to be little more than a defence against realizing and — especially — feeling the obviousness and inescapability of our true nature. Craving constancy or permanence — as in “This is who I am” — overly attaches or fastens (hence, fasten-ation) us to whatever most reassuringly provides a sufficiently convincing sense of personal solidity or anchoring.

Through such attachment, security takes on an exaggerated value, so that we get trapped in the very “safety” that we have sought, bought, or installed,

Darkness Shining Wild

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eluding Death by refusing to really live. As was described earlier, avoiding Death deadens us. “One need not fear death if one is dead anyway.”³ Making security too important — as when we, both personally and collectively, overbudget for defence — makes us very susceptible to cultism. Cults — rigidly self-contained affiliations that are all but impermeable to outside influence and minimally receptive to inside dissension — are not just the bizarre groupings sensationalized by the media. Marriages may be cults of two, political parties cults of many, and so on. Whatever its scale, cultism reflects our need for immunity — or at least a substantial break — from the evershifting nature and uncertainties of Life. To belong to something that emanates a convincing aura of lasting solidity and certainty is understandably tempting (and may be necessary at certain times, as when our well-being requires the protection and insulation made possible by cultism’s encapsulating capacity).

But it is not Freedom. Viewing the depths from a consensual bathysphere is not equivalent to being in the depths. However, egoity (even with all of its personalized trappings) is not something to be discarded — regardless of spiritual ambition’s ego-driven programs advocating ego annihilation — but rather to be illuminated, so that it might serve rather than obstruct or obscure Being.

When our me-knot gives up the ghost There’s more room for us

Room that makes all things frontier Don’t give fear your mind

Don’t make a goal out of leaving it all behind Pass through the looking glass and stop Stop worrying about repeating the class The dream of getting somewhere Comes unraveled here

As we rub the sleep out of our I’s And what then is left?

What’s been here all along.

The briefest of notes are we In the Song of songs Yet also are we its music Thus do we outlive ourselves

ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS

~ 83 ~ SPIRITUALITY AND FEAR

Leaving the world navigated by “I” — and leaving not as a tourist with a return ticket and cosmic Mastercard — carries both promise and peril. The joy and peace of primordial Being may await us, but so too may a terror beyond terror. It not only depends on how prepared we are, but also on how we arrive “there.”

In my case, biochemical dynamite, accompanied by seizures and near-fatal respiratory failure, had done the job, getting me “there” with violent efficiency.

But having arrived, I was stuck, stalled at the intersection of madness and illumination, my steering wheel disappearing in my hands, my vehicle afire with wonderstruck dread.

When the night pulled back the bedcovers And my breath was not mine

And I knew, knew the Holy Design

And the Dark stormed my room so dreadfully bright And my spine was a stem so green and so white I did, I did give the night my hand

And let it lead me through a wild of shadowland

In attempting to ensure that we are always capable of distraction from primal fear — including through busying ourselves “fixing” lesser fears — we run the risk of marooning ourselves not only from every other feeling of a similar depth or intensity, but also from Being. Remaining in the shallows of fear keeps us in the shallows of joy and love, cordoned off from the deep end.

There will be fear until we’re fully Awakened to our real nature, and fear, at least as a physiological phenomenon, may still even be there, though without its usual implications.

As long as we’re preoccupied with being separate, self-contained “I’s,” we’ll continue to feel threatened by whatever could disrupt, evacuate, or erase our apparent identity. Even at its noblest, “I” remains fundamentally fearful and fear-driven, plagued by the untraversable gap between it and its idealization of itself. There is no information that can truly liberate us from fear, “because our whole involvement with information and knowledge is secondary to fear itself.”⁴

Darkness Shining Wild

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Also, contrary to most models of spiritual development, fear may not decrease as we “progress” spiritually. Deeper stages of meditative practice, even when stably established, may in fact be followed by intensely hellish or regressive

“descents” that are not mapped into developmental models of spiritual maturation.

For example, a seasoned Vipassana teacher⁵ describes how, after years of having deep, sometimes transcendent meditative experiences, she began experiencing the apparent opposite, as her positive sense of ceasing to identify with ego would be followed by a negative disappearing of self, an agonizing sense of overwhelming and inexplicable annihilation. From this “black hole”

emerged preverbal memories of heavy trauma and abuse, which necessitated several years of intensive psychotherapeutic work, and a sobering reevaluation of the usefulness and meaning of “ascent” and “descent” metaphors in spiritual cartography.

Dread is not “down there” somewhere, in some archetypal abyss. It is here, less than a thought away, gnawing at our credentials and certainty.

Dread is barely muffled, existential (and sometimes also transpersonal) fear, saturated with a congealed yet still nastily agitating ontological apprehension.

It may, vastly diluted, surface as a vague, broad-spectrum kind of worrying, or it may show up unedited, swallowing us whole. In any case, the presence of dread signifies doom.

In dread, the roots of fear have been glimpsed, but only partially illuminated.

The amorphous immensity from which dread seems to emerge is far more threatening than home-like, and understandably so, given the dualistic perspective through which it generally is perceived. We sense that something

“out there” or alien (be it external or internal) is happening to “us,” losing ourselves in the dialectic between the two.

But what is wrong with dread? Must we shun, drug, sanitize, and otherwise avoid it? Must we spurn intimacy with our dread? Must we assign it leper status among our clan of emotional states?

The distance between us and our dread is inversely proportional to our depth of compassion — and what is spiritual practice in the crunch, other than the art of keeping our heart open in hell?

ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS

~ 85 ~

It can be so easy to exploit the attributes of our thinking mind, using its considerable reasoning and contextualizing powers to distance ourselves from the very pain or fear that we need to openly feel, embrace, and eventually integrate. It is, of course, very tempting (and not necessarily inappropriate for a time!) to flee dread and its ominous implications, yet in rejecting our dread, we also reject the extraordinarily fertile opportunities it can provide.